Part 18

Thus those who have sought an American paradise of nature, a physical paradise, have reported finding only despair. In essentials this hope is identical with the primitivistic and industrial hope which Europe found inadequate over a century ago. Wordsworth, the high priest of naturalism, confessed he had “too blindly reposed” his trust, and he had the wisdom to seek the support of the classical and the Christian traditions. And Ruskin and Carlyle exposed the criminal fallacies involved in setting material gain above the sanctity of the individual personality. But when this outworn, exploded philosophy, based upon primitivism, faith in natural goodness, absolute liberty, laissez faire, and reliance upon nature and material things, was transplanted to the vast material resources of a frontier land, it was given a new, hysterical lease of life. Now, a century and a quarter later, a disenchanted America agrees with the English naturalist who testified of his infinite “dejection” and his conviction that man

“may not hope from outward forms to win The passion and the life, whose fountains are within.”

III

If those who have entered the American Door of Hope in quest of happiness have reported that it is to be found neither in the Land of the Blue Flower nor in the Land of Sensuous Desire, let us inquire what those have reported who have sought the happiness of self-perfection, of an exalted personal life, of “A Paradise within thee, happier far.” This quest involves a definitely focused aspiration toward, and a disciplined imitation of what is most richly and deeply human, of what is most balanced and poised and complete, of what has in the past been reported to yield lasting contentment and peace. This sort of quest is very old. To Plato and Aristotle, justice, the crown of life, consisted of the ideal balance of all the desires. Behind the Horatian doctrine of the golden mean--auream mediocritatem--and Cicero’s praise of mediocritatem illam quae est inter nimium et parum is the ideal of mediation and centrality. The Christian tradition, according to Mr. G. K. Chesterton, is peculiar in its reconciling of opposites, in its synthetic balance. At any rate, the worldly classical and the other-worldly Christian traditions have united in upholding the doctrines of imitation, restraint, of a dualistic conflict in man between appetite and aspiration, and of a definitely focused aspiration which culminates in inner peace. In the Middle Ages the “law for measure” was allied to the theory of the four humours, the balance of which caused health, the excess of any one of which caused “one-sidedness” and disease. In the Renaissance the author of Everyman in His Humour used satire to render eccentricity ridiculous, and the Hamlet who allowed all to be “sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought” recognised that “by the o’ergrowth of some complexion,” by “one defect,” men “take corruption.” He honoured Horatio, his “soul’s choice,” because in him “blood and judgment are so well commingl’d.” The Elizabethans recognised that a great man, like a tall tower, must be balanced at all points, or be drawn down to ruin by his own strength. If space permitted, one might trace through the impetus given scientific specialisation and material progress by Bacon and the Royal Society, through such figures as Congreve and Pope and Edward Young and Rousseau, the gradual evolution of the theory of humours into the theory of the master-passion and the “original genius” of being idiosyncratic. But let us remember that Milton, uniting the Renaissance passion for sensuous delight and the Puritan passion for saintliness, kept his sublime balance, his vision of centrality, his ideal of self-mastery. His exhortation to Adam as he leaves the physical paradise of Eden is his exhortation to us:

“Only add Deeds to thy knowledge answerable; add faith; Add virtue, patience, temperance; add love By name to come called Charity, the soul Of all the rest: then wilt thou not be loth To leave this Paradise, but shalt possess A Paradise within thee, happier far.”

Mindful of the dark impulses of the natural man, the great liberal distinguished sharply between anarchy and the true liberty resulting from the substitution of inner for outer control: “License they mean when they cry Liberty,” he remarks of the Cavaliers, “For who loves that must first be wise and good.” “He who reigns within himself ... is more than a king.... Real and substantial liberty is rather from within than from without.”

Americans may well be proud that this noble hope partially lives on in Emerson, our greatest man of letters, who found Milton “foremost of all men ... to inspire,” to communicate “the vibration of hope, of self-reverence, of piety, of delight in beauty.” Out of materialistic America has come this “friend and aider of those who would live in the spirit,” who strove above all to celebrate “the Ideal and Holy Life, the life within life, ... the spiritual powers in their infinite contrast to the mechanical powers and the mechanical philosophy of this time.” It is true, of course, that Emerson did not altogether escape the contagion of his romantic age; that in his apparent praise of the unique and the individual, in his most un-Miltonic faith in natural goodness, in his belittling of logic, of tradition, and of the aid which culture can give as a guide to conduct, Emerson has a certain kinship with Rousseau. Let us grant it--and guard against it! One must recall, however, that part of his dubious influence has resulted from a superficial and piece-meal reading of Emerson, encouraged by his characteristic oracular device of presenting two conflicting statements rather than a balanced and qualified generalisation. If one reads all of Emerson, however, in an endeavour to relate and define his thought, it is apparent, as Professor Harrison and Professor Foerster have found, that his stronger affinities are not with Rousseau but with Plato and the humanists. His central doctrine of self-reliance turns out to be a reliance on a self which is not unique but common to all men, “a reliance upon man’s share of divinity,” upon his higher, universal self. “We become divine,” he says, not by eccentricity, by revolt, but by “obedience,” by conformity to “the common heart,” to what is normally, typically, and nobly human. In fact he strictly warns us against the “rudeness” of failing to “distinguish between the private and the universal consciousness.” He perceived the unity of man, the need of spiritual concentration; his occasional assumption of good intentions is balanced by his own Spartan virtue and his confession that “because the temptations are so manifold and so subtle,” he agrees with Socrates and the Hindoos in denominating the Supreme Being the “Internal Check.” In common with the Christian tradition, he sharply severs the “law for man” from the “law for thing.” He is aware of “the eternal distinction between the soul and the world,” aware that too great a preoccupation with the outward, sensuous, mundane life about us (the “work” rather than the “workman”) at the expense of “the integrity of your own mind” and deeper spiritual needs, breeds a dread of transience and hence “uneasiness” and despair. Behind the fleeting scenes of daily life he perceived “that which changes not,” permanent human elements common to every one, the cultivation of which gave him that sweet serenity, that “cheerfulness and courage” which Arnold pronounced the outcome of his philosophy, “his abiding word for us.” “Happiness in labour, righteousness, and veracity; in all the life of the spirit; happiness and eternal hope;--that was Emerson’s gospel.”

Here, then, in our own native tradition is a sort of hope which led to happiness. Can such a hope, however, be reconciled with the artist’s devotion to beauty? To Emerson, as to the æsthetes, art is simply “the creation of beauty,” “beauty is its own excuse for being,” and “the Beautiful is the highest.” But, unlike the æsthetes, he proclaims the unity and parity of beauty, truth, and goodness--“different faces of the same All.” Beauty has “its source in perfect goodness”; it is “the mark God sets upon virtue.” In other words, the rarest beauty is a by-product of that perfect harmony by which a man realises his complete humanity, his complete happiness. This ideal of beauty was given the support of a literary creed by James Russell Lowell, who never feared to expose the weakness of a romanticism whose ultimate fruit was a “melancholy liver-complaint.” He urged the study and creation of a literature which should be an ideal representation of life, “stripped of all unessential particulars” by an imagination which found “the true ideal” not by escape but by a purposeful selection of the real. For Lowell as for Emerson the “first duty” of the artist “is to be delightful.” He distinguishes, however, between a merely recreational “literature as holiday” and a literature which, ideally “representing life, ... teaches, like life, by indirection.” Such a literature, ministering to all the higher needs of the mind and spirit, yields the greatest delight and the greatest beauty.

Aspiration and art of this quality, however, are rare in American fiction. We looked for them in vain in the seekers for a paradise of supernal beauty, and in the seekers for an American paradise of nature. Great as is Hawthorne as an artist, in my judgment he falls short of an aspiration of the Emersonian quality on account of his penchant for the eccentric, the fanciful, and the morbid. One seeks it in vain in the realists’ transcripts from life, which lack the selection and focusing that distinguish art from experience. There is evidence, nevertheless, that the novel is no longer hostile to the specifically human destiny of normal humanity, no longer oblivious to that rare beauty which is the by-product of the struggle by which a noble character imposes order on the chaos of natural desire and approaches the imaginative ideal of a life richly varied, finely poised, and of exalted happiness.

I have space for but one example in modern fiction--Dorothy Canfield’s The Brimming Cup. This deals with the “eternal triangle” in a little Vermont town. Marise Chittenden, whose children have gradually taken her interest from Neale, her husband, becomes lonely when her children all go to school and she senses that “the days of her physical flowering are numbered.” She is loved by Marsh, a wealthy man visiting her elderly neighbour Mr. Wells; Marsh tries to convince her that she is sacrificing “a world of impassioned living” for “an outworn ideal” of “the traditional thing to do.” The characters, not always vividly humanised, symbolise man’s universe. Marise, the “brimming cup,” “filled with some emotion ... gushing up in a great flooding rush,” typifies the surge of impulse. Marsh, a “swirly brook,” to whom life is but a moment’s “blind sensual groping and grabbing” before the “big final smash-up,” typifies unbridled lust and greed. The “steady, visible light” of Neale’s life, Neale who had found true freedom by conquering his “great, fierce, unguessed appetite, the longing for wandering, lawless freedom,” typifies centrality. Mr. Wells, who surrenders “the happiness that comes of living as suits his nature” to help make the world more courteous to negroes, typifies humanitarian sympathy. The much-travelled Eugenia typifies “sophisticated cosmopolitanism,” æsthetic escape: to her “everything’s so common-place”; she cultivates her fading beauty by “breathing in and out through one nostril, and thinking of the Infinite!” Cousin Hetty symbolises tradition; the Indian Touclé, mysticism. Marise sees her conflict as one not between “routine, traditional, narrow domestic life and the mightiness and richness of mature passion,” but as a conflict between the lure of sensuousness and “what is deepest and most living in you.” It is a psychological novel, a novel of introspection: it is based on the quest, not for what is conventionally moral, but for what in the end gives the richest human satisfaction. It presents a struggle based on self-reliance and self-conquest. Neale “wanted her to be herself, to be all that Marise could ever grow to be, he wanted her to attain her full stature.” “Nothing is your own, if you haven’t made it so.” Marise wonders if her mother-love is what Marsh calls “inverted sensuality”; Neale says, “Look into your own heart and see for yourself.” He “longed for her sake to have her strike out into the deep,” he knew that peace could only come from “Marise’s acting with her own strength on her own decision.” He urges not outer but inner control--“as few umpires as possible.” In her conflict Marise sought “what was deepest and most living in her ...; that was what the voices were trying to cry her down from finding.” She longed to be “one with the great current”--Emerson’s “stream of power.” She discovers that she is being lured by “the conventional pose of revolt,” that separation from her children would not be true “growth and freedom, and generous expansion of the soul.” Like Milton and Emerson, she finally becomes free by discovering and obeying what is deepest within:

“She was a free woman, free from something in her heart that was afraid. For the moment she could think of nothing else beyond the richness of that freedom. Why, here was the total fulfilment she had longed for. Here was the life more abundant, within, within her own heart, waiting for her!”

Joyous in her centrality, poise and freedom, she sees Marsh as an “undeveloped and tyrannical soul, the cramped mind without experience or conception of breadth and freedom.” “How narrow and cramped,” and “blinded to the bigness and variety of life” seemed people who thought that “a woman of beauty and intelligence” was wasting her life “unless she was engaged in ... stimulating ... sexual desire.” Marise had the serene joy of her home, her beloved children and her understanding husband; she had the marvel of her music; and she had the surpassing wisdom to seek her happiness not in the miraculous but in the common--in the symbolic neighbourly gathering on the night of the blooming of the Cereus, that rite of beauty; in the calm strength of simple folk whom experience has made wise. And this woman, living out her “heritage, alive and rooted deep,” with her “vivid charm like an aureole of golden mist,” “felt slowly coming into her, like a tide of a great ocean,” the ineffable peace which comes from self-mastery, from the quest of what is most universally and nobly human. Calm and free, she was lifted “high, high above the smallness of life, up to a rich realm of security in joy.”

What are we to conclude from this cursory sketch of the quality of three different sorts of American hope represented in our fiction? To the hope for a paradise of supernal beauty we owe much delicate artistry of a high order; one may maintain, however, as Emerson and Lowell did, that other things being equal, the truthful representation of typical humanity alone produces that harmony which yields the highest beauty. To this hope we owe much which, when read for recreation, can give delight; one takes issue only with those, like Poe and Cabell, who take Arcadianism seriously as a universal way of life and would substitute it for a literary ideal which resolutely confronts life and seeks to solve its meaning. To the hope for a paradise of American nature, a physical paradise, we owe the imposing of order upon the natural chaos of the wilderness; we owe the physical “improvements,” the miracles of the machinery and science of a great nation. Of what ultimate avail, however, are material resources, physical comfort, time-saving machinery, and science unless the time and energy conserved are used for higher intellectual or spiritual ends, for the attainment of happiness? To those who have recorded this hope in fiction we owe the faithful preservation of an important aspect of the social history of America; but literature is greater than social history: it aspires to embody the meaning of life in terms at once timeless and universal and beautiful. Our frontier lands are exhausted, and those who have sought the physical paradise of a standardized industrialism have found nothing but boredom and despair. In place of this dead level of repression and standardisation let us develop a new respect for personality--for personality richly varied and healthily individual. Let us re-direct the joy-giving passion for creation through the matchless resources of the realm of the spirit. If both the rarest happiness and the rarest beauty are the fruit only of the hope of a paradise within, it would appear that American fiction would in the future be wise in dealing not with escape or with externalities but with the infinite variety and eternal mystery of the human soul’s conflict between appetite and aspiration on its quest for an exalted inward happiness. Before we can expect American fiction to do this, however, the way must be prepared by the development of an adequate social imagination. For great art has always been organic with and supported by the life and vision of a whole people. Shakespeare was the “Soul of the Age,” Dante the “voice of ten silent centuries.” A hope must have throbbed in the breasts of a whole age before a writer can body it forth with the concentration, the brooding intensity, and the unerring congruency to human nature demanded of great art. Such a hope, such a social imagination, such an agreement in aspiration, can be developed best, perhaps, through education--through our interpreters of literature in college and university. Mindful of the heritage of heroic pioneers, we must embark upon our intellectual pioneering with the same resolute courage, the same loyal devotion, the same consecration to a high cause. Although our scholars are still being lured aside either to the camp of the æsthetes or the camp of the philologists, America must hereafter strive to develop the “middle-of-the-road” scholar who shall be, as Emerson said, Man Thinking, the delegated mind of society, whose major aim shall be the purposeful and discriminating interpretation of the record man has left, in terms of beauty, regarding “the conduct of life” and the path to peace. When such scholar-critics have developed such a social imagination, such a popular unanimity of hope, we shall be ready to receive the artist of genius who is to write for us the great American novel.

Note--For copyrighted evidence used in the foregoing essay I am indebted as follows: Sherwood Anderson, Poor White (Modern Library, N. Y., 1925); Dorothy Canfield Fisher, The Brimming Cup (Grosset and Dunlap, N. Y., 1921); James Branch Cabell, The Cream of the Jest (Modern Library, N. Y., 1922); Jurgen (Grosset and Dunlap, N. Y., 1927); Beyond Life (Modern Library, N. Y., 1919); Straws and Prayerbooks (Robert M. McBride and Co., N. Y., 1925); Willa Cather, The Professor’s House (Alfred A. Knopf, N. Y., 1925); Floyd Dell, Moon-Calf (Alfred A. Knopf, N. Y., 1921); R. W. Emerson, Complete Works (Houghton Mifflin Co., Boston, 1903); Journals (Houghton Mifflin Co., Boston, 1909-14); The Correspondence of Emerson and Carlyle (Houghton Mifflin Co., Boston, 1888); Norman Foerster, American Criticism (Houghton Mifflin Co., Boston, 1928); Hamlin Garland, A Son of the Middle Border (Grosset and Dunlap, N. Y., 1927); Joseph Hergesheimer, Linda Condon (Alfred A. Knopf, N. Y., 1919); Mark Twain, Complete Works (American Publishing Co., Hartford, 1903); A. B. Paine, Mark Twain, A Biography (Harper and Brothers, N. Y., 1912); F. L. Pattee, “James Fenimore Cooper” (American Mercury, Alfred A. Knopf, N. Y.); Gregory Paine, Introduction to The Deerslayer (Harcourt, Brace and Co., N. Y., 1927); O. E. Rolvaag, Giants in the Earth (Harper and Brothers, N. Y., 1929).

Dionysus in Dismay

STANLEY P. CHASE

Twenty-five years ago, when my generation were beginning to find their way around in the world of print and paint, a group of us used to meet occasionally to share each other’s discoveries in contemporary thought and literature. You may smile at the association of the date 1904 and contemporary literature, and confessedly some of the objects of our attention were fantastic enough--Elbert Hubbard, Edward Howard Griggs, and even “I, Mary MacLane.” The more daring among us were delving in Haeckel and Henry George; our conservatives, according to their bents, delighted in Kipling and Barrie, or a group of alluring Celts, or became expert in discriminations between the earlier and the later manner of Henry James. We all read, of course, William James and Bernard Shaw and H. G. Wells and Chesterton. In poetry, to be sure, we had no such variegated menu as the contemporary road-house affords; I should say that our diet was easily digestible and a little saccharine. For the most part, as I recall, we followed along the vagabondia trail after Richard Hovey and Bliss Carman. In that old college town near the coast, we could still thrill to such verses as

Three of us without a care In the red September Tramping down the roads of Maine, Making merry with the rain, With the fellow winds a-fare Where the winds remember.

Frost and Sandburg, Lindsay and Masefield, had not come into our world--much less Walter de la Mare or Aldous Huxley or Robinson Jeffers. But we were not so entirely neglected by the contemporary muse as you may suppose. We knew the early work of Yeats, and “The Hound of Heaven” of Francis Thompson; we had discovered the sonnets of Santayana; we could repeat a large part of A Shropshire Lad; and of course for our more cosmic moods we had Walt Whitman. Hundreds of other such groups must have existed, like ours callow, inexperienced, bumptious, but very inquisitive, very receptive. Not against us did the “new poetry” (no longer such) have to hurl its bolts.

And even in that distant, unreal decade of the nineteen-hundreds, before President Roosevelt, by a few kindly pages in the Outlook, put Edwin Arlington Robinson’s name into every one’s mouth, we knew the poet of “Tilbury Town” (only thirty miles from our own). There was one poem of his whose meaning used to be a great subject of dispute,--for we were than naïve enough to think that a poem must be susceptible of some rational explanation. It was entitled “Cortège,” and had appeared in the Captain Craig volume of 1902.

Four o’clock this afternoon, Fifteen hundred miles away: So it goes, the crazy tune, So it pounds and hums all day.

Four o’clock this afternoon, Earth will hide them far away: Best they go to go so soon, Best for them the grave to-day.

Had she gone but half so soon, Half the world had passed away. Four o’clock this afternoon, Best for them they go to-day.

Four o’clock this afternoon Love will hide them deep, they say; Love that made the grave so soon, Fifteen hundred miles away.

Four o’clock this afternoon-- Ah, but they go slow to-day: Slow to suit my crazy tune, Past the need of all we say.

Best it came to come so soon, Best for them they go to-day: Four o’clock this afternoon, Fifteen hundred miles away.

The half-benumbing, half-intensifying effect of the “crazy tune,” the curious way in which a mere pattern of words can usurp the mind, now stealing its attention from the very grief they point to, and now flashing upon it a new aspect of that grief--something like that, I suppose, accounts for the fascination the poem had for us. But a number of us were dissatisfied with an explanation so simple. No, we wanted to know, first, who and how many persons were being buried at four o’clock to-day, and their relationship to the poet (was it, for instance, a former sweetheart and her husband?), and whether “she” in the third stanza was one of the deceased, and in what sense it could be said that Love “made the grave so soon,” and what “half so soon” meant--was it any different from “twice as soon”? We even calculated that the burial must be taking place some fifteen hundred miles to the west, since otherwise, all (Protestant) funerals being held commonly at two o’clock, the poet’s time would be twelve noon instead of four afternoon. All, of course, very silly and irrelevant questions.

Only a few years ago, in a poetry course, I was recalling these old agitations of ours, as a warning, I feel sure, against such literalness of interpretation. But, as will happen with class-room instruction, my admonitions produced quite the opposite effect from that intended, for one member of the class was so intrigued by the problem, even as we had been twenty years before, that he evolved the staggering theory that the poem was not about a funeral at all, but about a marriage. This ingenious view having been communicated, in a circuitous way, to Mr. Robinson, he settled the matter quite simply with the following note to the inquirer: