Last Frontier_, with no sacrifice of story interest, can stake a claim of
more importance. Like certain novels of Emerson Hough’s[82] and Hal G.
Evarts’s, this is an accurate and alive presentation of American history
in the guise of fiction. The period is 1867-68 when, as an aftermath of
the Civil War, many impoverished families sought the unsettled frontier
lands. The Kansas-Pacific Railway, a link between East and West, was
under construction, its every mile contested by the Indians. It was
the period when Buffalo Bill made his reputation as a buffalo hunter
and Indian scout; when General Custer nearly wore himself out hunting
Indians; when the Battle of Beecher’s Island aroused the nation. Buffalo
Bill, Custer, and the building of the railroad are the true subjects of
this fine romance which ends when the great stampede has failed. “The
buffalo were gone. Likewise the feathered beings who had striven to
use them as a bulwark and had failed—enfiladed by scouts, volleyed by
cavalry, their bodies were strewn in the valley with the carcasses of
the buffalo.” Within months Custer was to come back, and in triumph. The
“golden-haired general” was to ride to the battle of Washita “at the head
of the greatest army of troops ever sent against the red man.... There
would be other frontiers—true. But they would be sectional things, not
keystones, such as this had been.”
These novels, in their order, mark a growth in the writer’s stature;
and Mr. Cooper, like others who show growth, has humility as well as
ambition. The thing he has in mind to do, possibly in his next novel,
is more difficult than anything he has done—an attempt to take a few
contemporary lives and view them in the perspective that history affords.
This, of course, is very hard to do. Certainly Sinclair Lewis did not do
it in _Main Street_, and no amount of exact, faithful, realistic detail
accomplishes it. It can only be done by simplifying one’s material so
that a few humble people are seen as typifying human endeavor. But if the
effort is successful, the result will mean as much in one century as in
another, and the work will live.
v
Mr. Cooper’s two books based on the circus accomplish something that no
one else, so far as I know, has even attempted. They make a permanent and
fascinating record of a truly American institution. _Under the Big Top_
presents the circus as a whole, although five of the eleven chapters are
concerned with the circus animals. _Lions ’n’ Tigers ’n’ Everything_ is
wholly about the menagerie.
The first of these books is a curious illustration of the breach
ordinarily existing between literature and life. Although, in the
complexities of a surface civilization, the circus may hold less
significance for Americans today than fifty or forty or even twenty years
ago, most of us were brought up to go to the circus. Or, at any rate,
went. The formative influence of the circus on American character is
incalculably great. Yet neither literature nor formal education took any
cognizance of the circus tent. Public officials, as Mr. Cooper points
out, very generally took into consideration the educational value of
circus animals when fixing license fees. But that was about all the
notice of value the circus got. Where were books on the circus? When
was the circus reckoned with by the professional analysts of American
character? How far has present-day American advertising acknowledged its
immense debt to the traveling show? What Matthew Arnold or James Bryce
coming to our shores to examine American character and lacking, possibly,
the wisdom of the serpent acquired the Wisdom of the circus? And our
psychologists busied with delicate tests on the nerve-endings of frogs;
were they dumb-bells so long? They were. They went not to the circus, the
sluggards; they examined not its ways.
Yet it would be true to say that the circus is the one most typical
American institution. Between the American circus and the traveling
shows of other lands no comparison is possible. In size, in variety, in
achievements of audacity, devotion and courage, the American big tent
show has no rival. It is, to begin with, playing around in a country
which is to most other countries as a ten-acre field is to a city lot.
Its self-reliance must be complete. Its morale, especially in the days
of its greatest importance, has had to be high and unwavering; for
otherwise-excellent people have been its unrelenting foes. At the same
time the circus has been something much more than a spectacle; frequently
it has been a coöperative enterprise. Mr. Cooper gives some idea of the
innumerable occasions on which the American small boy, judiciously and
fairly rewarded with a free ticket, has pulled the circus out of some
insuperable physical difficulty. The circus was the original discoverer
of the most important element in American psychology, the love of
bigness and display, the admiration for achievement in size. It was the
circus which first put in firm practice the important principle of human
nature which time merely refines upon: the desire to be bunked: and the
circus drew the correct line between bunk and bunco and with the fewest
exceptions steered clear of bunco.
Now in _Under The Big Top_, Mr. Cooper, who naturally knows circuses,
gayly gives the whole show away—a process which a good show can come
out of with colors flying. And the circus does. The gist of the book,
the real why of the circus, will be found in that rousing final chapter
written upon the text:
RAIN OR SHINE
THE WORLD’S GREATEST SHOW
WILL POSITIVELY APPEAR
Here are stories of that ultimate sheer persistence which is the spirit
of the circus and, pretty nearly, the history of the nation to which it
belongs.
vi
The chapters on animals in _Under the Big Top_ led directly to Mr.
Cooper’s _Lions ’n’ Tigers ’n’ Everything_, which is the menagerie
inside out. In the course of long study of caged and captive jungle
creatures, and aided by the continuous study of his staff-helpers, Mr.
Cooper has found no human emotion which these animals do not exhibit at
some time or other in appropriate circumstances. “I have seen jealousy,
insanity, hallucination, the highest kind of love including mother love,
the fiercest brand of hate, trickery, cunning and revenge. I have seen
gratitude. The only desire I will exclude as not being common to humans
and animals is the desire for money. There is a corresponding animal
desire, however. It is horse meat. Horse meat is the currency of the
animal kingdom.”[83]
The extraordinary instance of Casey, a giant, black-faced chimpanzee[84]
captured in infancy in the Cape Lopez district of Africa, has suggested
to Mr. Cooper that something most remarkably approaching a man could
be bred from a monkey in as few as four generations. Not a physical
likeness, but mental, is the prospect. Enough apes of Casey’s type would
be necessary to avoid inbreeding, and the first generation born in
captivity would have to be subjected to wholly human contacts.[85] About
150 years would be required for the experiment.
But _Lions ’n’ Tigers ’n’ Everything_ is a book of fact, not of theories.
It is most valuable, perhaps, in its contrast between the old and new
methods of animal training. Mr. Cooper shows in the first chapter the
transformation that has come about:
“The circus animal trainer of today is not chosen for his brutality, or
his cunning, or his so-called bravery. He is hired because he has studied
and knows animals—even to talking their various ‘languages.’ There are
few real animal trainers who cannot gain an answer from their charges,
talking to them as the ordinary person talks to a dog and receiving as
intelligent attention. Animal men have learned that the brute isn’t any
different from the human; the surest way to make him work is to pay him
for his trouble. In the steel arena today ... the animals are just so
many hired hands. When they do their work, they get their pay.... The
present-day trainer doesn’t cow the animal or make it afraid of him....
The first thing to be eliminated is not fear on the part of the trainer,
but on the part of the animal!... Sugar for dogs, carrots for elephants,
fish for seals, stale bread for the polar bears, a bit of honey or candy
for the ordinary species of bear, pieces of apple or lumps of sugar for
horses; every animal has his reward for which he’ll work a hundred times
harder than ever he did in the old and almost obsolete days of fear.”
With lions, tigers and leopards the trainer, imitating their own sound
that expresses satisfaction, can convey to them his satisfaction with
their work. And there is catnip. “To a house cat, catnip is a thing of
ecstasy. To a jungle cat it holds as much allurement as morphine to a
dope user, or whisky to a drunkard. The great cats roll in it, toss it
about their cages, purr and arch their backs, all in a perfect frenzy of
delight.”
Does this new method of animal training seem to remove from the circus
menagerie most of its adventure and romance? Does Mr. Cooper’s account
of the “Wallace act,” in which a lion impersonates an untameable lion and
fights its trainer, seem to sickle over all such performances a hopeless
theatricalism? The answer may be found in the pages of _Lions ’n’ Tigers
’n’ Everything_, a chronicle of breathlessness if ever there was one.
Here are stories of Mabel Stark, Captain Ricardo, Bob McPherson and many
others to make the hair curl: stories of animals that remembered and men
that forgot, of trained dogs and untrained leopards, of animal nature
and—best of all—of human nature. How much better, this book, than the
fiction which attempts to approach animals from the imaginative side!
With a low bow in the direction of Mr. Kipling, it may be pointed out
that the ordinary child’s sole contact with the beasts of the jungle is
through the circus menagerie or the zoo. As captive animals are utterly
different from wild, it is in terms of the captive existence that the
child reasonably craves to know and appreciate them (I say “child,” but
in this matter we are all children, regardless of age). But no one who
reads _Lions ’n’ Tigers ’n’ Everything_ will ever see an animal act again
without an observation at least twice as intelligent or an interest at
least doubly great.
BOOKS BY COURTNEY RYLEY COOPER
_The Eagle’s Eye_ (with William J. Flynn, then Chief of the
U. S. Secret Service)
1919 _Dear Folks at Home_ (with Kemper F. Cowing)
1919 _Memories of Buffalo Bill_ (with Mrs. William F. Cody)
1921 _The Cross-Cut_
1922 _The White Desert_
1923 _The Last Frontier_
1923 _Under the Big Top_
1924 _Lions ’n’ Tigers ’n’ Everything_
SOURCES ON COURTNEY RYLEY COOPER
Several are referred to in footnotes to the text of the chapter. The
usual record will be found in _Who’s Who in America_, and there is Mr.
Cooper himself (address, Idaho Springs, Colorado).
19. Edith Wharton’s Old New York
i
Willa Cather once made a significant confession, to the effect that
nothing which had happened to her after the age of twenty seemed to
matter as material for her fiction. On the whole, the statement is
strongly borne out by her work; and there is reason to believe that it
is true of other women writers. Dangerous as the path of generalization
may be, I am persuaded that in such cases as Miss Cather, Zona Gale, Edna
Ferber and Edith Wharton, all or nearly all of the writer’s best work is
traceable to contacts and impressions in those young years which alone
seem to hold an inextinguishable spark for the tinder of imagination.
And in the instance of Mrs. Wharton one has only to consider her early
life in relation to some of her fiction to feel that she could echo Miss
Cather.
For whatever the high merit of much of her fiction, its finished irony,
its polished strength, its assurance and ease, where is the work of
hers, leaving aside _Ethan Frome_, which has the robust vitality of
her pictures of old New York? It is not a question of accuracy in
historical detail; various slips have been charged up against _The Age
of Innocence_. Well, the fact that Keats confused Cortez with Balboa has
never diminished the splendor of a famous sonnet. Vitality has little
to do with structure or detail, and everything to do with the artist’s
feeling for what he is modelling, painting or writing about. Who can
read _The Age of Innocence_, or the four novelettes grouped under the
general title _Old New York_ (_False Dawn_, _The Old Maid_, _The Spark_,
and _New Year’s Day_) and doubt that it is a return to first loves?
As everyone knows, or should know, she was born in New York in 1862,
Edith Newbold Jones; and her mother was a Rhinelander. One grandparent
was a Stevens, another a Schermerhorn.[86] In the period before her
marriage at the age of twenty-three to Edward Wharton, of Boston, and in
spite of much time spent abroad, she was herself one of those sensitive
souls who “in those days were like muted keyboards, on which Fate played
without a sound,” who found themselves inextricably and by no means
unhappily enmeshed in a “cautious world built up on the fortunes of
bankers, India merchants, shipbuilders and ship-chandlers,” a world where
everybody “lived in a genteel monotony of which the surface was never
stirred by the dumb dramas now and then enacted underneath.”[87] In this
society the girl and young woman had need of imaginative sympathy as well
as sharpened perceptions if she were ultimately to comprehend what went
on. For few can comprehend such things as the affair of Ellen Olenska and
Newland Archer,[88] or such behavior as Lizzie Hazeldean’s[89] at the
time. Innocence of mind is not in question here, nor observations; it
is simply that one has to be older, to have had one’s own experiences,
and to be able to relate what one has seen to what one has come to
know from life. Then and only then can comprehension come in terms
of that sympathy which Mrs. Wharton beautifully defines as a “moved
understanding.” One is no longer shackled by exact memory and one is
animated by the same strong feeling, in the flood-tide of which one takes
the past and fashions from it a story serviceable in meaning for mankind.
ii
It is tempting to speculate whether Mrs. Wharton could have written _The
Age of Innocence_ in present-day New York. The thing seems improbable.
Not even in the shelter of the National Arts Club, with a window
overlooking Gramercy Park, or in one of the old Chelsea houses, does the
feat look the least likely. Living in France she could quite readily
cross the Atlantic in recollection, sit in a shabby red and gold box
at the old Academy of Music and listen to Christine Nilsson singing in
“Faust.” “She sang, of course, ‘_M’ama!_’ and not ‘He loves me!’ since
an unalterable and unquestioned law of the musical world required that
the German text of French operas sung by Swedish artists should be
translated into Italian for the clearer understanding of English-speaking
audiences.” Newland Archer would be in the club box with other men, of
whom Sillerton Jackson would be the undisputed social authority. He would
sit at the back but Where he could see directly across the house in
the box opposite the “young girl in white with eyes ecstatically fixed
on the stage-lovers,” May Welland. “It was only that afternoon that
May Welland had let him guess that she ‘cared’ (New York’s consecrated
phrase of maiden avowal).” And then? Mrs. Wharton is not the one to avoid
the delicious opening offered to review Newland Archer’s confused but
hopeful visions. His masculine pride, a tender reverence he felt for her
“abysmal purity,” the simple vanity which led him to wish May to be as
worldly-wise and eager to please as the married woman of his acquaintance
(“without, of course, any hint of the frailty which ... had disarranged
his own plans for a whole winter”)—these elements of Newland Archer’s
feeling are pieced together easily enough _now_ from dozens of young men
one grew up with and dozens of young couples one looked on at....
The infatuation of Newland Archer for Ellen Olenska would be gradual,
handicapped by the efforts of his sympathy, unaided by any quality of
imagination, “to picture the society in which the Countess Olenska
had lived and suffered, and also—perhaps—tasted mysterious joys.” The
constraint, like an enormous enveloping pressure, as if everyone in the
old New York society lived in the remotest depths of the sea, would
overcome both Ellen Olenska and Newland Archer. But, as Mrs. Wharton
realized—one feels that it is these two moments for which she wrote—the
time would come when Newland would look at his wife and wish she were
dead, and the time would come when he would sit as the victim of tribal
ceremony.
“Archer, who seemed to be assisting at the scene in a state of odd
imponderability, as if he floated somewhere between chandelier and
ceiling, wondered at nothing so much as his own share in the proceedings.
As his glance traveled from one placid well-fed face to another he saw
all the harmless-looking people engaged upon May’s canvas-backs as a
band of dumb conspirators, and himself and the pale woman on his right
as the center of their conspiracy. And then it came over him, in a vast
flash made up of many broken gleams, that to all of them he and Madame
Olenska were lovers, lovers in the extreme sense peculiar to ‘foreign’
vocabularies. He guessed himself to have been, for months, the center
of countless silently observing eyes and patiently listening ears, he
understood that, by means as yet unknown to him, the separation between
himself and the partner of his guilt had been achieved, and that now
the whole tribe had rallied about his wife on the tacit assumption
that nobody knew anything, or had ever imagined anything, and that the
occasion of the entertainment was simply May Archer’s natural desire to
take an affectionate leave of her friend and cousin.
“It was the old New York way of taking life ‘without effusion of blood’:
the way of people who dreaded scandal more than disease, who placed
decency above courage, and who considered that nothing was more ill-bred
than ‘scenes,’ except the behavior of those who gave rise to them.
“As these thoughts succeeded each other in his mind Archer felt like a
prisoner in the center of an armed camp. He looked about the table, and
guessed at the inexorableness of his captors from the tone in which, over
the asparagus from Florida, they were dealing with Beaufort and his wife.
‘It’s to show me,’ he thought, ‘what would happen to _me_—’ and a deathly
sense of the superiority of implication and analogy over direct action,
and of silence over rash words, closed in on him like the doors of the
family vault.”
Here, indeed, is the novel of character at its finest. One does not have
to praise the character novel in a day when the turn of critical taste
has caused it to be esteemed above everything. As we know this type of
fiction it has passed through several mutations since Jane Austen gave
it existence by her novels. Men have seized upon Miss Austen’s lesson
and have wrought so prodigiously with it, as in _Vanity Fair_, in _The
Egoist_, and in _The Old Wives’ Tale_, that nothing is easier than to
forget that the whole business originated in a woman’s mind. But the
novel of character is even yet distinctly feminine. It ignores the
mysterious and unknown. It says that whatever may be the Unknowable,
there is much we do and can explore and know. It baffles the typically
masculine effort to reason with the mind, and yields at a touch to the
typically feminine approach by sympathy and intuition, by thinking, as
it were, not with the mind but with the nervous system. Among the many
perversions to which it has been subjected none is more hopeless than a
sort of conscientious, wholly masculine realism, a placid apprehension
of surfaces, such as triumphed in the work of William Dean Howells. Mr.
George Moore said in malice that Henry James went abroad and read the
great Europeans, while Mr. Howells stayed at home and read Henry James.
It would be at least as true to suggest that Mrs. Wharton, for whatever
time she was his “pupil,” chose Mr. James to escape from Mr. Howells. At
home was dignity and dullness; abroad was the author of _The Portrait of
a Lady_ busy with highly-disguised melodrama. Who—least of all, a woman
like Mrs. Wharton—could hesitate?
iii
The four novelettes grouped under the title, _Old New York_, are
doubtless as works of art more perfect than _The Age of Innocence_, for
in each case Mrs. Wharton has selected a subject as a painter might,
with a feeling for the effect in certain lights and with a wish to avoid
so far as possible the air of having “composed” her figures in their
background. The extreme artificiality and rigidity of the society she
writes about demands that at least one or two persons—the one or two in
the foreground—shall possess a movement apparently unstudied. Therefore
her task has been finely and ruthlessly to cut away the richly rambling
growth of her recollections, the profusion in this direction or that;
it has been to isolate a single crucial situation, or to expose behind
the dried leaves and the withered roses of mid-century sentimentality
and correctitude the reality of a heart that beat in its pathetic moment
of terror or of despairing courage. These are exquisite stories; I do
not think it an exaggeration to say they are the finest things Mrs.
Wharton has ever done with the exception of _Ethan Frome_. Indeed, they
have something that no work of hers but _Ethan Frome_ has in the same
degree, the mood of stirred comprehension and compassionate pity, joined
to something that no work of hers but _The Age of Innocence_ has, a
rapturously perfect setting.
_False Dawn_ (_The ’Forties_) begins at a country house which overlooked
Long Island Sound at a point now shabby with cliff-dwellings and gas
tanks. “Hay, verbena and mignonette scented the languid July day. Large
strawberries, crimsoning through sprigs of mint, floated in a bowl of
pale yellow”—and young Lewis Raycie, who has hard work to down his punch
(“perfumed fire”) is twenty-one and ready for the Grand Tour. The more
tender-hearted of his sisters has a habit of going out furtively at
daybreak to take comforts to poor Mrs. Poe, the very sick wife of an
atheistical poet. The son, secretly in love with an ineligible girl, runs
across in his travels John Ruskin, and buys Italian primitives instead
of the Raphael and conventional “masters” desired by his father. For
this he is cut off from a fortune and left with the collection. We have
a glimpse of him and his wife and little girl embraced in poverty while
the pictures are exhibited to a New York still totally unready for them.
Lewis Raycie, his wife and child are dust when the “dawn” comes.
In _The Old Maid_ (_The ’Fifties_) Mrs. Wharton deals with a situation
so dramatic that I feel the shocking unfairness of disclosing it
prematurely to the reader. Although Delia Lovell, wife of James Ralston,
and Charlotte Lovell are actually cousins, one comes to think of them as
sisters. The faithful but unsparing presentation of what, essentially,
is comprised in motherhood grows out of the most intimate glimpses of
husband, wife, lover and mistress. “Afterward: why, of course, there
was the startled puzzled surrender to the incomprehensible exigencies
of the young man to whom one had at most yielded a rosy cheek in return
for an engagement ring; there was the large double-bed; the terror of
seeing him shaving calmly the next morning, in his shirt-sleeves, through
the dressing-room door; the evasions, insinuations, resigned smiles and
Bible texts of one’s Mamma; the reminder of the phrase ‘to obey’ in the
glittering blur of the Marriage Service; a week or a month of flushed
distress, confusion, embarrassed pleasure; then the growth of habit, the
insidious lulling of the matter-of-course, the dreamless double slumbers
in the big white bed, the early morning discussions and consultations
through that dressing-room door which had once seemed to open into a
fiery pit scorching the brow of innocence. And then, the babies; the
babies who were supposed to ‘make up for everything,’ and didn’t—though
they were such darlings, and one had no definite notion as to what it was
that one had missed, and that they were to make up for.”
Although _The Spark_ is subtitled _The ’Sixties_, it is more truly a tale
of the ’Sixties reflected in the ’Nineties. Hayley Delane, whose “harsh
head stood out like a cliff from a flowery plain,” is the supremely
good-natured, stupid husband. It is only by slow degrees that the
young man who tells the story comes to understand that while Delane is
intellectually no different from the other men of his social set, he is
morally far in advance of them. Parenthetically, it is interesting to
note Mrs. Wharton’s use of the young man as narrator not only in this
story but in _New Year’s Day_, and to compare it with Willa Cather’s use
of the same device in _My Antonia_ and _A Lost Lady_.
_The Spark_ is a story devoted to the exploration of character, an
obscure but fascinating task resumed at intervals over the years. The
secret of Delane’s character leads back, curiously and astonishingly,
to his brief contact as a youth with “an old fellow in Washington” who
visited the sick in the army hospitals. Otherwise Delane has never heard
of Walt Whitman. I withhold the ironic and perfect ending.