about his failures. Let us not fool ourselves as to his triumphs. Let us
not blame the symbolical Mr. Allan for acting so well his ungrateful
role in a Scene so vastly without his canny ken. Let us, above all, not
split Poe—as is the fashion of the day—into pseudo-scientific fragments
of psychologic and sociologic terms. Let us take him whole—the man and
his work: Poe the embodied impulse of an Organism which holds not only
him, but us; Poe the impulse of America to transfigure the worlds within
it into a world more real. And let us proceed to the Adventure.
_1925_
2. FRANCE AND THOREAU
Since Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, French literature has come variously to
America for materials and forms wherewith to re-create itself. The
greatest instance is still perhaps that of Chateaubriand whose
impossible Indians may outlast the too-possible Frenchmen of Flaubert.
The sustenance which Stendhal won from contemplation of our scene for
the esthetic of his novel of the modern will is less widely recognized.
We are aware, however, of how the symbolists transfigured Poe; and more
recently of the enthusiastic creation by the Dadaists of a romantic
America of cowboys, skyscrapers and jazz. Romantic movements in
classicist France are ever forages for nurture rather than voyages of
discovery. Like Greece, France is omnivorous and egocentric. In every
period of influences her writers are like a family consuming beefsteak.
That beefsteak will become, let us say, part of a lanky father, a fat
mother, a bad pagan boy, and a noble Christian sister. At this moment,
we may behold America turn into Louis Aragon, Valéry Larbaud, and
Bazalgette....
Bazalgette’s translation and biography of Whitman had a dynamic share in
the slow stirring of French letters, away from the Narcissus mood which
led to the masterworks of Claudel, Valéry, Proust, toward a new gesture
of spiritual excursion whence a good range of fresh romantic stuffs will
accrue for the young classicists to work on. His Whitman was a biography
that held fairly close to the narrative form, save that a lyrism
illumined it and made it speak with emphasis and fervor to the
imagination of the French. In “Henry Thoreau,” however, Bazalgette
stands revealed more clearly: a poet himself, and a prophet, he employs
a certain spiritual experience made manifest in America because less
assimilated here than the experience of Rousseau and of Tolstoi in their
lands; and he makes of it his own spiritual Word for France. This
technical analogy between Bazalgette in sophisticated Paris writing of
Thoreau, and Chateaubriand in rationalist Paris dreaming of our virgin
forests must not be strained too far. Bazalgette is less a poet than
Napoleon’s noble hater, but he is more historian and critic. His book
has the lilt and passage and effect of a packed personal paean; and yet
it is perhaps the best of all pictures of our great New England. There
is no phenomenal relation between Chateaubriand’s America—or that of the
Dadaists—and ourselves. Their work is, therefore, not negotiable beyond
their immediate needs. But clad in the fine English of Van Wyck Brooks,
Bazalgette’s “Thoreau” responds to our experience. It becomes an
American classic as surely as it is a French one.
The method is not narrative: it is a composite of allusiveness,
colloquy, lyrical projection and dramatic scening. A hard method to
follow unflagging through three hundred pages; and at first the frail
figure of Thoreau seems insufficient for it. The author has sustained
his tone with ruthless logic that at times may pall. One would
occasionally welcome passages in a more direct, conventional prose. But
the consequence of the author’s lack of mercy is an esthetic form the
more remarkable when one considers the, after all, comparative
slightness of Thoreau’s stuff and the frustrate colors of his milieu. At
the end, one realizes that this unsparing method was the inevitable
right one for the subject. Thoreau’s greatness did not loom like
Whitman’s. It was the consequence of impacts on a small living nucleus,
of the organic yet reactive growth of that nucleus within an inchoate
social envelope. When he created his Whitman, Bazalgette had but to
follow Whitman. Hence his use of narrative was correct. Even the Civil
War fell into place as a sort of objective scene for the hero’s
progress. Creating Thoreau, Bazalgette creates primarily the New England
town, and the woods and the rivers and the birds, creates the astringent
air of Emerson and Alcott, creates Mr. Greeley and his _Tribune_, John
Brown and his raiders, lyceum audiences and village ne’er-do-wells. A
superb massivity of America bounding Thoreau gives him his dimensions by
indirection and by the dynamism of the man’s responses. It was a subtle
task, and Bazalgette has done it. It required a complete mastery of the
American scene; and the extent to which this Frenchman who has never
visited our land knows it—its past, its present, _and_ its future—is
uncanny. Where did he learn what a New England village feels like, what
winter is in a Canadian wood? How did he catch this scent of the
Emersonian family, this shuttling rhythm of Broadway, this dark deluvial
stain in the Judge’s house in Staten Island? No mere thorough
scholarship can explain it. Chateaubriand’s Indians, Baudelaire’s Poe,
are alien and exotic. Bazalgette possesses a true intuition of America.
Strange as it may seem, he loves us—loves our promise, our struggle to
evolve it. But his love is clairvoyant: his mind has stratified his
vision of us with analytic understanding. He knows the heartbreaking
husk of social and psychic life in which our promise stifles. Bazalgette
is a Roussinean romanticist in that he chooses to bring to Paris our
Thoreau as a reality _for it_, from the New England town. But he is no
romanticizer of the town. Nor of Thoreau who emerges from the book as a
true hero almost by a process of survival. Thoreau is a hero of his age,
we gather, because his age was otherwise unheroic.
The book is a new type of novel, if you please, rather than biography in
the strict French sense. There is a new novel form—the Proustian—in
which the hero is literally “I.” An example of it in our language is
Sherwood Anderson’s “Story Teller’s Story.” Here is another kind of
novel—a sort of Crocean history—in which a real personage is drawn
ruthlessly as regards the facts and yet with Dionysian freedom in
spiritual emphasis and in esthetic.
A work like this dares to contain anything: and there is to be found
here a bit of literary criticism so original in form that it must be
mentioned. Thoreau and Whitman meet. Their talk is a failure. Walt is
distrustful of this highbrow Yankee who has so consciously turned away
from Harvard. Bazalgette records the futile dialogue and adds to it, by
way of antistrophe, an imagined dialogue consisting of responses gleaned
from the two men’s work. The effect is powerful and convincing: a
contrapuntal fugue that does more to prove the nuclear energy of the
American mind and its unity, in variety, of direction, than a score of
essays.
Mr. Brooks’s translation has a tendency toward “toning down.” The
original title, as an instance, reads “Henry Thoreau, Sauvage.” This
might be faithfully Englished as Henry Thoreau, the Untamed. Mr. Brooks
has preferred to substitute Emerson’s “bachelor of Nature.” Perhaps he
shares somewhat Emerson’s Apollonian attitude toward this nature-drunk,
nature-sweet, neoprimitive neighbor. But the translation is very far,
indeed, from a betrayal. It is the process whereby Bazalgette’s book
becomes indigenous and takes its place in our American literature
between the old and the new. Thoreau stands with Whitman and with
Melville for the creative transitional gesture between that new America,
inheritor of Old World forms, and our old America, creator of a new
world. Of this hazardous long birth-hour in whose travail we persist,
there is no lovelier expression than the prose of Van Wyck Brooks.
_1927_
3. FAIRY TALES FOR THE OLD
Our country was not young from the beginning. It had to achieve youth.
From the Old World came old shoots: the transplantation as often as not
aggravated their antiquity. Ere we could be young, our elements had to
rot and to be remingled. This took time. And it may broadly be said that
only with the opening of the West and the demise, in civil war, of our
old sectional cultures, did America become at last a single sprawling
infant.
Even then, the sectional elderships persisted. They took many forms.
None more pleasant than the glowing second childhood of New England
which stands expressed in the stories of Sarah Orne Jewett. These are
tales mostly of Maine in the later decades of the nineteenth century.
And rightly enough the best of them are about old women. The occasional
story of a child is sicklied over with an aged cast: for instance,
Sylvia of “A White Heron” is an old woman’s child, and lives with an old
woman. And when there is a wooing in “The Country of the Pointed Firs”
the maid has grown grey in service of her mother; the man—son of the
almost centenarian Mrs. Blackett—is a simpleton past fifty. But whether
the scene be the Poor Farm or a spruce island home or the tiny palace of
Queen Victoria’s Twin, there is ever a single glamorous illusion making
the substance and life of these sweet tales. And it is the manner of
illusion that dwells in the hearts of folks who have grown sweetly
childish, rather than sour, in their senility.
It is not necessary to insist that the farms painted by Miss Jewett are
about as “realistic” as the England of “Alice in Wonderland” or of
Tennyson’s “Idylls.” Yet these uniformly charming people, so pure of
thought, so innocuous in action, so redolent of lavender and lace, are
true, although the theatre of their verity is the poetic fancy of Miss
Jewett. We may all snatch from our coming decrepit days the nodding wish
to turn from the rot of our world into a sweet-scented realm of senile
wishes, in order to enjoy Miss Jewett.
The Maine of a mature mind, contemporary with these stories, must have
revealed men and women more like the persons of Robert Frost, more like
those one feels, rather by reaction than by direct creation, in the
works of Thoreau, Hawthorne, Margaret Fuller, Melville. And yet these
kind and well-groomed vagaries of Miss Jewett’s are no less a result of
the crass facts—no less respectable. The spirit of them is a sort of
iridescent mist rising from the shut pools of that life.
Of course, stories with substance so wistful and so misty cannot rank
high as art: and we must not permit the present mood of American
reminiscence to which are due so many biographies, so many re-editions,
so many reconstructions, to blind us to their frail value. The fairy
tales of youth have greater destiny, because they have harder substance.
The child transcends his world: his ebullient vaulting energy despises a
mere unmastered round of fact and with parabolic power brings Mystery to
earth. But with second childhood, reality is too much and is avoided by
a sharp reduction. Energy, exhausted, draws back in catatonic gesture;
re-creates smallnesses to dwell in as a comfortable offset to the no
longer challengeable world.
Willa Cather, a feeble daughter of Miss Jewett, has had the fondness to
compare her tales with “Huckleberry Finn” (a fairy tale of youth) and
“The Scarlet Letter”—one of the maturest dreams of American romance. But
these perfumed pictures of the land of pointed firs are a gross
reduction of the truth. All the primary lines, colors, forms, are
missing. Indeed, all life-welling passion, all organic substance, have
been mulcted out by the desire for Peace: and what remains is a
predigested brew of natural descriptions and carefully balanced
converse—a true diet, indeed, for old and toothless gums.
Yet, although their stuff be small, these tales have loveliness. And one
rereads them, after all these years, marveling at the grace with which
their frailties have aged. The scenes of nature are good lyrics.
Although Miss Jewett’s sea has become strangely gentle, like a parlor
pet, it is still living: it is captured somewhat as life is captured in
certain two-dimensional prints from old Japan. The dialect has the mark
of absolute perfection; and yet is musically mannered so that none of
the conscious stress on veracity is there to irk one. But above
all—those women, those adorable, impossible old ladies, brewing tea,
gossiping, sewing! They are there, not like our grandmothers, but like
our childish vision of them—like what our grandmothers would have liked
to be, to our rapt young love. Even this sentimental splendor is reduced
to a kind of loophole glimpse. And yet the lens is never blurred and the
effect has all the negotiability of art.
There was a strength in old New England which passed maturity without
losing all its power. There are wild flowers still in these rock-bound
fields that go to seed hardily: they do not scatter or fall with the
first turning away of the summer sun; but wraithlike they stand aloft
upon their stems and let the autumn air run through them. Something of
this prowess is in Miss Jewett’s stories. For all their simplification,
for all their romantic refusal of the true stuff of tragedy—finally,
hence, for all their subtle denigration of New England which deserves
greater and more athletic art, these tales bear well. They may be tales
of senescence—of a soul’s twilight: but this is a soul not impotent even
in decay.
Most of them appeared in magazines well over forty years ago. As one
measures them with what has followed, one is dismayed. For hidden in
their glamour is a sinister seed. True enough are tales which spring
from a felt illusion. But it is only the lie which has brought forth
progeny. The hallucination of Miss Jewett, making her see such paragons
of peace and sweetness in the New England farms, causing her in all
solemnity to compare the “Bowdoin reunion” with “a company of Greeks
going to celebrate a victory, or to worship the god of harvest”—this
peculiar magic of old age could not be copied and has not been
transmitted. Only the trick of reduction, only the simplification, only
the falsehood. And the consequence, patented and standard, swarms within
our fiction magazines and in our novels.
The fairy tale turned formula—the fairy tale without the motive of youth
or of old age—becomes the harsh, cold, mechanical, nugatory art which
makes up most of our current “competence” in fiction. It marks the
extension into literature of the processes of mass production which
belong to an industrial age. It is responsible for the factories and
sweatshops whence reading matter is turned out for the million. How it
came to be born you can trace in the soft, warm, gradually shallowing
and self-repeating art of Sarah Orne Jewett.
_1925_
4. DUSK AND DAWN
The basis for any criticism of a book by Lewis Mumford must be respect
for the author and thankfulness that he is at work in our country. Rare,
indeed, are American critics who, like him, venture into the realm of
general ideas; and rarer are the men who, with his good will, possess
his rounded equipment. For Mr. Mumford tries to be no specialist save in
the task of seeing and interpreting life whole. No less than all the
works of men shall be his laboratory; no less than the search of values
for “the good life” his aim. He can write of archaic Utopias and future
city plannings, of modern books and ancient pictures and medieval
guilds; he is at home in all subjects since he has gained awareness that
all of them are one.
Mr. Mumford’s “The Golden Day” sustains this sense of him. It is in many
ways a beautiful book. It flows easy, brilliant, poetical, from the
store of its maker. It has style, it has form. There is no reason to
doubt that it will take its place in the sparse critical literature of
our uncertain era.
Mr. Mumford has written an essay in interpretation of the American past.
With this purpose, he has utilized an analysis of our customs, of our
ideals, principally through the medium of our writers. But the
standpoint of his study is the present. He has not written history; he
has established, as his focus, not alone our day, but as well our need.
His retrospect receives its dynamic rhythm, one might almost say its
_life_, from the author’s mastering interest in “What next?”
The general theme, viewed as a series of facts, is plain enough and has
been proposed in similar terms, before. Europe’s state since the Middle
Ages is regarded as a disintegration. Of this profound breakup America
is a conspicuous symptom and expression. America was colonized by forces
of Europe’s decomposition; and America itself, determining such states
of mind as pioneering, hastened the deliquescence of that spiritual
world which man raised up in Europe and whose tearing down had no deeper
symbol than the emigrations. Howsoever, before the final breakup of
Europe in the American West, new shoots of the transplanted European
culture rose on our Eastern seaboard. In the Golden Day of Emerson,
Thoreau, Whitman, they reached a splendor fresh and unparalleled in the
contemporary hour of a Europe less swiftly, but as essentially decadent.
Thereafter, the American West, in which the disintegrated force of the
Old World and the barbarizing condition of the New came to a climax,
gradually prevailed. Already, with Hawthorne, Melville, Poe, the Golden
Day was waning: the good elements of old Europe were rotted by
unconscious “new” American factors. The “pragmatic acquiescence” marks
America’s rationalized slump into the barbaric mood of the industrial
pioneer. William James, John Dewey, are good men ennobling the sterile
cause. The descent, now, is swift. The muckrakers are social critics
themselves submerged in the muck, failing of any principle to catapult
them free. Novelists socially and spiritually submerged are Mark Twain,
Jack London, Theodore Dreiser—scavengers whose true function is to pick
to pieces what still remains of a once noble structure. And not deeply
otherwise are the wistful “pillagers of the past” of whom the finest are
Henry James and George Santayana; their retreat into Europe or to
“philosophy” is motived by as forceless an acceptance of the barbaric
day as the rationalization of the pragmatists. Finally, Mr. Mumford
brings us to ourselves. After this ebb, we are sunk so low that naught
could remain but a new rising. Mr. Mumford is hopeful, one feels, for
sheerly tidal reasons.
Of course, to state in a paragraph what the author himself has
athletically stripped to but three hundred pages is to leave out much
and to denature more. This book, it seems to me, is chiefly a personal
essay—a confession by a significant man. You will find, here, excellent
pages on the “romanticism” of the pioneer, on the genius of Emerson, on
the limitations of Dewey and Santayana. You will find other pages less
adequate: as the discussions of Whitman, Melville, Poe and Dreiser. What
interests me most in “The Golden Day” is not its assemblage of
interpretations, but its focus.
This focus is external. Mr. Mumford is outside his own book. He depicts
superbly the Platonic, pagan and mystical glories which in America’s
Golden Day were called Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman. But they are
experientially remote from Mr. Mumford: as remote as Dante and Aquinas.
Ideally, of course, we share all greatness and find its recognition in
our souls. Yet those medieval worlds were not actually ours: their
source, their form and their behavior differ. Mr. Mumford depicts, also,
and with no less eloquence, the horrors of the American scene: the
barbaric frontier, the Protestant decadence, the tyranny of the machine
and of the job, the fallacies of materialism, utilitarianism,
experimentalism, pragmatism. But he is outside the experience of these
also. When he praises the age of Emerson, there is an aloofness of
elegy. When he exhorts the young men, his contemporaries: “Allons. The
road is before us!” there is an aloofness of rhetoric. What is the
matter with Mr. Mumford?
The matter is that he has considered us, rather than experienced us. He
has gone deep to behold our past greatness, our present miseries; but
not deep enough to establish the vital connection between them, and
between them and himself. America is an organic subject. Mr. Mumford,
for all his studies in causation, treats as a series of isolate
manifestations, “good” or “bad,” “tasteful” or “disgusting,” what are
really acts of a single spiritual Organism, yet immature, yet basally
“in the making.” The Golden Day whereof the author so wistfully sings
was not a day at all: it was not even a dawn: it was, if you insist on
solar terms, _a_ dusk of Europe. But only in its ideologies and cultural
forms! More accurately, it was a moment in the American childhood when
the spirit spoke lyrically, before the whelming demands of body—of
nutrition and of growth—plunged America more fully into chaos. The fact
that this age was not a Day is plain in its shimmering, surface passage
over the American mind: and in the sequence when America transformed the
idealism of its transcendentalists and poets into immediate adolescent
matters of expansion and of self-indulgence. Mr. Mumford makes Emerson
the hero of this “day.” Yet if ever a man was a congeries of lovely
echoes, of wistful longings, of fleeting and unfleshed intuitions,
Emerson was he! His intimations of immortality were almost literally
those which the great Wordsworth beheld on the visage of a babe! Emerson
_was_ such an intimation on America’s huge child face. He was our first,
unfleshed, undifferentiate glimpse of manhood—of a manhood still very
far ahead.
In Whitman this intimation is no longer the tremorous glimpse so well
symbolized in Emerson’s frail and evanescent prose. It is a roar of
adolescence: a true hunger call: no more. Now, note Mr. Mumford’s basic
misunderstanding of Poe and Melville. These men were the first to try to
_flesh_ what we might style the Emersonian intuition in American life.
Mr. Mumford calls them figures of the twilight. And yet, from the
standpoint of a study of the American Organism, they are more advanced
than such more successful artists as Whitman and Thoreau. Poe’s mystical
attitude toward the mechanism and applied science, his marvelous attempt
to add a dimensional sense to the inherited experience of life; and
Melville’s tragic effort to wed God and whaling—these are the first
organic _acts_ after the childhood intimations of the men whom Mr.
Mumford esteems as makers of our Noon.[8] And the author fails to
recognize them, because he has no organic experience in America to guide
him. He is in love with the gesture, the dream, the childhood faëry of
our past: yet he rejects the _body_—our present interim of the Machine
and of the romanticisms of the Machine—whereby alone this promise from
our past may be organized into a living future.
Therefore, finally, his book brings the flavor of a plaint: his envoi is
wistful and vague, his call to future action has no ring. For American
future spiritual action must rise organically from the facts of our
hideous present, since these facts are an insuperable sequence from our
past ideals. Mr. Mumford, in this book, is a man sincerely,
prophetically in love with the sweet spirit of childhood; yet turning
from the physical, often bestial process whereby alone the child can
grow in order to express that spirit. When the child America lisps
purities half understood, Mr. Mumford blesses. But when the child
America gulps food, wallows in mud, slugs and robs comrades, adventures,
bullies, cheats—Mr. Mumford merely scolds.
_1926_
5. ELEGY FOR ANARCHISM
a.