STUDIES IN
CLASSIC AMERICAN
LITERATURE
BY D. H. LAWRENCE
NEW YORK
THOMAS SELTZER
1923
CONTENTS
FOREWORD
I. THE SPIRIT OF PLACE
II. BENJAMIN FRANKLIN
III. HECTOR ST. JOHN DE CRÈVECŒUR
IV. FENIMORE COOPER'S WHITE NOVELS
V. FENIMORE COOPER'S LEATHERSTOCKING NOVELS
VI. EDGAR ALLAN POE
VII. NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE AND "THE SCARLET LETTER"
VIII. HAWTHORNE'S "BLITHEDALE ROMANCE"
IX. DANA'S "TWO YEARS BEFORE THE MAST"
X. HERMAN MELVILLE'S "TYPEE" AND "OMOO"
XI. HERMAN MELVILLE'S "MOBY DICK"
XII. WHITMAN
FOREWORD
Listen to the States asserting: "The hour has struck! Americans shall be
American. The U.S.A. is now grown up artistically. It is time we ceased
to hang on to the skirts of Europe, or to behave like schoolboys let
loose from European schoolmasters--"
All right, Americans, let's see you set about it. Go on then, let the
precious cat out of the bag. If you're sure he's in.
Et interrogatum ab omnibus:
"Ubi est ille Toad-in-the-Hole?"
Et iteratum est ab omnibus:
"Non est inventus!"
Is he or isn't he inventus?
If he is, of course, he must be somewhere inside you, Oh American. No
good chasing him over all the old continents, of course. But equally no
good _asserting_ him merely. Where is this new bird called the true
American? Show us the homunculus of the new era. Go on, show us him.
Because all that is visible to the naked European eye, in America, is a
sort of recreant European. We want to see this missing link of the next
era.
Well, we still don't get him. So the only thing to do is to have a look
for him under the American bushes. The old American literature, to start
with.
"The old American literature! Franklin, Cooper, Hawthorne & Co.? All
that mass of words! all so unreal!" cries the live American.
Heaven knows what we mean by reality. Telephone, tinned meat, Charlie
Chaplin, water-taps, and World-Salvation, presumably. Some insisting on
the plumbing, and some on saving the world: these being the two great
American specialties. Why not? Only, what about the young homunculus of
the new era, meanwhile? You can't save yourself before you are born.
Look at me trying to be midwife to the unborn homunculus!
Two bodies of modern literature seem to me to have come to a real verge:
the Russian and the American. Let us leave aside the more brittle bits
of French or Marinetti or Irish production, which are perhaps over the
verge. Russian and American. And by American I do not mean Sherwood
Anderson, who is so Russian. I mean the old people, little thin volumes
of Hawthorne, Poe, Dana, Melville, Whitman. These seem to me to have
reached a verge, as the more voluminous Tolstoi, Dostoevsky, Chekhov,
Artzibashev reached a limit on the other side. The furthest frenzies of
French modernism or futurism have not yet reached the pitch of extreme
consciousness that Poe, Melville, Hawthorne, Whitman reached. The
European moderns are all _trying_ to be extreme. The great Americans I
mention just were it. Which is why the world has funked them, and funks
them to-day.
The great difference between the extreme Russians and the extreme
American lies in the fact that the Russians are explicit and hate
eloquence and symbols, seeing in these only subterfuge, whereas the
Americans refuse everything explicit and always put up a sort of double
meaning. They revel in subterfuge. They prefer their truth safely
swaddled in an ark of bulrushes, and deposited among the reeds until
some friendly Egyptian princess comes to rescue the babe.
Well, it's high time now that someone came to lift out the swaddled
infant of truth that America spawned some time back. The child must be
getting pretty thin, from neglect.
I. THE SPIRIT OF PLACE
We like to think of the old-fashioned American classics as children's
books. Just childishness, on our part.
The old American art-speech contains an alien quality, which belongs to
the American continent and to nowhere else. But, of course, so long as
we insist on reading the books as children's tales, we miss all that.
One wonders what the proper high-brow Romans of the third and fourth or
later centuries read into the strange utterances of Lucretius or
Apuleius or Tertullian, Augustine or Athanasius. The uncanny voice of
Iberian Spain, the weirdness of old Carthage, the passion of Libya and
North Africa; you may bet the proper old Romans never heard these at
all. They read old Latin inference over the top of it, as we read old
European inference over the top of Poe or Hawthorne.
It is hard to hear a new voice, as hard as it is to listen to an unknown
language. We just don't listen. There is a new voice in the old American
classics. The world has declined to hear it, and has blabbed about
children's stories.
Why?--Out of fear. The world fears a new experience more than it fears
anything. Because a new experience displaces so many old experiences.
And it is like trying to use muscles that have perhaps never been used,
or that have been going stiff for ages. It hurts horribly.
The world doesn't fear a new idea. It can pigeon-hole any idea. But it
can't pigeon-hole a real new experience. It can only dodge. The world is
a great dodger, and the Americans the greatest. Because they dodge their
own very selves.
There is a new feeling in the old American books, far more than there is
in the modern American books, which are pretty empty of any feeling, and
proud of it. There is a "different" feeling in the old American
classics. It is the shifting over from the old psyche to something new,
a displacement. And displacements hurt. This hurts. So we try to tie it
up, like a cut finger. Put a rag around it.
It is a cut, too. Cutting away the old emotions and consciousness. Don't
ask what is left.
Art-speech is the only truth. An artist is usually a damned liar, but
his art, if it be art, will tell you the truth of his day. And that is
all that matters. Away with eternal truth. Truth lives from day to day,
and the marvellous Plato of yesterday is chiefly bosh to-day.
The old American artists were hopeless liars. But they were artists, in
spite of themselves. Which is more than you can say of most living
practitioners.
And you can please yourself, when you read _The Scarlet Letter_, whether
you accept what that sugary, blue-eyed little darling of a Hawthorne has
to say for himself, false as all darlings are, or whether you read the
impeccable truth of his art-speech.
The curious thing about art-speech is that it prevaricates so terribly,
I mean it tells such lies. I suppose because we always all the time tell
ourselves lies. And out of a pattern of lies art weaves the truth. Like
Dostoevsky posing as a sort of Jesus, but most truthfully revealing
himself all the while as a little horror.
Truly art is a sort of subterfuge. But thank God for it, we can see
through the subterfuge if we choose. Art has two great functions. First,
it provides an emotional experience. And then, if we have the courage of
our own feelings, it becomes a mine of practical truth. We have had the
feelings _ad nauseam._ But we've never dared dig the actual truth out of
them, the truth that concerns us, whether it concerns our grandchildren
or not.
The artist usually sets out--or used to--to point a moral and adorn a
tale. The tale, however, points the other way, as a rule. Two blankly
opposing morals, the artist's and the tale's. Never trust the artist.
Trust the tale. The proper functions of a critic is to save the tale
from the artist who created it.
Now we know our business in these studies; saving the American tale from
the American artist.
Let us look at this American artist first. How did he ever get to
America, to start with? Why isn't he a European still, like his father
before him?
Now listen to me, don't listen to him. He'll tell you the lie you
expect. Which is partly your fault for expecting it.
He didn't come in search of freedom of worship. England had more freedom
of worship in the year 1700 than America had. Won by Englishmen who
wanted freedom, and so stopped at home and fought for it. And got it.
Freedom of worship? Read the history of New England during the first
century of its existence.
Freedom anyhow? The land of the free! This the land of the free! Why, if
I say anything that displeases them, the free mob will lynch me, and
that's my freedom. Free? Why I have never been in any country where the
individual has such an abject fear of his fellow countrymen. Because, as
I say, they are free to lynch him the moment he shows he is not one of
them.
No, no, if you're so fond of the truth about Queen Victoria, try a
little about yourself.
Those Pilgrim Fathers and their successors never came here for freedom
of worship. What did they set up when they got here? Freedom, would you
call it?
They didn't come for freedom. Or if they did, they sadly went back on
themselves.
All right then, what did they come for? For lots of reasons. Perhaps
least of all in search of freedom of any sort: positive freedom, that
is.
They came largely to get _away_--that most simple of motives. To get
away. Away from what? In the long run, away from themselves. Away from
everything. That's why most people have come to America, and still do
come. To get away from everything they are and have been.
"Henceforth be masterless."
Which is all very well, but it isn't freedom. Rather the reverse. A
hopeless sort of constraint. It is never freedom till you find something
you really _positively want to be._ And people in America have always
been shouting about the things they are not. Unless of course they are
millionaires, made or in the making.
And after all there is a positive side to the movement. All that vast
flood of human life that has flowed over the Atlantic in ships from
Europe to America has not flowed over simply on a tide of revulsion from
Europe and from the confinements of the European ways of life. This
revulsion was, and still is, I believe, the prime motive in emigration.
But there was some cause, even for the revulsion.
It seems as if at times man had a frenzy for getting away from any
control of any sort. In Europe the old Christianity was the real master.
The Church and the true aristocracy bore the responsibility for the
working out of the Christian ideals: a little irregularly, maybe, but
responsible nevertheless.
Mastery, kingship, fatherhood had their power destroyed at the time of
the Renaissance.
And it was precisely at this moment that the great drift over the
Atlantic started. What were men drifting away from? The old authority of
Europe? Were they breaking the bonds of authority, and escaping to a new
more absolute unrestrainedness? Maybe. But there was more to it.
Liberty is all very well, but men cannot live without masters. There is
always a master. And men either live in glad obedience to the master
they believe in, or they live in a frictional opposition to the master
they wish to undermine. In America this frictional opposition has been
the vital factor. It has given the Yankee his kick. Only the continual
influx of more servile Europeans has provided America with an obedient
labouring class. The true obedience never outlasting the first
generation.
But there sits the old master, over in Europe. Like a parent. Somewhere
deep in every American heart lies a rebellion against the old parenthood
of Europe. Yet no American feels he has completely escaped its mastery.
Hence the slow, smouldering patience of American opposition. The slow,
smouldering, corrosive obedience to the old master Europe, the unwilling
subject, the unremitting opposition.
Whatever else you are, be masterless.
"Ca Ca Caliban
Get a new master, be a new man."
Escaped slaves, we might say, people the republics of Liberia or Haiti.
Liberia enough! Are we to look at America in the same way? A vast
republic of escaped slaves. When you consider the hordes from eastern
Europe, you might well say it: a vast republic of escaped slaves. But
one dare not say this of the Pilgrim Fathers, and the great old body of
idealist Americans, the modern Americans tortured with thought. A vast
republic of escaped slaves. Look out, America! And a minority of
earnest, self-tortured people.
The masterless.
"CaCa Caliban
Get a new master, be a new man."
What did the Pilgrim Fathers come for, then, when they came so
gruesomely over the black sea? Oh, it was in a black spirit. A black
revulsion from Europe, from the old authority of Europe, from kings and
bishops and popes. And more. When you look into it, more. They were
black, masterful men, they wanted something else. No kings, no bishops
maybe. Even no God Almighty. But also, no more of this new "humanity"
which followed the Renaissance. None of this new liberty which was to be
so pretty in Europe. Something grimmer, by no means free-and-easy.
America has never been easy, and is not easy to-day. Americans have
always been at a certain tension. Their liberty is a thing of sheer
will, sheer tension: a liberty of THOU SHALT NOT. And it has been so
from the first. The land of THOU SHALT NOT. Only the first commandment
is: THOU SHALT NOT PRESUME TO BE A MASTER. Hence democracy.
"We are the masterless." That is what the American Eagle shrieks. It's a
Hen-Eagle.
The Spaniards refused the post-Renaissance liberty of Europe. And the
Spaniards filled most of America. The Yankees, too, refused, refused the
post-Renaissance humanism of Europe. First and foremost, they hated
masters. But under that, they hated the flowing ease of humour in
Europe. At the bottom of the American soul was always a dark suspense,
at the bottom of the Spanish-American soul the same. And this dark
suspense hated and hates the old European spontaneity, watches it
collapse with satisfaction.
Every continent has its own great spirit of place. Every people is
polarized in some particular locality, which is home, the homeland.
Different places on the face of the earth have different vital
effluence, different vibration, different chemical exhalation, different
polarity with different stars: call it what you like. But the spirit of
place is a great reality. The Nile valley produced not only the corn,
but the terrific religions of Egypt. China produces the Chinese, and
will go on doing so. The Chinese in San Francisco will in time cease to
be Chinese, for America is a great melting pot.
There was a tremendous polarity in Italy, in the city of Rome. And this
seems to have died. For even places die. The Island of Great Britain had
a wonderful terrestrial magnetism or polarity of its own, which made the
British people. For the moment, this polarity seems to be breaking. Can
England die? And what if England dies?
Men are less free than they imagine; ah, far lessfree. The freest are
perhaps least free.
Men are free when they are in a living homeland, not when they are
straying and breaking away. Men are free when they are obeying some
deep, inward voice of religious belief. Obeying from within. Men are
free when they belong to a living, organic, _believing_ community,
active in fulfilling some unfulfilled, perhaps unrealized purpose. Not
when they are escaping to some wild west. The most unfree souls go west,
and shout of freedom. Men are freest when they are most unconscious of
freedom. The shout is a rattling of chains, always was.
Men are not free when they are doing just what they like. The moment you
can do just what you like, there is nothing you care about doing. Men
are only free when they are doing what the deepest self likes.
And there is getting down to the deepest self! It takes some diving.
Because the deepest self is way down, and the conscious self is an
obstinate monkey. But of one thing we may be sure. If one wants to be
free, one has to give up the illusion of doing what one likes, and seek
what IT wishes done.
But before you can do what IT likes, you must first break the spell of
the old mastery, the old IT.
Perhaps at the Renaissance, when kingship and fatherhood fell, Europe
drifted into a very dangerous half-truth: of liberty and equality.
Perhaps the men who went to America felt this, and so repudiated the old
world altogether. Went one better than Europe. Liberty in America has
meant so far the breaking away from _all_ dominion. The true liberty
will only begin when Americans discover IT, and proceed possibly to
fulfill IT. IT being the deepest _whole_ self of man, the self in its
wholeness, not idealistic halfness.
That's why the Pilgrim Fathers came to America, then; and that's why we
come. Driven by IT. We cannot see that invisible winds carry us, as they
carry swarms of locusts, that invisible magnetism brings us as it brings
the migrating birds to their unforeknown goal. But it is so. We are not
the marvellous choosers and deciders we think we are. IT chooses for us,
and decides for us. Unless of course we are just escaped slaves,
vulgarly cocksure of our ready-made destiny. But if we are living
people, in touch with the source, IT drives us and decides us. We are
free only so long as we obey. When we run counter, and think we will do
as we like, we just flee around like Orestes pursued by the Eumenides.
And still, when the great day begins, when Americans have at last
discovered America and their own wholeness, still there will be the vast
number of escaped slaves to reckon with, those who have no cocksure,
ready-made destinies.
Which will win in America, the escaped slaves, or the new whole men?
The real American day hasn't begun yet. Or at least, not yet sunrise. So
far it has been the false dawn. That is, in the progressive American
consciousness there has been the one dominant desire, to do away with
the old thing. Do away with masters, exalt the will of the people. The
will of the people being nothing but a figment, the exalting doesn't
count for much. So, in the name of the will of the people, get rid of
masters. When you have got rid of masters, you are left with this mere
phrase of the will of the people. Then you pause and bethink yourself,
and try to recover your own wholeness.
So much for the conscious American motive, and for democracy over here.
Democracy in America is just the tool with which the old mastery of
Europe, the European spirit, is undermined. Europe destroyed,
potentially, American democracy will evaporate. America will begin.
American consciousness has so far been a false dawn. The negative ideal
of democracy. But underneath, and contrary to this open ideal, the first
hints and revelations of IT. IT, the American whole soul.
You have got to pull the democratic and idealistic clothes oft American
utterance, and see what you can of the dusky body of IT underneath.
"Henceforth be masterless."
Henceforth be mastered.
II. BENJAMIN FRANKLIN
The Perfectibility of Man! Ah heaven, what a dreary theme! The
perfectibility of the Ford car! The perfectibility of which man? I am
many men. Which of them are you going to perfect? I am not a mechanical
contrivance.
Education! Which of the various me's do you propose to educate, and
which do you propose to suppress?
Anyhow I defy you. I defy you, oh society, to educate me or to suppress
me, according to your dummy standards.
The ideal man! And which is he, if you please? Benjamin Franklin or
Abraham Lincoln? The ideal man! Roosevelt or Porfirio Diaz?
There are other men in me, besides this patient ass who sits here in a
tweed jacket. What am I doing, playing the patient ass in a tweed
jacket? Who am I talking to? Who are you, at the other end of this
patience?
Who are you? How many selves have you? And which of these selves do you
want to be?
Is Yale College going to educate the self that is in the dark of you, or
Harvard College?
The ideal self! Oh, but I have a strange and fugitive self shut out and
howling like a wolf or a coyote under the ideal windows. See his red
eyes in the dark? This is the self who is coming into his own.
The perfectibility of man, dear God! When every man as long as he
remains alive is in himself a multitude of conflicting men. Which of
these do you choose to perfect, at the expense of every other?
Old Daddy Franklin will fell you. He'll rig him up for you, the pattern
American. Oh, Franklin was the first downright American. He knew what he
was about, the sharp little man. He set up the first dummy American.
At the beginning of his career this cunning little Benjamin drew up for
himself a creed that should "satisfy the professors of every religion,
but shock none."
Now wasn't that a real American thing to do?
"_That there is One God, who made all things._"
(But Benjamin made Him.)
"_That He governs the world by His Providence._"
(Benjamin knowing all about Providence.)
"_That He ought to be worshipped with adoration, prayer, and
thanksgiving._"
(Which cost nothing.)
"_But--_" But me no buts, Benjamin, saith the Lord.
"_But that the most acceptable service of God is doing good to men._"
(God having no choice in the matter.)
"_That the soul is immortal._"
(You'll see why, in the next clause.)
"_And that God will certainly reward virtue and punish vice, either
here or hereafter._"
Now if Mr. Andrew Carnegie, or any other millionaire, had wished to
invent a God to suit his ends, he could not have done better. Benjamin
did it for him in the eighteenth century. God is the supreme servant of
men who want to get on, to _produce._ Providence. The provider. The
heavenly store-keeper. The everlasting Wanamaker.
And this is all the God the grandsons of the Pilgrim Fathers had
left. Aloft on a pillar of dollars.
"_That the soul is immortal._"
The trite way Benjamin says it!
But man has a soul, though you can't locate it either in his purse or
his pocket-book or his heart or his stomach or his head. The wholeness
of a man is his soul. Not merely that nice little comfortable bit which
Benjamin marks out.
It's a queer thing, is a man's soul. It is the whole of him. Which means
it is the unknown him, as well as the known. It seems to me just funny,
professors and Benjamins fixing the functions of the soul. Why the soul
of man is a vast forest, and all Benjamin intended was a neat back
garden. And we've all got to fit in to his kitchen garden scheme of
things. Hail Columbia!
The soul of man is a dark forest. The Hercynian Wood that scared the
Romans so, and out of which came the white-skinned hordes of the next
civilization.
Who knows what will come out of the soul of man? The soul of man is a
dark vast forest, with wild life in it. Think of Benjamin fencing it
off!
Oh, but Benjamin fenced a little tract that he called the soul of man,
and proceeded to get it into cultivation. Providence, forsooth! And they
think that bit of barbed wire is going to keep us in pound forever? More
fools them.
This is Benjamin's barbed wire fence. He made himself a list of virtues,
which he trotted inside like a grey nag in a paddock.
1
TEMPERANCE
Eat not to fulness; drink not to elevation.
2
SILENCE
Speak not but what may benefit others or yourself; avoid trifling
conversation.
3
ORDER
Let all your things have their places; let each pert of your business
have its time.
4
RESOLUTION
Resolve to perform what you ought; perform without fail what you
resolve.
5
FRUGALITY
Make no expense but to do good to others or yourself--i. e., waste
nothing.
6
INDUSTRY
Lose no time, be always employed in something useful; cut off all
unnecessary action.
7
SINCERITY
Use no hurtful deceit; think innocently and justly, and, if you speak,
speak accordingly.
8
JUSTICE
Wrong none by doing injuries, or omitting the benefits that are your
duty.
9
MODERATION
Avoid extremes, forbear resenting injuries as muchas you think they
deserve.
10
CLEANLINESS
Tolerate no uncleanliness in body, clothes, or habitation.
11
TRANQUILLITY
Be not disturbed at trifles, or at accidents common or unavoidable.
12
CHASTITY
Rarely use venery but for health and offspring, never to dulness,
weakness, or the injury of your own or another's peace or reputation.
13
HUMILITY
Imitate Jesus and Socrates.
A Quaker friend told Franklin that he, Benjamin, was generally
considered proud, so Benjamin put in the Humility touch as an
afterthought. The amusing part is the sort of humility it displays.
"Imitate Jesus and Socrates, and mind you don't outshine either of these
two. One can just imagine Socrates and Alcibiades roaring in their cups
over Philadelphian Benjamin, and Jesus looking at him a little puzzled,
and murmuring; Aren't you wise in your own conceit, Ben?"
"Henceforth be masterless," retorts Ben. "Be ye each one his own master
unto himself, and don't let even the Lord put his spoke in. Each man his
own master" is but a puffing up of masterlessness.
Well, the first of Americans practised this enticing list with
assiduity, setting a national example. He had the virtues in columns,
and gave himself good and bad marks according as he thought his
behaviour deserved. Pity these conduct charts are lost to us. He only
remarks that Order was his stumbling block. He could not learn to be
neat and tidy.
Isn't it nice to have nothing worse to confess?
He was a little model, was Benjamin. Doctor Franklin. Snuff-coloured
little man! Immortal soul and all!
The immortal soul part was a sort of cheap insurance policy.
Benjamin had no concern, really, with the immortal soul. He was too
busy with social man.
1. He swept and lighted the streets of young Philadelphia.
2. He invented electrical appliances.
3. He was the centre of a moralizing club in Philadelphia, and he wrote
the moral humorisms of Poor Richard.
4. He was a member of all the important councils of Philadelphia, and
then of the American colonies.
5. He won the cause of American Independence at the French Court, and
was the economic father of the United States.
Now what more can you want of a man? And yet he is _infra dig_, even in
Philadelphia.
I admire him. I admire his sturdy courage first of all, then his
sagacity, then his glimpsing into the thunders of electricity, then his
common-sense humour. All the qualities of a great man, and never more
than a great citizen. Middle-sized, sturdy, snuff-coloured Doctor
Franklin, one of the soundest citizens that ever trod or "used venery."
I do not like him.
And, by the way, I always thought books of Venery were about hunting
deer.
There is a certain earnest naïveté about him. Like a child. And like a
little old man. He has again become as a little child, always as wise as
his grandfather, or wiser.
Perhaps, as I say, the most complete citizen that ever "used venery."
Printer, philosopher, scientist, author and patriot, impeccable husband
and citizen, why isn't he an archetype?
Pioneer, Oh Pioneers! Benjamin was one of the greatest pioneers of the
United States. Yet we just can't do with him.
What's wrong with him then? Or what's wrong with us?
I can remember, when I was a little boy, my father used to buy a scrubby
yearly almanack with the sun and moon and stars on the cover. And it
used to prophesy bloodshed and famine. But also crammed in corners it
had little anecdotes and humorisms, with a moral tag. And I used to have
my little priggish laugh at the woman who counted her chickens before
they were hatched, and so forth, and I was convinced that honesty was
the best policy, also a little priggishly. The author of these bits was
Poor Richard, and Poor Richard was Benjamin Franklin, writing in
Philadelphia well over a hundred years before.
And probably I haven't got over those Poor Richard tags yet. I rankle
still with them. They are thorns in young flesh.
Because although I still believe that honesty is the best policy, I
dislike policy altogether; though it is just as well not to count your
chickens before they are hatched, it's still more hateful to count them
with gloating when they _are_ hatched. It has taken me many years and
countless smarts to get out of that barbed wire moral enclosure that
Poor Richard rigged up. Here am I now in tatters and scratched to
ribbons, sitting in the middle of Benjamin's America looking at the
barbed wire, and the fat sheep crawling under the fence to get fat
outside and the watchdogs yelling at the gate lest by chance anyone
should get out by the proper exit. Oh America! Oh Benjamin! And I just
utter a long loud curse against Benjamin and the American corral.
Moral America! Most moral Benjamin. Sound, satisfied Ben!
He had to go to the frontiers of his State to settle some disturbance
among the Indians. On this occasion he writes:
"We found that they had made a great bonfire in the middle of the
square; they were all drunk, men and women quarrelling and fighting.
Their dark-coloured bodies, half naked, seen only by the gloomy light of
the bonfire, running after and beating one another with fire-brands,
accompanied by their horrid yellings, formed a scene the most resembling
our ideas of hell that could well be imagined. There was no appeasing
the tumult, and we retired to our lodging. At midnight a number of them
came thundering at our door, demanding more rum, of which we took no
notice.
"The next day, sensible they had misbehaved in giving us that
disturbance, they sent three of their counsellors to make their apology.
The orator acknowledged the fault, but laid it upon the rum, and then
endeavoured to excuse the rum by saying: "The Great Spirit, who made all
things, made everything for some use; and whatever he designed anything
for, that use it should always be put to. Now, when he had made rum, he
said: 'Let this be for the Indians to get drunk with.' And it must be
so."
"And, indeed, if it be the design of Providence to extirpate these
savages in order to make room for the cultivators of the earth, it seems
not improbable that rum may be the appointed means. It has already
annihilated all the tribes who formerly inhabited all the seacoast..."
This, from the good doctor, with such suave complacency is a little
disenchanting. Almost too good to be true.
But there you are! The barbed wire fence. "Extirpate these savages in
order to make room for the cultivators of the earth." Oh, Benjamin
Franklin! He even "used venery" as a cultivator of seed.
Cultivate the earth, ye gods! The Indians did that, as much as they
needed. And they left off there. Who built Chicago? Who cultivated the
earth until it spawned Pittsburgh, Pa.?
The moral issue! Just look at it! Cultivation included. If it's a mere
choice of Kultur or cultivation, I give it up.
Which brings us right back to our question, what's wrong with Benjamin,
that we can't stand him? Or else, what's wrong with us, that we find
fault with such a paragon?
Man is a moral animal. All right. I am a moral animal. And I'm going to
remain such. I'm not going to be turned into a virtuous little automaton
as Benjamin would have me. "This is good, that is bad. Turn the little
handle and let the good tap flow," saith Benjamin and all America with
him. "But first of all extirpate those savages who are always turning on
the bad tap."
I am a moral animal. But I am not a moral machine. I don't work with a
little set of handles or levers. The Temperance-silence-order-
resolution-frugality-industry-sincerity-justice-moderation-cleanliness-
tranquillity-chastity-humility keyboard is not going to get me going.
I'm really not just an automatic piano with a moral Benjamin getting
tunes out of me.
Here's my creed, against Benjamin's. This is what I believe:
"_That I am I._"
"_That my soul is a dark forest._"
"_That my known self will never be more than a little clearing in the
forest._"
"_That gods, strange gods, come forth from the forest into the clearing
of my known self, and then go back._"
"_That I must have the courage to let them come and go._"
"_That I will never let mankind put anything over me, but that I will
try always to recognize and submit to the gods in me and the gods in
other men and women._"
There is my creed. He who runs may read. He who prefers to crawl, or to
go by gasoline, can call it rot.
Then for a "list." It is rather fun to play at Benjamin.
1
TEMPERANCE
Eat and carouse with Bacchus, or munch dry bread with Jesus, but don't
sit down without one of the gods.
2
SILENCE
Be still when you have nothing to say; when genuine passion moves you,
say what you've got to say, and say it hot.
3
ORDER
Know that you are responsible to the gods inside you and to the men in
whom the gods are manifest. Recognize your superiors and your inferiors,
according to the gods. This is the root of all order.
4
RESOLUTION
Resolve to abide by your own deepest promptings, and to sacrifice the
smaller thing to the greater. Kill when you must, and be killed the
same: the must coming from the gods inside you, or from the men in whom
you recognize the Holy Ghost.
5
FRUGALITY
Demand nothing; accept what you see fit. Don't waste your pride or
squander your emotion.
6
INDUSTRY
Lose no time with ideals; serve the Holy Ghost; never serve mankind.
7
SINCERITY
To be sincere is to remember that I am I, and that the other man is
not me.
8
JUSTICE
The only justice is to follow the sincere intuition of the soul, angry
or gentle. Anger is just, and pity is just, but judgment is never just.
9
MODERATION
Beware of absolutes. There are many gods.
10
CLEANLINESS
Don't be too clean. It impoverishes the blood.
11
TRANQUILLITY
The soul has many motions, many gods come and go. Try and find your
deepest issue, in every confusion, and abide by that. Obey the man in
whom you recognize the Holy Ghost; command when your honour comes to
command.
12
CHASTITY
Never "use" venery at all. Follow your passional impulse, if it be
answered in the other being; but never have any motive in mind, neither
off-spring nor health nor even pleasure, nor even service. Only know
that "venery" is of the great gods. An offering-up of yourself to the
very great gods, the dark ones, and nothing else.
13
HUMILITY
See all men and women according to the Holy Ghost that is within them.
Never yield before the barren.
There's my list. I have been trying dimly to realize it for a long time,
and only America and old Benjamin have at last goaded me into trying to
formulate it.
And now I, at least, know why I can't stand Benjamin. He tries to take
away my wholeness and my dark forest, my freedom. For how can any man be
free, without an illimitable background? And Benjamin tries to shove me
into a barbed-wire paddock and make me grow potatoes or Chicagoes.
And how can I be free, without gods that come and go? But Benjamin won't
let anything exist except my useful fellow-men, and I'm sick of them; as
for his Godhead, his Providence, He is Head of nothing except a vast
heavenly store that keeps every imaginable line of goods, from victrolas
to cat-o-nine tails.
And how can any man be free without a soul of his own, that he believes
in and won't sell at any price? But Benjamin doesn't let me have a soul
of my own. He says I am nothing but a servant of mankind--galley-slave I
call it--and if I don't get my wages here below--that is, if Mr.
Pierpont Morgan or Mr. Nosey Hebrew or the grand United States
Government, the great US, US or SOMEOFUS, manages to scoop in my bit
along with their lump--why, never mind, I shall get my wages HEREAFTER.
Oh Benjamin! Oh Benjamin! You do NOT suck me in any longer.
And why oh why should the snuff-coloured little trap have wanted to take
us all in? Why did he do it?
Out of sheer human cussedness, in the first place. We do all like to get
things inside a barbed-wire corral. Especially our fellow-men. We love
to round them up inside the barbed-wire enclosure of FREEDOM, and make
'em work. "_Work, you free jewel, WORK!_" shouts the liberator, cracking
his whip. Benjamin, I will not work. I do not choose to be a free
democrat. I am absolutely a servant of my own Holy Ghost.
Sheer cussedness! But there was as well the salt of a subtler purpose.
Benjamin was just in his eyeholes--to use an English vulgarism meaning
he was just delighted--when he was at Paris judiciously milking money
out of the French monarchy for the overthrow of all monarchy. If you
want to ride your horse to somewhere you must put a bit in his mouth.
And Benjamin wanted to ride his horse so that it would upset the whole
apple-cart of the old masters. He wanted the whole European apple-cart
upset. So he had to put a strong bit in the mouth of his ass.
"Henceforth be masterless."
That is, he had to break-in the human ass completely, so that much more
might be broken, in the long run. For the moment it was the British
Government that had to have a hole knocked in it. The first real hole it
ever had: the breach of the American rebellion.
Benjamin, in his sagacity, knew that the breaking of the old world was a
long process. In the depths of his own under-consciousness he hated
England, he hated Europe, he hated the whole corpus of the European
being. He wanted to be American. But you can't change your nature and
mode of consciousness like changing your shoes. It is a gradual
shedding. Years must go by, and centuries must elapse before you have
finished. Like a son escaping from the domination of his parents. The
escape is not just one rupture. It is a long and half-secret process.
So with the American. He was a European when he first went over the
Atlantic. He is in the main a recreant European still. From Benjamin
Franklin to Woodrow Wilson may be a long stride, but it is a stride
along the same road. There is no new road. The same old road, become
dreary and futile. Theoretic and materialistic.
Why then did Benjamin set up this dummy of a perfect citizen as a
pattern to America? Of course he did it in perfect good faith, as far as
he knew. He thought it simply was the true ideal. But what we _think_ we
do is not very important. We never really know what we are doing. Either
we are materialistic instruments, like Benjamin or we move in the
gesture of creation, from our deepest self, usually unconscious. We are
only the actors, we are never wholly the authors of our own deeds or
works. IT is the author, the unknown inside us or outside us. The best
we can do is to try to hold ourselves in unison with the deeps which are
inside us. And the worst we can do is to try to have things our own way,
when we run counter to IT, and in the long run get our knuckles rapped
for our presumption.
So Benjamin contriving money out of the Court of France. He was
contriving the first steps of the overthrow of all Europe, France
included. You can never have a new thing without breaking an old. Europe
happens to be the old thing. America, unless the people in America
assert themselves too much in opposition to the inner gods, should be
the new thing. The new thing is the death of the old. But you can't cut
the throat of an epoch. You've got to steal the life from it through
several centuries.
And Benjamin worked for this both directly and indirectly. Directly, at
the Court of France, making a small but very dangerous hole in the side
of England, through which hole Europe has by now almost bled to death.
And indirectly in Philadelphia, setting up this unlovely, snuff-coloured
little ideal, or automaton, of a pattern American. The pattern American,
this dry, moral, utilitarian little democrat, has done more to ruin the
old Europe than any Russian nihilist. He has done it by slow attrition,
like a son who has stayed at home and obeyed his parents, all the while
silently hating their authority, and silently, in his soul, destroying
not only their authority but their whole existence. For the American
spiritually stayed at home in Europe. The spiritual home of America was
and still is Europe. This is the galling bondage, in spite of several
billions of heaped-up gold. Your heaps of gold are only so many
muck-heaps, America, and will remain so till you become a reality to
yourselves.
All this Americanizing and mechanizing has been for the purpose of
overthrowing the past. And now look at America, tangled in her own
barbed wire, and mastered by her own machines. Absolutely got down by
her own barbed wire of shalt-nots, and shut up fast in her own
"productive" machines like millions of squirrels running in millions of
cages. It is just a farce.
Now is your chance, Europe. Now let Hell loose and get your own back,
and paddle your own canoe on a new sea, while clever America lies on her
muck-heaps of gold, strangled in her own barbed-wire of shalt-not ideals
and shalt-not moralisms. While she goes out to work like millions of
squirrels in millions of cages. Production!
Let Hell loose, and get your own back, Europe!
III. HECTOR ST. JOHN DE CRÈVECŒUR
Crèvecœur was born in France, at Caen, in the year 1735. As a boy he
was sent over to England and received part of his education there. He
went to Canada as a young man, served for a time with Montcalm in the
war against the English, and later passed over into the United States,
to become an exuberant American. He married a New England girl, and
settled on the frontier. During the period of his "cultivating the
earth" he wrote the _Letters From an American Farmer_, which enjoyed
great vogue in their day, in England especially, among the new reformers
like Godwin and Tom Payne.
But Crèvecœur was not a mere cultivator of the earth. That was his
best stunt, shall we say. He himself was more concerned with a perfect
society and his own manipulation thereof, than with growing carrots.
Behold him then trotting off importantly and idealistically to France,
leaving his farm in the wilds to be burnt by the Indians, and his wife
to shift as best she might. This was during the American War of
Independence, when the Noble Red Man took to behaving like his own old
self. On his return to America, the American Farmer entered into public
affairs and into commerce. Again tripping to France, he enjoyed himself
as a litterateur Child-of-Nature-sweet-and-pure, was a friend of old
Benjamin Franklin in Paris, and quite a favourite with Jean Jacques
Rousseau's Madame d'Houdetot, that literary soul.
Hazlitt, Godwin, Shelley, Coleridge, the English romanticists, were of
course thrilled by the _Letters From an American Farmer._ A new world, a
world of the Noble Savage and Pristine Nature and Paradisal Simplicity
and all that gorgeousness that flows out of the unsullied fount of the
ink-bottle. Lucky Coleridge, who got no farther than Bristol. Some of us
have gone all the way.
I think this wild and noble America is the thing that I have pined for
most ever since I read Fenimore Cooper, as a boy. Now I've got it.
Franklin is the real _practical_ prototype of the American. Crèvecœur
is the emotional. To the European, the American is first and foremost a
dollar-fiend. We tend to forget the emotional heritage of Hector St.
John de Crèvecœur. We tend to disbelieve, for example, in Woodrow
Wilson's wrung heart and wet hanky. Yet surely these are real enough.
Aren't they?
It wasn't to be expected that the dry little snuff-coloured Doctor
should have it all his own way. The new Americans might use venery for
health or offspring, and their time for cultivating potatoes and
Chicagoes, but they had got _some_ sap in their veins after all. They
had got to get a bit of luscious emotion somewhere.
NATURE.
I wish I could write it larger than that.
NATURE.
Benjamin overlooked NATURE. But the French Crèvecœur spotted it long
before Thoreau and Emerson worked it up. Absolutely the safest thing to
get your emotional reactions over is NATURE.
Crèvecœur's _Letters_ are written in a spirit of touching simplicity,
almost better than Chateaubriand. You'd think neither of them would ever
know how many beans make five. This American Farmer tells of the joys of
creating a home in the wilderness, and of cultivating the virgin soil.
Poor virgin, prostituted from the very start.
The Farmer had an Amiable Spouse and an Infant Son, his progeny. He took
the Infant Son--who enjoys no other name than this--
"What is thy name?
I have no name.
I am the Infant Son----"
to the fields with him, and seated the same I. S. on the shafts of the
plough whilst he, the American Farmer, ploughed the potato patch. He
also, the A. F., helped his Neighbours, whom no doubt he loved as
himself, to build a barn, and they laboured together in the Innocent
Simplicity of one of Nature's Communities. Meanwhile the Amiable Spouse,
who likewise in Blakean simplicity has No Name, cooked the dough-nuts or
the pie, though these are not mentioned. No doubt she was a
deep-breasted daughter of America, though she may equally well have been
a flat-bosomed Methodist. She would have been an Amiable Spouse in
either case, and the American Farmer asked no more. I don't know whether
her name was Lizzie or Ahoolibah, and probably Crèvecœur didn't.
Spouse was enough for him. "Spouse, hand me the carving knife."
The Infant Son developed into Healthy Off-spring as more appeared: no
doubt Crèvecœur had used venery as directed. And so these Children of
Nature toiled in the Wilds at Simple Toil with a little Honest Sweat now
and then. You have the complete picture, dear reader. The American
Farmer made his own Family Picture, and it is still on view. Of course
the Amiable Spouse put on her best apron to be _Im Bild_, for all the
world to see and admire.
I used to admire my head off: before I tiptoed into the Wilds and saw
the shacks of the Homesteaders. Particularly the Amiable Spouse, poor
thing. No wonder _she_ never sang the song of Simple Toil in the
Innocent Wilds. Poor haggard drudge, like a ghost wailing in the
wilderness, nine times out of ten.
Hector St. John, you have lied to me. You lied even more scurrilously to
yourself. Hector St. John, you are an emotional liar.
Jean Jacques, Bernardin de St. Pierre, Chateaubriand, exquisite Francois
Le Vaillant, you lying little lot, with your Nature Sweet and Pure!
Marie Antoinette got her head off for playing dairy-maid, and nobody
even dusted the seats of your pants, till now, for all the lies you put
over us.
But Crèvecœur was an artist as well as a liar, otherwise we would not
have bothered with him. He wanted to put NATURE in his pocket, as
Benjamin put the Human Being. Between them, they wanted the whole scheme
of things in their pockets, and the things themselves as well. Once
you've got the scheme of things in your pocket, you can do as you like
with it, even make money out of it, if you can't find in your heart to
destroy it, as was your first intention. So. H. St. J. de C. tried to
put Nature-Sweet-and-Pure in his pocket. But nature wasn't having any,
she poked her head out and baa-ed.
This Nature-sweet-and-pure business is only another effort at
intellectualizing. Just an attempt to make all nature succumb to a few
laws of the human mind. The sweet-and-pure sort of laws. Nature seemed
to be behaving quite nicely, for a while. She has left off.
That's why you get the purest intellectuals in a Garden Suburb or a
Brook Farm experiment. You bet, Robinson Crusoe was a high-brow of
high-brows.
You can idealize or intellectualize. Or, on the contrary, you can let
the dark soul in you see for itself. An artist usually intellectualizes
on top, and his dark under-consciousness goes on contradicting him
beneath. This is almost laughably the case with most American artists.
Crèvecœur is the first example. He is something of an artist, Franklin
isn't anything.
Crèvecœur the idealist puts over us a lot of stuff about nature and
the noble savage and the innocence of toil, etc., etc. Blarney! But
Crèvecœur the artist gives us glimpses of actual nature, not writ
large.
Curious that his vision sees only the lowest forms of natural life.
Insects, snakes and birds he glimpses in their own mystery, their own
pristine being. And straightway gives the lie to Innocent Nature.
"I am astonished to see," he writes quite early in the _Letters_, "that
nothing exists but what has its enemy, one species pursue and live upon
another: unfortunately our king-birds are the destroyers of those
industrious insects (the bees); but on the other hand, these birds
preserve our fields from the depredations of the crows, which they
pursue on the wing with great vigilance and astonishing dexterity."
This is a sad blow to the sweet-and-pureness of Nature. But it is the
voice of the artist in contrast to the voice of the ideal turtle. It is
the rudimentary American vision. The glimpsing of the king-birds in
winged hostility and pride is no doubt the aboriginal Indian vision
carrying over. The Eagle symbol in human consciousness. Dark, swinging
wings of hawk-beaked destiny, that one cannot help but feel, beating
here above the wild centre of America. You look round in vain for the
"One being Who made all things, and governs the world by His
Providence."
"One species pursue and live upon another."