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THE ROVING
CRITIC
_SOME BORZOI BOOKS_
FINDERS _by John V. A. Weaver_
POEMS _by Wilfrid Scawen Blunt_
INTO THE DARK _by Barbra Ring_
GOLDEN BIRD _by James Oppenheim_
LITERARY LIGHTS _by Gene Markey_
YOUR HIDDEN POWERS _by James Oppenheim_
FOX FOOTPRINTS _by Elizabeth J. Coatsworth_
THE STORY OF THE MIKADO _by W. S. Gilbert_
A LINE O’ GOWF OR TWO _by Bert Leston Taylor_
THE WORLD IN FALSEFACE _by George Jean Nathan_
THE ROVING
CRITIC
CARL VAN DOREN
[Illustration: Decoration]
NEW YORK
ALFRED · A · KNOPF
1923
COPYRIGHT, 1923, BY ALFRED A. KNOPF, INC.
_Published, March, 1923_
_Set up and printed by the Vail-Ballou Co., Binghamton, N. Y.
Paper furnished by W. F. Etherington & Co., New York.
Bound by H. Wolff Estate, New York._
MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
TO
GUY, FRANK, MARK, PAUL
_These essays, sketches, and reviews are reprinted, with the courteous
permission of the various publishers, from_ The Atlantic Monthly, The
Literary Review, The Nation, _and_ The Texas Review.
CONTENTS
I. TOWARD A CREED
A FOURTH DIMENSION IN CRITICISM 15
THE REVENGE OF THE BARDS 21
CREATIVE READING 27
II. THREE OF OUR CONQUERORS
THE POETICAL CULT OF LINCOLN 35
WHITMAN IN HIS CRISES 40
THE LION AND THE UNIFORM 45
III. TWO NOTES ON YOUTH
THE RELEASE OF YOUTH 59
YOUTH IS ALWAYS RIGHT 63
IV. HOWELLS: MAY 1920
EULOGIUM 69
V. NOOKS AND FRINGES
ON HATING THE PROVINCES 83
WHAT THE FATHERS READ 87
THE KIND MOTHER OF US ALL 92
MOCHA DICK 97
FOLK-LORE IN KENTUCKY 100
PAUL BUNYAN GOES WEST 105
THE WORST AMERICAN BOOK 108
AT THE SATURDAY CLUB 114
THE SILVER AGE OF OUR LITERATURE 121
JOHN BURROUGHS 125
BROAD HOUSE AND NARROW HOUSE 128
GOOD NAMES 133
PICTURES OF THE PAST 142
THE GREAT LABORATORY 146
VI. LONG ROADS
THE COSMIC IRONIES 153
JUSTICE OR MELODRAMA 158
THE CORRUPTION OF COMFORT 162
“GOD IS NOT DEAD OF OLD AGE” 167
VII. SHORT CUTS
PETIT UP TO THIRTY 175
IN LIEU OF THE LAUREATE 180
“MURDERING BEAUTY” 183
CHAIRS 186
INISHMORE, INISHMAAN, INISHEER 189
SWEETNESS OR LIGHT 192
CROWNING THE BISHOP 195
VIII. A CASUAL SHELF
HONESTY IS A GIFT 199
GOLDEN LYRICS 202
THE CHRISTIAN DIPLOMAT 205
LAWYER AND ELEGIST 207
WOMEN IN LOVE 209
MOSES IN MASSACHUSETTS 212
BROWN GIRLS 215
INVENTION AND VERACITY 217
A HERO WITH HIS POSSE 219
MARIA AND BATOUALA 221
STUPID SCANDAL 224
THE MUSE OF KNICKERBOCKER 228
IX. POETS’ CORNER
GREEK DIGNITY AND YANKEE EASE 231
THROUGH ELLIS ISLAND 238
TAP-ROOT OR MELTING-POT 244
X. IN THE OPEN
AUGUST NIGHTS AND AUGUST DAYS 251
LAKE AND BIRD 256
FIREFLIES IN CORNWALL 258
GARDENS 260
THE ROVING
CRITIC
I. TOWARD A CREED
A FOURTH DIMENSION IN CRITICISM
Criticism ordinarily asks about literature one of three questions: “Is
it good?” “Is it true?” “Is it beautiful?” Each of these questions, of
course, permits the widest range in the critic. He may be so simple
as to think a given work is not good when it fails to emphasize some
truism or when it violates the sort of poetic justice which children in
the nursery are mistaught to expect; he may be so complex as to demand
from literature the subtlest casuistries concerning moral problems;
he may be so perverse as to wince at the first symptom of any plain
contrast between good and evil. If it be the true which exercises him,
he may sink so low as to be worried over this or that surface error in
his author—such as an anachronism or a blunder in botany or mechanics;
he may rise so high as to discuss on an equal plane with a great
authority the difficult questions what the nature of truth may be or
whether there is after all any such thing as truth. Or, holding beauty
uppermost in his mind, he may at the one extreme peck at a masterpiece
because it departs from some traditional form or at the other extreme
may view it under the light of an eternity of beauty and feel satisfied
if he can perceive and identify the masterpiece’s peculiar reflection.
Yet wide as these ranges are, they can all be reduced to the three
questions and they mark what may be called the three dimensions of
criticism.
There is, however, a fourth dimension—to continue the analogy—which
comes into the account when a critic asks about literature: “Is it
alive?” In a sense this query includes all the others and in a sense
it transcends them. Odysseus is not good: he is adulterous and crafty;
Faust is not good: he sells his soul for the sake of forbidden power;
Gargantua is not good: he buffets and tumbles the decencies in all
directions; Henry V is not good: he wastes his youth and wages unjust
war; Huckleberry Finn is not good: he is a thief and a liar. The
heroes, the demigods, the gods themselves occasionally step aside from
the paths into which men counsel one another; there are at least as
many great stories about gorgeous courtesans as about faithful wives.
It is not the “goodness” of all such literature but the vividness that
gives it its perennial impact. Better a lively rogue than a deadly
saint.
To a different extent the same thing appears when truthfulness is
concerned. There is a vitality which lies back both of naturalism and
of romance and which communicates itself through books as dissimilar,
say, as _Madame Bovary_ and _The Faerie Queene_—one of them the most
fastidious document and one of them the most spacious dream. The gods
of Homer are not real; the history of Virgil will not bear scrutiny;
Dante wanders in a maze of superstitions; Shakespeare lets his plots
take him almost where they like; the machinery of a folk-tale is good
enough for Goethe, as it was for the author of the Book of Job. How
many cosmogonies, Bernard Shaw points out, have gone to the dust heap
in spite of an accuracy superior to that which keeps Genesis alive
through cynical centuries! The looser Molière is in the long run no
less convincing than the tighter Ibsen. Swift and Voltaire and Lucian,
twitting their worlds for their follies, dare every extravagance of
invention without serious penalty. Ariosto with his whimsical paladins
and Scott with his stately aristocrats and Dickens with his hearty
democratic caricatures and Dostoevsky with his tortured souls—to find
a common denominator of truth among them is so hard that the critics
who attempt it are likely to end in partisanship for this or that one
and to assign the others to a station outside the approved class. Yet
an author may be killed a dozen times with the charge of untruthfulness
and still live.
And concerning beauty the disagreement of the doctors is unending
and unendable. Whitman is now called beautiful and now called ugly;
so are Browning, and Hugo, and Tolstoi, and Nietzsche, and Lope de
Vega, and Leopardi, and Catullus, and Aristophanes. Moreover, by any
aesthetic standard which the judgment can arrive at, any one of these
authors is sometimes beautiful and sometimes not. Nor does it finally
matter, as it did not finally matter that Socrates had a thick body
and a pug-face. The case of Socrates illustrates the whole argument.
Was he good? There was so great a difference on this point among
the critics of his time that the majority of them, translating their
conclusion into action, put him to death as dangerous to the state. Was
what he taught the truth? It is of course not easy to disentangle the
actual Socrates from the more or less polemic versions of him which
Xenophon and Plato furnish, but it seems clear that he had his share of
unscientific notions and individual prejudices and mistaken doctrines.
Was he beautiful? He confused Greek orthodoxy by being so uncomely and
yet so great. But whatever his shortcomings in these regards, no one
ever doubted that he was alive—alive in body and mind and character,
alive in war and peace and friendship and controversy, alive in bed or
at table. Life was concentrated in him; life spoke out of him.
So with literature, which collects, transmutes, and utters life. It
may represent the good, may speak the truth, may use the modes of
beauty—any one or all of these things. Call the good the bow which
lends the power; call the truth the string which fixes the direction;
call the beautiful the arrow which wings and stings. But there is still
the arm in which the true life of the process lies. Or, to change the
figure, one of those gods who in the mythologies model men out of
clay may have good clay and a true purpose and may shape his figure
beautifully; but there is still the indispensable task of breathing the
breath of life into it before it will wake and go its own course and
continue its breed to other generations. Life is obviously what makes
the difference between human sculpture and divine creation; it is the
same element which makes the difference between good literature and
dead literature.
The critic who is aware of this fourth dimension of the art he
studies saves himself the effort which critics less aware contrive to
squander in trying to explain their art in terms merely of the three
dimensions. He knows that life began before there were such things
as good and evil; that it surges through both of them; that it will
probably outlast any particular conception of either one or the other:
he knows that it is not the moral of so naïve a tale as _Uncle Tom’s
Cabin_ which makes it moving but the life which was breathed into it
by fiery passion. He knows that the amount of truth in poetry need not
always be great and often indeed is much exaggerated; that a ruthless
hand can find heaps of theological slag in Milton and corners full of
metaphysical cobwebs in Plato and glittering excrescences of platitude
in Shakespeare: he knows that these poets now live most in those parts
of their work in the creating of which they were most alive. He knows
that a powerful imagination may beget life even upon ugliness: he knows
it because he has felt the vibrations of reality in Browning’s cranky
grotesques and in Whitman’s long-drawn categories and in Rabelais’s
great dung-cart piled high with every variety of insolence and wisdom.
Not goodness alone nor truth alone nor beauty alone nor all of them in
one of their rare fusions can be said to make great literature, though
these are the tools of that hard trade. Great literature may be known
by the sign that it communicates the sense of the vividness of life.
And it communicates it because its creators were alive with it at the
moment of creation.
There are many kinds of literature because there are many kinds of
life. Pope felt one kind and Wordsworth another and Poe another—and
so on and on. There are no universal poets, not even Homer and
Shakespeare. Nor, of course, are there any universal critics, not even
Lessing and Sainte-Beuve. Neither creator nor critic can make himself
universal by barely taking thought about it; he _is_ what he _lives_.
The measure of the creator is the amount of life he puts into his work.
The measure of the critic is the amount of life he finds there.
THE REVENGE OF THE BARDS
“The natural desire of every man,” says Peacock in _The Four Ages of
Poetry_, “to engross to himself as much power and property as he can
acquire by any of the means which might makes right, is accompanied
by the no less natural desire of making known to as many people as
possible the extent to which he has been a winner in this universal
game. The successful warrior becomes a chief; the successful chief
becomes a king; his next want is an organ to disseminate the fame of
his achievements and the extent of his possessions; and this organ he
finds in a bard, who is always ready to celebrate the strength of his
arm, being duly inspired by that of his liquor. This is the origin of
poetry.... The first rude songs of all nations ... tell us how many
battles such an one has fought, how many helmets he has cleft, how many
breastplates he has pierced, how many widows he has made, how much
land he has appropriated, how many houses he has demolished for other
people, what a large one he has built for himself, how much gold he has
stowed away in it, and how liberally and plentifully he pays, feeds,
and intoxicates the divine and immortal bards, the sons of Jupiter,
but for whose everlasting songs the names of heroes would perish.”
The bards meanwhile, according to Peacock, do not neglect their own
status. “They are observing and thinking, while others are robbing and
fighting: and though their object be nothing more than to secure a
share of the spoil, yet they accomplish this end by intellectual, not
by physical, power: their success excites emulation to the attainment
of intellectual eminence: thus they sharpen their own wits and awaken
those of others.... Their familiarity with the secret history of gods
and genii obtains for them, without much difficulty, the reputation of
inspiration ... being indeed often themselves (as Orpheus and Amphion)
regarded as portions and emanations of divinity: building cities with a
song, and leading brutes with a symphony; which are only metaphors for
the faculty of leading multitudes by the nose.”
This is the revenge of the bards: from singing of godlike men they come
to feel themselves godlike; and in time they persuade a respectable
portion of the community to take them at their own value. Now it is
their turn to share—almost to usurp—the glory of the kings and warriors
their former patrons. Homer takes as high a rank as Agamemnon and
Achilles and Ulysses, who are remembered because Homer admitted them
to his narrative. The bard establishes the canon of the memorable. May
there not have been other men as wise as Moses or as patient as Job
or as strong as Samson? There may have been, but as they lacked bards
they dropped out of the race for perennial honor. That race, at least,
is not for the swift alone. Socrates had a better bard than Pericles;
he had Plato. Caesar had a better bard than Pompey: he had himself.
If there were more Caesars, history might be different; certainly
historiography would be. As it is, accident and art play an enormous
part in fixing human fame.
The process continues to the present day, for the biographer who has
succeeded to the bard has the bard’s habits in no very different
degree. But he is no longer quite so dependent as his ancestor, no
longer quite so official. Like will to like in biography as elsewhere.
So long as the craft of making reputations is left to the guild of
letters, so long will the guild impress it with its special prejudices.
It will choose to write about those great men whose careers best
conform to some classic type or fit some dramatic mode or flatter some
literary sentiment. A great man who has been a conspicuous patron of
the arts has ten times the chances at posterity that a mere man of
power or money has; but so has a great man who has been eloquent or who
has borne himself like Cato or who has had a fate in some way or other
resembling Napoleon’s.
Not only does the literary guild choose men of action on literary
grounds to write about: it chooses disproportionately to write about
its members. There are as many lives of thinkers and artists as of
generals and monarchs. Philostratus wrote about the sophists and
Eunapius and Diogenes Laertius about the philosophers and Suetonius
about the grammarians; in the Middle Ages monks wrote particularly
about monks who succeeded in their business and turned saints; Vasari
in the Renaissance said less about even the princes who encouraged
painters than about the painters themselves; Boswell chose not Burke
nor Chatham but Johnson to stand as the centre of his society; Goethe’s
Duke survives primarily in the various lives of Goethe; how many
passionate, beautiful books there are about Poe and Keats and Byron and
Heine and Hugo and Pushkin and Leopardi!
The situation has consequences. Though the king who can command a poet
or the politician who can catch a biographer will always have one,
few other persons outside the poet’s or the biographer’s own caste
boast any such intercessors with the future. The most mighty man of
business perishes from the public memory almost as speedily as the most
petty trader. The artisan who has invented no matter how comfortable
devices and the athlete who has been no matter how much on the tongues
of men leave but short wakes of fame behind them. Now this may hint
that those who do not survive actually merit oblivion, but it does
not prove it. Rather, it proves that peoples have the best memories
with regard to those men and women about whom there are voices to go
on speaking. In any given generation rumour widens out in various
ways: its heroes are pugilists and saints and misers and entertainers
and generals and statesmen and orators and preachers and lovers and
murderers and philanthropists and scholars and poets and humorists
and musicians and detectives—all mingled in one vast confusion. But
with posterity selection intervenes. A hundred fames grow dim because
no one has a special reason for perpetuating them; word of mouth in
general is not enough. Even particular professions in time forget those
who once practised them eminently. Only of the men of letters—bards
and biographers—is it the trade as well as the delight to keep old
reputations burning. And it is only certain things that they remember:
blood and glory and learning. Paul Revere gave a lifetime to a noble
craft and a few hours all told to a midnight ride which any man might
have made who was able to sit a horse and follow a dark road. Who now
hears of Revere’s craft? He is merely a demigod and Longfellow is his
prophet; the two of them symbolize the past, as most men see it, and
the way of the bards with the past.
For it is clear, upon reflection, that just as the current world comes
to the perceptions of mankind through the interpretations of artists
or demagogues or prophets, so the past comes to them through the
interpretations of its chroniclers. There lies the past, enormous and
unformed; here are the men of pen and book who make the lenses through
which it is perceived, who fix the frame of the picture, who choose
what shall be looked at and what not. They are artists and the past is
their material. Let a given chronicler be as honest as he can or will
be; he is still a member of a limited class of men and he is interested
in a limited range of life. Let all the chroniclers be honest, and they
are still chroniclers: they will set down what interests their caste.
They will shape their material in epic or dramatic form; they will find
arguments for their favourite convictions; they will cherish or neglect
in accordance with their dispositions. Sophisticate and complicate the
matter as they will, they tend in all ages and the latest age to do
what they did at first. They see the rulers of men sitting on their
proper thrones and they sing in verse or say in prose how those rulers
came there; they remember themselves and they pay natural honour to
their fellows of the guild. In a sense, the plain man cannot feel that
he has a past. He looks into histories and sees very little of the
world he knows. That older world is much too full of kings and bards
for him to feel at home.
CREATIVE READING
As surely as there is such a thing as creative writing there is such
a thing as creative reading. That it is not very common appears from
the universal demand for fiction, in which the creative process has
already been applied to the material in hand, so that the reader is
called upon to contribute very little himself. Indeed, if the writer
of fiction is strong enough he can carry his more compliant readers to
almost any distance from the world of their experience and can persuade
them to accept as its equal or as its superior some merely invented
region. To go so far with a romancer is not, as is often thought, a
necessary sign that the reader is imaginative: he may be only limp or
uncritical, unable to hold his own in the presence of a more powerful
fancy. Children are regularly beguiled in this fashion, as are the
credulous of all ages by travellers and politicians and priests who
have a romantic turn of mind. The creative reader, however, begins to
build the minute he begins to read. In varying degrees, of course, he
leans upon his writer, but he takes profit from his book in proportion
to the amount of creative energy he puts into it. Perhaps the simplest
illustration of this is to be noted in the fact that one reads a book
with different results at different times. A reader, for instance,
who has never been in love cannot find in a play or poem, a novel or
biography portraying the effects of love, more than a fraction of what
he would find there if he had genuinely known the passion. Another who
has thought the history of some foreign country dull may discover that
it is fascinating after he has visited that country. And still another
may suddenly perceive a large pertinence in ideas or speculations which
heretofore have left him cold: he has in his own person caught up with
them, and now greets them heartily for the first time though they have
been there in the book all the time.
The notion that unhappy men and women employ reading as an anodyne is
not quite accurate. With them reading furnishes more than a substitute
for thought; it furnishes them the occasion to set going in their minds
a dance of images, a sequence of ideas, a march of memories which run
parallel to the matter of the book, and to which the book, indeed, may
be but the exciting cause. Neither is it quite accurate to say that
inveterate readers, happy or unhappy, lead their lives within the pages
of this volume or that for want of the more robust outlet which action
affords those who do not care to read, or at least to read so much.
Rather, such readers may be full of creative impulses which they prefer
to exercise in a purer and more plastic universe than they have found
elsewhere. There happens to be no standard by which to measure the
relative value of the forces which are released by action and of those
which are released by contemplation. If the man of action is associated
in his career with other active persons, why may not the man of
contemplation be equally associated in his with others whose society he
enjoys through the medium of printed words? As there are men of action
who drive blindly forward, without thought, to some goal which they
hardly see though their instincts urge them in that general direction,
so there are men of contemplation who drift with the tide of some—or
any—poet or historian or philosopher without critical resistance;
but the creative reader challenges, disputes, denies, fights his
way through his book, and he emerges to some extent always another
person. He has been a creator while he seemed to be merely passive and
recipient.
To take another easy illustration, a scholar engaged in actual research
may wade through rivers and climb mountains of books while in the
pursuit of proofs for his thesis, and may yet at every step be full of
creative fire, throwing aside what he does not need and choosing what
he does as emphatically as if he were a soldier on the most difficult
campaign. The researcher is but a common type of creative reader, his
process and his aim being more readily comprehensible than those of the
other types but not essentially unlike them. All creative readers have
at any given moment some conscious or unconscious thesis which they are
seeking to prove, some conscious or unconscious picture they desire to
complete, some conscious or unconscious point they mean to reach if
they can. By it they are sustained through what would be unendurable
labour to another, or even to them at an earlier or a later day. It
gives them resoluteness, it gives them form. More potent than has been
ordinarily recognized, it belongs with that faculty whereby the mind
arranges its impressions in some sort of order and comes to some kind
of conclusion without always consulting the will or even inviting the
consciousness to be aware of what is going on.
The token by which the creative reader can best be known is his lack
of the pedantic expectation with which many readers of considerable
taste begin to read. For instance, there was that professorial critic,
for whom no pillory can be too high or naked or windy, who declared
he could not approve of _The Playboy of the Western World_ because it
was neither tragedy nor comedy nor tragi-comedy. He did not create
as he read; he could not even follow a free representation of human
life; he was tied brain and mood to a prejudice which shut him in from
any liberation by novel wit or beauty. Like many better men, he was a
victim of an obsession for the classics into which creative readers
never allow themselves to fall. They may have formed their literary
principles upon the strictest canon and they may be richly responsive
to the great traditions of style and structure; but they have not been
made timid by their training and they know that the heartiest reader,
like the heartiest spectator of human affairs, must occasionally have
his fling outside narrow circles or must begin to stifle. It is as
snobbish to feel at home only among the “best” books as to feel at home
only among the “best” people. After all, the best books have been made
up out of diverse elements, transmuted by some creative spirit from
the raw materials which lay around. The reader who in some degree can
share that spirit’s vision can share also its delight in the same sort
of original stuff. Imagine, for example, the state of mind of a person
who can argue that it is a weakness, if not a literary impropriety, to
prefer Goethe’s conversations with Eckermann at times to _Faust_.
There are very proper moods which the noblest work of art cannot
satisfy as well as some casual memoir, some quaint history or book of
travel, some halting speculation, some mere array of facts. Who has
not preferred the nasturtiums or turnips of his own garden to more
sumptuous flowers or vegetables from the open market? The pleasant
odours of many mornings and the colour of many fine sunsets cling
about the blossoms which he has tended; the plain roots from his soil
have in them the savour of honest sweat and the contour of agreeable
hopes. So the creative reader likes frequently to shape his own designs
and make his own conclusions out of raw materials which no other
hand—however better he may know it is—has worked with. In fact, it is
now and then hard for a reader in the full strength of some creative
impulse to keep himself as aware of the positive aesthetic merit of
what he is reading as perhaps he should. If the matter of life is there
in large abundance he may overlook the lack of form and proportion
and interpretation because he is himself able to supply them. It is
for this reason that generous spirits like Sir Walter Scott, and even
more rigid critics, seem often to have gone too far in their praise
of this or that book which has not survived or pleased as much as
they expected; they were misled by finding in the book an element
of creation which they had contributed but which colder readers do
not find there. If criticism, professional or amateur, were an exact
science, practised in a vacuum, the creative reader by his vagaries
might deserve the accusation of being a sort of astrologer among the
scientists; but it is not, and so his more creative vagaries must be
classed less with the winds of bad doctrine than with the breath of
life.
II. THREE OF OUR CONQUERORS
THE POETICAL CULT OF LINCOLN
When Secretary Stanton at the bedside of Lincoln declared that the dead
man now belonged to the ages, he had a vision which was probably not
without melodrama, not without the large pomp and plumage which went in
the sixties with the expectation of renown. He must have seen rows of
ample bronze statues in innumerable parks, where togaed or equestrian
Lincolns would look blandly down, mindful of the dignity of history,
upon a reverent people hushed in part by the very weight of the metal
which commemorated the great man. It is after all too much to have
hoped from Stanton that he could foresee how familiar fame would be
with Lincoln, how colloquially it would treat him on the one hand, and
on the other how quickly it would make him out not an iron demigod, or
a wooden hero, but a friendly saint, an immanent presence, a continual
comforter. Richard Henry Stoddard, in his _Horation Ode_ written almost
at the first news, was not even sure that Lincoln was great: he saw in
him a curious epitome of the people, a genius who had risen from them
yet safely stood above their variable antipathies and affections. A
consciousness of class sounds also in Lowell’s more impassioned lines,
though the _Commemoration Ode_ perceives the nation not as divided
within itself into grades and ranks but as united upon a common ground
of simple humanity against the ingenuities and insubstantialities of
feudal caste. It remained for Whitman to disregard all thought of
Lincoln’s modest origins and to utter, without argument or doctrine,
the intimate grief of the great American poet of the age for the great
American leader, the cautious-handed, gentle, plain, just, resolute,
the sweetest, wisest soul, the natural captain who had brought in the
victor ship from her fearful voyage.
No such memorable utterance rendered at the moment, or has rendered
since, proper tribute to the aspects of Lincoln which on the whole
have most touched the daily memories of his fellow-countrymen: his
habit of humour and his habit of pardons. Everywhere in the North,
but particularly on his own frontier, he was, even in 1865, reputed
for his mirth—for his illuminating repartee and his swift, homely,
pertinent apologues. Lincoln stories multiplied, many of them gathered
year by year in tolerant volumes which paid no attention to any canon;
and still others, often too indelicate for type, clustered about his
name through their casual ascription to him by narrators who wanted
the effect of his authority. Our folk-lore is permeated with anecdotes
of this description. And side by side with them go other tales of
a sentimental sort, tales of wives who went begging to him for the
lives of their husbands under military sentence, and of plain, dull,
sad old mothers who pled—never in vain by the popular records—for
sons who had slept on sentry post almost in the face of the enemy. Of
all folk-heroes Lincoln most strikingly unites a reputation for wit
with a reputation for mercy. The American folk has done nothing more
imaginative, and nothing more revealing, than to build up this tender,
merry myth.
In the hands of our newest poets, however, the myth is changing both
outlines and dimensions. Lincoln’s laughter has lost something of its
rusticity since we have ceased to live so close to frontier conditions.
To Edwin Arlington Robinson, who has cut as in steel his conception of
Lincoln the smiling god, the laconic Olympian, that laughter was only
a cryptic mirth with which a sage met the rancour of blind gentlemen,
sullen children who had to be taught what they could not understand
until it should be too late to acknowledge that their master had after
all been right and they pitifully wrong. The homespun mantle which
Lincoln originally wore in the myth has entirely fallen away, as Mr.
Robinson perceives him; and with it have gone both the buffoonery of so
much of the popular tradition and the sentimental humanitarianism. What
survives is the elemental, ancient matter of heroic genius and wisdom.
By this sense of the cosmic elements which shaped his hero Mr. Robinson
stands in the centre of the latest Lincoln cult, a cult which has the
distinction of bringing the most revolutionary and most reactionary
poets together to pay equal honours to the sole American whom they all
agree to honour.
Lowell struck this note tentatively when he spoke of the sweet clay
from the West out of which nature had chosen to fashion the new hero
who should be less a lonely mountain-peak than a broad, genial,
friendly prairie. Edwin Markham more fully analyzed him: the tried
clay of the common road, warmed by the earth, and dashed through
with prophecy and laughter; the colour and tang and odour of primal
substances, with a dozen virtues caught from external nature. This
rhetoric John Gould Fletcher translates into a subtler language in
his massive image of Lincoln as a gaunt, scraggly pine which has its
roots so deep down in the very foundations of human life, in the old
unshakable wisdom and knowledge and goodness and happiness, that wind
and weather cannot hurt it and that a nation of men may safely rest in
its shade.
The image is finely illustrative of a common attitude taken toward
Lincoln during the late war, when men constantly turned to him, more
by far than most people realized, for words which would quiet their
bitter fears and doubts, and for instructions how to act in a time so
nearly parallel to his. He was the symbol and seal of American unity;
he was the American proof that greatness may emerge from the people;
he was the American evidence that supreme nobility may come very close
to normal love and comprehension. Vachel Lindsay, in Lincoln’s own
Springfield, gave true voice to this feeling in the poem which speaks
of Lincoln as so stirred even in death by the horrors which alarmed
the universe that he could not sleep but walked up and down through the
midnight streets, mourning and brooding over the violent dangers as in
the days when he himself bore the burden of a similar, however smaller,
strife. It is precisely thus, in less critical ages, that saints are
said to appear at difficult moments, to quiet the waves or turn the
arrow aside. These more vulgar manifestations Mr. Lindsay naturally did
not use. Lincoln as he walks at midnight is only the desire of living
hearts realized, the apparition for a moment in its bodily vesture of
a spirit too precious ever to have become merely a memory. He lives
as the father of every cult lives, in the echoes of his voice on many
tongues and the vibrations of his presence in many hearts. For poetry
such a cult offers an enormous future as yet only just suspected. Our
poets have a folk-hero who to the common folk-virtues of shrewdness
and kindness adds essential wit and eloquence and loftiness of soul.
Perhaps the disposition just now to purge him of all rankness and to
make him out a saint and mystic may not last for ever, but obviously
it is a step in his poetical history analogous to those steps which
ennobled Charlemagne and Arthur and canonized Joan of Arc.
WHITMAN IN HIS CRISES
Documents increase around the great and mysterious figure of Whitman,
but they add little to his greatness and take away little from his
mystery. The two volumes called _The Gathering of the Forces_ contain
after all only ephemeral material which Whitman wrote for the Brooklyn
_Daily Eagle_ during his editorship in 1846-47 and which, though
important because by him, would be less important if it were by any
one else. And it might have been by almost any one else. Generally
sensible, occasionally rather noble, now and then eloquent, often
symptomatic of the prophet who was to come, these editorials and essays
and book reviews are most of the time perfunctory and commonplace. Here
Whitman loses himself in trivial political rows, echoes conventional
opinions, scrambles up to a few peaks of originality with obvious
effort. The demands of his occupation perhaps account for this; and yet
at that very period he was beginning to undergo the spiritual upheaval
which seems to have taken place in him during 1847-48 and out of which
he emerged with his loins girded for the mighty race. Something of the
nature of that upheaval appears in the manuscript notebooks lately
published for the first time in _The Uncollected Poetry and Prose of
Walt Whitman_. What Whitman wrote for the _Daily Eagle_ came, one may
say, from the top of his head; in his notebooks he set down the record
of dim perturbations which were then going on in his very spirit, his
very tissue.
The moment when Whitman found his wings and dared them is the most
interesting moment in his entire career. There the mystery of the poet
centres. He who had once screamed with the spread-eagle now proposed
to “sky-lark with God.” His excursion to New Orleans and back in
1848 does not sufficiently explain his awakening, much as it stirred
him to wonder at the body of his land; neither does the troubled
love which may then have entered his life and have shaken him out of
his established routines. Some change was taking place in him, some
annunciation, which roused the man into the seer. What are the actual
causes and processes of that change no one yet knows how to explain.
It may be God, it may be glands; it is the deep, unseen behaviour of
genius.
I am habitually at a loss to know why so few critics of Whitman have
paid due attention to what he himself reveals in his poems concerning
the crucial moments in his growth. Is it because he dramatizes those
moments with such fierce intensity that the biography in them is
neglected? He is unmistakably explicit in his account of the experience
reported in the fifth section of the _Song of Myself_, of his
experience with what he called his Soul:
“I mind how once we lay, such a transparent summer morning,
How you settled your head athwart my hips and gently turn’d over
upon me,
And parted the shirt from my bosom-bone, and plunged your tongue to
my bare-stript heart,
And reach’d till you felt my beard, and reach’d till you held
my feet.
Swiftly arose and spread around me the peace and knowledge that pass
all the argument of the earth,
And I know that the hand of God is the promise of my own,
And I know that the spirit of God is the brother of my own,
And that all the men ever born are also my brothers, and the women
my sisters and lovers.”
Yet this mystical experience, which has been often noted, is in no
respect more illuminating than the poetical experience of which Whitman
tells quite as explicitly in _Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking_. In
that supreme song of separation he not only gives voice to bereavement
in the guise of a bird’s wailing for its lost mate by the seashore:
he also records the sudden genesis of his consciousness that he was a
poet, “the outsetting bard of love.”
“Demon or bird! (said the boy’s soul,)
Is it indeed toward your mate you sing? or is it really to me?
For I, that was a child, my tongue’s use sleeping, now I have
heard you,
Now in a moment I know what I am for, I awake,
And already a thousand singers, a thousand songs, clearer, louder,
and more sorrowful than yours,
A thousand warbling echoes have started to life within me, never
to die.”
Awakened to his function, however, and vowed to be the singer of
death, Whitman had yet to find a mode of utterance. He would not find
it among traditional modes because he was wedded to the conception of
a new democratic aesthetic; he could not respond to current rhythms
because he was too stoutly original. What happened he makes clear
enough in _Proud Music of the Storm_. The poet lies in his “lonesome
slumber-chamber” haunted by the rhythms of life:
“Blast that careers so free, whistling across the prairies,
Strong hum of forest tree-tops—wind of the mountains,
Personified dim shapes—you hidden orchestras,
You serenades of phantoms with instruments alert,
Blending with Nature’s rhythmus, all the tongues of nations.”
Thither come to him the strophes of love, of martial enterprises, of
folk-dances, of the hymns of religions, till he is so shaken that
“Give me to hold all sounds, (I madly struggling cry,)
Fill me with all the voices of the universe,
Endow me with their throbbings, Nature’s also,
The tempests, waters, winds, operas and chants, marches and dances,
Utter, pour in, for I would take them all.
Then I woke softly,
And pausing, questioning awhile the music of my dream,
And questioning all those reminiscences, the tempest in its fury,
And all the songs of sopranos and tenors,
And those rapt oriental dances of religious fervour,
And the sweet varied instruments, and the diapason of organs,
And all the artless plaints of love and grief and death,
I said to my silent curious soul, out of the bed of the
slumber-chamber,
Come, for I have found the clue I sought so long,
Let us go forth refresh’d amid the day,
Cheerfully tallying life, walking the world, the real,
Nourish’d henceforth by our celestial dream.
And I said, moreover,
Haply, what thou hast heard O soul was not the sound of winds,
Nor dream of raging storm, nor sea-hawk’s flapping wings, nor harsh
screams,
Nor vocalism of sun-bright Italy,
Nor German organ majestic, nor vast concourse of voices, nor layers
of harmonies,
Nor strophes of husbands and wives, nor sound of marching soldiers,
Nor flutes, nor harps, nor the bugle-call of camps,
But, to a new rhythmus fitted for thee,
Poems bridging the way from Life to Death, vaguely wafted in the
night air, uncaught, unwritten,
Which let us go forth in the bold day and write.”
There was never a bolder conclusion to a poem in the world.
THE LION AND THE UNIFORM
In _The Ordeal of Mark Twain_ Van Wyck Brooks studies the tragedy which
he sees in the career of a genius who was born with the nature of a
great artist but born into an environment so uncongenial to art that
he had to struggle against it all his life, and vainly, except for a
few radiant occasions when he escaped it rather by accident than by any
natural sense of his best direction or any wisdom which he had been
able to acquire. In “that dry, old, barren, horizonless Middle-West
of ours,” according to Mr. Brooks, where in Mark Twain’s boyhood and
youth the frontier had not yet lightened the hand of death which it
always laid upon every uncomplacent urge toward art or creativeness
or even distinction, Mark Twain had a smaller opportunity for free
growth than he would have had on “the fertile human soil of any spot in
Europe.” Moreover, not only his general environment but the individual
who touched him most intimately contrived, however unwittingly, to
clip and bind his instinctive wings. His mother, keen, spry, witty,
energetic, but hungry for the love she had missed in her marriage and
therefore insatiate in her maternal passions, checked all the impulses
in her sensitive son which looked to her like eccentricities and
tenderly hammered him into the only mould tolerated in Missouri—the
mould of respectability and amiability. That he did not quite stay
hammered is testimony to the strength of his desire, but it was never
to become fully conscious. So, though his episode on the river as pilot
partly liberated him, for there he had a craft and an authority which
he never had anywhere else in his life, he was capable of relapsing
again into the temper and texture of the herd when he drifted to the
still wilder frontier of the Rockies and the Pacific Coast. There,
where any affection for privacy seemed a contempt for society and
any differentiation from the crowd seemed almost an insult to it,
Mark Twain had no choice, if he was to express himself and still be
respectable and amiable, but to express himself in the permitted idiom
of the humourist. “Plainly, pioneer life had a sort of chemical effect
on the creative mind, instantly giving it a humorous cast. Plainly,
also, the humourist was a type that pioneer society required in order
to maintain its psychical equilibrium.” Laughter was the only ultimate
weapon in the desperate battle with the wilderness. “Women laughed,” as
Albert Bigelow Paine phrases it, “that they might not weep; men when
they could no longer swear.”
That such laughter was heroic, Mr. Brooks, a humane critic, would
admit, but he is too ardently, too fiercely, a partisan of the divine
right of the creative impulse to feel that Mark Twain’s submission to
such laughter was less than deeply tragic. And when the first harvests
of fame released this Pacific humourist from his humorous prison, what
had he to turn to? Nothing, Mr. Brooks answers, but the Gilded Age of
our Reconstruction madness, when the entire nation, with a fearful
homogeneity, was out money-hunting as it had never been before; when
natural resources hitherto unsuspected were being tapped, and such
sparse resources of the soul as had existed here and there under the
régime of our ancient culture were being deserted, almost as obviously
as were those stony farms which the most alive natives of New England
were leaving to the shiftless men and hesitant, half-alive virgins who
had to carry on the stock and the traditions.
Into this desiccating atmosphere Mark Twain came just when its best
spiritual oxygen had all been pumped out. Too insecure in his own
standards not to defer to those of the established East, he took the
standards of the first persons under whose influence he fell. There
was his wife, who had been brought up in Elmira, in “up-state” New
York, where a “stagnant, fresh water aristocracy, one and seven-eighths
or two and a quarter generations deep, densely provincial, resting
on a basis of angular sectarianism, eviscerated politics, and raw
money, ruled the roost, imposing upon all the rest of society its
own type, forcing all to submit to it or to imitate it.” Mark Twain
submitted and imitated, with the result that he, who had in himself
the makings of a _sans-culotte_, became in most outward ways a pillar
of society, and he who was built to be a Rabelais of loud, large,
exuberant satire, became instead a writer quite safe (with a few
furtively obscene exceptions, such as “1601”) for the domestic fireside
and the evening lamp. And not only his wife was to blame. There was
William Dean Howells, whom Boston, lacking any such energetic blood
of its own in those decaying days, had had to import from Ohio, but
who without serious struggle accepted the spinsterly principles of
Boston, decided that “the more smiling aspects of life are the more
American,” and, as regards Mark Twain, tamed him with the doctrines
of a timid gentility and a surface realism. Once handcuffed between
these two good and gentle captors, Mark Twain was lost. Instead of
satirizing the United States as he was born to do, he satirized
medieval France and England and generally the great, deep past of
Europe, thereby actually multiplying the self-congratulations of which
his countrymen had already too much the habit. Instead of telling the
truth about contemporary life, which he had the eyes to see, he kept
a thousand silences on matters about which he could not say what he
saw and thought without hurting the feelings of his friends—that is,
the privileged class. Instead of building some precious edifice of
beauty that might dare the sun and shake the very spheres, as great
beauty does, he was content to laugh at beauty or at least at those
exceptional creatures who follow it into paths that to duller men seem
vague or ridiculous. Poor Mark Twain, Mr. Brooks in effect concludes,
he was born to be a master and creator, but he died having never
been anything but the victim of his epoch—the “saddest, most ironical
figure,” the playboy of the Western World.