Bids fair to rise and sing and rival Pope,
as a poetical friend neatly put it at the time.
THE KIND MOTHER OF US ALL
I imagine that those of our ancestors who first struggled up from the
aboriginal slime used to sit occasionally in moody caucuses and talk
of the good old days and perhaps envy the slower creatures which still
drew their breath—such as that breath was—in the simple freedom of
the mud. I know that at this very moment there are excursion steamers
plying, as a certain wit says, from the foot of Main Street to the
Blessed Islands of the Pacific, where the air never dreams of biting,
where love lies for ever in the green shade, and where the noble
savage runs wild and beautiful and good—but not too good—on the lovely
land or gives himself ecstatically to the tumbling surf. And I have
just been reading of a time in the eighteenth century—most amusing of
centuries—when curiosity and sentiment and a kind of cosmic libido
among Englishmen focussed themselves upon the State of Nature and found
what they were looking for, first abroad in many quarters of the earth
and then at home, where proper English explorations end.
Little Britain, as Chauncey B. Tinker shows in a solid and jolly
monograph called “Nature’s Simple Plan,” was waking up. During the
sixties of the century Commodore Byron had come back with yarns about
the giant Patagonians; Wallis had seen Tahiti and named it after the
idyllic George III; Cartwright, having lived for years in Labrador, had
brought live Eskimos to London; Bruce had studied deepest Abyssinia,
and Captain Cook had begun to plough the most distant seas with many a
home-keeping eye upon him. Not only did the poets hymn the delights of
new paradises, but the more or less sober men of science took up the
ardent chorus. Lord Monboddo claimed that the Golden Age still lingered
in the South Seas and tickled all the wags with his talk about men with
tails and about the cousinship of men and monkeys. Luxury was under
fire: Dr. Johnson defended it, but Goldsmith wept to see it devastating
villages and consequently to
see the rural virtues leave the land.
Rousseau, orator and laureate of the primitive, called the attention of
mankind to Corsica, where liberty still survived and where it might be
possible for some wise man to teach the people how to preserve it. He
himself began a constitution for the island, though he never finished
it. Half Europe looked on encouragingly—but idly—while Pasquale Paoli
led his Corsican revolt against Genoa. Boswell, visiting Rousseau
while the philosopher was about his constitutional task, formed such
a passion for the hardy island that he ventured into it, talked with
Paoli, carried back to England a Corsican costume, and now and then
conspicuously wore it while he tried to arouse the interest of
Englishmen at large in the heroic little revolution. When Genoa gave
Corsica to France and England let France keep it the lovers of liberty
had a dreadful shock.
They need not have been quite so shocked if they had viewed the matter
more in its political and less in its literary aspect. But most of
the partisans of Corsica were men, or amateurs, of letters, and they
believed its defeat meant the loss to the world of that outburst of
song which they had made up their minds they would hear as soon as
Corsica should be free. Without liberty, they thought, there would be
no lyres. At the very moment when countless peasants of England, unable
or unwilling to endure the hard conditions of life in that tight realm,
were taking themselves off in droves to the colonies, the poets of the
country, partly stifled by a smug atmosphere and a tame tradition,
sent their imaginations voyaging into lands and ages more hospitable
to their profession. In _The Progress of Poetry_ Gray talked about the
behaviour of the Muse in Lapland and Chile; in _The Bard_ he set forth
the figure of an ancient minstrel whose rage lifts him to the point
of prophecy. And whereas Gray had created a primitive singer, James
Macpherson created a primitive song and filled the world with the wails
of Ossian. The dream of a State of Nature had borne at least that much
fruit.
But there was more to come. Romance had sown its seeds broadcast and
the mood of the race kept on writhing in parturition. Gray had brooded
over the mute Miltons of Stoke Poges churchyard; the generation which
saw his poem did what it could to see that no such persons should be
mute. With the somewhat famous Stephen Duck the Poetical Thresher
must stand, Professor Tinker points out, Mary Collier the Poetical
Washerwoman and Henry Jones the Poetical Bricklayer and James Woodhouse
the Poetical Shoemaker and Ann Yearsley the Poetical Milkwoman—all
of them being wonders whom the fashionable exploited to this or that
extent. Poetically, it happened, they were unanimously fizzles; and
yet they paved a kind of way for a later peasant who was a genius. The
discoverers of Robert Burns the Poetical Ploughman must at first have
thought that here was merely another Duck. When they had caught him,
indeed, they did not know what to do with him, and it is a question
whether they helped or hurt him. He did not come, somehow, in the garb
and gesture they had expected. Where were the high strains of the
primitive bard? Where were the abstract declamations about liberty?
Where the novel “numbers” in which he might be expected to dress his
“natural” thought? Where the noble suavity? Where, I am afraid they
asked in some chagrin, was the meek gratitude that even an inspired
peasant should feel towards those who had unearthed him? So far as they
could see, this was a man very much like other men.
Well, give them credit for what they did, whatever it was. They had
been hunting for a simple, holy plan of nature, and they had looked
for it in the wrong places. They had looked into dim pasts and
into distant islands about which they knew too little to be able to
distinguish between nature and art. In their ignorance they had taken
to pleasant guesses, to pretty sentiments, to poetical inventions.
At least, however, they had longed for something simpler than the
muddled universe they lived in; and at last they must some of them have
understood that there is no State of Nature and there never has been
and there never will be. Among the turbulence of things the mind, each
mind, must discover and conquer its own simple plan.
Professor Tinker’s book, besides being a pungent footnote to human
history, is allegory. Its hero, which was a generation, set out to find
simplicity. It travelled into very far countries and was disappointed,
but in the end it turned back and learned that simplicity begins at
home.
MOCHA DICK
Moby Dick, the hugest character in American fiction, had his original
in a whale which Melville’s biographer does not even mention but
which must have been known to Moby Dick’s. The name of the creature,
according to the principal authority, was Mocha Dick, and he was first
seen and attacked near the island of Mocha about 1810. For years he
resisted capture. “Numerous boats are known to have been shattered by
his immense flukes,” wrote J. N. Reynolds a dozen years before _Moby
Dick_ was published, “or ground to pieces in the crash of his powerful
jaws; and on one occasion it is said that he came off victorious from
a conflict with the crews of three English whalers, striking fiercely
at the last of the retreating boats at the moment it was rising from
the water in its hoist up to the ship’s davits.... From the period of
Dick’s first appearance his celebrity continued to increase, until his
name seemed naturally to mingle with the salutations which whalemen
were in the habit of exchanging in their encounters upon the broad
Pacific, the customary interrogatories almost always closing with ‘Any
news from Mocha Dick?’”
No wonder that “nearly every whaling captain who rounded Cape Horn, if
he possessed any professional ambition, or valued himself on his skill
in subduing the monarch of the seas, would lay his vessel along the
coast, in the hope of having an opportunity to try the muscle of this
doughty champion, who was never known to shun opponents.” No wonder,
either, that his fame went so far. “From the effect of age, or more
probably from a freak of nature, ... he was white as wool. Instead
of projecting his spout obliquely forward, and puffing with a short,
convulsive effort, as usual with his species, he flung the water from
his nose in a lofty, perpendicular, expanded volume, at regular and
somewhat distant intervals; its expulsion producing a continuous roar,
like that of vapour struggling from the safety-valve of a powerful
steam engine. Viewed from a distance, the practised eye of the sailor
only could decide that the moving mass which constituted this enormous
animal was not a white cloud sailing along the horizon.”
In time Mocha Dick’s back came to be serried with irons which had
pierced his mighty hide and his wake was tangled with yards of line
which he had broken in his rush or which had been cut off by desperate
whalers to keep their boats from being dragged under water. Caution,
too, entered that head with the barnacles clustered hard and tight upon
it; he learned to present his back to the harpooner and to guard his
“small” and the softer area under his fins. But with so many allies
against him he finally met his fate. Attacked in his last battle, off
the coast of Chile, he charged the boat at the first encounter and
frightened the harpooner into missing him and then, on being accused
of fear, of plunging into the water to drown himself for chagrin. Later
Mocha Dick, who had been keeping out of sight though suspected to be
still near the ship, was angered at the attack which the whalers made
upon a calf and its mother and again charged them. This time the first
mate made a surer stroke and, after a furious struggle, got his victim.
“Mocha Dick was the longest whale I ever looked upon. He measured
more than seventy feet from his noodle to the tips of his flukes; and
yielded one hundred barrels of clear oil, with a proportionate quantity
of ‘head-matter.’”
This material underwent a great alchemy in Melville’s imagination.
He would not let his Moby Dick be mortal, but carried him unscathed
through his adventures and at the end sent him off, victorious,
shouldering the troubled waves with his ancient head. Nor would
Melville allow the war against Moby Dick to be the plain war of the
hunter and the hunted, but gave his hunter the excuse to chase the
whale that the whale had chased him and had bitten off his leg. Nor
would Melville allow the story to be conducted on the simple plane
of mere adventure, but lifted it up into the regions of allegory and
symbolism, added the fury of hot passions, drenched it with poetry and
dark mystery, lighted it with irony and satire and comic vividness and
vast laughter. It was his genius which made the story of Moby Dick
important. Because it is important, the neglected story of Mocha Dick
deserves at least its little moment.
FOLK-LORE IN KENTUCKY
The first and second members of the firm of Mencken, Nathan, and God
must have shouted for joy when they first opened—as doubtless they have
opened—the compilation lately made of nearly four thousand “Kentucky
Superstitions,” in the volume of that name. _The American Credo_ had
only about an eighth as many vulgar errors, for all its satiric malice.
And satiric malice can find nothing in the national mind more primitive
than some of the beliefs here set forth. For instance: “To cure a child
of thrush, let a stallion snort into the child’s face”; “Gunpowder is
given to women to facilitate childbirth”; “Catch a toad, put it under
a rock, and let it starve to death. After it has dried thoroughly,
beat it into a powder, and sprinkle this powder on the person whom you
wish to fall in love with you.” Doctrines like these recall medieval
medicine, aboriginal witchcraft, the jungle, and the cave. And yet side
by side with them are recent absurdities as new as the news: “Billikins
bring good luck”; “It is well for an aviator to wear a lady’s stocking
around his neck”; “It brings bad luck for the last of three people to
use a lighted match in smoking.” The idol has become a Billikin, and
the knight wearing his lady’s favour has taken to the air, but these
are superficial accidents. Otherwise it looks as if the folk changes
not much more rapidly than mountains grow.
The compilers of _Kentucky Superstitions_ have in a fashion perfectly
impartial printed all they have found (with some expurgations) without
distinction of age or novelty, universality or locality. “The good
die young,” according to one of the citations; and “No news is a sign
of good news.” Such notions belong to folk-lore everywhere. Others
among these Kentucky superstitions are more specific: “If once you
get your feet wet in the Cumberland River, you will always return
to the Kentucky Mountains”; “It is firmly believed by the people of
Leslie County, a mountain county, that President McKinley’s name was
written by spiders in their webs as a prophecy of his death.” There are
ceremonies for May Day that point to the rites of Flora: “To become
beautiful, wash your face in dew before sunrise on May Day”; there are
quaint fancies about Christmas old-style, such as that “At midnight of
Old Christmas the elders bloom”; there are sortileges and incantations,
divinations and auguries, weather wisdom, dream-lore, signs of the moon
and of the zodiac, witchcraft and hoodoos. The most numerous of all are
concerned with animals, birds, insects, and reptiles; then follow cures
and preventives, divinations concerning love (most of them practised by
girls), weather, household and domestic life, the human body, in the
order named.
The total result is an amazing palimpsest, as if each new generation
had written its lore upon an original manuscript, partly erasing the
old symbols and partly employing them to make new symbols; altering the
old text or adapting it; adding new illustrations or comments; bringing
in fresh material that flatly contradicts the old. One superstition
says that “If you take the next to the last biscuit on the plate, you
will never marry”; but another, that in such an event “you will have a
handsome husband.” A merely mnemonic change may alter the whole point
of a saying: “A whistling woman or a crowing hen never comes to a very
good end”; but “A woman that whistles, or a hen that crows, has her
way wherever she goes.” Most of these superstitions are, of course,
held by few people, and many by no one very seriously. The more highly
educated sections of the state, while represented by a large number of
superstitions, report rather trivial ones, for the reason that they
are of little importance in the life of these sections. The mountain
whites and the Negroes cherish a larger number of superstitions, which
are more barbarous but obviously more authentic than those of the
lowland whites. “If you drink water out of a stranger’s shoe,” they
say in the mountains, “your sore throat will be cured.” This is not so
casual an invention as the notion that “It brings bad luck to see an
empty street-car.” “If you curse God and shoot at the sun, you will be
able to see the wind,” according to mountain doctrine: according to the
Louisville Negroes, “If you cut your eyelashes, you will be able to see
the wind.”
Such a compilation is genuinely valuable to the anthropologist, the
folk-lorist, the historian, the teacher, but to none of them more
so than to the student of imaginative literature or, indeed, to the
creative writer. Every folk-superstition alluded to in _Tom Sawyer_
and _Huckleberry Finn_ is here recorded. Other superstitions in this
collection it is easy to remember from various novels and tales of
Kentucky life. And yet to read the book with such matters in mind is
to realize how little the riches of our folk-lore have been utilized.
Consider Thomas Hardy, working away like a profound mole among the
buried lores and memories of Wessex, and then consider the so much
more trivial, the sentimental use that literary Kentuckians have made
of their materials. The ordinary attitude of American men of letters
is that inasmuch as we have a briefer history on this continent than
Europeans have on theirs, there is hardly an excuse for investigating
our own folk-lore and employing it. But, of course, the folk here is
as old as the folk there, in any but a political or geographical, and
therefore superficial, sense. It has, too, customs and superstitions
developed on the native soil. Here is an extraordinarily important
field for the imaginative writer to plough. We write of our smart sets,
tinkling and cosmopolitan; we write of our Indians and Negroes, looking
for essentially native material there; but between these extremes,
except in the highly circumscribed “local colour” stories, we have done
little to sound the life and opinions of our folk as regards anything
deeper than their outward manners. In _Kentucky Superstitions_ we
have a document to help us in going deeper. There is the germ of such
another story as Hardy’s _The Withered Arm_ in the Kentucky belief that
“You may remove birth-marks by rubbing them with the hand of a corpse.”
There are poetry and drama both in one superstition from the mountains:
“A maid says: ‘If I’m not going to marry anybody, knock, Death, knock!’
If she hears nothing, she says: ‘If I’m going to marry a young man,
whistle, bird whistle!’ If her appeal remains unanswered, she says: ‘If
I’m going to marry an old man, hoot, owl, hoot!’”
PAUL BUNYAN GOES WEST
It was idle, of course, to expect that Paul Bunyan would continue to be
satisfied with the home in the neighbourhood of the Great Lakes where
that mighty man seems to have reached his majority. Call it invented,
if you will; true it is that the epic Paul sprang from the imaginations
of many lumbermen competing at evening fires for the honour of having
told the biggest whopper about the career of Paul the logger’s darling.
But a ghost of such heroic vigour is not lightly raised; Paul’s fame
has widened out, by word of mouth alone till very lately, to a thousand
camps in many forests; in that sense he has gone himself, for the man
lives, like your true epic hero or your politician, by the breath of
reputation. Now, as the first chapbook about Paul records for us, he
has moved west and done magnificent new deeds under the sunset. The
chapbook is called _Paul Bunyan Comes West_ and it should make all
lovers of Americana and all collectors of chapbooks snatch for it. What
are copies of the first _Faustbuch_ fetching now?
I admit that Paul Bunyan still lacks his Marlowe and his Goethe, but I
contend that he is a fellow at least as well worth keeping an eye on as
Bevis of Southampton or Guy of Warwick or any of the Seven Sleepers
of Ephesus or the Seven Champions of Christendom, to say nothing of
Jack the Beanstalk-climber or Jack the Giant-killer. In this first book
about him Paul Bunyan has fallen into the hands of a certain Yank,
still living somewhere in the valley of the Willamette and devoting the
hours he can spare from the neglect of his professional duties as camp
cook to the elaboration of tales about Paul. Art thus makes an advance
upon nature; in real life the mighty Bunyan grows almost by repartee,
as when one logger tells one tall tale about his hero and another tries
to go him rather better and some third attempts to outdo both; but the
epic has its rights. Robin Hood moved from separate ballads to a ballad
sequence, and the wily Ulysses from epic lays to the grand march of
Homer himself. So Paul Bunyan starts up.
It will be a shame if, like George Peele and some others, he ends in
a jestbook and never flies further. Exaggeration such as that in some
of the stories presses upon genius. His pick drags behind him on his
way West and the first thing he knows he has cut out the Colorado
Canyon; he blows the new dinner horn and down fall three square miles
of timber; with his Blue Ox to help him he brings an Alaskan glacier
down to the States and digs out Puget Sound for the Government; he
raises corn in Kansas enormous enough to suck the Mississippi dry and
interfere with navigation; he builds a hotel so high that he has “the
last seven stories put on hinges so’s they could be swung back for
to let the moon go by”; his ax “had a wove grass handle and Paul he
jist swung it round in a circle an’ cut all the trees within reach to
wunst.” He has a daughter Teenie of the same heroic breed, an adequate
dog named Elmer, and the Blue Ox, Babe, “a ’normous critter—forty
ax-handles an’ a plug o’ Star terbacker between the eyes.”
The question what the American imagination will make of Paul Bunyan is
a curious one. Will it make him another Hercules or another Munchausen?
Or will it extravagantly think itself rich enough to afford to neglect
him?
THE WORST AMERICAN BOOK
Now and then an honest superlative is both a luxury and a necessity,
and I take real pleasure in declaring my confident belief that the
worst book in American literature is one which was written by Milo
Erwin of Williamson County, Illinois, and published at Marion, the
county seat, in 1876 under the title _The Bloody Vendetta_. Though
intended to be an authoritative county history, it concerns itself
chiefly with a feud which had lately flourished in the neighbourhood
between the Bulliner and Henderson clans, with their allies. Only
ruthless quotation can do the work justice.
“On the morning of December 12, 1873, George Bulliner started to
Carbondale, on horseback. The sun was standing against the murkey haze
of the east, red and sullen, like a great drop of blood. The pearly,
vapour-like sails dotted the sky, and covered the more delicately
sculptured clouds with their alabaster sides. The great oak trees
lifted their parapets to the morning sky, and spangled the earth with
shadows. The voiceless winds swept the earth with sublime resignation
lawless through the leafless woods, and a melancholy breeze stirred the
dead ferns and droping rushes. A cold-scented sleuth-hound had followed
the tracks of Bulliner remorselessly. This morning two of them, with
stealthy movement, took their position near the Jackson county line in
an old tree top, on the ground. There, planted on the spot, their ears
drank in every sound that broke the air, mouth half open, ears, eyes,
soul, all directed up the road to catch, if possible, each passing
object.... Bulliner came riding along and one of the assassins fired
on him; only two or three of the balls took effect in his hip and leg;
but his horse wheeled and threw his back to the assassins, who fired
on him again, and forty-four buck-shot took effect in his back, and he
fell to the earth. The assassins then escaped. Bulliner was soon found
and carried to the nearest house, and his sons notified, but after
desperate riding John reached the place only in time to hear his father
say, ‘Turn me over and let me die.’ He did so, and George Bulliner
escaped from the cruelties of earth to the charities of Heaven.”
A few months later David Bulliner, another son, was shot, also from
ambush. "David was carried home by a host of friends, who had gathered
at the gate. At the gate he asked ‘Is it a dream? is it a dream?’ and
each broken word gurgled up out of the red fountain of his life. His
brothers were standing around, their faces sealed with the death seal
of inexpressible suffering, and their hearts hushed in the pulsation
of woes. His mother lay trembling against the casement, her heart
throbbing with its burden of sorrow, while the issues of life or death
were being waged in the soul of her son. His sisters were standing
in the vortex of misery, praying for the dreadful slaughter to be
stopped, and suing for happiness with the sunny side of life in view....