is a metaphysical affair about which no one need worry much. On one
side, let us say, is invention and on the other is veracity; every
biographer, however, has now and then to invent, and veracity is often
indispensable to the novelist. It is strange that the two forms have so
rarely been compounded: that, for instance, so few authors have written
biographies of imaginary persons. The mixture is particularly tempting.
It makes possible at once the freedom of the novel and the sober
structure of the biography; it has the richness, though perhaps also a
little of the perverseness, of certain hybrid types. In _Peter Whiffle_
Carl Van Vechten has crossed the two literary forms fascinatingly. His
hero has a _fin de siècle_ look about him, as if he were, perhaps, a
version of Stephen Crane or of one of his contemporaries. When Peter
first dawns upon his biographer he has in mind to beat such decorative
geniuses as Edgar Saltus at the art of producing fine effects by the
sheer enumeration of lovely or definite things: he will make his
masterpiece the catalogue of catalogues. Later, he has shifted to the
mode of Theodore Dreiser, having been converted by _Sister Carrie_,
and is a revolutionist wedded to the slums. Eventually he turns to the
occult and the diabolical and ends in about that spiritual longitude
and latitude. Does Peter suggest some of Max Beerbohm’s men too
much? The question will be asked. At least it is certain that he is
piquant, arresting, brightly mad. Whether in Paris or in New York he
glitters in his setting. And that setting is even more of a triumph
than the character of Peter. Mr. Van Vechten, however he made up his
protagonist, has taken his setting from life: actual persons appear in
it, actual places. He deals with it now racily, now poetically. He is
full of allusions, of pungencies, of learning in his times. He knows
how to laugh, he scorns solemnity, he has filled his book with wit and
erudition. He is a civilized writer.
A HERO WITH HIS POSSE
If literature is not cosmopolitan when a Japanese-German publishes in
the United States in English a book dealing with the life of the great
Jew whose deeds and doctrines, recounted in the Greek of the Gospels,
serve as the basis of the Christian religion, when is it? Sadakichi
Hartmann’s _The Last Thirty Days of Christ_ will sound to the orthodox
a good deal like George Moore for irreverence and a little like Anatole
France for slyness. Ostensibly the diary of the disciple Lebbeus, also
called Thaddeus, it explains the miracles as so many quite rational
affairs and ends with Jesus dying like a mortal man in a garden at
Emmaus; in the most realistic language it shows Lebbeus asking Jesus
if he is to “swipe” the ass on which the Master entered Jerusalem,
describing the shapely legs of the Samaritan woman, and recounting
with vigour and gusto the pranks of the dusty, naked apostles in the
Jordan. Bull-necked Peter, “fierce, stubborn, easily roused, but
devoted to the Master like no other”; “flamboyant Judas Iscariot, a
strangely magnetic personality”; “sturdy, straightforward James and sad
and headachy-looking John”—John being the Boswell of the expedition;
doubting Thomas, “a lean elderly crab-apple sort of a man”; “old
‘muffled-up’ Bartholomew, of whose face at no time one could see more
than a snivelling nose”; Matthew, “practical, shrewd, determined that
something great must be the outcome of all this personal discomfort and
marching about”—these and the others are keenly drawn to what may have
been life—of course no one knows. The apostles talk metaphysics behind
the Master’s back and undertake plans for “something great.” Indeed,
the betrayal appears as merely Judas’s scheme for bringing matters to
a head and forcing Jesus to call on the “legion of angels” which he
had said he could command. Alas, the apostles could not comprehend
their Teacher, his humour, his paradoxes, his hyperboles, his strength
in tenderness, his nature so rich and full that he could be ascetic
without drying up. He stands in this book, wherein the arguments of
Renan are made flesh, as a companionable saint—not a god at all—who is
still marked off from the intensely human group about him by a mystery
and a glory which are Sadakichi Hartmann’s tribute to his power and
which in Christian art have been symbolized by the bright aureole
around his head.
MARIA AND BATOUALA
The face of _Batouala_ is the face of Esau but the voice is the voice
of Jacob. Paris speaks through René Maran, as it spoke recently through
Louis Hemon and his _Maria Chapdelaine_: the Paris which is subtle yet
bored with subtlety and cruel yet bored with cruelty and eager for art
yet bored with art. Such complex towns are hungry for idyll and for
epic, the more so if, sitting at the centre of an empire, they can
look out toward dim provinces and see idyll and epic transacting on
their own soil. Paris, looking into French Canada, is thrilled along
unfamiliar nerves at the sight of the girl of Peribonka who, having
lost her dearest lover, chooses rather to stay in that hard native
wilderness than to take what comfort may be found in softer regions: it
is as if some Arcadian maiden had preferred Arcadia to Athens or some
Shropshire lass had preferred Shropshire to London. So Paris, looking
into French Africa, exults over the deeds of the black chief Batouala,
who loves and fights and loses and dies, like a bison or an eagle,
without a thought deeper than sensation and without a future longer
than quick oblivion. _Batouala_ is no primitive piece of art: no naïve
ballad of the people; no saga, remembering the harsh conflicts of
actual men; no epic even, calling up the large days of Agamemnons and
Aeneases and Rolands and Siegfrieds and Beowulfs for the edification
of smaller days. It is a document of civilization, of civilization
turning, with a touch of nerves, from the contemplation of itself to
a vicarious indulgence in the morals and manners of the jungle which,
whether they exist in Africa or not, exist somewhere beneath the
surface of every civilized person.
To say this is to say that René Maran, though himself of Batouala’s
race, has learned in Paris to make Parisians understand him and that
the fame of his book depends upon his skilful use of a sophisticated
idiom. But there is more to be said than that. _Batouala_ is a document
as well upon the process by which an inarticulate section of mankind is
beginning to be articulate. Out of the heart of a dark continent comes
a tongue which uses neither the rant of the imperialist nor the brag of
the trader nor the snuffle of the missionary. That tongue is hot with
hatred for what Europe has done to Africa through the exercise of a
greed which is the more malevolent because it is incompetent. The world
of Batouala is a world spoiled by alien hands and laid waste as fever
and tribal wars never laid it waste. Back of the quiet accents which M.
Maran uses is the impact of a whole race’s wrongs and resentments. And
yet those accents are quiet, for the book, though not primitive art, is
art of a high order. It is, says M. Maran in his preface, “altogether
objective. It makes no attempt to explain: it states.” Being a genuine
work of the imagination, _Batouala_, of course, is less impersonal than
its author believes it to be; its material is shaped at every point by
a hand which, beating with the pulse of Africa, loves these contours
and expresses its passion through them. Its passion, however, has been
so guided by principle that it is emphasized by reticence much as that
reticence is warmed by passion. In the circumstances, a plain story is
enough, given, too, merely as a series of etchings from the career of
Batouala, and only partly concerned with his relations to the whites.
Candid pictures (considerably softened in this translation) of his
daily life and final tragedy pass vividly by: all the customs and rites
and sounds and stenches of his village, the throbbing of drums, the
ferment of sexuality, the conflict of races, the pressure of nature
upon man, the irony of primitive plans, the pity of primitive defeat.
A great novel? Not quite, because it is febrile and fragmentary. But
it has some of the marks of greatness upon it: energy, intensity,
vitality.
STUPID SCANDAL
The story that Abraham Lincoln was an illegitimate son became a matter
of gossip about the time of his first nomination for the presidency
and was given a wide if stealthy circulation by the malice of the
disaffected. He himself always spoke with reticence of his ancestry,
for the reasons that he believed his mother to have been born out
of wedlock and that, supposing his parents to have been married in
Hardin County, Kentucky, he had looked in vain for the record of their
marriage which was all the time lying in the court house of Washington
County, where Thomas Lincoln and Nancy Hanks had been married 22
September, 1806. Lamon’s biography in 1872 first put the scandal into
print, though in veiled language. Since then it has been repeated in
varying forms, for the most part obscurely and always uncritically.
While there has never been any good excuse for crediting it, there
has come to be a better and better excuse for undertaking to refute
it. That has now been done by William E. Barton in _The Paternity of
Abraham Lincoln_, a convincing study which leaves not a square inch of
ground for the scandal to stand on. Mr. Barton’s researches have been
exhaustive and—barring a few minor slips—accurate; he follows the
rules of evidence in a way to put to shame those many lawyers who on
such trivial testimony have believed the story; at the risk of making
his book too bulky he has included practically all the documents in the
case; he writes everywhere with good temper, although he might well
have been forgiven for being vexed at the inanity or insolence of most
of those who have argued that Lincoln was the son of this or that Tom,
Dick, or Harry.
Mr. Barton’s arguments remove most of the charges into the territory of
the ridiculous. Abraham Enlow of Hardin County, Kentucky, for instance,
turns out to have been no more than fifteen—perhaps fourteen—years
old when Abraham Lincoln was conceived. As to Abraham Enlow of
Elizabethtown, Kentucky, there was no such man. George Brownfield,
of what is now La Rue County, was real, and may have known Lincoln’s
father and mother as early as eight or nine months before the child was
born, but no scandal ever touched Brownfield’s name in this connection
for fifty years after 1809, and then the yarn was apparently invented
because the story of Abraham Enlow of Hardin County to the older
citizens in the locality seemed untenable. The “Abraham” Lincoln of
Ohio who was formerly identified with the President, and about whose
birth there was a scandal, turns out to have been named John. Abraham
Inlow of Bourbon County is said to have paid Thomas Lincoln five
hundred dollars to marry Nancy Hanks, who already had a child named
Abraham; as a matter of fact, the pair had been married nearly three
years when their son was born, and there is nothing in the Abraham
Inlow story that even hints at an adulterous connection. If such an
affair ever took place it concerned a certain Nancy Hornback. The
rumour that Martin D. Hardin was the father of Lincoln died of its own
impossibility with the discovery that Lincoln was neither born nor
conceived in Washington County, where Hardin lived. Patrick Henry,
occasionally asserted to have been Lincoln’s father, died ten years
before Lincoln was born. The foolish affidavits which attempt to credit
the paternity to Abraham Enloe of North Carolina are too ignorant and
contradictory to be noticed. That a foster son of John Marshall was
Lincoln’s father seems unlikely in view of the fact that Marshall never
had a foster son; this report is about of a piece with another which
says that one of Marshall’s own sons was the father of Nancy Hanks,
when as a matter of fact she was a year older than the eldest of them
and might have been the mother of the youngest. John C. Calhoun may
possibly have indulged in a flirtation with a young woman at a tavern
at Craytonville, North Carolina, in 1808-9, and she may just possibly
have been a Nancy Hanks, but she cannot have been Nancy Hanks Lincoln,
who had already been married for two years and had been living in
Kentucky, it seems on good evidence, since early childhood.
All this is sheer gossip, motivated partly by an ugly desire to hurt
Lincoln’s fame and partly by a vulgar attempt to account for his
genius by giving him a father more promising than Thomas Lincoln. At
the worst it is disgusting; at the best it is stupidly unimaginative,
for the Hardin, Henry, Marshall, Calhoun stories are singularly frail,
and the Enlows and Inlows and Enloes of the legend were certainly
no more likely to beget a genius than the actual father. Even the
Baconians have chosen a great man to explain Shakespeare with. The only
use of the whole matter is to throw some light upon the way in which
in unenlightened ages, when there was no Mr. Barton to investigate the
facts and lay the ghosts, various nations of mankind have sought to
explain their heroes and leaders of humble birth by finding for them,
among gods or demigods, fathers more suitable than the plain men who,
such is the mystery of genius, are all that need be taken into account.
THE MUSE OF KNICKERBOCKER
We guiterman a volume when,
Though but one pen can rightly do it,
We view it reasonably, then
With ripe and rippling rhymes review it.
(How delicate should be the eye,
How deft and definite the hand
Of the audacious poet by
Whom Guiterman is guitermanned!)
This Arthur with the nib of gold,
The quaintest of the critic carpers
Who sang New York, has sung the Old
Manhattan now in ballads (Harpers).
The color of his music moves
From Dobson’s to our Yankee Doodle’s;
Assay his mixture, and it proves,
However, Guiterman in oodles.
He sings the founders: “Kips, Van Dorns,
Van Dams, Van Wycks, Van Dycks, Van Pelts,
Van Tienhovens, Schermerhorns,
And Onderdoncks and Roosevelts.”
Of Tappan Zee, of Nepperhan,
Of Hellegatt, of Spuyten Duyvil,
Of’t Maagde Paetje, Guiterman
Here rhymes in rings around each rival.
Adieu vers libre, adieu the news,
Adieu the horrid shilling-shocker;
We hail the marriage of the Muse
To Mynheer Diedrich Knickerbocker.
IX. POETS’ CORNER
GREEK DIGNITY AND YANKEE EASE
The single solid volume of Edwin Arlington Robinson’s _Collected Poems_
holds without crowding all but a few lines of the verse into which
one of the acutest of Americans has distilled his observations and
judgments during thirty studious, pondering, devoted, elevated years.
Never once does Mr. Robinson show any signs of having withdrawn his
attention from the life passing immediately under his eyes; but he has
no more frittered away his powers in a trivial contemporaneousness than
he has buried them under a recluse abstention from actualities: he has,
rather, with his gaze always upon the facts before him, habitually seen
through and behind them to the truths which give them significance
and coherence. That he from the first chose deliberately to follow an
individual—however solitary—path appears from a very early sonnet,
_Dear Friends_:
The shame I win for singing is all mine,
The gold I miss for dreaming is all yours;
that he from the first deliberately chose the path of stubborn thought
rather than of genial emotion appears from his unforgettable _George
Crabbe_:
Whether or not we read him, we can feel
From time to time the vigour of his name
Against us like a finger for the shame
And emptiness of what our souls reveal
In books that are as altars where we kneel
To consecrate the flicker, not the flame.
In the nineties, when England was yellow with its Oscar Wildes and
Aubrey Beardsleys and America was pink-and-white with its Henry van
Dykes and Hamilton Wright Mabies, Mr. Robinson was finding himself in
the novels of Thomas Hardy—the sonnet on whom has been omitted from
this collection—and fortifying himself in the study of Crabbe’s “hard,
human pulse.” His absolute loyalty to the ideals of art and wisdom thus
achieved is a thrilling thing.
The long delay of the fame to which he had every right may possibly be
held in part to account for his countless variations upon the theme
of vanity—even of futility, of which he is the laureate unsurpassed.
Leaving to blither poets the pleasure of singing the achievements of
the successful at the top of the wave, Mr. Robinson took for himself
the task of studying the unarrived or the _passé_ or the merely
mediocre. Consider Bewick Finzer,
Familiar as an old mistake,
And futile as regret;
consider Miniver Cheevy, who wept that he was ever born because he
could not stand the present and longed for the colours of romance—
Miniver Cheevy, born too late,
Scratched his head and kept on thinking;
Miniver coughed, and called it fate,
And kept on drinking;
consider the Poor Relation, who has perforce outstayed her welcome and
on whom
The small intolerable drums
Of Time are like slow drops descending;
consider the women-maddened John Everldown, and Richard Cory committing
suicide in the midst of what the world had thought triumphant
prosperity, and Amaryllis shrunk and dead, and Aaron Stark so hard that
pity makes him snicker, and Isaac and Archibald each telling their
little friend that the other has grown senile, and the graceless,
ancient vagabond Captain Craig discoursing gracefully from his
death-bed like some trivial Socrates, and Leffingwell and Lingard and
Clavering—
Who died because he couldn’t laugh—
and Calverly and that incomparably futile Tasker Norcross whose
tethered range
Was only a small desert,
and yet who knew that there was a whole world of beauty and meaning
somewhere if he could only reach it—all these are the brothers and the
victims of futility. Even when Mr. Robinson ascends to examine the
successful he bears with him the sense of the vanity of human life. The
peak of his poetry is that speech in which Shakespeare, in _Ben Jonson
Entertains a Man from Stratford_, likens men to flies for brevity and
unimportance:
Your fly will serve as well as anybody,
And what’s his hour? He flies, and flies, and flies,
And in his fly’s mind has a brave appearance;
And then your spider gets him in her net,
And eats him out and hangs him up to dry.
That’s Nature, the kind mother of us all.
And then your slattern housemaid swings her broom,
And where’s your spider? And that’s Nature, also.
It’s Nature, and it’s Nothing. It’s all Nothing.
It’s all a world where bugs and emperors
Go singularly back to the same dust,
Each in his time; and the old, ordered stars
That sang together, Ben, will sing the same
Old stave tomorrow.
And in his great flight into legend, in _Merlin_ and _Lancelot_, Mr.
Robinson elected to view a crumbling order from angles which seem
opposite enough but which both exhibit Camelot as a city broken by
frailties which on other occasions might be heroic virtues: Merlin
follows love to Vivien’s garden at Broceliande and the kingdom of
Arthur falls to ruin because it has no strong, wise man to uphold it;
Lancelot leaves love behind him to follow the Light, like a strong,
wise man, but the Light dupes him as much as love has duped Merlin, and
ruin overtakes Camelot none the less. This is Mr. Robinson’s reading
of existence: We are all doomed men and we hasten to our ends according
to some whimsy which establishes our hours soon or late, leaving us,
however, the consolation of being perhaps able to perceive our doom and
perhaps even to understand it.
What is it that holds Mr. Robinson, with his profound grasp of the
tragic, from the representation of those popular, magnificent hours of
tragedy when—as a more pictorial critic might say—the volcano bursts
from its hidden bed and the thunder reverberates along the mountains?
Well, Mr. Robinson is a Yankee, free of thought but economical of
speech; he is another Hawthorne, disciplined by a larger learning, a
more rigorous intellect, and a stricter medium. The light of irony
plays too insistently over all he writes to allow him to indulge in any
Elizabethan splendours. His characters cannot rave. They, too, in a
sort, are Yankees poet-lifted, and they must be at their most eloquent
in their silences. Consequently the fates which this poet brings upon
his quiet stage must all be understood and not merely felt. He gives
the least possible help; he pitilessly demands that his dramatic
episodes be listened to with something like the tenseness with which
the protagonists undergo them and without alleviating commentary or
beguiling chorus; he never ceases to cerebrate or allows his readers
to. Such methods imply selected readers. They imply, too, on the poet’s
part, that he pores too intently over the white core of life to look
long or often at the more gorgeous surfaces. If Mr. Robinson has any
strong passion for the outward pageantry of life—such as men like
Scott or Dickens have—he does not communicate it. His rhythms throb
with heightened thought not with quickened pulses, or only with pulses
quickened by thought. No line or stanza escapes his steady, conscious,
intelligent hands and runs off singing. Endowed at the outset with a
subtle mind and a temperament of great integrity, he has kept both
uncorrupted and unweakened and has hammered his lovely images always
out of the purest metal and in the chastest designs.
To lay too much stress upon the tragic and the fateful in his work is
to do it, however, less than justice. It contains hundreds of lines of
the shrewdest wordly wisdom, of the most delicate insight into human
character in its untortured modes, of rare beauty tangled in melodious
language. He has employed the sonnet as a vehicle for dramatic
portraiture until he has almost created a new type; he has evolved an
octosyllabic eight-line stanza which is unmistakably, inalienably,
inimitably his; he has achieved a blank verse which flawlessly fits his
peculiar combination of Greek dignity and Yankee ease; he has, for all
his taste for the severer measures, taught his verses, when he wanted,
to lilt in a fashion that has put despair in many a lighter head. Nor
must it be overlooked that Mr. Robinson has written some of the gayest
verses of his generation, as witness these from the ever-memorable
_Uncle Ananias_:
His words were magic and his heart was true,
And everywhere he wandered he was blessed.
Out of all ancient men my childhood knew
I choose him and I mark him for the best.
Of all authoritative liars, too,
I crown him loveliest.
How fondly I remember the delight
That always glorified him in the spring;
The joyous courage and the benedight
Profusion of his faith in everything!
He was a good old man, and it was right
That he should have his fling....
All summer long we loved him for the same
Perennial inspiration of his lies;
And when the russet wealth of autumn came,
There flew but fairer visions to our eyes—
Multiple, tropical, winged with a feathery flame,
Like birds of paradise....
THROUGH ELLIS ISLAND
Pascal D’Angelo was born, he says in an autobiographical sketch which
he has let me see, “near the old walled city of Sulmona, Italy. It is
a small town in the beautiful valley that was once the stronghold of
the Samnites, walled in by the great blue barrens of Monte Majella. Few
roads run to this quiet land and ancient traditions have never entirely
died out there. Below the town is the garden of Ovid with its wild
roses and cool springs, and above is an ancient castle that in summer
is fantastically crowned with the mingling flight of pigeons which take
care of their young on its towered heights. In the valley below are
finely cultivated fields dotted with the ruins of Italica, the capital
of fierce Samnium.” There Pascal D’Angelo went to school a very little
during his childhood, handicapped by the fact that his parents at home
could neither read nor write and that, because of their poverty, he was
frequently obliged to stay at home to herd the family’s six or seven
sheep and four goats. At sixteen he came with his father and a number
of fellow-villagers to the United States.
“In this country immigrants from the same town stick together like
a swarm of bees from the same hive and work where the foreman, or
‘boss,’ finds a job for the gang. At first I was water-boy and then
shortly after I took my place beside my father. I always was, and am, a
pick-and-shovel man.” Pascal D’Angelo worked here and there at similar
rough labour, in New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts,
Vermont, West Virginia, Maryland—at first unable to read newspapers
printed in English and unaware that there were any printed in Italian.
But gradually he learned to read, and always he was a poet. “When night
comes and we all quit work the thud of the pick and the jingling of the
shovel are not heard any more. All my day’s labours are gone, for ever.
But if I write a line of poetry my work is not lost, my line is still
there—it can be read by you today and can be read by another tomorrow.
But my pick-and-shovel works can be read neither by you today nor by
another tomorrow.... So I yearn for an opportunity to see what I can
accomplish ... before suffering, cold, wet, and rheumatism begin to
harm me in the not distant future.”