_Sherwood Anderson on This Side of Freud_
“Poor White,” published in 1920, marked a new turn in Sherwood
Anderson’s career and the transition toward a new style. It is now
characterized by the obsession of the subconscious and the study
of morbid psychology. “Poor White” tells once more the story of a
proletarian youth struggling against adverse surroundings. Like
“Marching Men” this novel is autobiographical to a large extent. With
Hugh McVey, the poor white, the experiments which Anderson’s previous
books had described start all over again. Uprooted and revolving
against his native environment, he too seeks to find an impossible
felicity in the gratification of his passions. Hugh McVey has grown,
like wild grass, on the shores of the Mississippi once haunted by the
ghost of Huckleberry Finn, in days when boys were more addicted to
“roughing it” than to brooding over their secret thoughts. The huge
river inspires Hugh with a longing for a life of abundance and ease.
Like all the characters in Anderson’s novels, he is the victim of
inhibitions. He vegetates in the sultry atmosphere of his small town.
Automatism and routine are ready to swallow him up. Luckily, he was
born a craftsman and he is saved by work. He is intelligent and wilful,
and turns out to be an inventor. A fortuitous circumstance takes him
beyond his narrow horizon. One day, he sees people busy planting
cabbages by hand. Why not build and patent a cabbage-setting machine?
Hugh carries out his plans successfully and he soon finds himself at
the head of a prosperous stock company; but he is dissatisfied. He
has not fulfilled his spiritual longings. He denounces machinery and
commercialism. He arraigns socialism because it cannot exist without
them. He sees salvation only in self-reliance and in sincerity to
oneself and to others. He thinks and acts, in fact, like a man who has
read and appropriated to himself R. W. Emerson’s essays. Hugh marries a
frigid woman who deserts him. At the end of the book we find him alone
on the road to Truth. All in all, “Poor White” is painfully composed
and rather badly written. Its value resides in the Freudian sketches
aside from the main plot, and in the analysis of the pathological forms
of sensibility.
It did not greatly increase the novelist’s reputation. The previous
year he had published his famous collection of short stories,
“Winesburg, Ohio.” This is a first-rate psychological document.
Anderson has now definitely given up sociology to become a psychologist
and a specialist in the study of dual personalities. “Winesburg, Ohio,”
is entirely in harmony with the most recent contributions of American
literature to psychoanalysis. It is as rich and original in intuition
as the books of Robert Frost, Edgar Lee Masters and Eugene O’Neill.
Winesburg is a sort of Main Street, not in breadth but in depth. Each
one of these stories is a masterpiece of dramatized insight. They stage
the tragedy of moral failure. The real drama is not enacted in the open
but in the gloom of what the author names “the well,” deep under the
surface of existence. It is the tragedy of evasion. The scene is the
provincial United States of half a century ago, somewhere in and around
Chicago. The novelist ascribes the neurasthenia of his characters,
their errantry and their inconsistency in thought and action to the
shock of too sudden a transition from the old order to the new. Mystic
Anderson once more denounces our times as the most materialistic in
the history of the world, as an epoch where wars are fought without
patriotism, when men substitute their vague ethics to the worship of
the living God, when the will-to-power replaces the will-to-serve,
when beauty has been almost entirely forgotten in the terrible race
for money. But the stories of “Winesburg, Ohio” cannot be limited
to the American scene. Their appeal is broadly human and universal.
Admirable as studies of morbid psychology, they are still more so as
dramatizations of our secret thoughts. Within their limited bounds they
contain the most suggestive portraits.
The eccentrics, the maniacs, the daydreamers and the half-insane
whom, up to now, have been relegated to the background of Anderson’s
books, occupy the center of the stage. The novelist has most skilfully
succeeded in grouping the different anecdotes and in giving to all his
people a family air of resemblance. He has individualized the morbid
states of sensibility, with something akin to genius. His psychology is
utterly pessimistic, as every true psychology must be. It is based on
the observation of distortions and abortions caused by moral restraint.
Anderson introduces us to human beings condemned to intellectual and
moral decrepitude. The surrounding mediocrity has atrophied their
moral life, without killing their elementary instincts. All these
half-insane and these maniacs are dual personalities for themselves and
for others. Winesburg is the city of hypocrites, or, as we prefer to
call them to-day, the city of the inhibited.[43]
As we watch this parade of lunatics of both sexes, we cannot think of a
stranger Cabinet of Doctor Caligari.[44]
Anderson’s rogues’ gallery shelters the most fantastic medley of moral
outcasts, the libidinous, the perverse, the sly, the morbid. All of
them suffer particularly from soul-fear and floating anxiety, as
described by the experimental psychologists. These abnormalities are
caused chiefly by an erotic obsession. As their energy is no longer
able to express itself in acts, it loses itself in nightmares and
incoherent actions. This explains the verbal _psittacism_ upon which
Anderson has made some curious remarks. Let us enter this Musée Grevin
of the psychologically abnormal.
Here is a man whose hands are incessantly shaken by a suspicious
automatism. He is fond of caressing children. One day he is accused
of having taken advantage of one of them and he is expelled from the
village. Here is an hysterical woman who married an old doctor. The
doctor has a mania for stuffing his pockets with slips of paper on
which he has written maxims which he forces everybody to read. Here
comes a professional simulator who has lived a thousand imaginary
lives. He wants to make us believe that he is Christ and that he has
been made to die upon a cross. This rich landowner lost his mind from
brooding over the Bible. One day he went into the woods to kill his
grandson, as Abraham did to Isaac. Another Winesburgher, a woman, was
seized with an erotic fit which made her run out into the streets all
naked on a rainy day. Let us not forget the hypocritical minister who
had seen a naked woman through a crack in the window of his church.
The wretched man had forgotten prayer and could no longer expel the
temptation from his mind. He became half insane and was about to end up
badly. But one day he again saw the naked woman praying in her room and
he conceived a new and happier idea of life. Never has the human mind
been subjected to more crucial dissections and been denounced as such a
mad and dangerous machine.
There is a moral attached to these tales. Anderson’s philosophy, as
well as his mysticism, centers upon what may be called the problem of
deliverance. It is based upon a tragic feeling of the complexities of
the human self, on the necessity and difficulty of extracting from the
subconscious labyrinth our real personality. It slumbers, deep within
us, buried under formalism. A city filled with millions of living
people can be, in reality, a necropolis for the dead.
And quite truly, from the spiritual and moral point of view, the live
are dead in Winesburg. No matter if they do go about their daily tasks,
if they play at being born, at marrying, at having children, at making
money, at voting, at going to church, at talking of the weather or
the approaching elections. This is not life. Spiritually and morally,
the Winesburghers are as dead as the corpses whose epitaphs Edgar Lee
Masters collected in the “Spoon River Anthology.” At most, Sherwood
Anderson accords to the inhabitants of Winesburg a larval existence,
a life of sleepwalkers and daydreamers. Of the various selves which
William James classified in his treatise on psychology, and which he
called the _material_, the _social_ and the _spiritual_ selves, the
living dead of Winesburg possess only the most elementary, _i.e._, the
material. Their social and their spiritual selves are illusory. Instead
of actions they know only manias; instead of ambitions, velleities;
instead of achievements, dreams. Let the professional psychiatrist read
these tales. He will find in them all the forms of psychic degeneracy.
The embryonic and larval life of Winesburg defies even the slow-motion
process of photographic reproduction. Still life and twilight sleep
prevail here as the characteristic phases of existence.
How strange a paradox that the land of the _strenuous life_ should
shelter such moral mummies.[45] In “Winesburg, Ohio,” Sherwood Anderson
closed without hope the gates of the mystic evasion through which the
characters of his early novels used to escape. “Abandon hope, all ye
who enter here!” Dante’s Inferno is an Eden compared to this American
abode of unescapable gloom.
* * * * *
In almost every case the great issue of suppressed sensibilities
in Anderson’s stories is eroticism. This is the central pivot of
the lives of his larvæ. The male wants to be rich quick. He has not
time to love; he simply flirts. The female, on the contrary, is like
Phaedra, the wife of Theseus, in Racine’s tragedy, _toute entière à
sa proie attachée_, all intent upon securing the gratification of her
instinctive impulses. Man makes up for his erotic disillusions by
irony, work or drink.[46] Woman simply surrenders to the _libido_.
Inhibitions and repressions make an agony of her life. Anderson
suggests that she come out of the “well” for the sake of health,
happiness and moral progress. Surrendering to nature and not asceticism
is the cure of morbidity. He sides with Hawthorne on this point, and
he proves it in one of the best tales of “Winesburg, Ohio.” We see the
Reverend Hartman released from the nightmares of his cell by facing
life as it is and discovering that religion and beauty can very well
go together. Evasion, it is true, is not within the reach of every one
in Anderson’s books. It is reserved to the elect. Many try to lift the
lid of the “well” and are drowned. The most pathetic case of evasion
is that of Elsie in “The Triumph of The Egg.” The story is called “The
New Englander.” Elsie is an uprooted girl from the East. She dies
of moral dearth and inhibited desires, somewhere on a lonely farm in
the Middle West. One day homesickness and longing make her run away
in the corn-fields with the same pagan fury which took Hester Prynne
to the primitive forest. The scene is literarily beautiful and almost
technically Freudian:
In the month of August, when it is very hot, the corn in Iowa
fields grows until the corn stalks resemble young trees. The
corn-fields become forests. The time for the cultivating of the
corn has passed and weeds grow thick between the corn rows. The men
with their giant horses have gone away. Over the immense fields
silence broods.
When the time of the laying-by of the crop came that first summer
after Elsie’s arrival in the West, her mind, partially awakened by
the strangeness of the railroad trip, awakened again. She did not
feel like a staid, thin woman with a back like the back of a drill
sergeant, but like something new and as strange as the new land
into which she had come to live. For a time she did not know what
was the matter. In the field the corn had grown so high that she
could not see into the distance. The corn was like a wall and the
little bare spot on which her father’s house stood was like a house
built behind the walls of a prison. For a time she was depressed,
thinking that she had come west into a wide open country, only to
find herself locked up more closely than ever.
An impulse came to her. She arose and going down three or four
steps seated herself almost on a level with the ground.
Immediately she got a sense of release. She could not see over the
corn but she could see under it. The corn had long wide leaves
that met over the rows. The rows became long tunnels running away
into infinity. Out of the black ground grew weeds that made a soft
carpet of green. From above light sifted down. The corn rows were
mysteriously beautiful. They were warm passageways running out
into life. She got up from the steps, and, walking timidly to the
wire fence that separated her from the field, put her hand between
the wires and took hold of one of the corn stalks. For some reason
after she had touched the strong young stalk and had held it for a
moment firmly in her hand, she grew afraid. Running quickly back to
the step she sat down and covered her face with her hands. Her body
trembled. She tried to imagine herself crawling through the fence
and wandering along one of the passageways. The thought of trying
the experiment fascinated, but at the same time terrified. She got
quickly up and went into the house.
But the temptation proved too strong. Elsie could not resist the lure
of the broad fields:
Elsie ran into the vastness of the corn-fields filled with but one
desire. She wanted to get out of her life and into some new and
sweeter life she felt must be hidden away somewhere in the fields.
After she had run a long way she came to a wire fence and crawled
over. Her hair became unloosened and fell down over her shoulders.
Her cheeks became flushed and for the moment she looked like a
young girl. When she climbed over the fence she tore a great hole
in the front of her dress. For a moment her tiny breasts were
exposed, and then her hand clutched and held nervously the sides
of the tear. In the distance she could hear the voices of the boys
and the barking of the dogs. A summer storm had been threatening
for days, and now black clouds had begun to spread themselves over
the sky. As she ran nervously forward, stopping to listen and then
running on again, the dry corn blades brushed against her shoulders
and a fine shower of yellow dust from the corn tassels fell on her
hair. A continued crackling noise accompanied her progress. The
dust made a golden crown about her head. From the sky overhead a
low rumbling sound, like the growling of giant dogs, came to her
ears.
Sharp pains shot through her body. Presently she was compelled to
stop and sit on the ground. For a long time she sat with closed
eyes. Her dress became soiled. Little insects that live in the
ground under the corn, came out of their holes and crawled over her
legs.
Following some obscure impulse the tired woman threw herself on
her back and lay still with closed eyes. Her fright passed. It was
warm and close in the roomlike tunnels. The pain in her side went
away. She opened her eyes and between the wide green corn blades
could see patches of a black threatening sky. She did not want to
be alarmed and so closed her eyes again. Her thin hand no longer
gripped the tear in her dress and her little breasts were exposed.
They expanded and contracted in spasmodic jerks. She threw her
hands back over her head and lay still.
It seemed to Elsie that hours passed as she lay thus, quiet and
passive under the corn. Deep within her there was a feeling that
something was about to happen, something that would lift her out of
herself, that would tear her away from her past and the past of her
people. Her thoughts were not definite. She lay still and waited as
she had waited for days and months by the rock at the back of the
orchard on the Vermont farm when she was a girl. A deep grumbling
noise went on in the sky overhead, but the sky and everything she
had ever known seemed very far away, no part of herself....
Elsie followed, creeping on her hands and knees like a little
animal, and when she had come within sight of the fence surrounding
the house she sat on the ground and put her hands over her face.
Something within herself was being twisted and whirled about as
the tops of the corn stalks were now being twisted and whirled by
the wind. She sat so that she did not look toward the house and
when she opened her eyes, she could again see along the long,
mysterious aisles.... The storm that had been threatening broke
with a roar. Broad sheets of water swept over the corn-fields.
Sheets of water swept over the woman’s body. The storm that had
for years been gathering in her also broke. Sobs arose out of her
throat. She abandoned herself to a storm of grief that was only
partially grief. Tears ran out of her eyes and made little furrows
through the dust on her face. In the lulls that occasionally came
in the storm she raised her head and heard, through the tangled
mass of wet hair that covered her ears and above the sound of
millions of raindrops that alighted on the earthen floor inside the
house of the corn, the thin voices of her mother and father calling
to her out of the Leander house.
The tortures of inhibition have rarely been so dramatically and
scientifically described.
* * * * *
From now on, the problem of sexual inhibition was going to haunt
Sherwood Anderson. He was soon to devote to it a strange and, for
the average reader, a most shocking book which we must examine with
the same candor which the author has shown in writing it. It is
called “Many Marriages.” In order to be entirely just to it, I shall
again warn the reader of what I have already suggested. Eroticism
and mysticism go hand in hand for Anderson. Having discovered sexual
inhibition to be the main cause of social hypocrisy, he preaches the
gospel of absolute sexual sincerity as a _sine qua non_ condition
of moral progress. To understand the author’s point of view, let us
not forget that his stories take place in a Puritan country. Let us
remember Theodore Dreiser’s sayings about the primordial importance of
the sexual question in a pioneer land where the woman remained, for
a long time, as the only luxury allowed to men, and the only object
of art offered to their dreams. “Many Marriages” is a confession, a
soliloquy, which continues uninterrupted for nearly three hundred
pages.[47]
The hero is a lunatic, an erotomaniac who parades naked before a
Madonna and a crucifix surrounded by burning tapers, in order to better
vent his feelings about sex, love and marriage to his daughter. His
name is John Webster. He was born in a small Wisconsin town and began
as a business man. One day, passing in front of his factory, he heard
his workingmen humming a hymn like this:
And before I’d be a slave,
I’d be buried in my grave
And go home to my father and be saved.
As has been already hinted, verbal automatism plays a large part in the
career of Anderson’s characters. The song heard by John Webster loosens
a new stream of consciousness in him. A married man with a grown-up
daughter, in charge of a business concern, John Webster suddenly feels
that he has missed his life. He immediately leaves everything to follow
the call. In fact, he had never been happy as a married man or as an
American citizen. He had never been able to express himself freely.
Above all, he had lived in complete ignorance of his body. Now he has
found the road to Damascus. Let him be erotically sincere. At last,
let him know the “house” of his body which he has inhabited so long as
a stranger, and let him visit what he calls other people’s “houses.”
Thereupon his mystic lubricity is let loose. The most shocking part
of the book is that in which the Wisconsin gymnosophist gives a
demonstration of erotic sincerity to his daughter, she herself being
hardly dressed. The pages where he tells her his misfortunes as a
married man and a lover are indeed amazing. The like can only be found
in Andreiev or Gorki. John Webster is insane, but he is also sincere
and pure, according to the author. More than this, he atones in his
person for all the inhibited inhabitants of Winesburg. This immoral
book is after all pure and candid from the writer’s point of view.
It was composed to keep a wager which Sherwood Anderson was careful
to explain in his preface. John Webster, he tells us, may be crazy,
as anybody would be who tried to act contrary to accepted standards
in public. At any rate courage is also a virtue, and John is not a
coward. Doubtless, a man who seeks love as directly as he does is
abnormal according to present standards, but he may be more moral than
many of us who refrain to follow his tracks only for fear of public
opinion. Better be a De Sade than a Tartuffe. “Many Marriages” is, at
the bottom, a plea in favor of individual renewal. It is the book of a
moralist and of a mystic. John Webster is a saint after a fashion. He
dares to uncover his most secret thoughts before others. The problem of
correlations between our thoughts and our actions has always proved to
be of a great interest to the author. One of the tales in “The Triumph
of The Egg” showed a father who was impelled by his longing for Truth
to reveal his secret life to his daughter, but he was a coward and
stopped short at the last minute. As for the denudation of the body at
the moment of intensive moral or religious crises, and as a symptom of
conversion, it is not unknown to hagiographers. Do not the Scriptures
speak of “shedding the old man?” The biography of Saint Francis of
Assisi tells a similar story with a very different purpose. Nakedness
in “Many Marriages” is ritual. It is equivalent to the white robe which
the neophytes of the primitive church used to don.
This is said, not as a plea in favor of John Webster, but as an
analysis of some of the tortuous and yet well-meaning paths which
Anderson’s mind likes to travel. At any rate, he made no mystery of his
intentions or of the significance of his book. He tells us that, whilst
loving Natalie Schwartz, his mistress, John Webster never intended to
shut himself off from the possibility of loving another woman, or many
other women. Why should not a rich man marry many times? He was certain
that all the potentialities in wedlock had yet been hardly explored. He
wanted to be the Christopher Columbus of a new continent of inter-human
relations. In Webster’s mind something had opposed itself, up to then,
to a broad and human acceptation of life. Before loving one had to
know and accept himself and others. Sexual love is true only when it
comes as an inspiration, a miracle. Happy are those who follow the
call. But they are few. For most people life is a renunciation of their
best self. And that is why John Webster left his wife. She had never
forgiven him his primitive spontaneity and his brusque mode of attack
at their first meeting. “Leave all and follow me,” says the Voice. Love
must not be a bond but a token of freedom. Such was the meaning of the
refrain heard by John Webster one day. Let us break down the walls and
free the prisoners:
If one kept the lid off the well of thinking within oneself, let
the well empty itself, let the mind consciously think any thoughts
that came to it, accepted all thinking, all imaginings, as one
accepted the flesh of people, animals, birds, trees, plants, one
might live a hundred or a thousand lives in one life. Then each one
of us could become “something more than just one individual man and
woman living one narrow circumscribed life.” One could tear down
all walls and fences and walk in and out many people. One might in
oneself become a whole town full of people, a city, a nation.
This may be a generous dream, and one infinitely more attractive than
the inhibitions of Winesburg or Gopher Prairie, and yet one cannot help
seeing in John Webster’s gospel only the last challenge of romanticism
at bay. After Rousseau, Walt Whitman has tried the gospel of sexual
sincerity at all cost. He had attempted to call the universe to him
and hold it in his naked arms. “I Walt Whitman, a cosmos!” and it all
ended in failure. Theodore Dreiser in “The Genius” had answered John
Webster’s queries concerning sexual freedom. Sherwood Anderson himself
noted somewhere that humanism and not pantheism, concentration and not
expansion, could free and feed human hearts. Webster’s mystic orgies
have not only ethics but common sense against them. But Anderson is a
poet. Like Whitman he worships Life and the Vital Force. He wants us
to surrender to all beautiful instincts. Society denies us this right,
Life itself will build a bridge to greater freedom. Life, he proclaims,
will empty the prisons. It will raise the lid of the “well” where the
Freudian monsters are asleep, these monsters which the Puritan felt
groping within himself, and which he carefully and wisely held in
chains. Anderson wants to free the Hairy Ape and make an angel of him:
There was a deep well within every man and woman, and when Life
came in at the door of the house, that was the body, it reached
down and tore the heavy iron lid off the well. Dark hidden
things, festering in the well, came out and found expression for
themselves, and the miracle was that, expressed, they became often
very beautiful. There was a cleansing, a strange sort of renewal
within the house of the man or woman when the god Life had come
in.[48]
Anderson has dedicated himself once more to the task of raising the lid
of the “well.” In “Dark Laughter” it is again the story of a spiritual
evasion and the return to erotic sincerity. Psychological insight
and verbal lyricism are beautifully and musically blended in this
book. In it the author is felt to become more and more conscious and
to have acquired a greater mastery of his instruments of expression.
Lyrical outbursts, soliloquies and descriptions are brought into
perfect harmony. The hero of “Dark Laughter,” Bruce Dudley, alias John
Stockton, is another John Webster. He began his career as a reporter,
got a good position, married and ... ran away. He dropped his wife and
his job to become a tramp. He began anew earning a living by painting
carriage wheels in company with a comrade similar to those celebrated
by Walt Whitman. He then becomes a gardener and falls in love at first
sight with his employer’s wife. It is the inspiration, the miracle so
much looked for by John Webster. So Bruce and Aline wed sincerity and
elope.... But it would be a betrayal of Anderson to reduce the plots
of his books, especially this one, to such trivial incidents. For him
the orchestration is more important than the theme. The main charm of
“Dark Laughter” is its poetry and its music, the curious and clever
blending of thought, dream, color and song. It is a sort of _sotto
voce_ monologue with musical interludes. In several of Anderson’s books
there had already been an undertone of music echoing the thoughts of
the characters. He has perfected the process in “Dark Laughter.”
The scene of the novel is laid upon the shores of the Ohio and of the
Mississippi. These gigantic American waterways, sung to the tune of
a Greek hymn by Monsieur de Chateaubriand and desecrated in modern
times by Mark Twain, become musical again through Sherwood Anderson’s
poetic prose. There is an orchestra of Negro minstrels on the shore
and on the deck of the boat which takes Bruce Dudley to New Orleans.
The writer looks to Negro music as to the symbol of free instinctive
expression. The humming of Negro spirituals accompanies the soliloquies
of Bruce Dudley like the tom-tom in “Emperor Jones.” The black man’s
songs in Anderson’s novels emphasize the return to nature. They are the
last avatars of romanticism in America, the protest of nature against
civilization, a challenge to social hypocrisy.[49] While the white
man broods at home over his woes, real or imaginary, the black sings
naturally in the open and vents his naïve soul in hymns and laughter,
with an occasional strain of melancholy, soothing itself as it is sung.
Anderson finds in these Negro chanteys what he calls “a way of getting
at the ultimate truth of things,” which is tantamount, almost, to a
system of metaphysics.
The pages devoted to New Orleans in “Dark Laughter” are among the most
original ever written by the author. Here is the homecoming of Bruce
Dudley in the old creole city:
The niggers were something for Bruce to look at, think about. So
many black men slowly growing brown. Then would come the light
brown, the velvet-browns, Caucasian features. The brown women
tending up to the job--getting the race lighter and lighter. Soft
Southern nights, warm dusky nights. Shadows flitting at the edge
of cotton fields, in dusky roads by saw-mill towns. Soft voices
laughing, laughing.
Oh, ma banjo dog,
Oh, ho, ma banjo dog.
An’ I ain’t go’na give you
None of ma jelly roll.
Niggers on the docks, niggers in the city streets, niggers
laughing. A slow dance always going on.... Clean ships, dirty tramp
ships, half-naked niggers--a shadow dance.... They dance south--out
of doors--white in a pavilion in one field, blacks, browns, high
browns, velvet-browns in a pavilion in the next field--but one ...
Oh, ma banjo dog!
... Give us a song, Jack--a dance--the gumbo drift. Come, the night
is hot....
Nigger girls in the streets, nigger women, nigger men. There is
a brown cat lurking in the shadow of a building. “Come, brown
puss--come and get your cream.” The men who work on the docks
in New Orleans have slender flanks like running horses, broad
shoulders, loose, heavy lips hanging down--faces like old monkeys
sometimes--bodies like young gods--sometimes. On Sundays--when
they go to church, or to a bayou baptizing, the brown girls do
sure cut loose with the colors--gaudy nigger colors on nigger
women making the streets flame--deep purples, reds, yellows, green
like young corn-shoots coming up. They sweat. The skin colors
brown, golden yellow, reddish brown, purple brown. When the sweat
runs down high brown backs the colors come out and dance before
the eyes. Flash that up, you silly painters, catch it dancing.
Song-tones in words, music in words--in colors, too. Silly American
painters! They chase a Gauguin shadow to the South Seas.
I shall not add any comments to this beautifully colored piece,
recalling, at once, both Gauguin, Matisse and Baudelaire, with the
addition of a jazz band. The man who wrote this is certainly one of the
greatest artists in words of American literature, if not the greatest
and the most modern. If young America succeeds in creating an art of
the New World, as original as that of the old one, she will owe it to
Sherwood Anderson, as to her truest literary pathfinder. He may not
be himself completely emancipated yet from his native loam. He looks
very much like a faun fighting to disentangle himself from his dual
nature, but as a colorist and a musician it is difficult to dispute him
the first rank. Consumptive American fiction owes to him at least real
flesh and blood. That he is a sensuous mystic can be concluded from
his very definition of art. He calls art “a perfume issuing from the
truth of things through the fingers of an humble man filled with love.”
Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Verlaine and Mallarmé, the founders of modern
æsthetics, would certainly have endorsed this programme which gratifies
harmoniously both the body and the soul.