America, Carlyle wrote Emerson, “is verily the Door of Hope to
distracted Europe; which otherwise I should see crumbling down into
blackness of darkness.”
The Door of Hope! It is perhaps time now to ask down what corridors
this door has led, to scrutinise the precise quality of American hope.
Is it a new hope, or a disguised form of the European hope which has
led “to blackness of darkness”? What, for example, have our fiction
writers, reflecting the American mind, past and present, reported
regarding the success of their quest for happiness? If they have
reported that certain sorts of hope have led to despair, what evidence
is there that other sorts lead to joy? For “the desire for happiness,”
says Arnold, “is the root and ground of man’s being. Tell him and show
him that he places his happiness wrong, that he seeks for delight where
delight will never really be found; then you illumine and further
him.” Let us sketch the quality, first, of the hope of a paradise of
supernal beauty; second, the hope of an American paradise of nature;
and finally, the hope of “A Paradise _within_ thee, happier far.”
I
If we consider the European background of the hope to escape to a
paradise of supernal beauty and bliss, we find that in the classical
legends of the Golden Age, in such Renaissance writers as Lyly,
Sidney, and Spenser, and in such later work as Thomson’s _Castle of
Indolence_, this idyllic Arcadianism was either frankly recreational
and non-philosophic or else a cloak for allegory. Not until the middle
of the eighteenth century was the idyllic dream taken seriously.
Revolting from earlier and contemporary restriction of the imagination,
Akenside advocated refusing to “restrain” one’s “soaring fancy,” Joseph
Warton glorified the “creative and glowing imagination,” and Edward
Young sought to escape “this pestilential earth” by the “creative
power” of the imagination to call forth paradisiacal beauties, “shadowy
beings and unknown worlds,” in the “vast void beyond real existence.”
He exalted a genius which was to “wander wild” in “the fairy land of
fancy,” “reign arbitrarily over its own empire of chimeras,” and “sport
with its infinite objects uncontrolled.” Thus in _Vathek_ Beckford
created a sensuous and erotic paradise with its five palaces which he
destined “for the particular gratification of each of the five senses.”
“The light that never was, on sea or land,” enthralled the youthful
Wordsworth, but he soon questioned it as a “fond illusion.” Keats
sought to escape on “the viewless wings of Poesy” from the “weariness”
of actuality to the “charmed magic casements.” Shelley, the high priest
of this ceaseless and aimless quest for the unattainable, tells us
that only his “fearful and monstrous” story of _The Cenci_ is “a sad
reality”; otherwise he “dreams of what ought to be, or what may be.”
For him the Spirit of Beauty leaves “This dim vast vale of tears,
vacant and desolate.” His is a longing indeterminate, a
“devotion to something afar
From the sphere of our sorrow.”
“I loved I know not what--but this low sphere,
And all that it contains, contains not thee.”
_Alastor_ and _Epipsychidion_ are matchless records of his fruitless
quest for the phantom of desire. DeQuincey’s fantasies are “filled
with perishing dreams, and the wrecks of forgotten deliriums.” _The
Lady of Shalott_ and _The Palace of Art_ testify to Tennyson’s
reluctant renunciation of the life of illusion. Swinburne characterised
himself in _A Nympholept_, while his friend, the author of _The Earthly
Paradise_, strove to
“build a shadowy isle of bliss
Midmost the beating of the steely sea.”
With this background in mind, let us see to what extent the American
story-tellers’ hope for a paradise of supernal beauty coincides with
the idyllic, indeterminate hope of the English romanticists. In _The
Author’s Account of Himself_, Irving, our first master of the short
story, states his Old World longing “to escape, in short, from the
common-place realities of the present,” to “the shadowy grandeurs
of the past,” the “earthly paradise” of “Bellissima Granada” and
the legend-haunted Alhambra. _The Legend of Prince Ahmed al Kamel_,
dealing with the quest for the phantom of desire, illustrates the
idyllic quality of his imagination. The Prince, called the “Perfect”
on account of his “super-excellence,” receives from a dove tidings
of a fair princess--“no flower of the field could compare with her
for loveliness.” In the Spanish spring-time the Prince, a “pilgrim of
love,” resolves to “seek this unknown princess throughout the world.”
Guided by a parrot and an owl, he eventually finds her in the court of
her hostile father. The lover produces his “silken carpet of the throne
of Solomon,” and after confessing his devotion, “the carpet rose in
the air, bearing off the prince and princess ... and then disappeared
in the blue vault of heaven.” Irving, however, sought “escape ... from
the common-place” not only in the picturesque fantasies of Old Spain
but also in the glamorous aspects of the American past, as illustrated
in _The Legend of Sleepy Hollow_. In “a remote period of American
history,” among “some of the goodliest scenes of the mighty Hudson,”
Ichabod rides on a “fine autumnal day” through the “rich and golden
livery” of a natural paradise to win the “peerless,” “ripe and melting
and rosy-cheeked Katrina” and her “unimaginable luxury.” Introduced
by lines from _The Castle of Indolence_, _The Legend_ illustrates
Irving’s somewhat sentimental and humorous continuation of the merely
recreational Arcadianism of earlier days. And the ruse of the Headless
Horseman, in connection with the “twilight superstitions” of one who
was “a perfect master of Cotton Mather’s _History of New England
Witchcraft_,” suggests the interesting tendency of the native Puritan
interest in things unearthly, with the waning of faith, to become a
subject for the æsthetic imagination as in the case of Hawthorne and
Poe.
Unlike Irving, Poe takes the idyllic dream seriously. He defines
the Poetic Principle as “simply the Human Aspiration for Supernal
Beauty,” manifested “in an elevating excitement of the Soul.” Of
course, as every one knows, his vigorous reason controlled the decadent
imagination and emotion of the earlier Gothic school and made him
perhaps our greatest master of the short story technique. But let us
illustrate and define the content of his “aspiration,” his “elevating
excitement of the Soul.” Where does he seek happiness? One thinks of
the “delirious bliss” of “the Valley of the Many-Coloured Grass” in
_Eleanora_. We might better, however, turn to _The Domain of Arnheim_,
where Ellison, with “_a fortune of four hundred and fifty million
dollars_,” seeks to satisfy his passion for an exclusively “physical
loveliness,” his “four elementary conditions of bliss,” which are
“free exercise,” “the love of woman,” “contempt of ambition,” and “an
object of unceasing pursuit.” After a four year quest he finds in the
“luxuriant nature of the Pacific Islands” “an elevated tableland of
wonderful fertility and beauty”; it was the “Paradise of Arnheim,”
combining everything rich and voluptuous. Ellison, however, sought to
gratify the “one passion of his soul, the thirst for beauty,” “above
all ... in the sympathy of a woman, not unwomanly, whose loveliness
and love enveloped his existence in the pure atmosphere of Paradise.”
Thus the content of Poe’s aspiration, as well as his references here
to the “chimera of the perfectionists” “Turgot, Price, Priestley and
Condorcet,” to “Fonthill,” the birthplace of _Vathek_, and to the “rapt
day-dreams of De Staël,” suggest that his aspiration is essentially one
with that ceaseless and aimless sensuous longing already illustrated in
the English romanticists. Or take _The Island of the Fay_, which deals
with the contemplation of “the glory of God” in “natural scenery”--“all
within the Spirit Divine”--in a “rivulet and island,” “all one
radiant harem of garden beauties.” Shelley-like, he sees approach the
“enchanted” island a gentle Fay in a “fragile canoe” with a “phantom
of an oar.” This vision of loveliness, however, passed “disconsolately
with her boat into the region of the ebony flood,” and “darkness fell
over all things and I beheld her magical figure no more.” Thus, as
Professor Foerster has so finely said, Poe gives us only “shuddering
harmonies of the murky subconscious, and roseate harmonies of
sensuous longing posing as spirituality.... His vision oscillated not
between the earthly and the supernal, but between the infernal and
the Arcadian.” But what did Poe report regarding the success of his
aspiration for supernal beauty? “To be thoroughly conversant with Man’s
heart,” he concludes, “is to take our final lesson in the iron-clasped
volume of Despair.” Thinking of writing a book on his life, he said:
“No man will ever dare write it. No man could write it, even if he
dared. The paper would shrivel and blaze at every touch of the fiery
pen.”
Perhaps the most vigorous and passionate Arcadian in American
literature is Herman Melville, mariner and mystic. Descended from Dutch
and New England parents proud and conservative, Melville was driven
to “the water world,” he tells us, by “sad disappointments ... united
with a naturally roving disposition.” He deserted his ship and found
in the valley of the Typees “perpetual hilarity. Surrounded by all the
luxurious provisions of nature,” the innocent natives enjoy the idyllic
bliss “that springs principally from that all-pervading sensation which
Rousseau told us he at one time experienced: the mere buoyant sense of
healthful, physical existence.” This was before the missionaries and
“the worst attendances of civilisation” drove “all peace and happiness
from the valley.” In _Mardi_, frankly idyllic and nympholeptic, devoted
to the savages “as they are not,” Melville’s nostalgic idealism and his
hatred of reality become intensified. Here he creates a dream-girl,
Yillah, “the earthly semblance of that sweet vision, that haunted my
earliest thought,” and the book is a record of the allegorical quest
for her through all the nations of the earth. It follows Unitarianism
and Transcendentalism, with their hope for the infinite perfectibility
of men; it is the quest of _Alastor_ and _Epipsychidion_, the quest
of Novalis for the Blue Flower. “But fiery yearnings their own
phantom-future make, and deem it present. So, if after all these
fearful, fainting trances, the verdict be, the golden haven was not
gained;--yet, in bold quest thereof better to sink in boundless deeps
than float on vulgar shoals; and give me, ye gods, an utter wreck,
if wreck I do.” If Melville fled, however, “not so much bound to any
haven ahead as rushing from all havens astern”--such as the “Babylonish
brick-kiln of New York,” “Commonness and Conventionalism,” “mines
and marts,” and Democracy, “the harlot on horseback”--his first-hand
experience with the reality of a sea red in tooth and claw as well as
“the mystery of iniquity” tended to clash with his dreams of Utopia.
_Moby-Dick_ was born of this clash between the hope of a paradise of
supernal beauty and the sight of a malignant reality from the deck of a
whaler. We have his own commentary on the final results of nympholeptic
longing:
“Explain this darkness, exorcise this devil, ye cannot.... The
truest of men was the Man of Sorrows, and the truest of all books
is Solomon’s, and the Ecclesiastes is the fine hammered steel of
woe. All is vanity. All.... He who ... calls Cowper, Young, Pascal,
Rousseau, poor devils all of sick men.... And your only Mardian
happiness is but exemption from great woes--no more.... Sadness
makes the silence throughout the realms of space; Sadness is
universal and eternal.”
Let us skip the realism of the later nineteenth century, most of which
is essentially arid, and approach such a figure as Floyd Dell. Born
of autobiographical revery, _Moon-Calf_ is the history of a “lonely,
unhappy, desperately desiring and bewildered child” in various Middle
Western towns as he sought refuge in dreams from “the mysterious and
troublesome real world which he feared and disliked.” The avenues of
escape are two: the “gorgeous fantasies which were unrolled for him in
the pages of books,” and the quest of the dream-girl. Lured by the hope
of “freedom, of happiness, of a world altogether new and beautiful,”
Felix becomes a Socialist, only to find later that “that garret
Utopia had somehow lost its savour.” He becomes a factory worker--in
the chaste language of his boss, “the messiest, absent-mindedest,
God-damn carelessest person he had ever seen around a factory.” And
then he tries newspaper work, and is again discharged. Then “he wanted,
with a kind of nostalgia, to write that novel.” Like Shelley, he
sought refuge from a world to which he refused to adjust himself by
turning “his gaze inward upon a world of ideas and dreams.” As Wheels
says, “The world itself is hideous. You can’t do anything with it.
But you can dream beautiful dreams.... There is no other beauty.”
An “incorrigible Utopian,” a member of the Agnostic Society, Felix
escaped to poetry--an “enchanted land”--loving the “drug-like beauty”
of “words, which were like a perfumed breeze out of nowhere, or out of
some strange life lived before, affecting him with a strange nostalgia.”
“Nay, I was sent a wanderer
On Beauty’s desperate quest--
To go forever seeking Her,
Nor, ere I find her, rest.”
And then there is the quest for the dream-girl. First there is Rose,
the gardener’s daughter, whom he meets in the attic and to whom he
reads Rousseau’s _Confessions_. One night they stay in the woods,
watching the stars, and “awakened chill and stiff, a little before
dawn.” In “the innermost caves of fantasy” she was the “Virgin Queen”
of Atlantis, and he her Harper.... “She was ... hope that turns to
despair.” And then there was Margaret, Helen Raymond, Daisy Fisher,
Emily, Mrs. Miller, Lucy, and finally Joyce, with whom he spent the
nights in the cabin. He explains to Joyce that he seeks “something
better than just ordinary, everyday happiness,” that he doesn’t believe
in private property, God, the home, or the support of one’s wife. He
wants a companionship “at once light and gracious, irresponsible and
sincere, generous and self-respecting!” Finally he felt “a discrepancy
between her and a not very distinct ideal of his imagination.” He
“clung to the memory of his shadow-land of ideas” in preference to the
“world of desperate reality,” and when his beloved Joyce tells him she
is to work out her human destiny with another the “world of his dreams
fell shattering about him.” Obviously, _Moon-Calf_ is the creation of
the sort of hope which robbed Shelley of “peace within.”
Let us turn to Willa Cather, whose main theme is the struggle for
æsthetic or emotional self-realisation amid the sordid environment
of either the frontier or an industrial society. In _O Pioneers!_
most piteous is the fate of the fair Marie Tovesky, murdered in the
arms of her lover. In _The Song of the Lark_ Thea Kronsburg develops
her rare voice in spite of a gossipy Colorado town. “There is only
one big thing--desire.” In _My Ántonia_ the heroine says, “That is
happiness--to be dissolved in something complete and great.” Her lust
for richness of experience leads to her becoming an unmarried mother
and finally the mother of a large family. In _Youth and the Bright
Medusa_ a typical story is that of Paul, whose longing for an æsthetic
paradise in a flatly stolid industrial town led him to robbery and
to suicide after a week’s fulfilment of his hopes. Most instructive,
perhaps, is _The Professor’s House_, based on the fruitless struggle of
the romantic spirit against materialism and convention. The Professor
does not “think much of science as a phase of human development”; he
resisted the new “commercialism” in education; he preferred his old
dingy study to the one in the pretentious house which his worldly
wife and daughters had planned; he loathes the petty quarrels of his
daughters over fashions; and his wife accuses him of “shutting yourself
away from everybody.” In place of materialism and convention, however,
he seeks to substitute not a central interest in what is most richly
and typically human but rather a refuge in the romantic past: in the
pomp of the Middle Ages when man was “a principal in a gorgeous drama
with God”; in the bygone glories of the Spanish adventurers; in
reliving in revery his youth, “the realest of his lives”; in the loving
study of many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore; and in his
interest in his former student’s worship of the ancient Cliff-dwellers.
The seemingly irrelevant interpolation of Tom Outland’s story of his
inability to interest official Washington, “so petty, so slavish,”
in his “religious emotion” regarding his discovery of the relics of
the Cliff-dwellers is explained by its paralleling and under-scoring
the Professor’s own struggle--the romantic spirit struggling in vain
against materialism and convention. Finally, when the Professor’s
family departed for Europe, he “thought of eternal solitude with
gratefulness,” and “wanted to run away from everything he had intensely
cared for.” One night while he is resting in his old study a storm
blows out his gas stove and slams his window shut: he awakens to find
himself “nearly asphyxiated”; he wished to die. “He hadn’t lifted his
hand against himself--was he required to lift it for himself?” He
cannot bear the thought of his wife’s return and the continuation of
their way of life. Finally an old friend revives him, but he found that
“he had let something go--and it was gone: something very precious.”
He reflects that “his apathy” will not trouble a family “preoccupied
with their own affairs.” No, the merely romantic devotion to what is
picturesque in the storied past will never avail in the quest for peace
in a conventional and materialistic environment.
Like Poe, Joseph Hergesheimer strives to escape “the dreary and
impertinent duty of improving the world” in his worship of an
unattainable beauty. His friend Mr. Cabell finds “in all the
Hergesheimer novels” “men labouring toward the unattainable, and a
high questing foiled.” For example, in _Linda Condon_, based on this
theme, Peyton, a sculptor, seeks in vain to win the beautiful Linda,
who marries another. The sculptor endeavours to sublimate his passion
in the creation of a great statue, which is destroyed by a mob, and he
dies in forlorn desolation.
“Love was the supreme force, and its greatest expression a desire
beyond the body.... The endless service of beauty. Of course,
a woman--but never the animal; the spirit always. Born in the
spirit, served in the spirit, ending in the spirit. A direct
contradiction, you see, to nature and common sense, frugality and
the sacred symbol of the dollar.... The old gesture toward the
stars, the bridge of perfection, the escape from the fatality of
the flesh. Yet it was a service of the body made incredibly lovely
in actuality and still never to be grasped. Never to be won.”
This spiritualised beauty, however, is of course dependent upon
sensuousness, and Mr. Hergesheimer asserts that “the whole discharge
of my responsibility was contained in the imperative obligation to
... put down the colours and scents and emotions of existence.” And,
like Keats, like all who found life on a merely sensuous beauty,
he is haunted by the dread of transience, by “that sharp sense of
beauty which came from a firm, delicate consciousness of certain high
pretensions, valours, maintained in the face of imminent destruction
... in the category none was sharper than the charm of a woman, soon to
perish in a vanity of array as momentary and iridescent as a May-fly.”
He tells us that he creates ideal beauty as a result of “the assault of
a persuasive discontent.” Nothing matters but an unattainable sensuous
beauty; and this merely impresses him with its evanescence. This
transient beauty can be arrested only by art, and he begins a later
essay on art with the words, “I am getting damned tired of art....”
Perhaps the endless and aimless longing for the unattainable has
received most elaborate treatment at the hands of Mr. Hergesheimer’s
friend, James Branch Cabell. In _Beyond Life_, a series of essays,
he outlines his literary creed, his hostility to realism. Holding
that “veracity is the one unpardonable sin,” he “perceives this race
... to be beyond all wording petty and ineffectual,” and he follows
the “instinct of any hurt animal to seek revenge ... in the field
of imagination” by retreating to Poictesme, “that fair country ...
which is bounded by Avalon and Phæacia and Sea-coast Bohemia, and
the contiguous forests of Arden and Broceliande, and on the west of
course by the Hesperides.” Let us examine the quality and success
of Mr. Cabell’s aspiration as embodied in _The Cream of the Jest_.
Felix Kennaston, the hero, is actually a conventional novelist, a
conservative property-owner, a Presbyterian, and a good husband.
Inwardly, however, he is a dreamer who seeks to escape from the
thralldom of actuality in his quest of “Ettarre, who embodied all
Kennaston was ever able to conceive of beauty and fearlessness and
strange purity, all perfections, all the attributes of divinity,
in a word, such as his slender human faculties were competent to
understand.” “It is the cream of a vile jest,” he says, “that I am
forbidden ever to win quite to you, ever to touch you.” These magic
dreams of Ettarre are induced by a sigil--a broken disc which Felix
found on one of his walks. Finally, near his death, it is discovered
that this magic sigil is only “the metal top of a cold cream jar,”
and his dreams become a tale told by an idiot, signifying nothing.
This is perhaps the blackest pessimism in American literature--the
conviction that reality is a “dragging nightmare,” and the discovery
that the illusion which alone makes life bearable is founded on nothing
more sacred than the broken “top of a cold cream jar.” And it should
be noted that, all Mr. Cabell’s books being parts of a “Biography,”
Felix is nothing less than a symbol of “humanity.” “His history was,
in essentials, the history of our race thus far. All I advanced for or
against him, was true of all men that have ever lived.”
_Jurgen_ may be said to deal mainly with the poignancy of the
realisation of the contrast between the veiled loveliness of youthful
illusions and a cold and ugly sensuous reality; relief is sought
through an escape from this reality in dreaming of these illusions now
shattered, or in dreaming of new illusions. In actuality, Jurgen is
only a dirty little pot-bellied pawn-broker of the Middle Ages married
to a shrewish, cowardly wife. Through magic, however, he is enabled to
pack into one year “the follies of a quarter of a century,” to seek
through a land of fabulous loveliness the phantom of desire. There he
meets Dorothy la Désirée, “in all things perfect,” as he had loved
her in the “garden between Dawn and Sunrise”; in reality she was a
“horrible lascivious woman.” And there in her robe of flaming silk is
the young Guenevere, “the fairest of mortal women”; there is the Queen
Sylvia Tereu of pallid charm who vanishes at dawn; there is Anaitis,
the personification of a nature myth, with her ecstatic rites and
sensual orgies; there is the plump Chloris, loveliest of Hamadryads;
there is Queen Helen, for whose fabulous beauty he hungered even in
childhood; there is the proud Dolores, “lovely as a hawk is lovely”;
there is Florimel who dwelt by the Sea of Blood; and there is Phyllis,
Satan’s wife, “the loveliest little slip of devilishness.” Of one and
all Jurgen tires. His remark that his “tender heart and tolerably keen
eyes” force him “to jeer out of season” to avoid “far more untimely
tears” reminds us of the Bohemian Byron who finally confesses with
infinite sadness:
“If I laugh at any mortal thing,
’Tis that I may not weep; and if I weep,
’Tis that our nature cannot always bring
Itself to apathy.”
And in the end we have Jurgen’s Shelley-like admission of the futility
and hopelessness of his aimless longing:
“Oh, nothing can help me, for I do not know what thing it is that
I desire!... For I am Jurgen who seeks he knows not what.... I have
gone romancing through the world, ... nowhere have I found what I
desired.... I am compact of weariness and apprehension, for I no
longer discern what thing is I, nor what is my desire, and I fear
that I am already dead.”
It is evident, then, that in the hope for a paradise of supernal
beauty Americans have been lured as by a Siren to an abyss of despair
of which the English romanticists, who experimented with this idyllic
hope, warned us over a century ago. The Edward Young who sported in
his paradisiacal “empire of chimeras” “cast the total” of his life as
“despair.” Keats reported that in the romantic “Temple of Delight”
“Veiled Melancholy has her sovran shrine.”