Let us turn to a second sort of hope--the hope of an American paradise
of nature. Although the paradise of nature appears in Vergil, in
Renaissance pastorals by Lyly, Sidney, and Spenser, in Perdita’s
shepherd home and in the sylvan cave of Cymbeline’s sons, its use
was mainly either decorative or allegorical until the eighteenth
century. In 1711 Shaftesbury proclaimed the natural man benevolent,
compassionate, and altruistic; and as such he appears in _Ossian_. Pope
said, “The state of Nature was the reign of God.” Rousseau broadcast
the doctrine that civilisation had tended to corrupt the morals of
mankind, while he described the enchanting life of man in a natural
paradise. Cowper united literary simplicity, religious emotionalism,
and the naturalistic humanitarianism of Rousseau. Burns glorified the
simple peasant close to nature. And Coleridge and Southey dreamed
fondly of an American Pantisocracy--“A Dell of Peace and Equality”--on
the banks of the Susquehanna. In 1771, Philip Freneau, our first man
of letters, deriving his radical democracy and his devotion to the
indigenous scene from naturalism, envisaged “The Rising Glory of
America”:
“A new Jerusalem, sent down from heaven,
Shall grace our happy earth, ...
Thence called _Millennium_. Paradise anew
Shall flourish, by no second Adam lost ...
No tempting serpent to allure the soul
From native innocence.”
Indeed, it is interesting to speculate upon the extent to which
this English romantic faith in the “native innocence” of mankind,
transplanted to the inexhaustible resources of the American frontier,
has under these unique conditions furnished philosophic sanction
for an unbridled materialism which has become so characteristically
national. Frontier isolation tended to breed self-confidence, equality,
self-reliance, optimism, contempt for artificial distinctions and a
dependence upon the material world. Crèvecœur in 1782 defined “an
American” as a “new man who acts upon new principles.”
“We have no princes, for whom we toil, starve, and bleed: we are
the most perfect society now existing in the world. Here man is
free as he ought to be.”
Our first novelist who sought a paradise of American nature was James
Fenimore Cooper. Revolting against both the feudalism of aristocratic
Europe and the crude democracy of Jacksonian America, Cooper sought
refuge in projecting his ideals in the character of Leatherstocking
and also in such a Utopian paradise as in _The Crater_. Whatever one
may think of Cooper’s Indians, his “females,” his woodcraft, or his
rhetoric, Leatherstocking remains a great contribution to the fiction
of the world, “perhaps,” according to Professor Paine, “the greatest
embodiment of native character in American literature.” He is strangely
compounded of Cooper’s memories of his old hunter-friend Shipman, of
the heroic saga of the early frontiersman as synthesised in Daniel
Boone, of the Rousseauistic-Wordsworthian myth of the natural man
spiritualised by contact with forest and stream, and of the idealism of
American manhood. According to Cooper’s summary,
“... His feelings appeared to possess the freshness and nature of
the forest in which he passed so much of his time, and no casuist
could have made clearer decisions in matters relating to right and
wrong.... In short ... he was a fair example of what a just-minded
and pure man might be, while untempted by unruly or ambitious
desires, and left to follow the bias of his feelings, amid the
solitary grandeur and ennobling influences of a sublime nature.”
In 1828, however, we find Cooper disillusioned: “All attempts to blend
history and romance in America have been comparative failures....
The baldness of American life is in deadly hostility to scenic
representation.” And in _The Crater_ (1847) we find him creating a
Utopia in a fabulous mid-Pacific island in order to furnish a contrast
to the wretchedness of contemporary American life. This is a story
of how some folk, shipwrecked on a reef which is the crater of a
volcano, succeed in causing vegetation to grow, of how they create
a “settlement surrounded with a sort of earthly paradise” which is
finally “buried beneath the ocean.” The story, as Cooper conceives it,
is a parable: “Of such is the world and its much-coveted advantages.
For a time our efforts seem to create, and to adorn, and to perfect,
until we forget our origin and destination, substituting self for that
divine hand ...” Already, in _The Monikins_ (1835), born of bitter
disenchantment, Cooper the former idealist had presented the world as
a country ruled by a race of monkeys who laughed to scorn the Yahoo
race of mankind. The hope of an American paradise of nature ended for
Cooper in disillusionment; natural goodness, democracy, human ideals
are revealed here as sounding brass and tinkling cymbals. Professor
Pattee compares Cooper’s final pessimism with that of Mark Twain: “Both
began as border-minded individualists, parochial-minded, intoxicated
with American idealism; both by travel and by wide contacts with urban
pessimism were educated into blasé cosmopolitanism ... and both went
out at last in utter misanthropy.... It is an American evolution!”
The most significant history of our national quest for a material
happiness is perhaps embodied in the work of Mark Twain, whose
much-discussed pessimism may be explained mainly by the fact that,
as the spokesman of frontier America living exclusively “in the
present,” he served as the faithful mirror to a whole nation in which
an Industrial Revolution, philosophic mechanistic determinism, and
the collapse of illusions led to despair. His stories illustrate the
changing importance of the two planes of consciousness in the frontier
mind--the consciousness of a hopeful and radiant illusion, and the
consciousness of a hopeless and sordid reality. Take three stories,
representing three different periods. _The Jumping Frog_ (1865),
dealing with the winning of a bet by roguery, embodies in a humorous
way the reckless exuberance and joyousness of the dawning West after
the Gold Rush. To this type belong also the books which glorify the
“natural man” and the free-born American--_Roughing It_ (1873), _Tom
Sawyer_ (1876), _Life on the Mississippi_ (1883), and _Huck Finn_
(1884). In contrast, his first book, _Innocents Abroad_ (1869),
represents the frontiersman’s life-long contempt for European tradition
and Europe, “one vast museum of magnificence and misery,” groping “in
the midnight of priestly superstition for sixteen hundred years.” A
story of a second period, _The Million Pound Bank Note_ (1893) mirrors
a materialistic “gilded age” in which, lured on by a fabulous hope,
men bowed to the Golden Calf while the spectre of reality haunted
their thoughts. In this story the two planes of consciousness are in
equipoise until the end, when the plane of illusion prevails. It is
the tale, briefly, of how a poor tramp masquerades as the owner of a
million pound bank note; grim poverty stalks behind him, but every
one worships the illusion of his wealth, and he finally wins the girl
of his heart as well as the million pounds. The story is a parable of
the West: these were the days of illusory fortunes in transcontinental
railroads, in iron and steel, the days of the Morgans and Carnegies
and Fricks and Goulds. “I am,” said Mark Twain, “frightened at the
proportion of my prosperity ... Whatever I touch turns to gold.” In
1895 he was bankrupt. But take a story representative of the third
period--_The $30,000 Bequest_ (1907). A poor book-keeper and his wife,
learning of a promised fortune at the death of a relative, each night
“put the plodding world away, and lived in another and a fairer,
reading romances to each other, dreaming dreams, comrading with kings
and princes.” They increasingly neglect realities and scorn their
associates. “The castle-building habit, the day-dreaming habit--how it
grows! What a luxury it becomes; how we revel in them, steep our souls
in them, intoxicate ourselves with their beguiling fantasies--oh, yes,
and how soon and how easily our dream life and our material life become
so immingled and so fused together that we can’t tell which is which,
any more.” Just as the Golden West was unable to keep its “dream life,”
its illusions, triumphant over its “material life,” its stark reality,
so with the brutal news that the “town had to bury” the deceitful
relative, the poverty-stricken book-keeper and his wife “lived yet two
years, in mental night, always brooding, steeped in vague regrets and
melancholy dreams”--like the modern realists!
What did Mark Twain report regarding his early hope for a material
paradise? In _The Mysterious Stranger_ (1916) he recorded his final
despair, his conviction that life is cruel and meaningless--a
“wandering forlorn among the empty eternities”--and in that nightmare
of the fancy cowardice, hypocrisy and slavery are all that man can hope
for. After the death of his daughter the master of comedy said, “My
life is a bitterness, but I am content; for she has been enriched with
the most precious of all gifts--the gift that makes all other gifts
mean and poor--death.” His _What Is Man?_ and _To a Person Sitting in
Darkness_ express the same vein. “There is, of course, a Master Mind,
but it cares nothing for our happiness or our unhappiness ... As to the
hereafter, we have not the slightest evidence that there is any ...” To
him man became “a poor joke--the poorest that was ever contrived!”
Although Hamlin Garland came to believe that “truth was a higher
quality than beauty” and set himself down as “an unflinching realist,”
one must recall that he comes of a race of “potential poets, bards, and
dreamers,” that he traces in general the disillusionment resulting
from an idyllic hope based upon an idealistic quest for an American
paradise of nature. He records the “deep vein of poetry,” the illusion,
through which the pioneer viewed a sordid reality, “the place of the
rainbow, and the pot of gold.” “Beneath the sunset lay the enchanted
land of opportunity.”
“When we’ve wood and prairie land,
Won by our toil,
We’ll reign like kings in fairy land,
Lords of the soil!”
Here is Pater’s “Sangreal of an endless pilgrimage” transferred to
prairie-land. Later he confesses, “I had idealised all the figures and
scenes of my boyhood.” “This land of my childhood,” “its charm, its
strange dominion,” he has to admit, “did not in truth exist--it was a
magical world, born of the vibrant union of youth and firelight, of
music and the voice of moaning winds.” Like Wordsworth’s early “light
that never was, on sea or land,” Garland’s illusion “has all the
quality of a vision, something experienced in another world,” covered
with “a poetic glamour.”
However, if the Son of the Middle Border sought a pot of gold at the
foot of the rainbow which did not exist, if he is pursuing fancifully
a phantom of hope, he is honest enough to record the results of such a
quest. As he grew up he noted a “growing bitterness”--“disillusionment
had begun.” The Shelleyan rainbow of hope faded into the light of
common day. What had been the “marvel of a golden earth before a
crimson sky” became merely “Uncle Sam’s domain, bleak, semi-arid, and
wind-swept.” “I perceived little that was poetic, little that was
idyllic.”
“What purpose does a man serve by toiling like that for sixty years
with no increase in leisure, with no growth in mental grace?...
At the moment nothing glozed the essential tragic futility of
their existence.... The essential tragedy and hopelessness of most
human life under the conditions into which our society was swiftly
hardening embittered me, called for expression, but even then I did
not know that I had found my theme.... Now, suddenly I perceived
the futility of our quest....”
It is clear, also, that Garland is attempting a serious generalised
study of the outcome of frontier hope. The young orator, meeting his
father, is shocked at his sudden appearance of age and gloom: “He
had come a long way from the buoyant faith of ’66, and the change in
him was typical of the change in the West--in America.” “The almost
universal disappointment and suffering of the West was typical.”
“All the gilding of farm life melted away. The hard and bitter
realities came back upon me in a flood ... Every house I visited had
its individual message of sordid struggle and half-hidden despair.”
Garland, then, has given us a cross-section of our national history; he
has faithfully recorded the “almost universal” despair which greets men
who would “reign like kings in fairyland.”
Rolvaag’s _Giants in the Earth_, “A Saga of the Prairie,” is
another impressive record of the Odyssey “Toward the Sunset” of the
frontiersman and the finding of despair instead of the pot of gold.
Per Hansa and his religious wife Beret, Norwegians, journey “straight
toward the west, straight toward the sky line,” “deeper and deeper
into a bluish-green infinity--on and on, ... for Sunset Land.”
Finally they halt and raise a sod hut in “the endless solitude,” the
“eternal, unbroken wilderness”; they plant crops, and winter sets
in; Beret has a child. Here again we meet the two planes of frontier
consciousness--idyllic hope built on illusion and the dread of a sordid
and terrifying reality.
“That summer Per Hansa was transported, was carried farther and
ever farther away on the wings of a wonderful fairy tale--a romance
in which he was both prince and king, the sole possessor of
countless treasures. In this, as in all other fairy tales, the
story grew ever more fascinating and dear to the heart, the farther
it advanced.... Ever more beautiful grew the tale; ever more
dazzlingly shone the sunlight over the fairy castle.”
On one side there is the “divine restlessness,” the “enchanting
joyousness” of Per Hansa, on the other, Beret’s poignant yearning for
human companionship and inner spiritual peace which her dread of the
stark reality cannot satisfy. “Bleak, grey, God-forsaken, the empty
desolation stretched on every hand ... How could one lift up one’s
voice against such silence!” As winter came on Beret saw only the snow,
and for her the day “died in a pitch-black night that weighed down the
heart.” Her reflections give the key to the book:
“The country did not at all come up to her expectations; here, too,
she saw enough of poverty and grinding toil. What did it avail,
that the rich soil lay in endless stretches? More than ever did she
realise that ‘man liveth not by bread alone.’... Even the bread was
none too plentiful at times....
“But no sooner had they reached America than the west-fever had
smitten the old settlements like a plague. Such a thing had never
happened before in the history of mankind; people were intoxicated
by bewildering visions; they spoke dazedly, as though under the
force of a spell.... ‘Go west!... Go west, folks!... The farther
west, the better the land!’ Men beheld in feverish dreams the
endless plains, teeming with fruitfulness, glowing, out there
where day sank into night--a Beulah Land of corn and wine!... Ever
westward led the course, to where the sun glowed in matchless glory
as it sank at night; people drifted about in a sort of delirium,
like birds in mating time; then they flew toward the sunset, in
small flocks and large--always toward Sunset Land.... Now she saw
it clearly: here on the trackless plains, the thousand-year-old
hunger of the poor after human happiness had been unloosed!”
As she expects to die in childbirth, she pleads with Per Hansa to take
the other children back to civilisation: “Human beings cannot exist
here!... They grow into beasts!” And the magic of a fairy tale turns
out to be simply nature red in tooth and claw. In the last section of
the book, entitled “The Great Plain Drinks the Blood of Christian Men
and is Satisfied,” the story is told of how Per Hansa the faithful, the
hopeful, the loving husband and father, is frozen to death while going
for a doctor to help a neighbour.
“There was the Red Son of the Great Prairie, who hated the
Palefaces with a hot hatred; stealthily he swooped down upon them,
tore up and laid waste the little settlements. Great was the terror
he spread; bloody the saga concerning him.
“But more to be dreaded than this tribulation was the strange spell
of sadness which the unbroken solitude cast upon the minds of some.
Many took their own lives; asylum after asylum was filled with
disordered beings who had once been human.... Then, too, there were
years of pestilence--toil and travail, famine and disease.”
The frontier is exhausted, but it should be carefully noted that the
quest for a physical, external paradise lives on in the American
machine-age, in the dream of an industrial Utopia. To take but one
illustration recorded in our fiction, Sherwood Anderson’s _Poor
White_--paralleling the frontier stories--traces the transition
from the optimism born of untapped resources to the despair of a
standardised industrialism. It is the tale of a stolid boy, Hugh McVey,
who manages to invent machines from which every one hopes great things;
it is supposed to be typical, to present a cross-section of American
life.
“In every mind the future was bright with promise. Throughout the
whole Mid-American country ... a hopeful spirit prevailed.... The
youth and optimistic spirit of the country led it to take hold of
the hand of the giant, industrialism, and lead him laughing into
the land.... The thing that was happening in Bidwell happened in
towns all over the Middle West. Out through the coal and iron
regions of Pennsylvania, into Ohio and Indiana, and on westward
into the States bordering on the Mississippi River, industry
crept. Gas and oil were discovered in Ohio and Indiana. Over night
towns grew into cities. A madness took hold of the minds of the
people.... Wealth seemed to be spurting out of the very earth....
Farmers owning oil-producing land went to bed in the evening poor
and owing money at the bank, and awoke in the morning rich.”
But Hugh McVey, “the poor white, son of the defeated dreamer by the
river,” finds mere money and the satisfaction of physical needs
insufficient. “He was unfilled by the life he led.” Conscious of
“some indefinable, inner struggle,” “he fought to accept himself, to
understand himself, to relate himself with the life about him.” For
the sanctity of the individual personality America had substituted the
worship of mass production, of material gain.
“It was a time of hideous architecture, a time when thought and
learning paused. Without music, without poetry, without beauty in
their lives or impulses, a whole people, full of the native energy
and strength of lives lived in a new land, rushed pell-mell into a
new age.”
In place of the free workman, joyously expressing with his own hands
the dream of his own mind, came the factory-hand, blindly bitter from
the machine-standardisation which thwarted the self-expression which
even the farmer enjoyed. In the town of Bidwell, Jim Gibson exults
in selling machine-made harnesses and ruining Joe Wainsworth, the
old harness maker. Finally, in a fit of rage Wainsworth kills his
tormentor. Clara, the wife of Hugh McVey, points the moral:
“In her mind the harness maker had come to stand for all the men
and women who were in secret revolt against the absorption of the
age in machines and the products of machines. He had stood as a
protesting figure against what her father had become and what she
thought her husband had become.... As a child she had gone often to
Wainsworth’s shop with her father or some farm hand, and she now
remembered sharply the peace and quiet of the place.... Everything
worth while is very far away.... The machines men are so intent on
making have carried them very far from the old sweet things.”
And we have Anderson’s summary indictment of industrialism:
“Modern men and women who live in industrial cities are like mice
that have come out of the fields to live in houses that do not
belong to them. They live within the dark walls of the houses where
only a dim light penetrates, and so many have come that they grow
thin and haggard with the constant toil of getting food and warmth.”
Thus those who have sought an American paradise of nature, a physical
paradise, have reported finding only despair. In essentials this hope
is identical with the primitivistic and industrial hope which Europe
found inadequate over a century ago. Wordsworth, the high priest of
naturalism, confessed he had “too blindly reposed” his trust, and he
had the wisdom to seek the support of the classical and the Christian
traditions. And Ruskin and Carlyle exposed the criminal fallacies
involved in setting material gain above the sanctity of the individual
personality. But when this outworn, exploded philosophy, based upon
primitivism, faith in natural goodness, absolute liberty, _laissez
faire_, and reliance upon nature and material things, was transplanted
to the vast material resources of a frontier land, it was given a
new, hysterical lease of life. Now, a century and a quarter later, a
disenchanted America agrees with the English naturalist who testified
of his infinite “dejection” and his conviction that man
“may not hope from outward forms to win
The passion and the life, whose fountains are within.”