If those who have entered the American Door of Hope in quest of
happiness have reported that it is to be found neither in the Land of
the Blue Flower nor in the Land of Sensuous Desire, let us inquire what
those have reported who have sought the happiness of self-perfection,
of an exalted personal life, of “A Paradise within thee, happier
far.” This quest involves a definitely focused aspiration toward,
and a disciplined imitation of what is most richly and deeply human,
of what is most balanced and poised and complete, of what has in the
past been reported to yield lasting contentment and peace. This sort
of quest is very old. To Plato and Aristotle, justice, the crown of
life, consisted of the ideal balance of all the desires. Behind the
Horatian doctrine of the golden mean--_auream mediocritatem_--and
Cicero’s praise of _mediocritatem illam quae est inter nimium et parum_
is the ideal of mediation and centrality. The Christian tradition,
according to Mr. G. K. Chesterton, is peculiar in its reconciling of
opposites, in its synthetic balance. At any rate, the worldly classical
and the other-worldly Christian traditions have united in upholding
the doctrines of imitation, restraint, of a dualistic conflict in
man between appetite and aspiration, and of a definitely focused
aspiration which culminates in inner peace. In the Middle Ages the
“law for measure” was allied to the theory of the four humours, the
balance of which caused health, the excess of any one of which caused
“one-sidedness” and disease. In the Renaissance the author of _Everyman
in His Humour_ used satire to render eccentricity ridiculous, and the
Hamlet who allowed all to be “sicklied o’er with the pale cast of
thought” recognised that “by the o’ergrowth of some complexion,” by
“one defect,” men “take corruption.” He honoured Horatio, his “soul’s
choice,” because in him “blood and judgment are so well commingl’d.”
The Elizabethans recognised that a great man, like a tall tower,
must be balanced at all points, or be drawn down to ruin by his own
strength. If space permitted, one might trace through the impetus given
scientific specialisation and material progress by Bacon and the Royal
Society, through such figures as Congreve and Pope and Edward Young
and Rousseau, the gradual evolution of the theory of humours into
the theory of the master-passion and the “original genius” of being
idiosyncratic. But let us remember that Milton, uniting the Renaissance
passion for sensuous delight and the Puritan passion for saintliness,
kept his sublime balance, his vision of centrality, his ideal of
self-mastery. His exhortation to Adam as he leaves the physical
paradise of Eden is his exhortation to us:
“Only add
Deeds to thy knowledge answerable; add faith;
Add virtue, patience, temperance; add love
By name to come called Charity, the soul
Of all the rest: then wilt thou not be loth
To leave this Paradise, but shalt possess
A Paradise within thee, happier far.”
Mindful of the dark impulses of the natural man, the great liberal
distinguished sharply between anarchy and the true liberty resulting
from the substitution of inner for outer control: “License they mean
when they cry Liberty,” he remarks of the Cavaliers, “For who loves
that must first be wise and good.” “He who reigns within himself ... is
more than a king.... Real and substantial liberty is rather from within
than from without.”
Americans may well be proud that this noble hope partially lives on
in Emerson, our greatest man of letters, who found Milton “foremost
of all men ... to inspire,” to communicate “the vibration of hope, of
self-reverence, of piety, of delight in beauty.” Out of materialistic
America has come this “friend and aider of those who would live in
the spirit,” who strove above all to celebrate “the Ideal and Holy
Life, the life within life, ... the spiritual powers in their infinite
contrast to the mechanical powers and the mechanical philosophy of this
time.” It is true, of course, that Emerson did not altogether escape
the contagion of his romantic age; that in his apparent praise of the
unique and the individual, in his most un-Miltonic faith in natural
goodness, in his belittling of logic, of tradition, and of the aid
which culture can give as a guide to conduct, Emerson has a certain
kinship with Rousseau. Let us grant it--and guard against it! One must
recall, however, that part of his dubious influence has resulted from
a superficial and piece-meal reading of Emerson, encouraged by his
characteristic oracular device of presenting two conflicting statements
rather than a balanced and qualified generalisation. If one reads
all of Emerson, however, in an endeavour to relate and define his
thought, it is apparent, as Professor Harrison and Professor Foerster
have found, that his stronger affinities are not with Rousseau but
with Plato and the humanists. His central doctrine of self-reliance
turns out to be a reliance on a self which is not unique but common to
all men, “a reliance upon man’s share of divinity,” upon his higher,
universal self. “We become divine,” he says, not by eccentricity, by
revolt, but by “obedience,” by conformity to “the common heart,” to
what is normally, typically, and nobly human. In fact he strictly
warns us against the “rudeness” of failing to “distinguish between
the private and the universal consciousness.” He perceived the
unity of man, the need of spiritual concentration; his occasional
assumption of good intentions is balanced by his own Spartan virtue
and his confession that “because the temptations are so manifold and
so subtle,” he agrees with Socrates and the Hindoos in denominating
the Supreme Being the “Internal Check.” In common with the Christian
tradition, he sharply severs the “law for man” from the “law for
thing.” He is aware of “the eternal distinction between the soul and
the world,” aware that too great a preoccupation with the outward,
sensuous, mundane life about us (the “work” rather than the “workman”)
at the expense of “the integrity of your own mind” and deeper spiritual
needs, breeds a dread of transience and hence “uneasiness” and
despair. Behind the fleeting scenes of daily life he perceived “that
which changes not,” permanent human elements common to every one, the
cultivation of which gave him that sweet serenity, that “cheerfulness
and courage” which Arnold pronounced the outcome of his philosophy,
“his abiding word for us.” “Happiness in labour, righteousness,
and veracity; in all the life of the spirit; happiness and eternal
hope;--that was Emerson’s gospel.”
Here, then, in our own native tradition is a sort of hope which led to
happiness. Can such a hope, however, be reconciled with the artist’s
devotion to beauty? To Emerson, as to the æsthetes, art is simply “the
creation of beauty,” “beauty is its own excuse for being,” and “the
Beautiful is the highest.” But, unlike the æsthetes, he proclaims the
unity and parity of beauty, truth, and goodness--“different faces of
the same All.” Beauty has “its source in perfect goodness”; it is “the
mark God sets upon virtue.” In other words, the rarest beauty is a
by-product of that perfect harmony by which a man realises his complete
humanity, his complete happiness. This ideal of beauty was given the
support of a literary creed by James Russell Lowell, who never feared
to expose the weakness of a romanticism whose ultimate fruit was a
“melancholy liver-complaint.” He urged the study and creation of a
literature which should be an ideal representation of life, “stripped
of all unessential particulars” by an imagination which found “the
true ideal” not by escape but by a purposeful selection of the real.
For Lowell as for Emerson the “first duty” of the artist “is to be
delightful.” He distinguishes, however, between a merely recreational
“literature as holiday” and a literature which, ideally “representing
life, ... teaches, like life, by indirection.” Such a literature,
ministering to all the higher needs of the mind and spirit, yields the
greatest delight and the greatest beauty.
Aspiration and art of this quality, however, are rare in American
fiction. We looked for them in vain in the seekers for a paradise of
supernal beauty, and in the seekers for an American paradise of nature.
Great as is Hawthorne as an artist, in my judgment he falls short of an
aspiration of the Emersonian quality on account of his penchant for the
eccentric, the fanciful, and the morbid. One seeks it in vain in the
realists’ transcripts from life, which lack the selection and focusing
that distinguish art from experience. There is evidence, nevertheless,
that the novel is no longer hostile to the specifically human destiny
of normal humanity, no longer oblivious to that rare beauty which is
the by-product of the struggle by which a noble character imposes order
on the chaos of natural desire and approaches the imaginative ideal of
a life richly varied, finely poised, and of exalted happiness.
I have space for but one example in modern fiction--Dorothy Canfield’s
_The Brimming Cup_. This deals with the “eternal triangle” in a
little Vermont town. Marise Chittenden, whose children have gradually
taken her interest from Neale, her husband, becomes lonely when her
children all go to school and she senses that “the days of her physical
flowering are numbered.” She is loved by Marsh, a wealthy man visiting
her elderly neighbour Mr. Wells; Marsh tries to convince her that
she is sacrificing “a world of impassioned living” for “an outworn
ideal” of “the traditional thing to do.” The characters, not always
vividly humanised, symbolise man’s universe. Marise, the “brimming
cup,” “filled with some emotion ... gushing up in a great flooding
rush,” typifies the surge of impulse. Marsh, a “swirly brook,” to
whom life is but a moment’s “blind sensual groping and grabbing”
before the “big final smash-up,” typifies unbridled lust and greed.
The “steady, visible light” of Neale’s life, Neale who had found
true freedom by conquering his “great, fierce, unguessed appetite,
the longing for wandering, lawless freedom,” typifies centrality.
Mr. Wells, who surrenders “the happiness that comes of living as
suits his nature” to help make the world more courteous to negroes,
typifies humanitarian sympathy. The much-travelled Eugenia typifies
“sophisticated cosmopolitanism,” æsthetic escape: to her “everything’s
so common-place”; she cultivates her fading beauty by “breathing in and
out through one nostril, and thinking of the Infinite!” Cousin Hetty
symbolises tradition; the Indian Touclé, mysticism. Marise sees her
conflict as one not between “routine, traditional, narrow domestic life
and the mightiness and richness of mature passion,” but as a conflict
between the lure of sensuousness and “what is deepest and most living
in you.” It is a psychological novel, a novel of introspection: it
is based on the quest, not for what is conventionally moral, but for
what in the end gives the richest human satisfaction. It presents a
struggle based on self-reliance and self-conquest. Neale “wanted her
to be herself, to be all that Marise could ever grow to be, he wanted
her to attain her full stature.” “Nothing is your own, if you haven’t
made it so.” Marise wonders if her mother-love is what Marsh calls
“inverted sensuality”; Neale says, “Look into your own heart and see
for yourself.” He “longed for her sake to have her strike out into the
deep,” he knew that peace could only come from “Marise’s acting with
her own strength on her own decision.” He urges not outer but inner
control--“as few umpires as possible.” In her conflict Marise sought
“what was deepest and most living in her ...; that was what the voices
were trying to cry her down from finding.” She longed to be “one with
the great current”--Emerson’s “stream of power.” She discovers that she
is being lured by “the conventional pose of revolt,” that separation
from her children would not be true “growth and freedom, and generous
expansion of the soul.” Like Milton and Emerson, she finally becomes
free by discovering and obeying what is deepest within:
“She was a free woman, free from something in her heart that was
afraid. For the moment she could think of nothing else beyond the
richness of that freedom. Why, here was the total fulfilment she
had longed for. Here was the life more abundant, within, within her
own heart, waiting for her!”
Joyous in her centrality, poise and freedom, she sees Marsh as an
“undeveloped and tyrannical soul, the cramped mind without experience
or conception of breadth and freedom.” “How narrow and cramped,”
and “blinded to the bigness and variety of life” seemed people who
thought that “a woman of beauty and intelligence” was wasting her
life “unless she was engaged in ... stimulating ... sexual desire.”
Marise had the serene joy of her home, her beloved children and her
understanding husband; she had the marvel of her music; and she had
the surpassing wisdom to seek her happiness not in the miraculous but
in the common--in the symbolic neighbourly gathering on the night of
the blooming of the Cereus, that rite of beauty; in the calm strength
of simple folk whom experience has made wise. And this woman, living
out her “heritage, alive and rooted deep,” with her “vivid charm like
an aureole of golden mist,” “felt slowly coming into her, like a tide
of a great ocean,” the ineffable peace which comes from self-mastery,
from the quest of what is most universally and nobly human. Calm and
free, she was lifted “high, high above the smallness of life, up to a
rich realm of security in joy.”