That was her own business, of course, and it would have been of no

great concern to the rest of the country if New England had not set

up a cultural dictatorship over American letters. It was not content

to follow its own path to sterility, but was bent on dragging the

country with it. Boston taste determined American literary standards,

and Boston taste rejected most of the new movements then getting

under way. Stoddard and Stedman in New York, Boker in Philadelphia,

and Aldrich in Boston, stoutly upheld the genteel tradition, of which

the _Atlantic Monthly_ was the authoritative spokesman. Great figures

from the past--Emerson, Longfellow, Lowell, Whittier, Holmes, Motley,

Parkman--still walked the streets of Boston, and their extraordinary

reputations were little less than tyrannous in the inhibitions they

laid on younger men. It is incomprehensible today, the authority of

these great reputations. Young William Winter walking twenty miles

to stand in the moonlight at Craigie House gate and view reverently

the silent walls within which the great Longfellow was sleeping; Mark

Twain in the fullness of his powers abashed and put out of countenance

at his temerity in speaking humorously of Emerson and Longfellow and

Holmes at the _Atlantic_ dinner--one understands such things with

difficulty now that those reputations have so much bated and dwindled.

Yet to the generation of the seventies the inhibitions of the genteel

tradition were all-powerful, and the little Boston group set themselves

up as a court of final jurisdiction over American letters. New England

parochialism had become a nation-wide nuisance.

The genteel tradition, as Professor Santayana has pointed out, had

long been a disease in New England. Some of the finest minds of the

Renaissance--Emerson and Hawthorne in particular--had suffered from

it; their mental processes “had all a certain starved and abstract

quality,” a lack of the rich paganism that endows life and art with

sensuous beauty.

They could not retail the genteel tradition [he goes on]; they were

too keen, too perceptive, and too independent for that. But life

offered them little digestible material, nor were they naturally

voracious. They were fastidious, and under the circumstances they

were starved.... Therefore the genius of ... Hawthorne, and even

of Emerson, was employed in a sort of inner play, or digestion of

vacancy. It was a refined labor, but was in danger of being morbid,

or tinkling, or self-indulgent. It was a play of intra-mental

rhymes. Their mind was like an old music-box, full of tender

echoes and quaint fancies. These fancies expressed their personal

genius sincerely, as dreams may; but they were arbitrary fancies

in comparison with what a real observer would have said in the

premises. Their manner, in a word, was subjective. In their own

persons they escaped the mediocrity of the genteel tradition, but

they supplied nothing to supplant it in other minds.[527]

If the thin pale atmosphere in which the genteel tradition throve

starved the minds of greater men in a more vigorous age, it would play

havoc with smaller men in an imitative age. After Emerson and Hawthorne

came Stedman and Stoddard and Aldrich, upon whose studiously correct

pages the genteel tradition laid a hand of death. In the seventies it

had become the refuge of a stale mentality, emptied of all ideals save

beauty, and that beauty become cold and anemic. Its taboos were no more

than cushions for tired or lazy minds. The idea of morality--with its

corollary of reticence--and the idea of excellence were well enough in

the abstract, but become empty conventions, cut off from reality, they

were little more than a refuge for respectability, a barricade against

the intrusion of the unpleasant. In compressing literature within

the rigid bounds of a genteel morality and a genteel excellence, New

England was in a way of falsifying it. Highways are easy traveling,

but the artist who will not venture from them misses much. In the

seventies and eighties the incurious Boston mentality missed pretty

much everything vital and significant in American life, and the more

daring children of Boston--men like Henry Adams and, shall we add,

Henry James--sought congenial atmosphere elsewhere.

1 • Thomas Bailey Aldrich and the Genteel

In the expansive days of Walt Whitman and Mark Twain the official

custodian of the genteel in letters was Thomas Bailey Aldrich, who

as editor of the _Atlantic_ from 1881 to 1890 sturdily combated all

literary leveling. Sitting in the high seat of Boston authority he

would countenance none of the “Josh Billingsgate” corruptions of

the English language that he professed to believe were sullying the

purity of American literary taste. A Portsmouth, New Hampshire, boy,

early transplanted to New York City, he lisped in numbers before he

learned to think. At the age of nineteen he published a volume of

poems entitled _The Bells, A Collection of Chimes_, the tintillations

of which were little more than faint echoes of Keats, Chatterton,

Tennyson, Poe, Bryant, Willis, and Longfellow; and to the end of his

life his state of ideal felicity was to be “loaded to the muzzle with

lyrics and sonnets” wherewith to do execution on all purveyors of

realism with its “miasmatic breath blown from the slums.” Transplanted

to Boston from the Bohemian world of Pfaff’s restaurant where Willis

held court, he settled down into the staid atmosphere of the Back

Bay with immense content. Though he was fond of calling himself only

Boston-plated he was soon as completely Bostonian as the Autocrat

himself. Intellectually and esthetically he had been Cambridge bred,

and the influence of Longfellow, Lowell, and Holmes determined his

every literary endeavor. Like the returned prodigal he wandered no

more but was satisfied to feast on the dainties of Back Bay culture.

He immersed himself in the genteel. His one ambition as editor of the

_Atlantic_ was to keep it as Lowell wished it kept. To the end of his

life he remained completely insulated against the creative forces of

the times, and in the year that Stephen Crane was writing _Maggie_

he published _The Sisters’ Tragedy_. He would have been shocked by

_Maggie_, if he had read it, as a later generation wonders at _The

Sisters’ Tragedy_.

It is easy to see why Aldrich should have been taken to Boston’s

heart. His refined and delicate technique more than compensated for

an intellectual sterility that seems never to have been apparent to

his ardent admirers. Witty, charming in manners, in love with art

and devoted to a painstaking craftsmanship, he was a hollow reed

through which blew into flawless form the refinements of his world and

group. Good taste found nothing to offend in his scanty pages. If he

worshiped at the altar of beauty, beauty to him was always a chaste

goddess, severe and pale and slight. A blowsy goddess like Whitman’s,

or a slattern like Mark Twain’s, he would have none of. As a youthful

poet, to be sure, he sometimes hinted that she had red cheeks and

plump breasts and rounded limbs, but on his removal to Boston he

discovered that she was quite Beacon Street with her slender form and

modest reserve--no Greek but a lovely Puritan maiden; and the mature

Aldrich came to prefer her chaste reticence to the freer ways the

younger generation liked. They were destroying beauty--this younger

generation--with their vulgar realism, besmirching the goddess with

their vulgarities. In an interlude entitled “Realism” he gave voice to

the following pastoral lament:

Romance beside his unstrung lute

Lies stricken mute.

The old-time fire, the antique grace,

You will not find them anywhere.

To-day we breathe a commonplace,

Polemic, scientific air:

We strip Illusion of her veil;

We vivisect the nightingale

To probe the secret of his note.

The Muse in alien ways remote

Goes wandering.[528]

And in a dramatic monologue, quite evidently suggested by _The

Grammarian’s Funeral_, he voiced the following protest against an age

enslaved to realism:

A twilight poet, groping quite alone,

Belated, in a sphere where every nest

Is emptied of its music and its wings.

Not great his gift; yet we can poorly spare

Even his slight perfection in an age

Of limping triolets and tame rondeaux.

He had at least ideals, though unreached,

And heard, far off, immortal harmonies,

Such as fall coldly on our ear to-day.

The mighty Zolaistic Movement now

Engrosses us--a miasmatic breath

Blown from the slums. We paint life as it is,

The hideous side of it, with careful pains,

Making a god of the dull Commonplace.

For have we not the old gods overthrown

And set up strangest idols? We would clip

Imagination’s wing and kill delight,

Our sole art being to leave nothing out

That renders art offensive. Not for us

Madonnas leaning from their starry thrones

Ineffable, nor any heaven-wrought dream

Of sculptor or of poet; we prefer

Such nightmare visions as in morbid brains

Take form and substance, thoughts that taint the air

And make all life unlovely. Will it last?

Beauty alone endures from age to age,

From age to age endures, handmaid of God.[529]

It was not the realists alone, he thought, who were fouling their own

nests, but all who turned aside from the narrow path of Victorianism

to explore new ways. Whitman he regarded as a charlatan whose

mannerisms were a “hollow affectation” representing “neither the

man nor the time.” Riley’s formal verse he preferred to his dialect

poems--“The English language is too rich and sacred a thing to be

mutilated and vulgarized,” he wrote, overlooking the _Biglow Papers_.

He held Kipling’s cockneyisms in contempt and said he would not have

opened the pages of the _Atlantic_ even to the “Recessional.” Lanier

he thought a less significant figure than Fitz-Greene Halleck, and

of Poe he remarked that if he “had been an exemplary, conventional,

tax-oppressed citizen, like Longfellow, his few poems, as striking as

they are, would not have made so great a stir.”[530] In such literary

judgments the arch-conservative is engaged in defending the genteel

tradition against every assault, convinced that the portals of creative

literature open into the past and that in following in the footsteps of

the dead we shall come upon a living world. The sterility of his own

refined craftsmanship is perhaps sufficient commentary upon his faith.

When in later years he turned to prose his work revealed the same

negative qualities. His prose style is finished, clean, and thin,

wanting in homely idiom and a rich suggestiveness. The water trickled

gently from the spring of his invention, cool and unroiled, but never

abundant. The dignity that results from a strong nature held in

restraint, he never achieved. There were no depths in him. He waited

patiently for his vessel to fill and measured it out carefully. As a

short-story writer he gained a surprising repute, and admirers like

Sarah Orne Jewett were never tired of praising the sprightliness of his

humor. Nevertheless his most celebrated story scarcely explains today

the immense stir it made. _Marjorie Daw_ is a clever _jeu d’esprit_ but

a bit thin and artificial, too consciously written backwards from its

surprise ending. Other distillings of his wit and wisdom, done in the

sententious manner and gathered up in _Ponkapog Papers_, are slight in

content, and the effervescence is long since gone out of them. _The

Story of a Bad Boy_, with its pleasant recollections of his Portsmouth

youth, remains his most important work in prose and deserves much

of the praise that has been lavished upon it; but set over against

_Huckleberry Finn_ its shortcomings are evident.

It is absurd, of course, to expect an aesthete to concern himself with

ideas, or to care greatly about what goes on outside his ivory tower.

The rumblings of the vulgar world beat ineffectually against the gate

behind which he sits and dreams. For years the editor of the _Atlantic_

was scarcely conscious of his complete aloofness from the world of

reality, and he wrote in some surprise to Hamilton Wright Mabie, in

1897:

I like to have you say that I have always cared more for the

integrity of my work than for any chance popularity. And what

you say of my “aloofness” as being “due in part to a lack of

quick sympathies with contemporary experience” (though I had

never before thought of it) shows true insight. To be sure,

such verse as “Elmwood,” “Wendell Phillips,” “Unguarded Gates”

and the “Shaw Memorial Ode” would seem somewhat to condition

the statement; but the mood of these poems is not habitual with

me, not characteristic. They did, however, grow out of strong

conviction.[531]

Yet though he spoke rarely on social themes, during the long years

in Boston most of the Back Bay prejudices seemed to have seeped into

his mind and when the “strong convictions,” to which he refers, found

utterance they proved to be Brahmin convictions. In the vigorous poem

“Unguarded Gates”--a poem tense, outspoken, almost unique in its

deliberate declamation--he sallied forth from his ivory tower to speak

to the American people on the dangers of uncontrolled immigration, a

subject that Boston Brahmins had been talking about since the days of

Harrison Gray Otis.

Wide open and unguarded stand our gates,

And through them presses a wild motley throng--

Men from the Volga and the Tartar steppes,

Featureless figures from the Hoang-Ho,

Malayan, Scythian, Teuton, Kelt, and Slav,

Flying the Old World’s poverty and scorn;

These bringing with them unknown gods and rites,

Those, tiger passions, here to stretch their claws.

In street and alley what strange tongues are loud,

Accents of menace alien to our air,

Voices that once the Tower of Babel knew!

O Liberty, white Goddess! is it well

To leave the gates unguarded? On thy breast

Fold Sorrow’s children, soothe the hurts of fate,

Lift the down-trodden, but with hand of steel

Stay those who to thy sacred portals come

To waste the gifts of freedom. Have a care

Lest from thy brow the clustered stars be torn

And trampled in the dust. For so of old

The thronging Goth and Vandal trampled Rome,

And where the temples of the Caesars stood

The lean wolf unmolested made her lair.[532]

What emotions lay back of the measured words of the poem, and how

deeply they were colored by the social passions of the times, he tells

in a letter to George E. Woodberry, written May 14, 1892:

I went home and wrote a misanthropic poem called “Unguarded

Gates” ... in which I mildly protest against America becoming the

cesspool of Europe. I’m much too late, however. I looked in on an

anarchist meeting the other night ... and heard such things spoken

by our “feller citizens” as made my cheek burn. These brutes are

the spawn and natural result of the French Revolution; they don’t

want any government at all, they “want the earth” ... and chaos.

My Americanism goes clean beyond yours. I believe in America for

the Americans; I believe in the widest freedom and the narrowest

license, and I hold that jail-birds, professional murderers,

amateur lepers ... and human gorillas generally should be closely

questioned at our Gates. Or the “sifting” that was done of old will

have to be done over again.... A certain Arabian writer, called

Rudyard Kipling, described exactly the government of every city and

town in the ... United States when he described that of New York

as being “a despotism of the alien, by the alien, for the alien,

tempered with occasional insurrections of decent folk!”[533]

Two years later he again gave private expression to one of his rare

judgments on matters political and social:

When not otherwise engaged I sit and smoke, and smile at the

present administration [President Cleveland’s].... The best kind

of Democracy (as per sample) is no better than the worst kind

of Republicanism. The Income Tax is the deformed child of Coxey

and his brother scalawags. I vote for McKinley. We shall have

bloody work in this country some of these days, when the lazy

_canaille_ get organized. They are the spawn of Santerre and

Fouquier-Tinville. In about twenty years we shall bring out an

American edition (illustrated with cuts) of the beautiful French

Revolution.[534]

And again in 1899:

Personally I must confess that I have never been very deeply

impressed by the administrative abilities of what we call the lower

classes. The Reign of Terror in France is a fair illustration of

the kind of government which the masses give us when they get the

happy opportunity.[535]

The literary conservative, it appears, was no better than a social

and political Tory. He has traveled back a hundred years and speaks

again the very language of Robert Treat Paine. _Canaille_ is not a

nice word to apply to American workingmen, and the French Revolution

has never been well thought of by the children of the _ancien régime_.

Thomas Bailey Aldrich was a cultivated gentleman, on the pleasantest

terms with the Muse of Beacon Street. Twice he traveled around the

world; innumerable summers he spent in Europe; yet of many things that

concern men greatly he was very, very ignorant. Of the American people

beyond the Hudson River, he knew nothing. Of social economics he knew

nothing. Fearful lest his art should get a smutch from the streets, he

withdrew within his tower, where perhaps it is well to leave him. Yet

it is odd to recall that he was once regarded as a significant literary

figure and that intelligent people listened to him seriously.

2 • The New England Scene

In fields less distinguished than poetry and the essay the sway of

the genteel was neither so magisterial nor so repressive. As fiction

somewhat tardily encroached upon the older literary preserves of New

England it brought with it a fresher and more realistic spirit that

was eventually to deny the validity of the traditional standards. The

group of fiction writers that arose in the seventies and eighties to

chronicle the life of New England, was greatly concerned with the decay

of the old New England world, and with the causes of that decay. As it

set down with loving fidelity the characteristics of an earlier order

it could not fail to consider the unloveliness of the new world that

was rising on the decay of the old--the alien industrial towns with

their polyglot workers that were flourishing as the native villages

and quiet countryside declined. New England fiction, therefore, came

to embody two main features, chronicle and criticism. It gathered up

such picturesque bits of the past as time and change had left, and it

questioned with some anxiety the ways of an industrialism that was

destroying what it loved. It was not Boston fiction, but up-country

fiction, given to exploring quiet villages and decaying towns; and in

both its chronicles and its criticisms the spirit of realism became

more searching as the years passed.

In its own fashion such fiction would finally be brought into service

to the social conscience and issue as sociological studies. As the

evils of sweated labor under the factory system were brought home to

the common knowledge, one would suppose that New England would have

been the first to conscript the novel to arouse the public conscience.

There had been anxious discussion amongst the Concord intellectuals

on the evils of industrialism, and in the early forties the talk had

turned upon associationism as the likeliest cure; but though from such

discussions came Brook Farm and other Utopian ventures, no fiction

resulted. It was elsewhere, in the Pennsylvania iron district where

exploitation was harsher and more brutal than in the textile mills,

that fiction first turned to consider the ways of industrialism. In

1861 Rebecca Harding contributed to the _Atlantic_ a story entitled

“Life in the Iron Mills,” that was stark and fierce in its drab

realism.[536] Nevertheless ten years were to pass before Elizabeth

Stuart Phelps published _The Silent Partner_ (1871), a dithyrambic plea

for justice for the mill-hands.

If this was not the first New England novel of industrialism it was

certainly one of the earliest. In conception, temper, and technique it

belongs to the emotional fifties, and is almost primitive in comparison

with Rebecca Harding’s work. Underlain with religion, it is sticky

with sentiment. Although Miss Phelps professed to base her work on

the Reports of the Massachusetts Bureau of Statistics of Labor, to

which she says she was “deeply in debt for the ribs” of her story,

the result is more a tract than a study. There is no realistic grasp

of the materials. She was grieved that the mill-masters should reveal

so little Christian understanding of the hard lot of the hands and

so little sympathy with their poverty. “I believe,” she said, “that

a wide-spread ignorance exists among us regarding the abuses of our

factory system, more especially, but not exclusively, as exhibited in

many of the country mills.” “Had Christian ingenuity been generally

synonymous with the conduct of manufacturing corporations, I should

have found no occasion for the writing of this book.”[537] It was to

lessen such ignorance and encourage Christian sympathy between the

classes that she offered her study.

The book is a closet study done with more unction than skill. It is the

work of an emotional woman who lived in a world of sentiment rather

than reality. Miss Phelps was an Andover Brahmin, highly sensitive,

whose deeply religious nature was ruffled by every vagrant wind. She

was tremulous in her eager desire to lessen the injustice of men. _The

Silent Partner_ is a story of a young woman brought up in luxury,

daughter of a manufacturer, who on her father’s death wishes to join in

the management of the factory, but on being politely rejected by her

partners she engages in personnel work amongst her employees. There she

comes upon poverty as a sordid fact, and that discovery works a moral

change in her life. She is overwhelmed by it and cannot understand why

the conscience of the world is not overwhelmed. “Sometimes I do not

see,” she exclaimed, “what else there can _be_ to talk about in such a

world as this! I’ve stepped into it, as we have stepped out into this

storm. It has wrapped me in....”[538] Of the complexity of the problem

she is wholly ignorant. Surely there must be some road that leads to

justice--justice based on understanding and Christian kindliness; and

the working girl whom she singles out for heroine becomes in the end

a street preacher to the textile workers, after refusing to marry and

bring children into a world of factory toil. _The Silent Partner_ is an

emotional Puritan document that was out of date when it came from the

press.

While Miss Phelps was thus summoning the New England conscience to

cleanse the textile mills, her Brahmin sisters were little inclined

to engage in such thankless labors, but preferred to gather up and

preserve such fragments of the homely traditional New England as

had not been swept away in the engulfing stream of industrialism.

Female writers, from the days of Mrs. Sarah Wentworth Morton, had

long been busy in New England but never had they written so well or

so understandingly as in the days of the New England decline. Harriet

Beecher Stowe, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Harriet Prescott Spofford,

Rose Terry Cooke, Mary Wilkins Freeman, and Alice Brown were not

great writers, but they essayed to be faithful recorders of what came

under their eyes. It was the earlier New England that quickened their

imaginations, the rugged Yankee character that had taken form under

a homely domestic economy. They had no liking for the New England

that was rising in the shadow of the mills; the cleavages of race and

religion that were sundering the old homogeneous society were bitterly

distasteful to them. The Irish, the French-Canadians, the masses of

raw immigrants that were swept into the hoppers of the mills, were

unwelcome gobbets to the Brahmin stomach. And so these recorders of the

New England decline turned away from the sordid industrial scene, and

it was not till thirty years later that Mary Wilkins Freeman, in _The

Portion of Labor_ (1901), essayed to do more adequately what Elizabeth

Stuart Phelps had first sketched.

From Catherine Sedgwick to Mrs. Freeman the note shifted from the

moralistic to the sentimental, then to the idyllic, then to the

realistic; and the successive changes are sufficiently marked by three

writers, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Sarah Orne Jewett, and Mary Wilkins

Freeman. Seeking their materials remote from Boston, amidst the old

native stock pottering through the traditional round of life, they

discovered a world of angular figures that had grown knotty and gnarly

from a harsh climate and a meager soil. The stoic repressions that were

a heritage from Puritan ancestors had bred a hard race that any twist

of circumstance was likely to turn into grotesques. Calvinists have

always at hand a providential justification of any freakish outcome to

men’s struggles, and in piously denying freedom of the will they often

put the seal of God’s approval on their own willfulness. Mrs. Freeman’s

_Pembroke_ is not unlike _Winesburg, Ohio_, as a record of abortive

lives; and Sarah Orne Jewett, in spite of a Brahmin temperament that

chose to see the idyllic rather than the grotesque, could not overlook

what New England provided so abundantly. In _A Country Doctor_ a

visitor in the village of Oldsfield thus analyzed the New England

character:

... for intense, self-centred, smouldering volcanoes of humanity,

New England cannot be matched the world over. It’s like the regions

in Iceland that are full of geysers. I don’t know whether it is

the inheritance from those people who broke away from the old

countries, and who ought to be matched to tremendous circumstances

of life, but now and then there comes an amazingly explosive and

uncontrollable temperament that goes all to pieces from its own

conservation and accumulation of force. By and by you will all be

blown up,--you quiet descendants of the Pilgrims and Puritans, and

have let off your superfluous wickedness like blizzards; and when

the blizzards of each family have spent themselves you will grow

dull and sober, and all on a level, and be free from the troubles

of a transition state. Now, you’re neither a new country nor an

old one. You ought to see something of the older civilizations

to understand what peace of mind is. Unless some importation of

explosive material from the westward stirs them up, one century is

made the pattern for the next.[539]

They deal wholly with the past--these chronicles of a decaying New

England--concerning themselves with a “primitive and Biblical people”

who dwelt in quiet inland towns or about the lonely shores of the Maine

coast; yet always under the shadow of the meeting-house, with few

defenses betwixt them and the eternities. The age had traveled far

beyond them and they were left pottering about in their narrow Hebraic

world, unaware that science and industrialism were undermining the

foundations on which village and meeting-house rested. “In that handful

of houses,” said old Captain Littlepage in _The Country of the Pointed

Firs_, “they fancy that they comprehend the universe.” But if they

understood God’s plan of redemption they knew nothing of the ways of

capitalism. A certain romantic quaintness colors the realism of these

country tales and imparts a note of the idyllic. Harriet Beecher Stowe

first discovered the literary possibilities of decaying New England,

and in _Old-Town Folks_, _Poganuc People_, and _The Minister’s Wooing_,

she turned back to the days of its prime and sketched the scene with

a loving hand. But it was rather in _The Pearl of Orr’s Island_,

especially the first part before the heavy moralism that was always

entrapping her art had closed upon the tale, that she revealed its

possibilities to later writers. In a letter of July 5, 1889, Sarah Orne

Jewett suggests the source of her own more finished work:

I have been reading the beginning of _The Pearl of Orr’s Island_

and finding it just as clear and perfectly original and strong as

it seemed to me in my thirteenth or fourteenth year, when I read it

first. I never shall forget the exquisite flavor and reality that

it gave me.... It is classical--historical--anything you like to

say, if you can give it high praise enough.[540]

But Miss Jewett desired a more adequate realism and so she turned

curiously to consider the technique of the great continental realists

of the eighties. She read Zola and Flaubert, Tolstoi and Turgenev, and

oddly enough was persuaded that she had long been trying to do what

Tolstoi was doing. In a letter of 1888 she wrote:

That story of Tolstoi’s was such an excitement that I did not sleep

until almost morning. What a wonderful thing it is!... It startled

me because I was dimly feeling the same kind of motive (not the

same plan) in writing the “Gray Man.”... I have felt something of

what Tolstoi has been doing all the way along. I can tell you half

a dozen stories where I tried to say it, “Lady Terry,” “Beyond the

Toll-Gate,” and this “Gray Man.” Now and then it came clearer to

me. I never felt the soul of Tolstoi’s work until last night ...

but now I know what he means, and I know that I can dare to keep at

the work I sometimes have despaired about....[541]

Yet to later readers the tie that drew her to Tolstoi seems the

thinnest of gossamers. The roots of her character--and of her art--went

down too deep into Brahmin soil, she was too completely under the

critical sway of Lowell and Fields and Aldrich, for her to turn

naturalist. Her realism--if one may use the word--was as dainty and

refined as her own manners--bleached out to a fine maidenly purity.

In _The Country of the Pointed Firs_--a story that Willa Cather would

destine for immortality in the select company of _Huckleberry Finn_

and _The Scarlet Letter_--she discovers an innate gentility, or at

least gentleness, in the simple fisherfolk of the Maine village, and

she suggests as its source a primitive environment supplemented by

an encompassing religion. Nowhere does she paint in the smutch of

vulgarity, for in these eddies of New England life she discovers no

vulgarity either of mind or manners. But in the cities it is different.

There she found evidence in plenty of what she called the “cheap side

of life,” and she attributed it to the increasing material well-being

of the country. Of the new middle class she held a low opinion--

Their grandparents or even their own parents went hungry and ill

clothed, and it will take some time for these people to have their

fling, to eat all they want and to wear fine raiment, and flaunt

authority. They must get to a state, and by slow stages too, where

there is going to be something fit for education.... The trouble is

to us old-fashioned New Englanders that “the cheap streak” so often

spoils what there is of good inheritance, and the wrong side of our

great material prosperity is seen almost everywhere.[542]

There spoke the Brahmin. That this “cheap streak” should have spread

so far through American life, that the vulgar middle class should have

taken over the rule of the country, gave her concern. To one brought

up on Carlyle and Lowell and Arnold the ways of the plutocracy were

abhorrent, and she clung the more tenaciously to the land of her

memories, where the gentry ruled, where the plain people respected

themselves and their betters, and where vulgar display was unknown. “I

think as Mr. Arnold does,” she wrote in 1884, “and as Mr. Lowell did,

that the mistake of our time is in being governed by the ignorant mass

of opinion, instead of by thinkers and men who know something.”[543]

Though she disliked and distrusted the America that was submerging

the old landmarks, she was as ignorant as her Maine fisherfolk of the

social forces that were blotting out the world of her fathers, and

she clung with pathetic futility to such fragments of the old order

as remained. Like Lowell in his later years her heart was given to a

Brahmin democracy where gentlemen ruled and where “the best traditions

of culture and manners, from some divine inborn instinct toward what is

simplest and purest,” were held in universal respect.

What Miss Jewett with her love of the idyllic did not see--the grim and

stark ugliness that resulted from the long Puritan repression--Mary

Wilkins Freeman was to make the very warp of her work. She did not come

of Brahmin stock. Bred up in the narrow village world of New England,

she was a part of that world and she knew it as Miss Jewett could not.

The decay of a social order was all about her in her youth. The more

ambitious were drifting to the cities or to the new West, and those

who remained were deeply marked by the constricting round of duties.

Catastrophe seems always to be lying in wait for the characters that

fill her meager pages. They are either timid and querulous, or fiercely

“sot,” yet in either case happiness has a way of slipping through their

fingers. There was too little of the wine of paganism in their veins

for them to enjoy what life offers. They held themselves in with too

tight a rein. The New England conventions were always building higher

the dams of their emotions until they broke and the roily waters

rushed out in a wasting flood. Potential disaster peeps out of every

page of her stories. _Pembroke_ is an extraordinary collection of

mean and petty and tragic lives, besotted with stubborn willfulness,

without grace or comeliness, extracting no pleasant flavors from the

crushed grapes of life. In that narrow world daily existence demands an

unending struggle and the pinching meanness breeds miserly instincts

and dour ways. _A Humble Romance_ is a stark bit of sordid futility,

and in many another of her short stories Mrs. Freeman etched in the

familiar scene with a mordant pen. Drawn with realistic strokes the

picture of New England in decay is not so lovely as Miss Jewett found

it to be.

Realizing poignantly what was happening in the home of Puritanism, Mrs.

Freeman turned eventually to deal with the problem of industrialism

that was subduing New England to its will. _The Portion of Labor_

picks up the theme where it had been dropped a generation before by

Miss Phelps, and attempts in realistic manner to portray the life of

the New England villager in the shoe factory. It is a tract rather

than a story, and it finds no difficulty in reconciling industrialism

with morality. It revives the old Puritan ethics of work--preached by

Richard Baxter to his Kidderminster weavers two hundred and fifty years

before; it discovers in discipline of character the great end of life;

and it accepts the factory as a necessary instrument of civilization.

It is the Cinderella story of a village girl who, refusing a chance to

be sent to Vassar, enters a shoe factory, becomes a proletarian leader,

engineers a strike, gains a wider vision of the function of labor,

accepts the principle of exploitation, and is rewarded by marriage into

the exploiting class. In her girlhood she was a radical in an untaught

way, and from her valedictory essay at the High School Commencement to

her organization of the factory workers she boldly attacked the factory

owners. With the machine itself she had no quarrel. This is how she

felt when she took her place for the first time in the mill:

Scared she was not; she was fairly exultant. All at once she

entered a vast room in which eager men were already at the machines

with frantic zeal, as if they were driving labor herself. When she

felt the vibration of the floor under her feet, when she saw people

spring to their stations of toil, as if springing to guns in a

battle, she realized the might and grandeur of it all. Suddenly it

seemed to her that the greatest thing in the whole world was work

and that this was one of the greatest forms of work--to cover the

feet of progress of the travellers of the earth from the cradle to

the grave. She saw that these great factories, and the strength

of this army of the sons and daughters of toil, made possible the

advance of civilization itself, which cannot go barefoot. She

realized all at once and forever the dignity of labor, this girl of

the people, with a brain which enabled her to overlook the heads

of the rank and file of which she herself formed a part. She never

again, whatever her regret might have been for another life for

which she was better fitted, which her taste preferred, had any

sense of ignominy in this. She never again felt that she was too

good for her labor, for labor had revealed itself to her like a

goddess behind a sordid veil.[544]

Nevertheless she is ready to fight for control of the machine--for a

return to the workers of a larger share of their earnings; but when the

strike fails and she contemplates the misery that it has spread amongst

the workers, she recants:

Her youthful enthusiasm carried her like a leaping-pole to

conclusions beyond her years. “I wonder,” she said to herself,

“if, after all, this inequality of possessions is not a part of

the system of creation, if the righting of them is not beyond the

flaming sword of the Garden of Eden? I wonder if the one who tries

to right them forcibly is not meddling, and usurping the part of

the Creator, and bringing down wrath and confusion not only upon

his own head, but upon the heads of others? I wonder if it is wise,

in order to establish a principle, to make those who have no voice

in the matter suffer for it--the helpless women and children?”...

She reflected, as she had so many times before, that the world was

very old--thousands of years old--and inequality was as old as

the world. Might it not even be a condition of its existence, the

shifting of weights which kept it to its path in the scheme of the

universe?[545]

Mrs. Freeman wisely chose a girl in her teens as the leader in a fierce

labor battle, for Mrs. Freeman’s own thinking on social questions was

still in its teens. She had the warmest sympathy for the exploited

poor; her conscience was as tender as Miss Phelps’s; but her inadequate

knowledge of economics served her ill. If economic inequality is

necessary to keep the world from flying from its orbit, it serves the

purpose likewise of character development. When an old factory-hand

looks back upon a long life of futile labor he thus philosophizes:

Andrew quoted again from the old King of Wisdom--“I withheld not

my heart from any joy, for my heart rejoices in all my labor, and

that was my portion of labor.” Then Andrew thought ... of all the

toilsome lives of those beside him, of all the work which they had

done with their poor, knotted hands, of the tracks which they had

worn on the earth towards their graves, with their weary feet, and

suddenly he seemed to grasp a new and further meaning for that

verse of Ecclesiastes.

He seemed to see that labor is not alone for itself, nor for what

it accomplishes of the tasks of the world, not for its equivalent

in silver and gold, not even for the end of human happiness and

love, but for the growth in character of the laborer.

“That is the portion of labor,” he said.[546]

So the book ends on a Hebraic note. In 1901 when Mrs. Freeman wrote

_The Portion of Labor_ the psychology of work had been pretty well

explored. For years William Morris had been preaching a very different

doctrine, pagan rather than Hebraic, yet Mrs. Freeman seems to have

been acquainted with Morris no more than was Ellen Brewster, her

girlish heroine. Even the starkest New England realism was not very

critical of the industrialism that was destroying the traditional New

England. A cynical reader might perhaps suggest that the explanation

is to be found in the fact that the Yankee was profiting enormously

from this fouling of the Puritan nest.

II • The Afterglow of the Enlightenment--Walt Whitman

If the philosophy of the Enlightenment was fast disintegrating in the

America of 1870, it still numbered its picturesque followers who sought

to leaven the age with the social spirit of an earlier generation. It

was a noble bequest--this gift of the French thinkers--with its passion

for liberty, its faith in man, its democratic program. From that great

reservoir had come pretty much all that was generously idealistic

and humanitarian in the life of the two preceding generations. Its

persuasive idealism had woven itself so closely into the fabric of

national thought that our fathers had come to believe that America

was dedicated in a very special sense to the principles of a free

society. The democratic movement returned to it constantly to refresh

its strength and take new bearings. At every great crisis the familiar

pronouncement of the Declaration of Independence had been confidently

appealed to in furtherance of social justice. And now in the days

of an acquisitive individualism, when idealism was begging alms in

the market-place, it still threw flashes of romantic splendor on

the crude American scene. Old Peter Cooper still dreamed his dreams

of social justice after eighty years had passed over his head; and

Thaddeus Stevens, grown crabbed and surly from bitter struggles, mutely

testified to his passionate equalitarianism on the day of his burial.

But it was Walt Whitman in his den at Camden--culturally and in the

things of the spirit countless leagues removed from Boston--who was the

completest embodiment of the Enlightenment--the poet and prophet of a

democracy that the America of the Gilded Age was daily betraying.

In his somewhat truculent pose of democratic undress Whitman was a

singular figure for a poet, and especially an American poet. The

amplitude and frankness and sincerity of his rich nature were an

affront to every polite convention of the day. Endowed with abundant

sensuousness and catholic sympathies, he took impressions as sharply as

wax from the etcher’s hand; and those impressions he transcribed with

the careful impartiality of the modern expressionist. His sensitive

reactions to experience were emotional rather than intellectual. A

pagan, a romantic, a transcendentalist, a mystic--a child of the

Enlightenment yet heeding the lessons of science and regarding

himself as a realist who honored the physical as the repository of

the spiritual--to an amazing degree he was an unconscious embodiment

of American aspiration in the days when the romantic revolution was

at flood tide. His buoyant nature floated easily on the turbulent

stream of national being, and his songs were defiant chants in praise

of life--strong, abundant, procreative--flowing through the veins of

America.

Oracular and discursive, Whitman lived and moved in a world of sensuous

imagery. His imagination was Gothic in its vast reaches. Thronging

troops of pictures passed before him, vivid, vital, transcripts

of reality, the sharp impress of some experience or fleeting

observation--his own and no one’s else, and therefore authentic.

Delighting in the cosmos he saw reflecting its myriad phases in

the mirror of his own ego, he sank into experience joyously like a

strong swimmer idling in the salt waves. Borne up by the caressing

waters, repressing nothing, rejecting nothing, he found life good in

all its manifestations. As an Emersonian he was content to receive

his sanctions from within, and as he yielded to the stimulus of the

environing present his imagination expanded, his spirits rose to

earth’s jubilee, his speech fell into lyric cadences, and from the

exalted abandon of egoistic experience there issued a strong rich note

of the universal. His like had not before appeared in our literature

for the reason that the childlike pagan had not before appeared.

Emerson with his serene intelligence almost disencumbered of the flesh,

and Hawthorne with his dessicating skepticisms that left him afraid

of sex, were the fruits of a Hebraized culture that Puritan America

understood; but Walt Whitman the caresser of life, the lover who found

no sweeter fat than stuck to his own bones, was incomprehensible, and

not being understood, it was inevitable that he should be inexorably

damned. The most deeply religious soul that American literature knows,

the friend and lover of all the world, the poet of the democratic ideal

to which, presumably, America was dedicated, Whitman was flung into

outer darkness by the moral custodians of an age that knew morality

only from the precepts of the fathers.

The early stages of Whitman’s intellectual development are obscure,

but that in his twenties he caught most of the infections of the

times, literary, political, and social, is clear enough. The young

printer-editor in frock coat and tall hat, with cane and boutonnière,

who often joined the Bohemian society at Pfaff’s restaurant, was a

callow romantic, practicing the conventional literary arts of the time,

writing formal verse, spinning romantic tales,[547] and seeking to

approve himself a reputable littérateur. But the passion of reform was

already stirring within him and a succession of causes--temperance,

anti-capital-punishment, abolitionism--recruited his pen. As a child

of Manhattan and of the Jacksonian revolution it was inevitable that

his first great passion should have been political, and when in the

late forties he found a suitable vehicle of expression in the _Brooklyn

Eagle_, his native Jeffersonianism took stock of current political

programs. His political master was the radical equalitarian William

Leggett--whose praises in after life he never stinted--and from Leggett

and the _Evening Post_, supplemented by Fanny Wright and Tom Paine and

other disreputable influences, he seems to have got the first clear

expression of the sweeping democratic postulates on which later he

was to erect his philosophy. The times were stirring everywhere with

revolution and on Manhattan Island Locofocoism, with the newfangled

matches, ten years before had started its little local bonfire by way

of preparation for a general conflagration that should consume the

accumulated mass of wrong and injustice. The ardent young Whitman was

deeply infected with Locofoco enthusiasm and his editorials for the

_Eagle_ were the pronouncements of an extreme left-wing Democrat, as

became a disciple of Leggett.

In this early phase of his democracy he fixed his hopes on the

great West where, he believed, a freer and more democratic America

was taking shape. He was an expansionist, full of ardent hopes, an

apostle of “manifest destiny.” In such lesser matters as finance and

governmental subsidies he was a good Jacksonian, following Old Bullion

Benton in his preference for hard money and dislike of shin-plasters.

He was opposed to the bankers and monopolists. He called himself a

“free-trader by instinct,” and so late as 1888 he said, “I object to

the tariff primarily because it is not humanitarian--because it is a

damnable imposition upon the masses.”[548] But these lesser things were

inconsequential in comparison with the great objective towards which

America was moving--the ever-widening freedom of men in society. “There

must be,” he wrote in those early years, “continual additions to our

great experiment of how much liberty society will bear.”[549] On that

grand theme he was never tired of speaking. With Tom Paine he believed

that just government was a simple thing, fitted to the capacity of many

heads; it is made complex to hide its dishonesty. After commenting on

the “once derided, but now widely worshipped doctrines which Jefferson

and the glorious Leggett promulgated,” he went on:

... this one single rule, rationally construed and applied, is

enough to form the starting point of all that is necessary in

government: _to make no more laws than those useful for preventing

a man or body of men from infringing on the rights of other men_.

And again:

There is not a greater fallacy on earth than the doctrine of

_force_, as applied in government.... Sensible men have long seen

that the best government is that which governs least.[550]

Such comments, of course, are only familiar echoes of the

Enlightenment--echoes that run through all the thinking of the

naturistic school, from Godwin and Paine to Channing and Emerson and

Thoreau. In the minds of the children of the Enlightenment the creative

ideal of individualism was always pointing toward the ultimate end

of philosophic anarchism, and Whitman with his assured faith in the

average man accepted the Godwinian political theory as naturally as

did Thoreau. What other politics, indeed, was possible for those who

built upon the postulates of the innate excellence of human nature

and the measureless potentialities of men when vicious social codes

have been swept away and the plastic clay is molded by a kindly

environment? The perfectibility of man was no romantic dream to the

disciples of the French school, but a sober statement of sociological

fact, based on a rationalistic psychology; and Whitman was convinced

that he was a competent realist in thus envisaging the social problem.

If man’s instincts are trustworthy, what justification is there for

narrow repressions laid on his freedom? Hitherto those repressions

have only maimed and distorted him, encouraging his baser rather than

his better impulses; and before he can realize his potentialities he

must put away all external compulsions and learn to rely solely upon

himself. Hence the immediate objective of the democratic revolution was

individual freedom, the breaking of all chains, to the end that free

men may create a society worthy of them.

So it was as a revolutionary that Whitman began his work; and a

revolutionary he remained to the end, although in his last years he

chose to call himself an evolutionist. A born rebel, he was always

preaching the gospel of rebellion. “I am a radical of radicals,” he

said late in life, “but I don’t belong to any school.”[551] It was this

revolutionary spirit that made him the friend of all rebellious souls

past and present. “My heart is with all you rebels--all of you, today,

always, wherever: your flag is my flag,”[552] he said to a Russian

anarchist; and it was this sympathy that enabled him to understand

Fanny Wright and Tom Paine and Priestley, who “have never had justice

done them.”[553] “The future belongs to the radical,” and so _Leaves of

Grass_--he says in “Starting from Paumanok”--“beat the gong of revolt.”

Conventional law and order he frankly despised and those individuals

who sought their own law and followed it awoke his admiration.

Thoreau’s “lawlessness” delighted him--“his going his own absolute

road let hell blaze all it chooses.” It is a coward and a poltroon who

accepts his law from others--as true of communities as it is true of

individuals. He was a good Jeffersonian in his fear of Federalistic

consolidation that must put an end to local rights and freedoms.

To the States or any one of them, or any city of the States,

_Resist much, obey little_,

Once unquestioning obedience, once fully enslaved,

... no nation, state, city of this earth, ever afterward resumes

its liberty.[554]

I am for those that have never been master’d,

For men and women whose tempers have never been master’d,

For those whom laws, theories, conventions can never master.[555]

This is the spirit of the radical forties when men were prone to

repudiate their allegiance to the political state; when left-wing

Abolitionists were dissolving the Union by resolutions; and

transcendentalists were proclaiming the doctrine of nullification of

unrighteous law. It had come out of the Jacksonian upheaval, but it

was daily discovering fresh sanctions as the anarchistic premises of

the Enlightenment were more adequately explored and the revolutionary

spirit of Europe broke in upon America. During these turbulent years

Whitman’s great plan was in gestation, but before _Leaves of Grass_

came to print in the first slender edition of 1855 other influences had

been at work, confirming his earlier views, endowing them with lyric

passion and expanding them into a grandiose whole. Those influences

would seem to have been the fervid emotionalism of the fifties, the

monistic idealism of the transcendental school, and the emerging

scientific movement. On the whole perhaps it was the first, with its

vague and expansive Utopianism, that bit most deeply, stimulating his

rich pagan nature to unconventional frankness and encouraging him to

throw off the inhibitions of a Puritan ethicism that held American

thought in narrow bondage. The rude and ample liberalisms that so

shocked his early readers were in no sense peculiar to Whitman, despite

common opinion, but the expression of the surging emotionalism of the

times, and _Leaves of Grass_, can best be understood by setting its

frank paganism against the background of the lush fifties.

* * * * *

With its Calvinistic antecedents--Scotch-Irish and Huguenot as well

as New England Puritan--America had always been unfriendly to a

pagan evaluation of man’s duties and destiny, and the revolutionary

movement of the forties had been kept within sober ethical bounds.

John Humphrey Noyes was probably the most radical American of the

times, yet the Perfectionism of his earlier years, with its ascetic

religiosity, bore little resemblance to the later communism of the

Oneida Community. But the liberalism of the fifties was casting off all

Hebraic restraints and running wild, proclaiming a new heaven about to

appear on the free continent of America, and bidding the youth of the

land live joyously as children of the earth. Paganism for the first

time lifted up its head and surveyed the American scene--a youthful

paganism, lusty and vigorous, that suggested amazing applications of

the respectable doctrines of freedom and individuality, to the scandal

of older-fashioned folk. From the free spaces of the West, carried on

the tide of the Gold Rush, had come a spontaneous reaction from the

earlier repressions. Liberalism was passing from the political to the

social--a free welling-up of repressed desires, a vast expansiveness.

Too long had the natural human emotions been under the ban of

asceticism; too long had a God of wrath dispossessed a God of love.

Life is good in the measure that it is lived fully, and to live fully

is to live in the flesh as well as the spirit. Emerson the prophet of

the earlier decade had suffered from an extreme unfleshliness; Whitman

the prophet of the fifties would recover the balance. As the current of

emotionalism gathered force a frank _joie de vivre_ submerged the old

reticences; candor, frankness, a very lust of self-expression, was the

new law for free men and women--a glorification of the physical that

put to rout the traditional Hebraisms. A riotous sentimentalism ran

about the land until it seemed to timid souls as if liberty were quite

running away with decency. Freedom for black slaves was one thing,

but freedom for women--the loosening of social convention--suggested

terrifying eventualities like free love and the disruption of the

family. They would countenance no such immoral freedom and under the

leadership of young Anthony Comstock the forces of reticence and

respectability made ready to do battle with the new liberalisms.

It was not alone Walt Whitman who threw down the gage to the

Comstockian watchmen in the gates. The apostle of the new freedom,

the high priest of emotional liberalism, was Henry Ward Beecher,

lately come out of the West, who from the pulpit of Plymouth Church

swept his thousands of idolizing followers along the path of Utopian

emotionalism. With a rich amplitude and golden vagueness of metaphor

he preached the new gospel. From his lips flowed a lyric chant, a vast

paean, a very shout in praise of liberty and love, of godlike man and

a manlike God. “Life--affirmative, immediate, in a highly ornamented

Mayday world--he acknowledged and commemorated life!”[556] He bathed

in a “perpetual tropical luxuriance of blessed love.” “I never knew

how to worship until I knew how to love,” he cried; “and to love I

must have something ... that touching my heart, shall not leave the

chill of ice but the warmth of summer.” Like a good Emersonian he

discarded reason--the discipline of the ancestral Calvinism--to follow

the “secret chords of feeling,” the “heart’s instincts, whose channels

you may appoint but whose flowing is beyond control.” A “magnificent

pagan”--so Thoreau called him--he reveled in sensuous beauty. His

emotions mounted as he contemplated this new land, this new people,

the golden future that beckoned--with all shackles broken, dedicated

to freedom, warm and palpitating from abundant life--a radiant world

of lovely women and manly men. He dwelt on Pisgah and from the heights

looked out on a divine democracy. “The life of the common people is the

best part of the world’s life,” he exclaimed; “the life of the common

people is the life of God.” And to his congregation intoxicated with

his rhetoric he shouted, “Ye are gods! You are crystalline, your faces

are radiant!”[557] And the end and outcome envisaged by this prophet of

the American Idea was a vaguely grandiose fellowship, not of the Saints

alone, but of all the thronging children of men, for of such is God’s

kingdom of this world.

As such lyric chants fell on Whitman’s ears, they must have quickened

the ferment of thought that was eventually to clarify for him the

ideal of democracy, exalting it by making it warm and human and

social. The old Jacksonian leveling had been negative; its freedoms

had been individual, its anarchism selfish and unsocial. The great

ideal of the fellowship had been lost in the scramble for rights. Even

transcendental democracy had narrowed its contacts. The hermit Thoreau

in his cabin at Walden Pond was no symbol of a generous democratic

future. In the struggle for liberty and equality the conception of

fraternity had been denied and the golden trinity of the Enlightenment

dismembered. It was this idea of fraternity, made human and hearty by

his warm love of men and women, that Whitman got from the expansive

fifties and built into his thinking. The conception of solidarity,

then entering the realm of proletarian thought through the labors of

Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx, was his response to the new times--a

response that infused his democratic faith with a glowing humanism.

Democracy spiritualized by Channing and Emerson and Parker had suffered

limitations from their lingering Hebraisms--the Puritan passion for

righteousness had imposed strict ethical bounds on the democratic

will. In Thoreau it had been subjected to caustic skepticisms--the

transcendental individualist quizzically asked, “What _is_ your

people?” and refused to subject himself to the mass. But in Whitman

all limitations and skepticisms were swept away by the feeling of

comradeship. Flesh is kin to flesh, and out of the great reserves

of life is born the average man “with his excellent good manliness.”

Not in distinction but in oneness with the whole is found the good

life, for in fellowship is love and in the whole is freedom; and love

and freedom are the law and the prophets. The disintegrations of the

earlier individualism must be succeeded by a new integration; fear and

hate and jealousy and pride have held men apart hitherto, but love

will draw them together. After all solidarity--the children of America

merging in the fellowship, sympathetic, responsive, manlike yet divine,

of which the poet should be the prophet and literature provide the

sermons.

It was a noble conception--washing away all the meanness that befouled

Jacksonian individualism--and it somewhat slowly found its way to

parity with his first master conception, the universal ego, and settled

into place in those later opening lines of _Leaves of Grass_:

One’s-self I sing, a simple separate person,

Yet utter the word Democratic, the word En-Masse.[558]

Then came the war to strengthen his faith in the common man. As he

watched the soldiers marching, fighting, suffering, he was deeply

impressed with their courage, patience, kindness, manliness, and came

to reverence the deep wellspring of national being from which issued

such inexhaustible waters. It was not the few but the many that gave

him hope. “I never before so realized the majesty and reality of the

American people _en masse_,” he wrote of some regiments returning

from the front. “It fell upon me like a great awe.”[559] And as he

contemplated this fecund people, with its sons and daughters issuing

strong and wholesome from every part of the land, there came to him

a new conception of unity--the Union that Lincoln loved--the drawing

together into an indissoluble whole of the far-flung commonwealths--a

realization of the perfect State where reign liberty, equality,

fraternity. Solidarity had taken on a political complexion but its

life-blood was in the veins of a free people.

But pagan though he was in his deeper nature, a child of the emotional

fifties, he was a transcendentalist also and his democratic philosophy,

as it took shape, bears unmistakable marks of the New England school,

supplemented perhaps by Quakerism. His well-known comment, “I was

simmering and simmering; it was Emerson brought me to boil,” suggests

much, and in particular that the Enlightenment as it had come to him

through the Jeffersonian heritage was supplemented and spiritualized

by the Enlightenment as it had taken special form in passing through

the transcendental mind. To this latter source must be traced the

philosophic monism that served to draw his speculations together--a

mystic sense of the divine oneness of life that took his major

postulates in golden hands and fused them into a single spiritual

whole. Thus instructed the “great Idea, the idea of perfect and free

individuals,” became curiously Emersonian in all its amplifications.

There is the same glorification of consciousness and will, the same

exaltation of the soul, the same trust in the buried life that men call

instinct, the same imperious call to heed the voice of innate Godhood;

and round and about this “perfect and free individual” is a mystical

egocentric universe wherein the children of men may luxuriate in

their divinity. The body is excellent as the soul is excellent; away,

therefore, with all shamefacedness--the mean secretiveness, the putting

of fingers to the lips in presence of the naked, the lies in presence

of open palpable fact! For if this be indeed God’s universe, and He is

in and through it all, the children of Adam may stand in His presence

unafraid--nay, rather with pride in their own excellence. “I exist as I

am, that is enough,” for “Divine am I inside and out, and I make holy

whatever I touch or am touch’d from.”

Whitman not only accepted Emerson with ungrudging loyalty but he dwelt

much with Hegel and the German idealists, and with their help he

penetrated curiously to the core of things, discovering there an inner

spiritual reality that is the abiding substance behind the external

manifestation. He had come upon food to sustain his faith in presence

of the mean and base that compassed him about, and the puzzling

contradictions of life no longer troubled him. If man be perfectible,

if he be indeed a child of God though still in his infancy, how

glorious must be the future toward which he is pressing! The evil will

pass and the good remain.

Roaming in thought over the Universe, I saw the little that is Good

steadily hastening towards immortality,

And the vast all that is call’d Evil I saw hastening to merge

itself and become lost and dead.[560]

When he turned from the oracular utterance of _Leaves of Grass_ to

sober exposition, he phrased it thus:

There is, apart from mere intellect ... a wondrous something that

realises without argument ... an intuition of the absolute balance,

in time and space, of the whole of this multifarious, mad chaos of

fraud, frivolity, hoggishness--this revel of fools, and incredible

make-believe and general unsettledness, we call the _world_; a

soul-sight of that divine clue and unseen thread which holds the

whole congeries of things, all history and time, and all events

however trivial, however momentous, like a leash’d dog in the hands

of the hunter.[561]

To discover this divine clue and be drawn by the unseen thread

into the orbit of things, to suffer the Me--the “human identity of

understanding, emotions, spirit”--to fuse with the Not Me--“the whole

of the material, objective universe and laws, with what is behind them

in time and space”--became therefore for Whitman the grand objective

of man’s life and effort. This for him was the sum and substance of

religion, which was no other than the binding of the individual back

upon the whole. “A vast similitude interlocks all.” And so from his

conception of social solidarity he went forward to the conception of

spiritual solidarity, and discovered religion to be the crown and

glory of the “American Idea.” Walt Whitman and America were to be the

prophets of religion. “Easily at home in a natural world of prodigious

brightness and scale, he ... saw ‘the most splendid race the sun ever

shone upon,’ and was urging the life of instinct and impulse. Love

was the key--taking form and in ‘Starting from Paumanok’ he asserted

his Love, Democracy, Religion--a new religion.”[562] His message was

purpose.

The soul,

Forever and forever--longer than soil is brown and solid--longer than

water ebbs and flows.

I will make the poems of materials, for I think they are to be the

most spiritual poems,

And I will make the poems of my body and of mortality,

For I think I shall then supply myself with the poems of my soul and

of immortality.

I will make a song for these States that no one State may under any

circumstances be subjected to another State,

* * * * *

I will sing the song of companionship,

* * * * *

I will write the evangel-poem of comrades and of love,

* * * * *

I am the credulous man of qualities, ages, races,

I advance from the people in their own spirit,

* * * * *

I, too, following many and follow’d by many, inaugurate a

religion, ...

* * * * *

Each is not for its own sake,

I say the whole earth and all the stars in the sky are for religion’s

sake.

I say no man has ever yet been half devout enough,

None has ever yet adored or worship’d half enough,

None has begun to think how divine he himself is, and how certain the

future is.

* * * * *

I say that the real and permanent grandeur of these States must be

their religion,

Otherwise there is no real and permanent grandeur;

* * * * *

My comrade!

For you to share with me two greatnesses, and a third one rising

inclusive and more resplendent,

The greatness of Love and Democracy, and the greatness of

Religion.[563]

But this new religion of the mystical Whitman, in harmony with

post-transcendental thought, was deeply impregnated with the spirit of

science. He was in the very fullness of his powers when the conception

of evolution came to him and he greeted it gladly, weaving it into all

his thinking and discovering in it a confirmation of his idealistic

philosophy. It was the evolution of Herbert Spencer, it must be

remembered, that Whitman accepted--teleological, buoyantly optimistic,

dominated by the conception of progress, shot through with the spirit

of the Enlightenment; and such an evolution was a confirmation and not

a denial of his transcendental premises. It supplemented rather than

contradicted the tenets of his faith. Like Emerson as he saw the bounds

of the material universe slowly pushed back by science he discovered

amidst the constant change the presence of growth, development, the

natural passage from the simple to the complex; and like Theodore

Parker he felt that this slow unfolding was no other than the unfolding

of God, making Himself evident and unmistakable to man. Evolution was

God’s great plan. “The law over all, the law of laws, is the law of

successions,” he was persuaded; “for what is the present after all but

a growth out of the past?” But noble as is the evidence of God’s work

discoverable by science, the soul is not content to rest with such

evidence; it must seek out the reality behind the manifestation; and

for this work the poet alone is fitted. The poet must complete the work

of the scientist. The noble “Passage to India” is a lovely chant of

human progress, the adventurous soul conquering the earth; but it must

not pause there; it must seek God through the universe until it finds

Him, and “Nature and Man shall be disjoin’d and diffused no more,” and

“All these hearts as of fretted children shall be sooth’d.”

Bathe me O God in thee, mounting to thee,

I and my soul to range in range of thee.[564]

It was in this profoundly religious spirit that Whitman accepted

science, built it into his poetry, rested confidently upon it; and

it is this spirit that explains his formal statement in the “Song of

Myself.”

I accept Reality and dare not question it,

Materialism first and last imbuing.

Hurrah for positive science! long live exact demonstration!

Fetch stonecrop mixt with cedar and branches of lilac,

This is the lexicographer, this the chemist, this made a grammar

of the old cartouches,

These mariners put the ship through dangerous unknown seas,

This the geologist, this works with the scalpel, and this is

the mathematician.

Gentlemen, to you the first honors always!

Your facts are useful, and yet they are not my dwelling,

I but enter by them to an area of my dwelling.[565]

Equipped with such a philosophy and supported by such a faith Whitman

accepted the twin duties laid upon him: to make clear to America her

present failure in the great adventure--how far she had fallen short

hitherto of any adequate democratic reality; and to mark out afresh

the path to the Canaan of democratic hopes--reviving the early hopes of

the Enlightenment and drawing in lovelier colors the democratic Utopia

dreamed of for a hundred years. To be both critic and prophet--that

he conceived to be his mission, a mission that he was faithful to for

upwards of forty years. For the first duty he was admirably equipped.

No other knew this America so intimately or so broadly--had penetrated

so lovingly to the common heart and read so clearly its secret

hopes and fears. That America was not yet a democracy--was very far

indeed from a democracy--that it was a somewhat shoddy _bourgeois_

capitalistic society shot through with cant and hypocrisy and every

meanness, he saw with calm, searching eyes. No contemporary critic, not

Godkin, not Emerson, saw more clearly the unlovely reality or dealt

with it more scathingly, not only in _Leaves of Grass_ but especially

in his prose writings and in casual talk. Amongst scores of such

passages a single one must serve for illustration.

I say that our New World democracy, however great a success in

uplifting the masses out of their sloughs, in materialistic

development, products, and in a certain highly-deceptive

superficial popular intellectuality, is, so far, an almost complete

failure in its social aspects, and in really grand religious,

moral, literary, and esthetic results.... Shift and turn the

combinations of the statement as we may, the problem of the future

of America is in certain respects as dark as it is vast. Pride,

competition, segregation, vicious wilfulness, and license beyond

example, brood already upon us. Unwieldy and immense, who shall

hold in behemoth? who bridle leviathan? Flaunt it as we choose,

athwart and over the roads of our progress loom huge uncertainty,

and dreadful threatening gloom. It is useless to deny it: Democracy

grows rankly up the thickest, noxious, deadliest plants and

fruits of all--brings worse and worse invaders--needs newer,

larger, stronger, keener compensations and compellers. Our lands

embracing so much ... hold in the breast that flame also, capable

of consuming themselves, consuming us all.... Even today, amid

these whirls, incredible flippancy, and blind fury of parties,

infidelity, entire lack of first-rate captains and leaders,

added to the plentiful meanness and vulgarity of the ostensible

masses--that problem, the labor question, beginning to open like

a yawning gulf, rapidly widening every year--what prospect have

we? We sail a dangerous sea of seething currents, cross and

under-currents, vortices,--all so dark and untried.[566]

As a realist Whitman granted the worst charges of the critics of

democracy, but he probed deeper and brought other facts to light

that modified the equation. It was the difficult question the old

Federalists had posed and that Carlyle had lately revived--the

question, is not this meanness inseparable from democracy? is not

your people in fact a great beast, requiring the lash and the curb?

It was the crux of the long debate over democracy and to it Whitman

gave anxious and frequent consideration. In fighting the battle of

1790 over again, like Jefferson he rested his case on the native

integrity and measureless potentiality of the “bulk-people”--they are

the deep soil from which spring the abundant fruits and flowers of

civilization. Gentle-nurtured folk do not understand this--they do

not like the rank qualities of vital being. Matthew Arnold “always

gives you the notion that he hates to touch the dirt--the dirt is so

dirty! But everything comes out of the dirt--everything: everything

comes out of the people ... not university people, not F.F.V. people:

people, people, just people!” In the rude, vital, natural man is the

inexhaustible wellspring of good and evil; “He’s got it all ... not

only the cruel, beastly, hoggish, cheating, bedbug qualities, but

also the spiritual--the noble--the high-born”;[567] in “some ways” he

is a “devil of a fellow,” but he is not “all devil or even chiefly

devil.”[568] And because he is not chiefly devil such love and beauty

and justice and comradeship as there is in the world, such progress

in civilization as has been made hitherto, have been possible--how

otherwise? If he has journeyed thus far out of the primeval slime, what

bounds shall be set to his eventual journeyings? Why put out one’s eyes

with a mere handful of years?

So Whitman projected his democratic commonwealth far into the future;

he would not have us believe that it had been realized here in America.

Political democracy, the struggle for political rights that had engaged

America hitherto, was only negative, a necessary preliminary to the

ultimate reality. “I submit,” he said, “that the fruition of democracy,

on aught like a grand scale, resides altogether in the future,” and its

realization depends upon the use to which the people put their freedom.

If from it emerges a proud and self-conscious individualism--“the

quality of Being, in the object’s self, according to its own central

idea and purpose, and of growing therefrom and thereto--not criticism

by other standards, and adjustments thereto”--then democracy on a grand

scale will be possible and the self-reliant citizen will take his

place in a free creative society. The ideal of the growing man, and

the ideal of the perfect State--broadly social rather than narrowly

political--these were his twin ideals; and the tie that is to bind

men together in spontaneous solidarity is love. How characteristic

is his sketch of the perfect city, and how deeply saturated with the

Enlightenment! There is wanting only a physiocratic economics to make

it perfect.

A great city is that which has the greatest men and women,

* * * * *

Where the city stands with the brawniest breed of orators and bards,

Where the city stands that is belov’d by these, and loves them in

return and understands them.

Where no monuments exist to heroes but in the common words and deeds,

Where thrift is in its place, and prudence is in its place,

Where the men and women think lightly of the laws,

Where the slave ceases and the master of slaves ceases,

Where the populace rise at once against the never-ending audacity of

elected persons,

* * * * *

Where outside authority enters always after the precedence of inside

authority.

Where the citizen is always the head and ideal, and President, Mayor,

Governor and what not, are agents for pay,

Where children are taught to be laws to themselves, and to depend on

themselves.

Where equanimity is illustrated in affairs,

* * * * *

Where the city of faithfulest friends stands,

Where the city of the cleanliness of the sexes stands,

* * * * *

There the great city stands.[569]

Individualism, solidarity--on such strong bases he erected his ideal

democracy, and the heaven-reaching temple will be overlaid with the

rich arts and graces of a civilization worthy at last of the name. Such

was the Enlightenment as it came to flower in the passionate idealism

of Walt Whitman--a dream that was mocked and flouted and nullified

by the Drews and Fisks and Goulds--the “hoggish, cheating, bedbug

qualities” of a generation that scorned him for a beast. Even his stout

faith was shaken at times by the infidelities of the Gilded Age. He

was troubled by the gap that opened between the free individual and

the perfect State. “I seem to be reaching for a new politics--for a

new economy,” he confessed in 1888; “I don’t quite know what, but for

something.”[570] Although he protested, “The older I grow ... the more

I am confirmed in my optimism, my democracy,” he projected his hopes

farther into the future. He sympathized with the socialists but he

was not one of them. His revolutionary ardor abated and he preferred

in later years to call himself an evolutionist.[571] “Be radical--be

radical,” he said to Traubel, “be not too damned radical.”[572] With

his catholic sympathies that refused all bitterness he could not be a

partisan--“after the best the partisan will say something better will

be said by the man.”[573]

So in the twilight of the romantic revolution Whitman quietly

slipped away. The great hopes on which he fed have been belied by

after events--so his critics say;[574] as the great hopes of the

Enlightenment have been belied. Certainly in this welter of today, with

science become the drab and slut of war and industrialism, with sterile

money-slaves instead of men, Whitman’s expansive hopes seem grotesque

enough. Democracy may indeed be only a euphemism for the rulership of

fools. Yet in a time of huge infidelities, in the dun breakdown and

disintegration of all faiths, it is not wholly useless to recall the

large proportions of Walt Whitman, his tenderness, his heartiness, his

faith, his hope. There was in him no weak evasion, no sniveling over

the shards of the goodly vessel broken at the well, but even when “old,

alone, sick, weak-down, melted-worn with sweat,” a free and joyous

acceptance of life.

Thanks in old age--thanks ere I go,

For health, the midday sun, the impalpable air--for life, mere life,

* * * * *

For all my days--not those of peace alone--the days of war the same,

For gentle words, caresses, gifts from foreign lands.

For shelter, wine and meat--for sweet appreciation,

* * * * *

For beings, groups, love, deeds, words, books--for colors, forms,

For all the brave strong men--devoted, hardy, men--who’ve forward

sprung in freedom’s help, all years, all lands,

For braver, stronger, more devoted men--(a special laurel ere I go,

to life’s war’s chosen ones,

The cannoneers of song and thought--the great artillerists--the

foremost leaders, captains of the soul:)

As soldier from an ended war return’d--As traveler out of myriads,

to the long procession retrospective.

Thanks--joyful thanks!--a soldier’s, traveler’s thanks.[575]

A great figure, the greatest assuredly in our literature--yet perhaps

only a great child--summing up and transmitting into poetry all

the passionate aspirations of an America that had passed through

the romantic revolution, the poet of selfhood and the prophet of

brotherhood, the virile man and the catholic lover--how shall Walt

Whitman become dumb or cease to speak to men unless the children of

those who are now half-devil and half-God shall prove to be wholly

devil--or wholly moron?

III • The Backwash of the Frontier--Mark Twain

As Whitman contemplated the feeble literature purveyed by the

worshipers of the genteel he asked with some irritation: “What

is the reason in our time, our lands, that we see no fresh local

courage, sanity, of our own--the Mississippi, stalwart Western men,

real mental and physical facts, Southerners, etc., in the body of

our literature?” That was in 1870 and the answer was at hand in the

person of Mark Twain. Here at last was an authentic American--a native

writer thinking his own thoughts, using his own eyes, speaking his own

dialect--everything European fallen away, the last shred of feudal

culture gone, local and western yet continental. A strange and uncouth

figure in the eyes of Thomas Bailey Aldrich, yet the very embodiment of

the turbulent frontier that had long been shaping a native psychology,

and that now at last was turning eastward to Americanize the Atlantic

seaboard. Yet in spite of a rare vein of humor, the outcropping of

a rich and whimsical imagination, he made his way slowly to polite

recognition. For years he was regarded by authoritative critics as

little more than a buffoon, an extravagant fun-maker with a broad

streak of western coarseness; and it was not till near the end, when

he had long been an international figure, that the culture of the

East accepted him. It was Howells then who pronounced him “the sole,

the incomparable, the Lincoln of our literature ... the very marrow of

Americanism.”

Just as that judgment was at the time, it needs qualification

now. The marrow of Americanism is not the same substance from

generation to generation. The outer environing life of a people

works itself slowly into the bones and brings about subtle changes.

Mark Twain was indubitably an embodiment of three centuries of

American experience--frontier centuries, decentralized, leveling,

individualistic; but the Americanism that issued from them came to

its flower and was quickly succeeded by another kind as the fields of

experience were re-plowed by industrialism and sowed to a different

grain. Mark Twain was the child of a frontier past--as Lincoln was, as

the Gilded Age was--and the America of today could no more breed him

than it could breed Lincoln, or Greeley, or Whitman; his Americanism

was the reflection of an environment that is no longer ours, in the

slack folk-ways of the frontier that we have outgrown. Child of the

Southwest in its early boom days, he was cradled in profitless schemes

and nourished on dreams of vast potential wealth. The frontier spirit

was an effervescence in his blood and golden expectations flung their

mirage over the drab reality. As a boy he took impress from a kindly,

ignorant, slave-holding, Calvinistic village world, and he quitted the

slattern village life to plunge into the picturesque traffic of the

Mississippi in the boom days when every river pilot drove his boat

full steam ahead. Then the Far West of silver mines and the Golden

Gate took him in hand--a gambling, romantic, optimistic frontier,

feverish with flush times, “a beggar’s revel of potential millionaires

without the price of a square meal.”[576] And finally this buoyant,

irreverent adolescent was taken in hand by the Far East: by New England

respectability in the persons of Olivia Langdon of Elmira, William Dean

Howells of Cambridge, Twitchell and Warner of Hartford; and by New York

in the persons of Carnegie and Gilder and Whitelaw Reid and Henry H.

Rogers, to be made over into a man of the world.

Such were his origins and his schooling. All his life he remained a

boy, with the imitativeness of youth, and yet with something deep

within him that cherished its own integrity. Quick to take color from

his environment and at home in crowds, he lived nevertheless in the

solitude of his own heart. Acutely conscious of his rough western

ways, he admired the culture of the Langdons and the refined art of

Howells, and he wanted to be approved by them. A kinsman of Beriah

Sellers, he delighted in the great barbecue and wanted to carve great

portions for himself, to heap up his plate as others were doing. His

reactions to experience were always emotional. He was not a Walt

Whitman to penetrate curiously to the core of his own being and grow

thence outwardly, content to wait till the world came round to him.

He loved to make a splurge, to be talked of, to be in the public eye,

to live on an ample scale; he accepted the world’s standards and

wished to be measured by them. It was characteristic of the frontier.

Wanting other standards, the frontier measured success by obvious

material standards. Its aggressive individualism was never spiritual or

intellectual or cultural. So with all his heritage of generations of

frontier individualism he never achieved an intellectual or spiritual

unity, an untroubled conscious integrity, as Emerson did and Whitman

did. He never was at home in the world of catholic thought, but all

his life he suffered from the petty inhibitions of his origins. He

could not throw off the frontier--its psychology and its morality were

too deeply intertwined with his primitive self; and the result was a

harassing inner conflict that left him maimed.

Yet with all his shortcomings--because of them indeed--Mark Twain is

an immensely significant American document. He is a mirror reflecting

the muddy cross-currents of American life as the frontier spirit washed

in, submerging the old aristocratic landmarks. To know Mark Twain is to

know the strange and puzzling contradictions of the Gilded Age. With

unconscious fidelity he reveals its crudity, its want of knowledge,

discipline, historical perspective; its intellectual incapacity to deal

with the complexities of a world passing through the twin revolutions

of industrialism and science. And he reflects with equal fidelity

certain other qualities that go far to redeem the meanness: a great

creative power; an eager idealism, somewhat vague but still fine; a

generous sympathy; a manly independence that strove to think honestly;

a passionate hatred of wrong and injustice and an honest democratic

respect for men as men. A significant if not an unsoiled or heroic

document!

That in his later years an impassable gulf opened between Mark Twain

and his generation, that the buoyant humorist of the seventies ripened

into the bitter satirist of the nineties, is a matter that has been

much remarked upon. The fact is clear enough but the explanation

is not so clear. In part no doubt--as Van Wyck Brooks has pointed

out--the change resulted from a thwarting of the creative artist by a

disastrous surrender to the ideals of the Gilded Age; in part, also,

it was the inevitable toll exacted by the passing years. A humane and

generous spirit cannot long watch with indifference the motley human

caravan hastening to eternity--cannot find food for laughter alone

in the incredible meanness and folly of men cheating and quarreling

in a wilderness of graves. Tenderness, chivalry, love of justice,

are poor bucklers to withstand the blows of fate, and Mark Twain had

little skill in defense. The humorist like the poet is sensitively

responsive to life and the scars multiply fast. Endowed with a nature

not unlike Swift’s in its fierce rage at inhumanity, not unlike Sir

Philip Sidney’s in its romantic chivalry, he was not a stoic to endure

with equanimity. He was foredoomed to suffer vicariously. The comment

he wrote Howells in 1899 throws a white light on the man. “I have been

reading the morning paper,” he said. “I do it every morning--well

knowing that I shall find in it the usual depravities and basenesses

and hypocrisies and cruelties that make up civilization, and cause me

to put in the rest of the day pleading for the damnation of the human

race.”

Yet granting so much, and granting also a morbid conscience that

harassed him with self-condemnation--“What a man sees in the human race

is merely himself in the deep and honest privacy of his own heart”--it

still remains true that the bleakness of his later years was due in

part, at least, to the insubstantial dwelling he chose to live in. The

architects of the Gilded Age were jerry-builders, and Mark Twain found

his jerry-built house a poor protection against the winter winds. It

was perhaps not greatly his fault that he built so flimsily. He was

too willing to be caught in the web of material things. He could not

reach out for companionship with the great earth. Hamlin Garland in a

bleak Dakota shack found help and comfort in the philosophy of Taine,

but Mark Twain could not get outside his own skin. He could not break a

path through the provincialism of his environment. He was held prisoner

to his own thoughts and his only release was through the window of

imagination. When harassed beyond endurance he sought release in

writing that hid the evidence of his rebellion. What would Livy say,

what would the American public say, if they knew he had come to deny

all the tribal gods!

There is no more pathetic figure in American literature than Mark

Twain, alone and solitary amid the blatant American crowd, living in

a dreary wash of speeches and banquets, spinning the threads of a

rebellious philosophy out of his own bowels, unaware of what others

were spinning, regarding himself as a dangerous fellow and stowing away

in his strong-box intellectual bombs that he thought too explosive for

the Gilded Age to play with. In his intellectual isolation he could

not take the measure of his speculations and he did not realize how

common were such conclusions--that his own generation indeed, under

the tutelage of the physical sciences, was fast drifting in the same

direction, and that the clouds of pessimism were obscuring for many

the brighter horizons of an earlier day. If he had known Henry Adams

as intimately as he knew Henry H. Rogers, very likely his eyes would

have been opened to many things that would have done him good. As it

was he knew only that his speculations ran counter to the formal creed

of his middle-class neighbors and friends. To deny the dogmas of the

conventional orthodoxy and in the face of a smug optimism to assert a

mechanistic pessimism, was an unpleasant business that he would have

avoided if he could.

But he couldn’t avoid it wholly, and in that fact is to be found the

thread that runs through his later life, giving to it such unity and

coherence as it possessed. It is this: here was a thoroughly honest

mind, that hated all sham and quackery and humbug, and a singularly

warm heart, that hated all wrong and cruelty and injustice; and this

honest mind and chivalrous heart, deceived and led astray by the mass

_mores_, espoused and defended such fragments of ideals, such bits

of truth, as he came upon in his solitary brooding, until driven

from one stronghold after another he came to doubt the adequacy

of all strongholds and took refuge in a black pessimism--God is a

malignant being, the universe is a machine, and man is a creature of

determinism. It was a fierce and stark reaction from the emotionalism

of the fifties--from Beecher’s God of love and Whitman’s religion of

democracy. His earlier loyalty to half-gods had brought him at last to

deny all the gods. And so a maimed giant, stumbling and uncertain, he

made such way as he could; and his journeyings wrung from him many a

fierce comment that his generation did not understand.

When the milk of western humor curdled in his veins, a Mark Twain

emerged who was a puzzle to the Gilded Age. A humorist who was a good

Republican and business man, the Gilded Age could understand; but a

satirist who launched his shafts at sacred things--at evangelical

religion, the Republican party, the government at Washington, the

damned human race itself--it could not understand. The professional

fun-maker had outgrown his audience. Expecting the familiar

exaggeration, they accounted his bitterest sally a characteristic

whimsy, and laughed when he commented bitterly on “this plodding sad

pilgrimage, this pathetic drift between the eternities,” or when he

exclaimed, “Everything human is pathetic. The secret source of Humor is

not joy but sorrow. There is no humor in heaven.” But the significant

thing is that in the end the tyrannizing _mores_ did not conquer, they

did not destroy him wholly; but such convictions as he had hewn from

puzzling experience, however bleak or repellent they might be, he clung

to firmly, desperately, and at last flung them in the face of the

Gilded Age that had kept him prisoner.

The slow drift of Mark Twain’s thought from humor to satire--it smacks

of Philistinism to call it progress with its many false alarums and

excursions and its huge frontier wastefulness--is plain enough to

anyone who will take the trouble to chart his course. Roughly it

falls into definite stages: the swaggering gayety of western youth

in _Innocents Abroad_ and _Roughing It_--the mood of flush times,

down-grade with the brakes off; then a gay plunge into satire in _The

Gilded Age_; then the West recalled in middle life--_Tom Sawyer_, _Life

on the Mississippi_, _Huckleberry Finn_--living over again a youth

that is gone; then an excursion into the Middle Ages--_The Prince

and the Pauper_ and _A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court_--a

romantic flare-up of the democratic passions of the Enlightenment; then

the search for the ideal in _Joan of Arc_--the dream of the perfect

woman, the Domnei of James Branch Cabell; and finally _The Mysterious

Stranger_ and _What is Man?_--a fierce satire of disillusion, the cry

of an idealist who realizes at last how greatly he has been cheated by

his dreams.

That he should have begun by burlesquing life was itself a broad

sign of his frontier origins. Since the first crossing of the

Allegheny Mountains a swaggering extravagance of speech had been a

hallmark of the Westerner. In part this swagger was an unconscious

defense-mechanism against the drabness of frontier life; and in part

it was the spontaneous expression of new experiences in an untrammeled

world, the spirit of wilderness-leveling. Its procreative source would

seem to have been the Ohio River where the rough flatboatmen bequeathed

the Mike Fink legend to literature; and it expanded in the huge

Davy Crockett hoax--a hoax that would have tickled the ribs of Mark

Twain had he traced its genesis and progress, as a colossal example

of how the damned human race loves to be humbugged. It developed

further in Gus Longstreet’s _Georgia Scenes_ with its grotesque Ransy

Sniffle--sorriest of backwoods heroes, too mean-spirited to ruffle like

Canebrake Davy; and in Joseph Baldwin’s _Flush Times of Alabama and

Mississippi_, with its greasy frontier blackguard, Colonel Simon Suggs.

This earliest backwoods humor had been done in realistic colors and

bears the impress of authenticity. But the school that succeeded--John

Phoenix, Artemus Ward, Petroleum V. Nasby--quickly conventionalized

its technique, relying on burlesque, tall lying, distorted spelling,

genial philosophy. The picaresque strain was softened and perverted by

deliberate human-interest touches--a better case must be made out for

the untutored children of nature. It was this humor that Mark Twain

inherited, and he enriched it with a wealth dug from his own large and

generous nature. An incorrigible idealist, as all great humorists must

be, he recreated some of the earlier types, translating Colonel Simon

Suggs into Colonel Sellers, and Ransy Sniffle into Huck Finn. It was a

glorious transformation, but the result lacked something of the soiled

reality of the earlier blackguards. Yet underneath his idealism was a

generous deposit of the common mud of life. The spirit of Mike Fink was

never far from Mark Twain. It haunted him like an evil genius, refusing

to be exorcised by Olivia Clemens, and it found vent in sly literary

sprees that begot offspring to be handed about furtively and chuckled

over by the sons of Adam; but for the most part it was kept in strict

subjection to the proprieties of Elmira and Hartford.

_Roughing It_ and _The Gilded Age_ are brilliant complementary pictures

of the gaudy frontier spirit that was washing in upon the staid realm

of the genteel, to the vast concern of such genteelists as Thomas

Bailey Aldrich. The former is a buoyant chronicle of the West of

Captain Carver and Wild Bill Hickok, the West of the Pony Express,

the Comstock lode, the bad man and the lynch law, a land of young

men in red flannel shirts, heavy boots, and six-shooters, who feared

neither God nor the devil. Bret Harte in San Francisco first realized

the literary possibilities of this picturesque world, and his tales

of life in the mining-camps were received with a shout of approval.

But Bret Harte had never been a miner. He was not realist enough, nor

honest enough, to portray the West in its stark, grotesque reality. He

was only a literary middleman who skillfully purveyed such wares as

his eastern readers wanted. In consequence he coated his tales with a

sentimental picaresque--pandered to the common taste by discovering

nuggets of pure gold in the dregs and outcasts of the mining-camps.

But Mark Twain was too honest for that. He had been a part of the

flush times and had seen the economic process work itself out. He had

seen the grub-stake prospector succeeded by the wild-cat speculator,

and him in turn followed by the eastern capitalist. He had seen

the mining frontier become a thing of the past in a single decade,

with the Comstock lode in the hands of competent exploiters and the

pick-and-shovel miners plunging deeper into the mountains to pursue

their feverish hopes. From that experience he had learned a lesson he

was to carry East with him. “Because we judged that we had learned,” he

said, “the real secret of success in silver mining, which was, not to

mine the silver ourselves by the sweat of our brows and the labor of

our hands, but to _sell_ the ledges to the dull slaves of toil and let

them do the mining.”[577]

It was the great lesson of his generation, and thus instructed he

proposed to sell his brains in the best market. Exploitation was the

royal road to wealth and he was eager to exploit both himself and

his fellows. Yet not all of Mark Twain was thus eager. Deep in his

heart was another Mark Twain, the artist, the chivalrous lover of

justice, the simple child puzzled at life--and this Mark Twain was

already plotting treason against the exploiting Mark Twain. For the

first time this deeper self got out of hand in _The Gilded Age_. As he

contemplated the common scoundrelism at Washington and elsewhere, his

anger exuded in scathing satire. He hated the dirty thing, yet he seems

never to have realized that such scoundrelism was only the backwash of

the spirit of exploitation and that he himself was riding on its waves.

With the soap-bubble dreams of Colonel Sellers he dealt lovingly, for

he was sketching his own origins; the Colonel and the Hawkinses were

his own flesh and blood and the Tennessee lands were an old investment

about which the family dreams of wealth had been woven for years. He

delighted in the Colonel’s childlike faith that prosperity only awaited

a vote of Congress--with adequate appropriations, of course. He asked

no questions about unearned increment; to question that would have been

treason to the frontier philosophy. So into Colonel Sellers he put all

that was naïve and lovable in the Gilded Age. But Senator Dillworthy

was another matter. Hypocrite and corruptionist, he was laying obscene

hands on sacred things, betraying his high trust for sordid ends. Mark

Twain hated graft--the word had not been coined but the ugly thing was

there--and with the innocence of his generation he damned the agent

and overlooked the principal. It was not his fault. The economics of

history was a closed book to Americans of the seventies, and even

Henry Adams in his analysis of the current corruption in his novel

_Democracy_ was no better than a mole nosing blindly underground.

He had opened another door to his genius and discovered the satirist.

There lay the real Mark Twain. But the wares of the satirist were not

in demand at the barbecue, so he closed the door and fell to purveying

what the public wanted. _Tom Sawyer_ was in part a malicious thrust

at the Sunday School tale, and in part a whimsical pronouncement

of the natural rights of the small boy. But it is in _Huckleberry

Finn_--the one great picaresque tale of the frontier--that the western

philosophy of Mark Twain, a philosophy that derives straight from the

old naturistic school, crops out most sharply. It is a drama of the

struggle between the individual and the village _mores_, set in a loose

picturesque framework, and exemplifying the familiar thesis that the

stuff of life springs strong and wholesome from the great common stock.

Huck Finn is a child of nature who has lived close to the simple facts

of life, unperverted by the tyrannies of the village that would make

a good boy of him. He had got his schooling from the unfenced woods,

from the great river that swept past him as he idly fished, from the

folk-tales of negroes and poor whites, from queer adventures with Tom

Sawyer; and from such experiences he had got a code of natural ethics.

Then he found himself on the raft with Jim the runaway nigger, and

his little pagan soul felt the stirrings of the problem of right and

wrong. The village code and the natural code clashed and the conflict

was terrifying. The village code warned him that hell yawned for one

who helped a slave escape, and the human code warned him that betrayal

was a blackguardly thing. With the fear of hell upon him he wrote to

Miss Watson, and then his sense of the kindliness of Jim, the honest

humanity under the black skin, rose up in fierce protest.

It was a close place. I took [the letter] up, and held it in my

hands. I was a-trembling, because I’d got to decide, forever,

betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied for a minute, sort

of holding my breath, and then says to myself:

“All right, then, I’ll _go_ to hell”--and tore it up.

It was awful thoughts and awful words, but they was said. And I let

them stay said; and never thought no more about reforming.[578]

It was a triumph over the sacred tribal law of conformity--the

assertion of the individual will in opposition to society--and it

reveals the heart of Mark Twain’s philosophy. The rebel Huck is no

other than the rebel Mark Twain whose wrath was quick to flame up

against the unrighteous customs and laws of caste. If men were only

honest realists--that is, if they were men and not credulous fools--how

quickly the stables might be cleansed and life become decent and

humane. If only the good brains could be segregated and trained in a

real “man-factory,” the history of civilization might become something

the angels need not weep over as they read it. It all comes back to an

honest realism that in accepting fact will clear away the superstitious

fogs in which men have floundered and suffered hitherto. The one sacred

duty laid on every rational being is the duty of rebellion against

sham--to deny the divinity of clothes, to thrust out quack kings and

priests and lords, to refuse a witless loyalty to things. This creed of

the rebel is written all through Mark Twain’s later work, edging his

satire and lending an Emersonian note to his individualism. In such a

passage as this it emerges sharply:

You see my kind of loyalty was loyalty to one’s country, not to

its institutions or its office-holders. The country is the real

thing, the substantial thing, the eternal thing; it is the thing

to watch over, and care for, and be loyal to; institutions are

extraneous, they are its mere clothing, and clothing can wear

out, become ragged, cease to be comfortable, cease to protect the

body from winter, disease, death. To be loyal to rags, to shout

for rags, to worship rags--that is a loyalty to unreason, it is

pure animal; it belongs to monarchy, was invented by monarchy;

let monarchy keep it. I was from Connecticut, whose Constitution

declares “that all political power is inherent in the people, and

all free governments are founded on their authority and instituted

for their benefit; and that they have _at all times_ an undeniable

and indefeasible right to _alter their form of government_ in such

manner as they may think expedient.”

Under that gospel, the citizen who thinks he sees that the

commonwealth’s political clothes are worn out, and yet holds his

peace and does not agitate for a new suit, is disloyal; he is a

traitor. That he may be the only one who thinks he sees this decay,

does not excuse him; it is his duty to agitate anyway, and it is

the duty of others to vote him down if they do not see the matter

as he does.[579]

In the Middle Ages clothes-worship had been exalted to a religion,

he believed, and he turned with gusto to reply to the aristocratic

romanticism of Sir Walter, who, delighting in the picturesque company

gathered in the great hall, forgot to penetrate to the _oubliettes_--is

not the word commentary enough on the ways of the seigneur?--where

nameless wretches were rotting under the walls of the castle. He had

small patience with the cult of medievalism that was turning such

men as Henry Adams and William Morris back to the Middle Ages as to

their lost home. He had the frontier contempt for medieval ways, and

for the _ancien régime_ that was the last rags of the Middle Ages.

The French Revolution had thrust the abomination away forever, and he

thanked God for that “ever memorable and blessed Revolution, which

swept a thousand years of ... villainy away in one swift tidal wave of

blood.” He had no tears for Marie Antoinette. What was the Terror but

“a settlement of that hoary debt in the proportion of half a drop of

blood for each hogshead of it that had been pressed by slow tortures

out of that people in the weary stretch of ten centuries of wrong and

shame and misery the like of which was not to be mated but in hell ...

that unspeakably bitter and awful Terror which none of us has been

taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves.”[580] The past

that had been consumed in that fierce conflagration had been a brutal,

tyrannical, superstitious past, and not till king and priest had been

flung out on the dung-heap did the people walk their native soil as

free men. The whole king business was preposterous to him; with Freneau

he cried, “Kings are the choicest curse that man e’er knew.” The battle

against medievalism had been fought and won and why go maundering back

over past battlefields, when other battles await?[581]

Mark Twain’s passionate republicanism was a product of the

Enlightenment as it had passed into the psychology of western

Americans, and it retained the militant idealism of Jeffersonian times.

It is shot through with the nature philosophy. In _The Prince and the

Pauper_, the heir of Offal Court and the heir of the Tudors are both

children of nature, endowed with warm hearts, generous sympathies,

and clever wits. Put rags on the prince and robes on the pauper and

their own kin cannot tell them apart. The latter, indeed, promises to

make the better king, for he has suffered the lot of the subject, and

not till the prince has put on rags does he come to know his people.

It is caste that breeds cruelty and wrong; the brutalities of the

English criminal code were deviltries devised by king and nobles to

safeguard their stealings. Only when the laws spring from the people

are they just. “The world is made wrong,” cried the young king when

he was brought out of prison to watch the burning at the stake of two

women who had befriended him--women whose only crime was that of being

Baptists--“the world is made wrong, kings should go to school to their

own laws, at times, and so learn mercy.” And this great lesson of mercy

is exemplified in the acts of the pauper king, who during his brief

reign tempers the harshness of the law with a sense of justice learned,

like Huck Finn’s, from sharp contact with reality.

It is in _A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court_--a curious

medley, half philippic and half farce--that Mark Twain’s passion for

justice rises to white heat. The book has been grossly misunderstood.

It is not an attack on chivalry--at least not primarily; it is rather

an attack on thirteen centuries of reputed Christian civilization

that under pretense of serving God has enslaved and despoiled the

children of God. The keen satire is given point and edge by the long

tragic perspective. Thirteen centuries heavy with sorrow and misery

and frustrated hopes--a meaningless succession of foolish and futile

generations, wandering in fogs of their own brewing, hagridden by

superstitions, deceived and exploited by priest and noble, with no will

to be free--here is a perspective to correct our callow enthusiasms,

our revolutionary hopes! Why indeed should we expect men to possess

the will to freedom, seeing that each generation is molded after the

likeness of the past and none has been free? There is change, advance

and recession, but the story of the generations is no more than a “sad

drift between the eternities,” without purpose or meaning. In the

brain of the Connecticut Yankee are secrets hidden from the children of

King Arthur’s time--a curious ability to use the forces of nature, some

glimmerings of social justice. But to what purpose have Hartford and

the nineteenth century used their knowledge? It is a world of slaves

still as it was in King Arthur’s day. The human animal cannot lift

himself to heaven by his own bootstraps, and heaven will not stoop to

lift him. For a “clammy atmosphere of reverence, respect, deference,”

it has substituted smartness, vulgarity, irreverence.

As one slips back and forth between the two worlds the satire takes

on vaster perspectives; it cuts deep into all civilizations, for all

alike are sham, all have issued from the conquest of man’s native

intelligence by his superstitions that are too useful to his masters

to be dissipated. Clearly in Mark Twain’s philosophy of history the

hopes of the Enlightenment are fading. Passionately dedicated to the

program of the Enlightenment--freedom, individuality, humanitarianism,

democracy--his faith in reason, free will, progress, was burning low,

in presence of the historical record. The determinism that lurked

at the bottom of John Locke’s psychology, unperceived by the French

idealists, was revealing itself to Mark Twain and he was already

trimming his sails to the chill winds blowing from the outer spaces of

a mechanistic cosmos.

More immediately of course _A Connecticut Yankee_ is an attack on the

aristocratic romanticism of Sir Walter. There is little loitering in

the great hall--except to comment on the coarseness of the knights

and ladies--and much poking about in unlovely secret places where

one comes upon a rare collection of human animals thrust away in the

_oubliettes_ or pigging together in mean huts. Few chapters in American

literature are so noble in their _saeva indignatio_, so beautiful in

their stern simplicity, as certain sketches of the king’s progress

through his realm--not a royal progress but a peasant’s. There are no

tears in them, they go far beyond that. The scene in the smallpox hut

where the wife is glad her husband and daughters are dead--they are

either in heaven or hell, it makes little difference, for they are no

longer in Britain and so are happy; and the scene of the young mother

hanged for stealing a piece of cloth of an ell’s length or so, hanged

that property in Britain might be safe--such pictures reveal how far

he had traveled from the days of _Roughing It_. He was no longer a

good Federalist-Whig concerned about exploitation and the safeguards

of property. Although he voted the Republican ticket he made merry

over the tariff[582] and he frankly hated the dominant Republican

property-consciousness. Like Lincoln he was for the man rather than the

dollar when the rights of the two clashed. In these later years he was

steadily drifting to the left, on the side of the social underling,

sympathetic with those who do the work of the world. “He never went so

far in socialism, as I have gone,” said Howells, “if he went that way

at all ... but from the first he had a luminous vision of organized

labor as the only present help for workingmen.... There was a time when

I was afraid that his eyes were a little holden from the truth; but in

the very last talk I heard from him I found that I was wrong, and that

this great humorist was as great a humanist as ever.”[583]

It is good for an American to read _A Connecticut Yankee_--and _Joan

of Arc_ as well; for in them is a flame that sears and shrivels the

mean property-consciousness which lays a blight on every civilization.

In the peasant girl of Domrémy, the rapt mystic led by her Voices,

Mark Twain found his ideal, the lily that bloomed out of the muck of

medieval times; and as he contemplated her life and work he was lifted

to the plane of worship. She had waged heroic warfare against the

embattled lies and shams and treacheries of a sordid age, and that she

should have died at the stake was inevitable. What other reward was to

be expected from bishops and kings and suchlike spawn of the devil? Not

till the people grow to manhood can any savior help them, and in that

day they will need no savior but themselves. The Sieur Louis de Conte

struggles with the idea confusedly.

I believe that some day it will be found out that peasants are

people. Yes, beings in a great many respects like ourselves. And

I believe that some day _they_ will find this out, too--and then!

Well, then I think they will rise up and demand to be regarded as

a part of the race, and that by consequence there will be trouble.

Whenever one sees in a book or in a king’s proclamation those words

‘the nation,’ they bring before us the upper classes; only those;

we know no other ‘nation;’ for us and the kings no other ‘nation’

exists. But from the day I saw old D’Arc the peasant acting and

feeling just as I should have acted and felt myself, I have carried

the conviction in my heart that our peasants are not merely

animals, beasts of burden put here by the good God to produce food

and comfort for the ‘nation,’ but something more and better. You

look incredulous. Well, that is your training; it is the training

of everybody; but as for me, I thank that incident for giving me a

better light, and I have never forgotten it.[584]

No Bayard ever did his devoir more knightly to his lady than Mark Twain

to Joan, finding in the noble drama of her life the romance he had

not found at Arthur’s court. The knights of the Round Table were “but

ghosts fighting in the fog,” but Jeanne D’Arc was human and lovable

and divine. And then the outlet through which his idealism had found

release slowly closed in, and he was left alone with his comfortless

speculations. What profits it to rail at the damned human race when man

has about as much chance for happiness as a blind puppy in a sack? The

bitter lot of humanity is due not to institutions alone or chiefly,

it is a part of the mad plan of a bleak mechanical universe. For Mark

Twain the solid earth was dissolving, leaving only a rack behind. It

is futile to lament. A sympathetic heart, indeed, is the last and

bitterest irony--for why weep over an evil exhalation! “_Life itself is

only a vision, a dream ... Nothing exists save empty space--and you._”

In a little while you will be alone in shoreless space, to wander

its limitless solitudes without friend or comrade forever--for you

will remain a _thought_, the only existent thought, and by your

nature inextinguishable, indestructible. But I, your poor servant,

have revealed you to yourself and set you free. Dream other dreams,

and better. Strange, indeed, that you should not have suspected

that your universe and its contents were only dreams, visions,

fiction! Strange, because they are so frankly and hysterically

insane--like all dreams ... the silly creations of an imagination

that is not conscious of its freaks--in a word that they are a

dream, and you the maker of it....[585]

So, like Cabell, Mark Twain asserts that man must build within and

by letting his dreams flow out create for himself such shelter as he

can against the chill of the eternal void. A flea on the epidermis of

earth, nevertheless he is thought and thought is deathless. To such a

conclusion did the buoyant youth of _Roughing It_ arrive in the dun

twilight years. _The Mysterious Stranger_ is only _Tom Sawyer_ retold

in the midnight of his disillusion.

What an ending for a child of the Gilded Age! In his youth a complete

frontiersman, with vast potential wealth within him, he hewed and

hacked at his genius, working the easiest veins, exploiting the most

accessible resources, wasting much to cash in on a little. And when in

the end the fool’s gold turned to ashes in his mouth, as a frontiersman

still he pursued his way alone, a solitary pioneer exploring the

universe, seeking a homestead in an ironical cosmos, until overwhelmed

by the intolerable solitude he made mock at all the gods. What a

commentary on the Gilded Age!

Footnotes

[527] _The Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy, University of

California Chronicle_, Vol. XIII, Number 4.

[528] _Poetical Works_, Vol. I, p. 45.

[529] “At the Funeral of a Minor Poet,” _Ibid._, Vol. II, p. 94.

[530] Ferris Greenslet, _Life of Thomas Bailey Aldrich_, p. 215.

[531] _Ibid._, p. 200.

[532] _Poetical Works_, Vol. II, p. 72.

[533] Ferris Greenslet, _Life of Thomas Bailey Aldrich_, pp. 168-169.

[534] _Ibid._, p. 176.

[535] _Ibid._, p. 205.

[536] Fred Lewis Pattee, _The Development of the American Short Story_,

pp. 171-172. See the entire chapter for a discussion of early realism

in the _Atlantic_.

[537] Preface, p. 5.

[538] Chapter VIII, p. 183.

[539] Chapter IX, p. 100.

[540] _Letters of Sarah Orne Jewett_, pp. 46-47.

[541] _Ibid._, pp. 38-39.

[542] _Ibid._, pp. 186-187.

[543] _Ibid._, p. 23.

[544] Chapter XXXV, p. 350.

[545] Chapter LVII, pp. 519-520.

[546] _Ibid._, p. 563.

[547] See Mabbott, _Short Stories by Walt Whitman_, Columbia University

Press, 1927.

[548] For his late views see Horace Traubel, _With Walt Whitman in

Camden_, Vol. I, p. 99, and elsewhere.

[549] Cleveland Rogers and John Black, _The Gathering of the Forces_,

Vol. I, p. 12.

[550] _Ibid._, Vol. I, pp. 53, 54, 57.

[551] Traubel, _op. cit._, Vol. I, p. 215.

[552] _Ibid._, Vol. I, p. 65.

[553] _Ibid._, Vol. I, pp. 79-80.

[554] _Leaves of Grass_, inclusive edition ed. by Emory Halloway,

Garden City, N. Y., 1927. Hereafter called _Leaves_. “To the States,”

p. 8.

[555] _Ibid._, “By Blue Ontario’s Shore,” p. 297, ll. 21-23.

[556] Constance Mayfield Rourke, _Trumpets of Jubilee_, p 171.

[557] _Ibid._, p. 172.

[558] _Leaves_, “One’s-Self I Sing,” p. 1, ll. 1-2.

[559] _Autobiographia_, p. 73. See also _Democratic Vistas_, p. 74.

[560] _Leaves_, “Roaming in Thought,” p. 233.

[561] “Carlyle from the American Point of View,” in _Specimen Days,

Prose Works_, pp. 174-175.

[562] Rourke, _op. cit._, p. 173.

[563] _Leaves_, “Starting from Paumanok,” p. 14, ll. 22-26; p. 15, ll.

1, 13, 19, 22-23; p. 16, ll. 2, 5-11; p. 17, ll. 7-10.

[564] _Leaves_, p. 349, ll. 18-19.

[565] _Leaves_, p. 43, ll. 9-17.

[566] _Democratic Vistas, Prose Works_, pp. 254-255.

[567] Traubel, _op. cit._, Vol. I, p. 174.

[568] _Ibid._, Vol. I, p. 285.

[569] _Leaves_, “Song of the Broad Axe,” p. 160, ll. 7, 14-20, 21-22;

p. 161, ll. 1-2, 6-7, 10.

[570] Traubel, _op. cit._, Vol. I, p. 101.

[571] _Ibid._, Vol. I, pp. 193, 215.

[572] _Ibid._, Vol. I, p. 223.

[573] _Ibid._ Vol. I, p. 363.

[574] See Norman Foerster, _American Criticism_, pp. 211-222; Lucy

Lockwood Hazard, _The Frontier in American Literature_, pp. 170-177.

[575] _Leaves_, “Thanks in Old Age,” p. 435.

[576] Lucy Lockwood Hazard, _The Frontier in American Literature_, p.

223.

[577] Vol. I, Chapter XXXIII, p. 237.

[578] Chapter 31.

[579] _The Connecticut Yankee_, N. Y., 1917, p. 107.

[580] _Ibid._, Chapter XIII, pp. 105-106.

[581] Cf. Whitman’s view, _The Gathering of the Forces_, Vol. II, pp.

284-286.

[582] See Chapter 33.

[583] W. D. Howells, _My Mark Twain_, p. 43.

[584] _Joan of Arc_, Chapter 37, p. 290.

[585] _The Mysterious Stranger_, p. 151.

Chapter III • Changing Theory