ART
1. BOOTH TARKINGTON
Booth Tarkington is the glass of adolescence and the mold of Indiana.
The hero of his earliest novel, Harkless in _The Gentleman from
Indiana_, drifts through that narrative with a melancholy stride because
he has been seven long years out of college and has not yet set the
prairie on fire. But Mr. Tarkington, at the time of writing distant from
Princeton by about the same number of years and also not yet famous,
could not put up with failure in a hero. So Harkless appears as a mine
of latent splendors. Carlow County idolizes him, evil-doers hate him,
grateful old men worship him, devoted young men shadow his unsuspecting
steps at night in order to protect him from the villains of
Six-Cross-Roads, sweet girls adore him, fortune saves him from dire
adventures, and in the end his fellow-voters choose him to represent
their innumerable virtues in the Congress of their country without his
even dreaming what affectionate game they are at. This from the creator
of Penrod, who at the comical age of twelve so often lays large plans
for proving to the heedless world that he, too, has been a hero all
along! In somewhat happier hours Mr. Tarkington wrote _Monsieur
Beaucaire_, that dainty romantic episode in the life of Prince
Louis-Philippe de Valois, who masquerades as a barber and then as a
gambler at Bath, is misjudged on the evidence of his own disguises,
just escapes catastrophe, and in the end gracefully forgives the
gentlemen and ladies who have been wrong, parting with an exquisite
gesture from Lady Mary Carlisle, the beauty of Bath, who loves him but
who for a few fatal days had doubted. This from the creator of William
Sylvanus Baxter, who at the preposterous age of seventeen imagines
himself another Sydney Carton and after a silent, agonizing,
condescending farewell goes out to the imaginary tumbril!
Just such postures and phantasms of adolescence lie behind all Mr.
Tarkington's more serious plots--and not merely those earlier ones which
he constructed a score of years ago when the mode in fiction was
historical and rococo. Van Revel in _The Two Van Revels_, convinced and
passionate abolitionist, nevertheless becomes as hungry as any
fire-eater of them all the moment Polk moves for war on Mexico, though
to Van Revel the war is an evil madness. In _The Conquest of Canaan_
Louden plays Prince Hal among the lowest his town affords, only to mount
with a rush to the mayoralty when he is ready. _The Guest of Quesnay_
takes a hero who is soiled with every vileness, smashes his head in an
automobile accident, and thus transforms him into that glorious kind of
creature known as a "Greek god"--beautiful and innocent beyond belief or
endurance. _The Turmoil_ is really not much more veracious, with its
ugly duckling, Bibbs Sheridan, who has ideas, loves beauty, and writes
verse, but who after years of futile dreaming becomes a master of
capital almost overnight. Even _The Magnificent Ambersons_, with its
wealth of admirable satire, does not satirize its own conclusion but
rounds out its narrative with a hasty regeneration. And what can a
critic say of such blatant nonsense as arises from the frenzy of
propaganda in _Ramsey Milholland_?
Perhaps it is truer to call Mr. Tarkington's plots sophomoric than to
call them adolescent. Indeed, the mark of the undergraduate almost
covers them, especially of the undergraduate as he fondly imagines
himself in his callow days and as he is foolishly instructed to regard
himself by the more vinous and more hilarious of the old graduates who
annually come back to a college to offer themselves--though this is not
their conscious purpose--as an object lesson in the loud triviality
peculiar and traditional to such hours of reunion. Adolescence, however,
when left to itself, has other and very different hours which Mr.
Tarkington shows almost no signs of comprehending.
The author of _Penrod_, of _Penrod and Sam_, and of _Seventeen_ passes
for an expert in youth; rarely has so persistent a reputation been so
insecurely founded. What all these books primarily recall is the winks
that adults exchange over the heads of children who are minding their
own business, as the adults are not; the winks, moreover, of adults who
have forgotten the inner concerns of adolescence and now observe only
its surface awkwardnesses. Real adolescence, like any other age of man,
has its own passions, its own poetry, its own tragedies and felicities;
the adolescence of Mr. Tarkington's tales is almost nothing but
farce--staged for outsiders. Not one of the characters is an individual;
they are all little monsters--amusing monsters, it is true--dressed up
to display the stock ambitions and the stock resentments and the stock
affectations and the stock perturbations of the heart which attend the
middle teens. The pranks of Penrod Schofield are merely those of Tom
Sawyer repeated in another town, without the touches of poetry or of the
informing imagination lent by Mark Twain. The sighs of "Silly Bill"
Baxter--at first diverting, it is also true--are exorbitantly multiplied
till reality drops out of the semblance. Calf-love does not always
remain a joke merely because there are mature spectators to stand by
nudging one another and roaring at the discomfort which love causes its
least experienced victims. Those knowing asides which accompany these
juvenile records have been mistaken too often for shrewd, even for
profound, analyses of human nature. Actually they are only knowing, as
sophomores are knowing with respect to their juniors by a few years. In
contemporary American fiction Mr. Tarkington is the perennial sophomore.
If he may be said never to have outgrown Purdue and Princeton, so also
may he be said never to have outgrown Indiana. In any larger sense, of
course, he has not needed to. A novelist does not require a universe in
which to find the universe, which lies folded, for the sufficiently
perceptive eye, in any village. Thoreau and Emerson found it in Concord;
Thomas Hardy in Wessex has watched the world move by without himself
moving. But Mr. Tarkington has toward his native state the conscious
attitude of the booster. Smile as he may at the too emphatic patriotism
of this or that of her sons, he himself nevertheless expands under a
similar stimulus. The impulse of Harkless to clasp all Carlow County to
his broad breast obviously sprang from a mood which Mr. Tarkington
himself had felt. And that impulse of that first novel has been
repeated again and again in the later characters. _In the Arena_, fruit
of Mr. Tarkington's term in the Indiana legislature, is a study in
complacency. Setting out to take the world of politics as he finds it,
he comes perilously near to ending on the note of approval for it as it
stands--as good, on the whole, as any possible world. His satire, at
least, is on the side of the established order. A certain soundness and
rightness of feeling, a natural hearty democratic instinct, which
appears in the novels, must not be allowed to mislead the analyst of his
art. More than once, to his credit, he satirically recurs to the
spectacle of those young Indianians who come back from their travels
with a secret condescension, as did George Amberson Minafer: "His
politeness was of a kind which democratic people found hard to bear. In
a word, M. le Duc had returned from the gay life of the capital to show
himself for a week among the loyal peasants belonging to the old
chateau, and their quaint habits and costumes afforded him a mild
amusement." Such passages, however, may be matched with irritating
dozens in which Mr. Tarkington swallows Indiana whole.
That may have been an easier task than to perform a similar feat with
the state to the east of Indiana, which has always been a sort of
halfway house between East and West; or with that to the north, with its
many alien mixtures; or with that to the south, the picturesque,
diversified colony of Virginia; or with that to the west, which, thanks
in large part to Chicago, is packed with savagery and genius. Indiana,
at any rate till very recently, has had an indigenous population, not
too daring or nomadic; it has been both prosperous and folksy, the apt
home of pastorals, the agreeable habitat of a sentimental folk-poet
like Riley, the natural begetter of a canny fabulist like George Ade. It
has a tradition of realism in fiction, but that tradition descends from
_The Hoosier School-Master_ and it includes a full confidence in the
folk and in the rural virtues--very different from that of E.W. Howe or
Hamlin Garland or Edgar Lee Masters in states a little further outside
the warm, cozy circle of the Hoosiers. Indiana has a tradition of
romance, too. Did not Indianapolis publish _When Knighthood Was in
Flower_ and _Alice of Old Vincennes_? They are of the same vintage as
_Monsieur Beaucaire_. And both romance and realism in Indiana have
traditionally worn the same smooth surfaces, the same simple--not to say
silly--faith in things-at-large: God's in His Indiana; all's right with
the world. George Ade, being a satirist of genius, has stood out of all
this; Theodore Dreiser, Indianian by birth but hopelessly a rebel, has
stood out against it; but Booth Tarkington, trying to be Hoosier of
Hoosiers, has given himself up to the romantic and sentimental elements
of the Indiana literary tradition.
To practise an art which is genuinely characteristic of some section of
the folk anywhere is to do what may be important and is sure to be
interesting. But Mr. Tarkington no more displays the naïveté of a true
folk-novelist than he displays the serene vision that can lift a
novelist above the accidents of his particular time and place. This
Indianian constantly appears, by his allusions, to be a citizen of the
world. He knows Europe; he knows New York. Again and again, particularly
in the superb opening chapters of _The Magnificent Ambersons_, he rises
above the local prejudices of his special parish and observes with a
finely critical eye. But whenever he comes to a crisis in the building
of a plot or in the truthful representation of a character he sags down
to the level of Indiana sentimentality. George Minafer departs from the
Hoosier average by being a snob; time--and Mr. Tarkington's plot--drags
the cub back to normality. Bibbs Sheridan departs from the Hoosier
average by being a poet; time--and Mr. Tarkington's plot--drags the cub
back to normality. Both processes are the same. Perhaps Mr. Tarkington
would not deliberately say that snobbery and poetry are equivalent
offenses, but he does not particularly distinguish. Sympathize as he may
with these two aberrant youths, he knows no other solution than in the
end to reduce them to the ranks. He accepts, that is, the casual Hoosier
valuation, not with pity because so many of the creative hopes of youth
come to naught or with regret that the flock in the end so frequently
prevails over individual talent, but with a sort of exultant hurrah at
seeing all the wandering sheep brought back in the last chapter and
tucked safely away in the good old Hoosier fold.
Viewed critically this attitude of Mr. Tarkington's is of course not
even a compliment to Indiana, any more than it is a compliment to women
to take always the high chivalrous tone toward them, as if they were
flawless creatures; any more than it is a compliment to the poor to
assume that they are all virtuous or to the rich to assume that they are
all malefactors of a tyrannical disposition. If Indiana plays microcosm
to Mr. Tarkington's art, he owes it to his state to find more there than
he has found--or has cared to set down; he owes it to his state now and
then to quarrel with the dominant majority, for majorities occasionally
go wrong, as well as men; he owes it to his state to give up his method
of starting his narrative himself and then calling in popular
sentimentalism to advise him how to bring it to an end.
According to all the codes of the more serious kinds of fiction, the
unwillingness--or the inability--to conduct a plot to its legitimate
ending implies some weakness in the artistic character; and this
weakness has been Mr. Tarkington's principal defect. Nor does it in any
way appear that he excuses himself by citing the immemorial license of
the romancer. Mr. Tarkington apparently believes in his own conclusions.
Now this causes the more regret for the reason that he has what is next
best to character in a novelist--that is, knack. He has the knack of
romance when he wants to employ it: a light, allusive manner; a
sufficient acquaintance with certain charming historical epochs and the
"properties" thereto pertaining--frills, ruffs, rapiers, insinuation; a
considerable expertness in the ways of the "world"; gay colors, swift
moods, the note of tender elegy. He has also the knack of satire, which
he employs more frequently than romance. With what a rapid, joyous,
accurate eye he has surveyed the processes of culture in "the Midland
town"! How quickly he catches the first gesture of affectation and how
deftly he sets it forth, entertained and entertaining! From the
chuckling exordium of _The Magnificent Ambersons_ it is but a step to
_The Age of Innocence_ and _Main Street_. Little reflective as he has
allowed himself to be, he has by shrewd observation alone succeeded in
writing not a few chapters which have texture, substance, "thickness."
He has movement, he has energy, he has invention, he has good temper, he
has the leisure to write as well as he can if he wishes to. And, unlike
those dozens of living American writers who once each wrote one good
book and then lapsed into dull oblivion or duller repetition, he has
traveled a long way from the methods of his greener days.
Why then does he continue to trifle with his thread-bare adolescents, as
if he were afraid to write candidly about his coevals? Why does he drift
with the sentimental tide and make propaganda for provincial
complacency? He must know better. He can do better.
_February 1921._
POSTSCRIPT.--He has done better. Almost as if to prove a somewhat somber
critic in the wrong and to show that newer novelists have no monopoly of
the new style of seriousness, Mr. Tarkington has in _Alice Adams_ held
himself veracious to the end and has produced a genuinely significant
book. Alice is, indeed, less strictly a tragic figure than she appears
to be. Desire, in any of the deeper senses, she shows no signs of
feeling; what she loves in Russell is but incidentally himself and
actually his assured position and his assured prosperity. So considered,
her machinations to enchant and hold him have a comic aspect; one touch
more of exaggeration and she would pass over to join those sorry ladies
of the world of farce who take a larger visible hand in wooing than
human customs happen to approve. But Mr. Tarkington withholds that one
touch more of exaggeration. He understands that Alice's instinct to win
a husband is an instinct as powerful as any that she has and is all that
she has been taught by her society to have. In his handling she becomes
important; her struggle, without the aid of guardian dowager or
beguiling dot, becomes increasingly pathetic as the narrative advances;
and her eventual failure, though signalized merely by her resolution to
desert the inhospitable circles of privilege for the wider universe of
work, carries with it the sting of tragedy.
Mr. Tarkington might have gone further than he has behind the bourgeois
assumptions which his story takes for granted, but he has probably been
wiser not to. Sticking to familiar territory, he writes with the
confident touch of a man unconfused by speculation. His style is still
swift, still easy, still flexible, still accurate in its conformity to
the vernacular. He attempts no sentimental detours and permits himself
no popular superfluities. He has retained all his tried qualities of
observation and dexterity while admitting to his work the element of a
sterner conscience than it has heretofore betrayed. With the honesty of
his conclusion goes the mingling of mirth and sadness in _Alice Adams_
as another trait of its superiority. The manners of the young which
have always seemed so amusing to Mr. Tarkington and which he has kept on
watching and laughing at as his principal material, now practically for
the first time have evoked from him a considerate sense of the pathos of
youth. It strengthens the pathos of Alice's fate that the comedy holds
out so well; it enlarges the comedy of it that its pathos is so
essential to the action. Even the most comic things have their tears.
_August 1921._
2. EDITH WHARTON
At the outset of the twentieth century O. Henry, in a mood of reaction
from current snobbism, discovered what he called the Four Million; and
during the same years, in a mood not wholly different, Edith Wharton
rediscovered what she would never have called the Four Hundred. Or
rather she made known to the considerable public which peeps at
fashionable New York through the obliging windows of fiction that that
world was not so simple in its magnificence as the inquisitive, but
uninstructed, had been led to believe. Behind the splendors reputed to
characterize the great, she testified on almost every page of her books,
lay certain arcana which if much duller were also much more desirable.
Those splendors were merely as noisy brass to the finer metal of the
authentic inner circles. These were very small, and they suggested an
American aristocracy rather less than they suggested the aborigines of
their native continent.
Ralph Marvell in _The Custom of the Country_ described Washington
Square as the "Reservation," and prophesied that "before long its
inhabitants would be exhibited at ethnological shows, pathetically
engaged in the exercise of their primitive industries." Mrs. Wharton has
exhibited them in the exercise of industries not precisely primitive,
and yet aboriginal enough, very largely concerned in turning shapely
shoulders to the hosts of Americans anxious and determined to invade
their ancient reservations. As the success of the women in keeping new
aspirants out of drawing-room and country house has always been greater
than the success of the men in keeping them out of Wall Street, the
aboriginal aristocracy in Mrs. Wharton's novels transacts its affairs
for the most part in drawing-rooms and country houses. There, however,
to judge by _The House of Mirth_, _The Custom of the Country_, and _The
Age of Innocence_, the life of the inhabitants, far from being a
continuous revel as represented by the popular novelists, is marked by
nothing so much as an uncompromising decorum.
Take the case of Lily Bart in _The House of Mirth_. She goes to pieces
on the rocks of that decorum, though she has every advantage of birth
except a fortune, and knows the rules of the game perfectly. But she
cannot follow them with the impeccable equilibrium which is needful; she
has the Aristotelian hero's fatal defect of a single weakness. In that
golden game not to go forward is to fall behind. Lily Bart hesitates,
oscillates, and is lost. Having left her appointed course, she finds on
trying to return to her former society that it is little less
impermeable to her than she has seen rank outsiders find it. Then there
is Undine Spragg in _The Custom of the Country_, who, marrying and
divorcing with the happy insensibility of the animals that mate for a
season only, undertakes to force her brilliant, barren beauty into the
centers of the elect. Such beauty as hers can purchase much, thanks to
the desires of men, and Undine, thanks to her own blindness as regards
all delicate disapproval, comes within sight of her goal. But in the end
she fails. The custom of her country--Apex City and the easy-going
West--is not the decorum of New York reinforced by European examples.
Newland Archer and Ellen Olenska in _The Age of Innocence_ neither lose
nor seek an established position within the social mandarinate of
Manhattan as constituted in the seventies of the last century. They
belong there and there they remain. But at what sacrifices of personal
happiness and spontaneous action! They walk through their little drama
with the unadventurous stride of puppets; they observe dozens of taboos
with a respect allied to terror. It is true that they appear to have
been the victims of the provincial "innocence" of their generation, but
the newer generation in New York is not entirely acquitted of a certain
complicity in the formalism of its past.
From the first Mrs. Wharton's power has lain in the ability to reproduce
in fiction the circumstances of a compact community in a way that
illustrates the various oppressions which such communities put upon
individual vagaries, whether viewed as sin, or ignorance, or folly, or
merely as social impossibility. She has, of course, studied other
communities than New York: the priest-ridden Italy of the eighteenth
century in _The Valley of Decision_; modern France in _Madame de
Treymes_ and _The Reef_; provincial New England in _The Fruit of the
Tree_. What characterizes the New York novels characterizes these others
as well: a sense of human beings living in such intimate solidarity that
no one of them may vary from the customary path without in some fashion
breaking the pattern and inviting some sort of disaster.
Novels written out of this conception of existence fall ordinarily into
partizanship, either on the side of the individual who leaves his herd
or on the side of the herd which runs him down or shuts him out for
good. Mrs. Wharton has always been singularly unpartizan, as if she
recognized it as no duty of hers to do more for the herd or its members
than to play over the spectacle of their clashes the long, cold light of
her magnificent irony. At the same time, however, her attitude toward
New York society, her most frequent theme, has slightly changed. _The
House of Mirth_, published in 1905, glows with certain of the colors of
the grand style. These appear hardly at all in _The Age of Innocence_,
published in 1920, as if Mrs. Wharton's feeling for ceremony had
diminished, as if the grand style no longer found her so susceptible as
formerly. Possibly her advance in satire may arise from nothing more
significant than her retreat into the past for a subject. Nevertheless,
one step forward could make her an invaluable satirist of the current
hour.
Among Mrs. Wharton's novels are two--_Ethan Frome_ and _Summer_--which
unfold the tragedy of circumstances apparently as different as possible
from those chronicled in the New York novels. Her fashionable New York
and her rural New England, however, have something in common. In the
desolate communities which witness the agonies of Ethan Frome and
Charity Royall not only is there a stubborn village decorum but there
are also the bitter compulsions of a helpless poverty which binds feet
and wings as the most ruthless decorum cannot bind them, and which
dulls all the hues of life to an unendurable dinginess. As a member of
the class which spends prosperous vacations on the old soil of the
Puritans Mrs. Wharton has surveyed the cramped lives of the native
remnant with a pity springing from her knowledge of all the freedom and
beauty and pleasure which they miss. She consequently brings into her
narrative an outlook not to be found in any of the novelists who write
of rural New England out of the erudition which comes of more intimate
acquaintanceship. Without filing down her characters into types she
contrives to lift them into universal figures of aspiration or
disappointment.
In _Ethan Frome_, losing from her clear voice for a moment the note of
satire, she reaches her highest point of tragic passion. In the bleak
life of Ethan Frome on his bleak hillside there blooms an exquisite love
which during a few hours of rapture promises to transform his fate; but
poverty clutches him, drives him to attempt suicide with the woman he
loves, and then condemns him to one of the most appalling expiations in
fiction--to a slavery in comparison with which his former life was
almost freedom. Not since Hawthorne has a novelist built on the New
England soil a tragedy of such elevation of mood as this. Freed from the
bondage of local color, that myopic muse, Mrs. Wharton here handles her
material not so much like a quarryman finding curious stones and calling
out about them as like a sculptor setting up his finished work on a
commanding hill.
It has regularly been by her novels that Mrs. Wharton has attracted the
most attention, and yet her short stories are of a quite comparable
excellence. About fifty of them altogether, they show her swift,
ironical intelligence flashing its light into numerous corners of human
life not large enough to warrant prolonged reports. She can go as far
afield as to the ascetic ecstasies and agonies of medieval religion, in
_The Hermit and the Wild Woman_; or as to the horrible revenge of Duke
Ercole of Vicenza, in _The Duchess at Prayer_; or as to the murder and
witchcraft of seventeenth-century Brittany, in _Kerfol_. _Kerfol_,
_Afterward_, and _The Lady's Maid's Bell_ are as good ghost stories as
any written in many years. _Bunner Sisters_, an observant, tender
narrative, concerns itself with the declining fortunes of two
shopkeepers of Stuyvesant Square in New York's age of innocence.
For the most part, however, the locality and temper of Mrs. Wharton's
briefer stories are not so remote as these from the center of her
particular world, wherein subtle and sophisticated people stray in the
crucial mazes of art or learning or love. Her artists and scholars are
likely to be shown at some moment in which a passionate ideal is in
conflict with a lower instinct toward profit or reputation, as when in
_The Descent of Man_ an eminent scientist turns his feet ruinously into
the wide green descent to "popular" science, or as when in _The Verdict_
a fashionable painter of talent encounters the work of an obscure genius
and gives up his own career in the knowledge that at best he can never
do but third-rate work. Some such stress of conflict marks almost all
Mrs. Wharton's stories of love, which make up the overwhelming majority
of her work. Love with her in but few cases runs the smooth course
coincident with flawless matrimony. It cuts violently across the
boundaries drawn by marriages of convenience, and it suffers tragic
changes in the objects of its desire.
What opportunity has a free, wilful passion in the tight world Mrs.
Wharton prefers to represent? Either its behavior must be furtive and
hypocritical or else it must incur social disaster. Here again Mrs.
Wharton will not be partizan. If in one story--such as _The Long
Run_--she seems to imply that there is no ignominy like that of failing
love when it comes, yet in another--such as _Souls Belated_--she sets
forth the costs and the entanglements that ensue when individuals take
love into their own hands and defy society. Not love for itself but love
as the most frequent and most personal of all the passions which bring
the community into clashes with its members--this is the subject of Mrs.
Wharton's curiosity and study. Her only positive conclusions about it,
as reflected in her stories, seem to be that love cuts deepest in the
deepest natures and yet that no one is quite so shallow as to love and
recover from it without a scar. Divorce, according to her
representations, can never be quite complete; one of her most amusing
stories, _The Other Two_, recounts how the third husband of a woman
whose first two husbands are still living gradually resolves her into
her true constituency and finds nothing there but what one husband after
another has made of her.
In stories like this Mrs. Wharton occasionally leaves the restraint of
her ordinary manner to wear the keener colors of the satirist. _Xingu_,
for instance, with its famous opening sentence--"Mrs. Ballinger is one
of the ladies who pursue Culture in bands, as though it were dangerous
to meet alone"--has the flash and glitter, and the agreeable
artificiality, of polite comedy. Undine Spragg and the many futile women
whom Mrs. Wharton enjoys ridiculing more than she gives evidence of
enjoying anything else belong nearly as much to the menagerie of the
satirist as to the novelist's gallery. It is only in these moments of
satire that Mrs. Wharton reveals much about her disposition: her
impatience with stupidity and affectation and muddy confusion of mind
and purpose; her dislike of dinginess; her toleration of arrogance when
it is high-bred. Such qualities do not help her, for all her spare,
clean movement, to achieve the march or rush of narrative; such
qualities, for all her satiric pungency, do not bring her into sympathy
with the sturdy or burly or homely, or with the broader aspects of
comedy. Lucidity, detachment, irony--these never desert her (though she
wrote with the hysterical pen that hundreds used during the war). So
great is her self-possession that she holds criticism at arm's length,
somewhat as her chosen circles hold the barbarians. If she had a little
less of this pride of dignity she might perhaps avoid her tendency to
assign to decorum a larger power than it actually exercises, even in the
societies about which she writes. Decorum, after all, is binding chiefly
upon those who accept it without question but not upon passionate or
logical rebels, who are always shattering it with some touch of violence
or neglect; neither does it bind those who stand too securely to be
shaken. For this reason the coils of circumstance and the pitfalls of
inevitability with which Mrs. Wharton besets the careers of her
characters are in part an illusion deftly employed for the sake of
artistic effect. She multiplies them as romancers multiply adventures.
The illusion of reality in her work, however, almost never fails her, so
alertly is her mind on the lookout to avoid vulgar or shoddy romantic
elements. Compared to Henry James, her principal master in fiction, whom
she resembles in respect to subjects and attitude, she lacks exuberance
and richness of texture, but she has more intelligence than he. Compared
to Jane Austen, the novelist among Anglo-Saxon women whom Mrs. Wharton
most resembles, particularly as regards satire and decorum, she is the
more impassioned of the two. It may seem at first thought a little
strange to compare the vivid novels of the author of _The House of
Mirth_ with the mouse-colored narratives of the author of _Pride and
Prejudice_, for the twentieth century has added to all fiction many
overtones not heard in the eighteenth. But of no other woman writer
since Jane Austen can it be said quite so truthfully as of Mrs. Wharton
that her natural, instinctive habitat is a true tower of irony.
3. JAMES BRANCH CABELL
Although most novelists with any historical or scholarly hankerings are
satisfied to invent here a scene and there a plot and elsewhere an
authority, James Branch Cabell has invented a whole province for his
imagination to dwell in. He calls it Poictesme and sets it on the map
of medieval Europe, but it has no more unity of time and place than has
the multitudinous land of _The Faerie Queene_. Around the reigns of Dom
Manuel, Count and Redeemer of Poictesme, epic hero of _Figures of
Earth_, father of the heroine in _The Soul of Melicent_ (later renamed
_Domnei_), father of that Dorothy la Desirée whom Jurgen loved (with
some other women), father also of that Count Emmerich who succeeded
Manuel as ruler at Bellegarde and Storisende--around the reigns of
Manuel and Emmerich the various sagas of Mr. Cabell principally revolve.
Scandinavia, however, conveniently impinges upon their province, with
Constantinople and Barbary, Massilia, Aquitaine, Navarre, Portugal,
Rome, England, Paris, Alexandria, Arcadia, Olympus, Asgard, and the
Jerusalems Old and New. As many ages of history likewise converge upon
Poictesme in its ostensible thirteenth or fourteenth century, from the
most mythological times only a little this side of Creation to the most
contemporary America of Felix Kennaston who lives at comfortable
Lichfield with two motors and with money in four banks but in his mind
habitually bridges the gap by imagined excursions into Poictesme and the
domains adjacent.
Nothing but remarkable erudition in the antiquities as Cockaigne and
Faery could possibly suffice for such adventures as Mr. Cabell's, and he
has very remarkable erudition in all that concerns the regions which
delight him. And where no authorities exist he merrily invents them, as
in the case of his Nicolas of Caen, poet of Normandy, whose tales
_Dizain des Reines_ are said to furnish the source for the ten stories
collected in _Chivalry_, and whose largely lost masterpiece _Le Roman
de Lusignan_ serves as the basis for _Domnei_. One British critic and
rival of Mr. Cabell has lately fretted over the unblushing anachronisms
and confused geography of this parti-colored world. For less dull-witted
scholars these are the very cream of the Cabellian jest.
The cream but not the substance, for Mr. Cabell has a profound creed of
comedy rooted in that romance which is his regular habit. Romance,
indeed, first exercised his imagination, in the early years of the
century when in many minds he was associated with the decorative Howard
Pyle and allowed his pen to move at the languid gait then characteristic
of a dozen inferior romancers. Only gradually did his texture grow
firmer, his tapestry richer; only gradually did his gaiety strengthen
into irony. Although that irony was the progenitor of the comic spirit
which now in his maturity dominates him, it has never shaken off the
romantic elements which originally nourished it. Rather, romance and
irony have grown up in his work side by side. His Poictesme is no less
beautiful for having come to be a country of disillusion; nor has his
increasing sense of the futility of desire robbed him of his old sense
that desire is a glory while it lasts.
He allows John Charteris in _Beyond Life_--for the most part Mr.
Cabell's mouthpiece--to set forth the doctrine that romance is the real
demiurge, "the first and loveliest daughter of human vanity," whereby
mankind is duped--and exalted. "No one on the preferable side of Bedlam
wishes to be reminded of what we are in actuality, even were it
possible, by any disastrous miracle, ever to dispel the mist which
romance has evoked about all human doings." Therefore romance has
created the "dynamic illusions" of chivalry and love and common sense
and religion and art and patriotism and optimism, and therein "the ape
reft of his tail and grown rusty at climbing" has clothed himself so
long that as he beholds himself in the delusive mirrors he has for
centuries held up to nature he believes he is somehow of cosmic
importance. Poor and naked as this aspiring ape must seem to the eye of
reason, asks Mr. Cabell, is there not something magnificent about his
imaginings? Does the course of human life not singularly resemble the
dance of puppets in the hands of a Supreme Romancer? How, then, may any
one declare that romance has become antiquated or can ever cease to be
indispensable to mortal character and mortal interest?
The difference between Mr. Cabell and the popular romancers who in all
ages clutter the scene and for whom he has nothing but amused contempt
is that they are unconscious dupes of the demiurge whereas he, aware of
its ways and its devices, employs it almost as if it were some
hippogriff bridled by him in Elysian pastures and respectfully
entertained in a snug Virginian stable. His attitude toward romance
suggests a cheerful despair: he despairs of ever finding anything truer
than romance and so contents himself with Poictesme and its tributaries.
The favorite themes of romance being relatively few, he has not troubled
greatly to increase them; war and love in the main he finds enough.
Besides these, however, he has always been deeply occupied with one
other theme--the plight of the poet in the world. That sturdy bruiser
Dom Manuel, for instance, is at heart a poet who molds figures out of
clay as his strongest passion, although the world, according to its
custom, conspires against his instinct by interrupting him with love and
war and business, and in the end hustles him away before he has had time
to make anything more lovely or lasting than a reputation as a hero. In
the amazing fantasy _The Cream of the Jest_ Mr. Cabell has embodied the
visions of the romancer Felix Kennaston so substantially that
Kennaston's diurnal walks in Lichfield seem hardly as real as those
nightly ventures which under the guise of Horvendile he makes into the
glowing land he has created. Nor are the two universes separated by any
tight wall which the fancy must leap over: they flow with exquisite
caprice one into another, as indeed they always do in the consciousness
of a poet who, like Kennaston or Mr. Cabell, broods continually over the
problem how best to perform his function: "to write perfectly of
beautiful happenings."
Of all the fine places in the world where beautiful happenings come
together, Mr. Cabell argues, incomparably the richest is in the
consciousness of a poet who is also a scholar. There are to be found the
precious hoarded memories of some thousands of years: high deeds and
burning loves and eloquent words and surpassing tears and laughter.
There, consequently, the romancer may well take his stand, distilling
bright new dreams out of ancient beauty. And if he adds the heady tonic
of an irony springing from a critical intelligence, so much the better.
When Mr. Cabell wishes to represent several different epochs in _The
Certain Hour_ he chooses to tell ten stories of poets--real or
imagined--as the persons in whom, by reason of their superior
susceptibility, the color of their epochs may be most truthfully
discovered; and when he wishes to decant his own wit and wisdom most
genuinely the vessel he normally employs is a poet.
If the poets and warriors who make up the list of Mr. Cabell's heroes
devote their lives almost wholly to love, it is for the reason that no
other emotion interests him so much or seems to him to furnish so many
beautiful happenings about which to write perfectly. Love, like art, is
a species of creation, and the moods which attend it, though illusions,
are miracles none the less. Of the two aspects of love which especially
attract Mr. Cabell he has given the larger share of his attention to the
extravagant worship of women ("domnei") developed out of chivalry--the
worship which began by ascribing to the beloved the qualities of purity
and perfection, of beauty and holiness, and ended by practically
identifying her with the divine. This supernal folly reaches its apogee
in _Domnei_, in the careers of Perion and Melicent who are so uplifted
by ineffable desire that their souls ceaselessly reach out to each other
though obstacles large as continents intervene. For Perion the most
deadly battles are but thornpricks in the quest of Melicent; and such is
Melicent's loyalty during the years of her longing that the possession
of her most white body by Demetrios of Anatolia leaves her soul
immaculate and almost unperturbed. In this tale love is canonized:
throned on alabaster above all the vulgar gods it diffuses among its
worshipers a crystal radiance in which mortal imperfections perish--or
are at least forgotten during certain rapturous hours.
Ordinarily one cynical touch will break such pretty bubbles; but Mr.
Cabell, himself a master of cynical touches and shrewdly anticipant of
them, protects his invention with the competent armor of irony, and now
and then--particularly in the felicitous tenson spoken by Perion and
Demetrios concerning the charms of Melicent--brings mirth and beauty to
an amalgam which bids fair to prove classic metal. A much larger share
of this mirth appears in _Jurgen_, which narrates with phallic candor
the exploits of a middle-aged pawnbroker of Poictesme in pursuit of
immortal desire. Of course he does not find it, for the sufficient
reason that, as Mr. Cabell understands such matters, the ultimate magic
of desire lies in the inaccessibility of the desired; and Jurgen, to
whom all women in his amorous Cockaigne are as accessible as bread and
butter, after his sly interval of rejuvenation comes back in the end to
his wife and his humdrum duty with a definite relief. He may be no more
in love with Dame Lisa than with his right hand, and yet both are
considerably more necessary to his well-being, he discovers, than a
number of more exciting things.
Love in _Jurgen_ inclines toward another aspect of the passion which Mr.
Cabell has studied somewhat less than the chivalrous--the aspect of
gallantry. "I have read," says John Charteris, "that the secret of
gallantry is to accept the pleasures of life leisurely, and its
inconveniences with a shrug; as well as that, among other requisites,
the gallant person will always consider the world with a smile of
toleration, and his own doings with a smile of honest amusement, and
Heaven with a smile which is not distrustful--being thoroughly persuaded
that God is kindlier than the genteel would regard as rational." These
are the accents, set to slightly different rhythms, of a Congreve; and
if there is anything as remarkable about Mr. Cabell as the fact that he
has represented the chivalrous and the gallant attitudes toward love
with nearly equal sympathy, it is the fact that in an era of militant
naturalism and of renascent moralism he has blithely adhered to an
affection for unconcerned worldliness and has airily played Congreve in
the midst of all the clamorous, serious, disquisitive bassoons of the
national orchestra.
In _The Cords of Vanity_ Robert Townsend goes gathering roses and
tasting lips almost as if the second Charles were still the lawful ruler
of his obedient province of Virginia; and in _The Rivet in Grandfather's
Neck_ Rudolph Musgrave, that quaint figure whittled out of chivalry and
dressed up in amiable heroics, is plainly contrasted with the glib rogue
of genius John Charteris, who, elsewhere in Mr. Cabell's books generally
the chorus, here enters the plot and exhibits a sorry gallantry in
action. Poictesme, these novels indicate, is not the only country Mr.
Cabell knows; he knows also how to feel at home, when he cares to, in
the mimic universe of Lichfield and Fairhaven, where gay ribbons
perpetually flutter, and where eyes and hands perpetually invite, and
where love runs a deft, dainty, fickle course in all weathers.
That Felix Kennaston inhabits Lichfield in the flesh and in the spirit
elopes into Poictesme may be taken, after a fashion, as allegory with an
autobiographical foundation: _The Cream of the Jest_ is, on the whole,
the essence of Cabell. The book suggests, moreover, a critical
position--which is, that gallantry and Virginia have so far been
regrettably sacrificed to chivalry and Poictesme in the career of Mr.
Cabell's imagination. Not only the symmetry expected of that career
demands something different; so does its success with the gallantries of
Lichfield. In spite of all Mr. Cabell's accumulation of erudite
allusions the atmosphere of his Poictesme often turns thin and leaves
his characters gasping for vital breath; nor does he entirely restore it
by multiplying symbols as he does in _Jurgen_ and _Figures of Earth_
until the background of his narrative is studded with rich images and
piquant chimeras that perplex more than they illuminate--and sometimes
bore. These chivalric loves beating their heads against the cold moon
are, after all, follies, however supernal; they are as brief as they are
bright; in the end even the greedy Jurgen turns back to honest salt from
too much sugar.
Now in gallantry as Mr. Cabell conceives and represents it there is
always the salt of prudence, of satire, of comedy; and his gifts in this
direction are too great to be neglected. The comic spirit, let it be
remembered, has led Mr. Cabell from the softness and sweetness which in
spots disfigured his earlier romances--such as _The Line of Love and
Chivalry_--before he recently revised them; it has happily kept in hand
the wild wings of his later love stories; now it deserves to have its
way unburdened, at least occasionally. While it almost had its way in
Jurgen, where it behaved like a huge organ bursting into uproarious
laughter, it still had to carry the burden of much learning. It would be
freer of such delectable plunder could it once burst into uproar in the
midst of Virginia. Mr. Cabell has singled out two very dissimilar poets
for particular compliment: Marlowe and Congreve. As regards the still
more particular compliment of imitation, however, he has done Congreve
rather less than justice.
4. WILLA CATHER
When Willa Cather dedicated her first novel, _O Pioneers!_, to the
memory of Sarah Orne Jewett, she pointed out a link of natural piety
binding her to a literary ancestor now rarely credited with descendants
so robust. The link holds even yet in respect to the clear outlines and
fresh colors and simple devices of Miss Cather's art; in respect to the
body and range of her work it never really held. The thin, fine
gentility which Miss Jewett celebrates is no further away from the rich
vigor of Miss Cather's pioneers than is the kindly sentiment of the
older woman from the native passion of the younger. Miss Jewett wrote of
the shadows of memorable events. Once upon a time, her stories all
remind us, there was an heroic cast to New England. In Miss Jewett's
time only the echoes of those Homeric days made any noise in the
world--at least for her ears and the ears of most of her literary
contemporaries. Unmindful of the roar of industrial New England she
kept to the milder regions of her section and wrote elegies upon the
epigones.
In Miss Cather's quarter of the country there were still heroes during
the days she has written about, still pioneers. The sod and swamps of
her Nebraska prairies defy the hands of labor almost as obstinately as
did the stones and forests of old New England. Her Americans, like all
the Agamemnons back of Miss Jewett's world, are fresh from Europe,
locked in a mortal conflict with nature. If now and then the older among
them grow faint at remembering Bohemia or France or Scandinavia, this is
not the predominant mood of their communities. They ride powerfully
forward on a wave of confident energy, as if human life had more dawns
than sunsets in it. For the most part her pioneers are unreflective
creatures, driven by some inner force which they do not comprehend: they
are, that is perhaps no more than to say, primitive and epic in their
dispositions.
Is it by virtue of a literary descent from the New England school that
Miss Cather depends so frequently upon women as protagonists? Alexandra
Bergson in _O Pioneers!_, Thea Kronborg in _The Song of the Lark_,
Ántonia Shimerda in _My Ántonia_--around these as girls and women the
actions primarily revolve. It is not, however, as other Helens or
Gudruns that they affect their universes; they are not the darlings of
heroes but heroes themselves. Alexandra drags her dull brothers after
her and establishes the family fortunes; Ántonia, less positive and more
pathetic, still holds the center of her retired stage by her rich,
warm, deep goodness; Thea, a genius in her own right, outgrows her
Colorado birthplace and becomes a famous singer with all the fierce
energy of a pioneer who happens to be an instinctive artist rather than
an instinctive manager, like Alexandra, or an instinctive mother, like
Ántonia. And is it because women are here protagonists that neither
wars, as among the ancients, nor machines, as among the moderns, promote
the principal activities of the characters? Less the actions than the
moods of these novels have the epic air. Narrow as Miss Cather's scene
may be, she fills it with a spaciousness and candor of personality that
quite transcends the gnarled eccentricity and timid inhibitions of the
local colorists. Passion blows through her chosen characters like a
free, wholesome, if often devastating wind; it does not, as with Miss
Jewett and her contemporaries, lurk in furtive corners or hide itself
altogether. And as these passions are most commonly the passions of
home-keeping women, they lie nearer to the core of human existence than
if they arose out of the complexities of a wider region.
Something more than Miss Cather's own experience first upon the frontier
and then among artists and musicians has held her almost entirely to
those two worlds as the favored realms of her imagination. In them,
rather than in bourgeois conditions, she finds the theme most congenial
to her interest and to her powers. That theme is the struggle of some
elect individual to outgrow the restrictions laid upon him--or more
frequently her--by numbing circumstances. The early, somewhat
inconsequential _Alexander's Bridge_ touches this theme, though Bartley
Alexander, like the bridge he is building, fails under the strain,
largely by reason of a flawed simplicity and a divided energy. Pioneers
and artists, in Miss Cather's understanding of their natures, are
practically equals in single-mindedness; at least they work much by
themselves, contending with definite though ruthless obstacles and
looking forward, if they win, to a freedom which cannot be achieved in
the routine of crowded communities. To become too much involved, for her
characters, is to lose their quality. There is Marie Tovesky, in _O
Pioneers!_, whom nothing more preventable than her beauty and gaiety
drags into a confused status and so on to catastrophe. Ántonia, tricked
into a false relation by her scoundrel lover, and Alexandra, nagged at
by her stodgy family because her suitor is poor, suffer temporary
eclipses from which only their superb health of character finally
extricates them. Thea Kronborg, troubled by the swarming sensations of
her first year in Chicago, has to find her true self again in that
marvelous desert canyon in Arizona where hot sun and bright, cold water
and dim memories of the cliff-dwelling Ancient People detach her from
the stupid faces which have haunted and unnerved her.
Miss Cather would not belong to her generation if she did not resent the
trespasses which the world regularly commits upon pioneers and artists.
For all the superb vitality of her frontier, it faces--and she knows it
faces--the degradation of its wild freedom and beauty by clumsy towns,
obese vulgarity, the uniform of a monotonous standardization. Her heroic
days endure but a brief period before extinction comes. Then her
high-hearted pioneers survive half as curiosities in a new order; and
their spirits, transmitted to the artists who are their legitimate
successors, take up the old struggle in a new guise. In the short story
called _The Sculptor's Funeral_ she lifts her voice in swift anger and
in _A Gold Slipper_ she lowers it to satirical contempt against the dull
souls who either misread distinction or crassly overlook it.
At such moments she enlists in the crusade against dulness which has
recently succeeded the hereditary crusade of American literature against
wickedness. But from too complete an absorption in that transient war
she is saved by the same strength which has lifted her above the more
trivial concerns of local color. The older school uncritically delighted
in all the village singularities it could discover; the newer school no
less uncritically condemns and ridicules all the village
conventionalities. Miss Cather has seldom swung far either to the right
or to the left in this controversy. She has, apparently, few revenges to
take upon the communities in which she lived during her expanding youth.
An eye bent too relentlessly upon dulness could have found it in
Alexandra Bergson, with her slow, unimaginative thrift; or in Ántonia
Shimerda, who is a "hired girl" during the days of her tenderest beauty
and the hard-worked mother of many children on a distant farm to the end
of the story. Miss Cather, almost alone among her peers in this decade,
understands that human character for its own sake has a claim upon human
interest, surprisingly irrespective of the moral or intellectual
qualities which of course condition and shape it.
"Her secret?" says Harsanyi of Thea Kronborg in _The Song of the Lark_.
"It is every artist's secret ... passion. It is an open secret, and
perfectly safe. Like heroism, it is inimitable in cheap materials." In
these words Miss Cather furnishes an admirable commentary upon the
strong yet subtle art which she herself practises. Fiction habitually
strives to reproduce passion and heroism and in all but chosen instances
falls below the realities because it has not truly comprehended them or
because it tries to copy them in cheap materials. It is not Miss
Cather's lucid intelligence alone, though that too is indispensable,
which has kept her from these ordinary blunders of the novelist: she
herself has the energy which enables her to feel passion and the honesty
which enables her to reproduce it. Something of the large tolerance
which she must have felt in Whitman before she borrowed from him the
title of _O Pioneers!_ breathes in all her work. Like him she has tasted
the savor of abounding health; like him she has exulted in the sense of
vast distances, the rapture of the green earth rolling through space,
the consciousness of past and future striking hands in the radiant
present; like him she enjoys "powerful uneducated persons" both as the
means to a higher type and as ends honorable in themselves. At the same
time she does not let herself run on in the ungirt dithyrambs of Whitman
or into his followers' glorification of sheer bulk and impetus. Taste
and intelligence hold her passion in hand. It is her distinction that
she combines the merits of those oddly matched progenitors, Miss Jewett
and Walt Whitman: she has the delicate tact to paint what she sees with
clean, quiet strokes; and she has the strength to look past casual
surfaces to the passionate center of her characters.
The passion of the artist, the heroism of the pioneer--these are the
human qualities Miss Cather knows best. Compared with her artists the
artists of most of her contemporaries seem imitated in cheap materials.
They suffer, they rebel, they gesticulate, they pose, they fail through
success, they succeed through failure; but only now and then do they
have the breathing, authentic reality of Miss Cather's painters and
musicians. Musicians she knows best among artists--perhaps has been most
interested in them and has associated most with them because of the
heroic vitality which a virtuoso must have to achieve any real eminence.
The poet may languish over verses in his garret, the painter or sculptor
over work conceived and executed in a shy privacy; but the great singer
must be an athlete and an actor, training for months and years for the
sake of a few hours of triumph before a throbbing audience. It is,
therefore, not upon the revolt of Thea Kronborg from her Colorado
village that Miss Cather lays her chief stress but upon the girl's hard,
unspeculative, daemonic integrity. She lifts herself from alien
conditions hardly knowing what she does, almost as a powerful animal
shoulders its instinctive way through scratching underbrush to food and
water. Thea may be checked and delayed by all sorts of human
complications but her deeper nature never loses the sense of its proper
direction. Ambition with her is hardly more than the passion of
self-preservation in a potent spirit.
That Miss Cather no less truly understands the quieter attributes of
heroism is made evident by the career of Ántonia Shimerda--of Miss
Cather's heroines the most appealing. Ántonia exhibits the ordinary
instincts of self-preservation hardly at all. She is gentle and
confiding; service to others is the very breath of her being. Yet so
deep and strong is the current of motherhood which runs in her that it
extricates her from the level of mediocrity as passion itself might fail
to do. Goodness, so often negative and annoying, amounts in her to an
heroic effluence which imparts the glory of reality to all it touches.
"She lent herself to immemorial human attitudes which we recognize as
universal and true.... She had only to stand in the orchard, to put her
hand on a little crab tree and look up at the apples, to make you feel
the goodness of planting and tending and harvesting at last.... She was
a rich mine of life, like the founders of early races." It is not easy
even to say things so illuminating about a human being; it is all but
impossible to create one with such sympathetic art that words like these
at the end confirm and interpret an impression already made.
_My Ántonia_, following _O Pioneers!_ and _The Song of the Lark_, holds
out a promise for future development that the work of but two or three
other established American novelists holds out. Miss Cather's recent
volume of short stories _Youth and the Bright Medusa_, striking though
it is, represents, it may be hoped, but an interlude in her brilliant
progress. Such passion as hers only rests itself in brief tales and
satire; then it properly takes wing again to larger regions of the
imagination. Vigorous as it is, its further course cannot easily be
foreseen; it has not the kind of promise that can be discounted by
confident expectations. Her art, however, to judge it by its past
career, can be expected to move in the direction of firmer structure and
clearer outline. After all she has written but three novels and it is
not to be wondered at that they all have about them certain of the
graceful angularities of an art not yet complete. _O Pioneers!_ contains
really two stories; _The Song of the Lark_, though Miss Cather cut away
an entire section at the end, does not maintain itself throughout at the
full pitch of interest; the introduction to _My Ántonia_ is largely
superfluous. Having freed herself from the bondage of "plot" as she has
freed herself from an inheritance of the softer sentiments, Miss Cather
has learned that the ultimate interest of fiction inheres in character.
It is a question whether she can ever reach the highest point of which
she shows signs of being capable unless she makes up her mind that it is
as important to find the precise form for the representation of a
memorable character as it is to find the precise word for the expression
of a memorable idea. At present she pleads that if she must sacrifice
something she would rather it were form than reality. If she desires
sufficiently she can have both.
5. JOSEPH HERGESHEIMER
Joseph Hergesheimer employs his creative strategy over the precarious
terrain of the decorative arts, some of his work lying on each side of
the dim line which separates the most consummate artifice of which the
hands of talent are capable from the essential art which springs
naturally from the instincts of genius. On the side of artifice,
certainly, lie several of the shorter stories in _Gold and Iron_ and
_The Happy End_, for which, he declares, his grocer is as responsible as
any one; and on the side of art, no less certainly, lie at least _Java
Head_, in which artifice, though apparent now and then, repeatedly
surrenders the field to an art which is admirably authentic, and _Linda
Condon_, nearly the most beautiful American novel since Hawthorne and
Henry James.
Standing thus in a middle ground between art and artifice Mr.
Hergesheimer stands also in a middle ground between the unrelieved
realism of the newer school of American fiction and the genteel moralism
of the older. "I had been spared," he says with regard to moralism, "the
dreary and impertinent duty of improving the world; the whole discharge
of my responsibility was contained in the imperative obligation to see
with relative truth, to put down the colors and scents and emotions of
existence." And with regard to realism: "If I could put on paper an
apple tree rosy with blossom, someone else might discuss the economy of
the apples."
Mr. Hergesheimer does not, of course, merely blunder into beauty; his
methods are far from being accidental; by deliberate aims and principles
he holds himself close to the regions of the decorative. He likes the
rococo and the Victorian, ornament without any obvious utility, grace
without any busy function. He refuses to feel confident that the passing
of elegant privilege need be a benefit: "A maze of clipped box, old
emerald sod, represented a timeless striving for superiority, for, at
least, the illusion of triumph over the littorals of slime; and their
destruction in waves of hysteria, sentimentality, and envy was
immeasurably disastrous." For himself he clings sturdily, ardently, to
loveliness wherever he finds it--preferring, however, its richer, its
elaborated forms.
To borrow an antithesis remarked by a brilliant critic in the work of
Amy Lowell, Mr. Hergesheimer seems at times as much concerned with the
stuffs as with the stuff of life. His landscapes, his interiors, his
costumes he sets forth with a profusion of exquisite details which gives
his texture the semblance of brocade--always gorgeous but now and then a
little stiff with its splendors of silk and gold. An admitted personal
inclination to "the extremes of luxury" struggles in Mr. Hergesheimer
with an artistic passion for "words as disarmingly simple as the leaves
of spring--as simple and as lovely in pure color--about the common
experience of life and death"; and more than anything else this conflict
explains the presence in all but his finest work of occasional heavy
elements which weight it down and the presence in his most popular
narratives of a constant lift of beauty and lucidity which will not let
them sag into the average.
One comes tolerably close to the secret of Mr. Hergesheimer's career by
perceiving that, with an admirable style of which he is both conscious
and--very properly--proud, he has looked luxuriously through the world
for subjects which his style will fit. Particularly has he emancipated
himself from bondage to nook and corner. The small inland towns of _The
Lay Anthony_, the blue Virginia valleys of _Mountain Blood_, the
evolving Pennsylvania iron districts of _The Three Black Pennys_, the
antique Massachusetts of _Java Head_, the fashionable hotels and houses
of _Linda Condon_, the scattered exotic localities of the short
stories--in all these Mr. Hergesheimer is at home with the cool
insouciance of genius, at home as he could not be without an erudition
founded in the keenest observation and research.
At the same time, he has not satisfied himself with the bursting
catalogues of some types of naturalism. "The individuality of places and
hours absorbed me ... the perception of the inanimate moods of place....
Certainly houses and night and hills were often more vivid to me than
the people in or out of them." He has loved the scenes wherein his
events are transacted; he has brooded over their moods, their
significances. Neither pantheistic, however, nor very speculative, Mr.
Hergesheimer does not endow places with a half-divine, a half-satanic
sentience; instead he works more nearly in the fashion of his master
Turgenev, or of Flaubert, scrutinizing the surfaces of landscapes and
cities and human habitations until they gradually reveal what--for the
particular observer--is the essence of their charm or horror, and come,
obedient to the evoking imagination, into the picture.
Substantial as Mr. Hergesheimer makes his scene by a masterful handling
of locality, he goes still further, adds still another dimension, by his
equally masterful handling of the past as an element in his microcosm.
"There was at least this to be said for what I had, in writing, laid
back in point of time--no one had charged me with an historical novel,"
he boasts. Readers in general hardly notice how large a use of history
appears in, for instance, _The Three Black Pennys_ and _Java Head_. The
one goes as far back as to colonial Pennsylvania for the beginning of
its chronicle and the other as far as to Salem in the days of the first
clipper ship; and yet by no paraphernalia of languid airs or archaic
idioms or strutting heroics does either of the novels fall into the
orthodox historical tradition. They have the vivid, multiplied detail of
a contemporary record. And this is the more notable for the reason that
the characters in each of them stand against the background of a highly
technical profession--that of iron-making through three generations,
that of shipping under sail to all the quarters of the earth. The
wharves of Mr. Hergesheimer's Salem, the furnaces of his Myrtle Forge,
are thick with accurate, pungent, delightful facts.
If he has explored the past in a deliberate hunt for picturesque images
of actuality with which to incrust his narrative, and has at
times--particularly in _The Three Black Pennys_--given it an exaggerated
patina, nevertheless he has refused to yield himself to the mere spell
of the past and has regularly subdued its "colors and scents and
emotions" to his own purposes. His materials may be rococo, but not his
use of them. The conflict between his personal preference for luxury and
his artistic passion for austerity shows itself in his methods with
history: though the historical periods which interest him are bounded,
one may say, by the minuet and the music-box, he permits the least
possible contagion of prettiness to invade his plots. They are fresh and
passionate, simple and real, however elaborate their trappings. With the
fullest intellectual sophistication, Mr. Hergesheimer has artistically
the courage of naïveté. He subtracts nothing from the common realities
of human character when he displays it in some past age, but preserves
it intact. The charming erudition of his surfaces is added to reality,
not substituted for it.
Without question the particular triumph of these novels is the women who
appear in them. Decorative art in fiction has perhaps never gone
farther than with Taou Yuen, the marvelous Manchu woman brought home
from Shanghai to Salem as wife of a Yankee skipper in _Java Head_. She
may be taken as focus and symbol of Mr. Hergesheimer's luxurious
inclinations. By her bewildering complexity of costume, by her intricate
ceremonial observances, by the impenetrability of her outward demeanor,
she belongs rather to art than to life--an Oriental Galatea radiantly
adorned but not wholly metamorphosed from her native marble. Only at
intervals does some glimpse or other come of the tender flesh shut up in
her magnificent garments or of the tender spirit schooled by flawless,
immemorial discipline to an absolute decorum. That such glimpses come
just preserves her from appearing a mere figure of tapestry, a fine
mechanical toy. The Salem which before her arrival seems quaintly formal
enough immediately thereafter seems by contrast raw and new, and her
beauty glitters like a precious gem in some plain man's house.
Much the same effect, on a less vivid scale, is produced in _The Three
Black Pennys_ by the presence on the Pennsylvania frontier--it is almost
that--of Ludowika Winscombe, who has always lived at Court and who
brings new fragrances, new dainty rites, into the forest; and in
_Mountain Blood_ by the presence among the Appalachian highlands of that
ivory, icy meretrix Meta Beggs who plans to drive the best possible
bargain for her virgin favors. Meta carries the decorative traits of Mr.
Hergesheimer's women to the point at which they suggest the marionette
too much; by his methods, of course, he habitually runs the risk of
leaving the flesh and blood out of his women. He leaves out, at least,
with no fluttering compunctions, any special concern for the simpler
biological aspects of the sex: "It was not what the woman had in common
with a rabbit that was important, but her difference. On one hand that
difference was moral, but on the other aesthetic; and I had been
absorbed by the latter." "I couldn't get it into my head that
loveliness, which had a trick of staying in the mind at points of death
when all service was forgotten, was rightly considered to be of less
importance than the sweat of some kitchen drudge."
Such robust doctrine is a long way from the customary sentimentalism of
novelists about maids, wives, mothers, and widows. Indeed, Mr.
Hergesheimer, like Poe before him, inclines very definitely toward
beauty rather than toward humanity, where distinctions may be drawn
between them. In Linda Condon, however, his most remarkable creation, he
has brought humanity and beauty together in an intimate fusion. Less
exotic than Taou Yuen, Linda, with her straight black bang and her
extravagant simplicity of taste, is no less exquisite. And like Taou
Yuen she affords Mr. Hergesheimer the opportunity he most desires--"to
realize that sharp sense of beauty which came from a firm, delicate
consciousness of certain high pretensions, valors, maintained in the
face of imminent destruction.... In that category none was sharper than
the charm of a woman, soon to perish, in a vanity of array as momentary
and iridescent as a May-fly." It is as the poet musing upon the fleet
passage of beauty rather than as the satirist mocking at the vanity of
human wishes that Mr. Hergesheimer traces the career of Linda Condon;
but both poet and satirist meet in his masterpiece.
A woman as lovely as a lyric, she is almost as insensible as a steel
blade or a bright star. The true marvel is that beauty so cold can
provoke such conflagrations. Granted--and certain subtle women decline
to grant it--that Linda with her shining emptiness could have kindled
the passion she kindles in the story, what must be the blackness of her
discovery that when her beauty goes she will have left none of the
generous affection which, had she herself given it through life, she
might by this time have earned in quantities sufficient to endow and
compensate her for old age! Mr. Hergesheimer does not soften the blow
when it comes--he even adds to her agony the clear consciousness that
she cannot feel her plight as more passionate natures might. But he
allows her, at the last, an intimation of immortality. From her
unresponding beauty, she sees, her sculptor lover has caught a madness
eventually sublimated to a Platonic vision which, partially forgetful of
her as an individual, has made him and his works great. Without, in the
common way, modeling her at all, he has snared the essence of her spirit
and has set it--as such mortal things go--everlastingly in bronze.
If Mr. Hergesheimer offers Linda in the end only the hard comfort of a
perception come at largely through her intellect, still as far as the
art of his novel is concerned he has immensely gained by his refusal to
make any trivial concession to natural weaknesses. His latest conclusion
is his best. _The Lay Anthony_ ends in accident, _Mountain Blood_ in
melodrama; _The Three Black Pennys_, more successful than its
predecessors, fades out like the Penny line; _Java Head_ turns sharply
away from its central theme, almost as if _Hamlet_ should concern itself
during a final scene with Horatio's personal perplexities. Now the
conclusions of a novelist are on the whole the test of his judgment and
his honesty; and it promises much for fiction that Mr. Hergesheimer has
advanced so steadily in this respect through his seven books.
He has advanced, too, in his use of decoration, which reached its most
sumptuous in _Java Head_ and which in _Linda Condon_ happily began to
show a more austere control. The question which criticism asks is
whether Mr. Hergesheimer has not gone as far as a practitioner of the
decorative arts can go, and whether he ought not, during the remainder
of the eminent career which awaits him, to work rather in the direction
marked by _Linda Condon_ than in that marked by _Java Head_. The rumor
that his friends advise him to become a "period novelist" must disquiet
his admirers--even those among them who cannot think him likely to act
upon advice so dangerous to his art. Doubtless he could go on and write
another _Salammbô,_ but he does not need to: he has already written
_Java Head_. When a novelist has reached the limits of decoration there
still stretches out before him the endless road--which Mr. Hergesheimer
has given evidence that he can travel--of the interpretation and
elucidation of human character and its devious fortunes in the world.