Whitman believed to have been finally cemented by the Civil War, and
which has such import for the future of our democracy. There are
likewise communal loyalties, glowing with the new idealism which has
come with the twentieth century: ethical, municipal, industrial, and
artistic movements which are full of promise for the higher life of the
country, but which have not yet had time to express themselves
adequately in literature. There are stirrings of racial loyalty among
this and that element of our composite population,--as for instance
among the gifted younger generation of American Jews,--a racial loyalty
not antagonistic to the American current of ideas, but rather in full
unison with it. Internationalism itself furnishes motives for the
activity of the noblest imaginations, and the true literature of
internationalism has hardly yet begun. It is in the play and
counterplay of these new forces that the American literature of the
twentieth century must measure itself. Communal feelings novel to
Americans bred under the accepted individualism will doubtless assert
themselves in our prose and verse. But it is to be remembered that the
best writing thus far produced on American soil has been a result of
the old conditions: of the old "Reverences"; of the pioneer training of
mind and body; of the slow tempering of the American spirit into an
obstinate idealism. We do not know what course the ship may take in the
future, but
"We know what Master laid thy keel,
What Workman wrought thy ribs of steel,
Who made each mast and sail and rope,
What anvil rang, what hammers beat,
In what a forge and what a heat
Were shaped the anchors of thy hope!"
IV
Romance and Reaction
The characteristic attitude of the American mind, as we have seen, is
one of idealism. We may now venture to draw a smaller circle within
that larger circle of idealistic impulses, and to label the smaller
circle "romance." Here, too, as with the word "idealism," although we
are to make abundant use of literary illustrations of national
tendencies, we have no need of a severely technical definition of
terms. When we say, "Tom is an idealist" and "Lorenzo is a romantic
fellow," we convey at least one tolerably clear distinction between Tom
and Lorenzo. The idealist has a certain characteristic habit of mind or
inclination of spirit. When confronted by experience, he reacts in a
certain way. In his individual and social impulses, in the travail of
his soul, or in his commerce with his neighbors and the world, he
behaves in a more or less well-defined fashion. The romanticist, when
confronted by the same objects and experiences, exhibits another type
of behavior. Lorenzo, though he be Tom's brother, is a different
fellow; he is--in the opinion of his friends, at least--a rather more
peculiar person, a creature of more varying moods, of heightened
feelings, of stranger ways. Like Tom, he is a person of sentiment, but
his sentiment attaches itself, not so much to everyday aspects of
experience, as to that which is unusual or terrifying, lovely or far
away; he possesses, or would like to possess, bodily or spiritual
daring. He has the adventurous heart. He is of those who love to go
down to the sea in ships and do business in great waters. Lorenzo the
romanticist is made of no finer clay than Tom the idealist, but his
nerves are differently tuned. Your deep-sea fisherman, after all, is
only a fisherman at bottom. That is to say, he too is an idealist, but
he wants to catch different species of fish from those which drop into
the basket of the landsman. Precisely what he covets, perhaps he does
not know. I was once foolish enough to ask an old Alsatian soldier who
was patiently holding his rod over a most unpromising canal near
Strassburg, what kind of fish he was fishing for. "All kinds," was his
rebuking answer, and I took off my hat to the veteran romanticist.
The words "romance" and "romanticism" have been repeated to the ears of
our generation with wearisome iteration. Not the least of the good luck
of Wordsworth and Coleridge lay in the fact that they scarcely knew
that they were "romanticists." Middle-aged readers of the present day
may congratulate themselves that in their youth they read Wordsworth
and Coleridge simply because it was Wordsworth and Coleridge and not
documents illustrating the history of the romantic movement. But the
rising generation is sophisticated. For better or worse it has been
taught to distinguish between the word "romance" on the one side, and
the word "romanticism" on the other. "Romantic" is a useful but
overworked adjective which attaches itself indiscriminately to both
"romance" and "romanticism." Professor Vaughan, for example, and a
hundred other writers, have pointed out that in the narrower and more
usual sense, the words "romance" and "romanticism" point to a love of
vivid coloring and strongly marked contrasts; to a craving for the
unfamiliar, the marvellous, and the supernatural. In the wider and
less definite sense, they signify a revolt from the purely intellectual
view of man's nature; a recognition of the instincts and the passions,
a vague intimation of sympathy between man and the world around
him,--in one word, the sense of mystery. The narrower and the broader
meanings pass into one another by imperceptible shades. They are
affected by the well-known historic conditions for romantic feeling in
the different European countries. The common factor, of course, is the
man with the romantic world set in his heart. It is Gautier with his
love of color, Victor Hugo enraptured with the sound of words, Heine
with his self-destroying romantic irony, Novalis with his blue flower,
and Maeterlinck with his _Blue Bird_.
But these romantic men of letters, writing in epochs of romanticism,
are by no means the only children of romance. Sir Humphrey Gilbert and
Sir Walter Raleigh were as truly followers of "the gleam" as were
Spenser or Marlowe. The spirit of romance is found wherever and
whenever men say to themselves, as Don Quixote's niece said of her
uncle, that "they wish better bread than is made of wheat," or when
they look within their own hearts, and assert, as the poet Young said
in 1759, long before the English romantic movement had begun, "there is
more in the spirit of man than mere prose-reason can fathom."
We are familiar, perhaps too remorsefully familiar, with the fact that
romance is likely to run a certain course in the individual and then to
disappear. Looking back upon it afterward, it resembles the upward and
downward zigzag of a fever chart. It has in fact often been described
as a measles, a disease of which no one can be particularly proud,
although he may have no reason to blush for it. Southey said that he
was no more ashamed of having been a republican than of having been a
boy. Well, people catch Byronism, and get over it, much as Southey got
over his republicanism. In fact Byron himself lived long enough--though
he died at thirty-six--to outgrow his purely "Byronic" phase, and to
smile at it as knowingly as we do. Coleridge's blossoming period as a
romantic poet was tragically brief. Keats and Shelley had the good
fortune to die in the fulness of their romantic glory. They did not
outlive their own poetic sense of the wonder and mystery of the world.
Yet many an old poet like Tennyson and Browning has preserved his
romance to the end. Tennyson dies at eighty-three with the full
moonlight streaming through the oriel window upon his bed, and with his
fingers clasping Shakespeare's _Cymbeline_.
With most of us commonplace persons, however, a reaction from the
romantic is almost inevitable. The romantic temperament cannot long
keep the pitch. Poe could indeed do it, although he hovered at times
near the border of insanity. Hawthorne went for relief to his profane
sea-captains and the carnal-minded superannuated employees of the Salem
Custom House. "The weary weight of all this unintelligible world"
presses too hard on most of those who stop to think about it. The
simplest way of relief is to shrug one's shoulders and let the weight
go. That is to say, we cease being poets, we are no longer the children
of romance, although we may remain idealists. Perhaps it is external
events that change, rather than we ourselves. The restoration of the
Bourbons, the Revolutions of 1830 and 1848, make and unmake romantics.
Often society catches up with the romanticist; he is no longer a
soldier of revolt; he has become a "respectable." Or, while remaining a
poet, he shifts his attention to some more familiar segment of the
idealistic circle. He sings about his wife instead of the wife of
somebody else. Like Wordsworth, he takes for his theme a Mary
Hutchinson instead of the unknown and hauntingly alluring figure of
Lucy. To put it differently, the high light, the mysterious color of
dawn or sunset disappears from his picture of human life. Or, the high
light may be diffused in a more tranquil radiance over the whole
surface of experience. Such an artist may remain a true painter or
poet, but he is not a romantic poet or painter any longer. He has, like
the aging Emerson, taken in sail; the god Terminus has said to him, "no
more."
One must of course admit that the typical romanticist has often been
characterized by certain intellectual and moral weaknesses. But the
great romance men, like Edmund Spenser, for example, may not possess
these weaknesses at all. Robert Louis Stevenson was passionately in
love with the romantic in life and with romanticism in literature; but
it did not make him eccentric, weak, or empty. His instinct for
enduring romance was so admirably fine that it brought strength to the
sinews of his mind, light and air and fire to his soul. Among the
writers of our own day, it is Mr. Kipling who has written some of the
keenest satire upon romantic foibles, while never ceasing to salute his
real mistress, the true romance.
"Who wast, or yet the Lights were set,
A whisper in the void,
Who shalt be sung through planets young
When this is clean destroyed."
What are the causes of American romance, the circumstances and
qualities that have produced the romantic element in American life and
character? Precisely as with the individual artist or man of letters,
we touch first of all upon certain temperamental inclinations. It is a
question again of the national mind, of the differentiation of the race
under new climatic and physical conditions. We have to reckon with the
headiness and excitability of youth. It was young men who emigrated
hither, just as in the eighteen-sixties it was young men who filled the
Northern and the Southern armies. The first generations of American
immigration were made up chiefly of vigorous, imaginative, and daring
youth. The incapables came later. It is, I think, safe to assert that
the colonists of English stock, even as late as 1790,--when more than
ninety per cent of the population of America had in their veins the
blood of the British Isles,--were more responsive to romantic impulses
than their English cousins. For that matter, an Irishman or a Welshman
is more romantic than an Englishman to-day.
From the very beginning of the American settlements, likewise, there
were evidences of the weaker, the over-excitable side of the romantic
temper. There were volatile men like Morton of Merrymount; there were
queer women like Anne Hutchinson, admirable woman as she was; among the
wives of the colonists there were plenty of Emily Dickinsons in the
germ. Among the men, there were schemes that came to nothing. There
were prototypes of Colonel Sellers; a temperamental tendency toward
that recklessness and extravagance which later historical conditions
stimulated and confirmed. The more completely one studies the history
of our forefathers on American soil, the more deeply does one become
conscious of the prevailing atmosphere of emotionalism.
Furthermore, as one examines the historic conditions under which the
spirit of American romance has been preserved and heightened from time
to time, one becomes aware that although ours is rather a romance of
wonder than of beauty, the spirit of beauty is also to be found. The
first fervors of the romance of discovery were childlike in their
eagerness. Hakluyt's _Voyages_, John Smith's _True Relation of
Virginia_, Thomas Morton's _New England's Canaan_, all appeal to the
sense of the marvellous.
Listen to Morton's description of Cape Ann. I can never read it without
thinking of Botticelli's picture of Spring, so naively does this
picturesque rascal suffuse his landscape with the feeling for beauty:--
"In the Moneth of June, Anno Salutis 1622, it was my chaunce
to arrive in the parts of New England with 30. Servants, and
provision of all sorts fit for a plantation: and whiles our
howses were building, I did indeavour to take a survey of
the Country: The more I looked, the more I liked it. And
when I had more seriously considered of the bewty of the
place, with all her faire indowments, I did not thinke that
in all the knowne world it could be paralel'd, for so many
goodly groves of trees, dainty fine round rising hillucks,
delicate faire large plaines, sweete cristall fountaines,
and cleare running streames that twine in fine meanders
through the meads, making so sweete a murmering noise to
heare as would even lull the sences with delight a sleepe,
so pleasantly doe they glide upon the pebble stones, jetting
most jocundly where they doe meete and hand in hand runne
downe to Neptunes Court, to pay the yearely tribute which
they owe to him as soveraigne Lord of all the springs.
Contained within the volume of the Land, Fowles in
abundance, Fish in multitude; and discovered, besides,
Millions of Turtledoves on the greene boughes, which sate
pecking of the full ripe pleasant grapes that were supported
by the lusty trees, whose fruitful loade did cause the armes
to bend: while here and there dispersed, you might see
Lillies and the Daphnean-tree: which made the Land to mee
seeme paradice: for in mine eie t'was Natures Masterpeece;
Her cheifest Magazine of all where lives her store: if this
Land be not rich, then is the whole world poore."
This is the Morton who, a few years later, settled at Merrymount. Let
me condense the story of his settlement, from the narrative of the
stout-hearted Governor William Bradford's _History of Plymouth
Plantation_:--
"And Morton became lord of misrule, and maintained (as it
were) a schoole of Athisme. And after they had gott some good
into their hands, and gott much by trading with the Indeans,
they spent it as vainly, in quaffing & drinking both wine &
strong waters in great exsess, and, as some reported 10L.
worth in a morning. They allso set up a May-pole, drinking
and dancing aboute it many days togeather, inviting the
Indean women, for their consorts, dancing and frisking
togither, (like so many fairies, or furies rather,) and worse
practises. As if they had anew revived & celebrated the
feasts of the Roman Goddes Flora, or the beasly practieses of
the madd Bacchinalians. Morton likewise (to shew his poetrie)
composed sundry rimes & verses, some tending to
lasciviousnes, and others to the detraction & scandall of
some persons, which he affixed to this idle or idoll
May-polle. They chainged allso the name of their place, and
in stead of calling it Mounte Wollaston, they call it
Merie-mounte, as if this joylity would have lasted ever."
But it did not last long. Bradford and other leaders of the plantations
"agreed by mutual consent" to "suppress Morton and his consorts." "In a
friendly and neighborly way" they admonished him. "Insolently he
persisted." "Upon which they saw there was no way but to take him by
force." "So they mutually resolved to proceed," and sent Captain
Standish to summon him to yield. But, says Bradford, Morton and some of
his crew came out, not to yield, but to shoot; all of them rather
drunk; Morton himself, with a carbine almost half filled with powder
and shot, had thought to have shot Captain Standish, "_but he stepped
to him and put by his piece and took him_."
It is not too fanciful to say that with those stern words of Governor
Bradford the English Renaissance came to an end. The dream of a lawless
liberty which has been dreamed and dreamed out so many times in the
history of the world was over, for many a day. It was only a hundred
years earlier that Rabelais had written over the doors of his ideal
abbey, the motto "Do what thou wilt." It is true that Rabelais proposed
to admit to his Abbey of Theleme only such men and women as were
virtuously inclined. We do not know how many persons would have been
able and willing to go into residence there. At any rate, two hundred
years went by in New England after the fall of Morton before any
notable spirit dared to cherish once more the old Renaissance ideal. At
last, in Emerson's doctrine that all things are lawful because Nature
is good and human nature is divine, we have a curious parallel to the
doctrine of Rabelais. It was the old romance of human will under a new
form and voiced in new accents. Yet in due time the hard facts of human
nature reasserted themselves and put this romantic transcendentalism
by, even as the implacable Myles Standish put by that heavily loaded
fowling-piece of the drunken Morton.
But men believed in miracles in the first century of colonization, and
they will continue at intervals to believe in them until human nature
is no more. The marvellous happenings recorded in Cotton Mather's
_Magnalia_ no longer excite us to any "suspension of disbelief." We
doubt the story of Pocahontas. The fresh romantic enthusiasm of a
settler like Crevecoeur seems curiously juvenile to-day, as does the
romantic curiosity of Chateaubriand concerning the Mississippi and the
Choctaws, or the zeal of Wordsworth and Coleridge over their dream of a
"panti-Socratic" community in the unknown valley of the
musically-sounding Susquehanna. Inexperience is a perpetual feeder of
the springs of romance. John Wesley, it will be remembered, went out to
the colony of Georgia full of enthusiasm for converting the Indians;
but as he naively remarks in his _Journal_, he "neither found or heard
of any Indians on the continent of America, who had the least desire of
being instructed." The sense of fact, in other words, supervenes, and
the glory disappears from the face of romance. The humor of Mark
Twain's _Innocents Abroad_ turns largely upon this sense of remorseless
fact confronting romantic inexperience.
American history, however, has been marked by certain great romantic
passions that seem endowed with indestructible vitality. The romance of
discovery, the fascination of the forest and sea, the sense of danger
and mystery once aroused by the very word "redskin," have all moulded
and will continue to mould the national imagination. How completely
the romance of discovery may be fused with the glow of humanitarian
and religious enthusiasm has been shown once for all in the brilliant
pages of Parkman's story of the Jesuit missions in Canada. Pictorial
romance can scarcely go further than this. In the crisis of
Chateaubriand's picturesque and passionate tale of the American
wilderness, no one can escape the thrilling, haunting sound of the bell
from the Jesuit chapel, as it tolls in the night and storm that were
fatal to the happiness of Atala. One scarcely need say that the romance
of missions has never faded from the American mind. I have known a
sober New England deacon aged eighty-five, who disliked to die because
he thought he should miss the monthly excitement of reading the
_Missionary Herald_. The deacon's eyes, like the eyes of many an old
sea-captain in Salem or Newburyport, were literally upon the ends of
the earth. No one can reckon how many starved souls, deprived of normal
outlet for human feeling, have found in this passionate curiosity and
concern for the souls of black and yellow men and women in the
antipodes, a constant source of beneficent excitement.
Nor is there any diminution of interest in the mere romance of
adventure, in the stories of hunter and trapper, the journals of Lewis
and Clarke, the narratives of Boone and Crockett. In writing his superb
romances of the Northern Lakes, the prairie and the sea, Fenimore
Cooper had merely to bring to an artistic focus sentiments that lay
deep in the souls of the great mass of his American readers. Students
of our social life have pointed out again and again how deeply our
national temperament has been affected by the existence, during nearly
three hundred years, of an alien aboriginal race forever lurking upon
the borders of our civilization. "Playing Indian" has been immensely
significant, not merely in stimulating the outdoor activity of
generations of American boys, but in teaching them the perennial
importance of certain pioneer qualities of observation,
resourcefulness, courage, and endurance which date from the time when
the Indians were a daily and nightly menace. Even when the Indian has
been succeeded by the cowboy, the spirit of romance still lingers,--as
any collection of cowboy ballads will abundantly prove. And when the
cowboys pass, and the real-estate dealers take possession of the
field, one is tempted to say that romance flourishes more than ever.
In short, things are what we make them at the moment, what we believe
them to be. In my grandfather's youth the West was in the neighborhood
of Port Byron, New York, and when he journeyed thither from
Massachusetts in the eighteen-twenties, the glory of adventure enfolded
him as completely as the boys of the preceding generation had been
glorified in the War of the Revolution, or the boys of the next
generation when they went gold-seeking in California in 1849. The West,
in short, means simply the retreating horizon, the beckoning finger of
opportunity. Like Boston, it has been not a place, but a "state of
mind."
"We must go, go, go away from here,
On the other side the world we're overdue."
That is the song which sings itself forever in the heart of youth.
Champlain and Cartier heard it in the sixteenth century, Bradford no
less than Morton in the seventeenth. Some Eldorado has always been
calling to the more adventurous spirits upon American soil. The
passion of the forty-niner neither began nor ended with the discovery
of gold in California. It is within us. It transmutes the harsh or
drab-colored everyday routine into tissue of fairyland. It makes our
"winning of the West" a magnificent national epic. It changes to-day
the black belt of Texas, or the wheat-fields of Dakota, into pots of
gold that lie at the end of rainbows, only that the pot of gold is
actually there. The human hunger of it all, the gorgeous dream-like
quality of it all, the boundlessness of the vast American spaces, the
sense of forest and prairie and sky, are all inexplicably blended with
our notion of the ideal America. Henry James once tried to explain the
difference between Turgenieff and a typical French novelist by saying
that the back door of the Russian's imagination was always open upon
the endless Russian steppe. No one can understand the spirit of
American romance if he is not conscious of this ever-present hinterland
in which our spirits have, from the beginning, taken refuge and found
solace.
We have already noticed, in the chapter on idealism, how swiftly the
American imagination modifies the prosaic facts of everyday
experience. The idealistic glamour which falls upon the day's work
changes easily, in the more emotional temperaments, and at times,
indeed, in all of us, into the fervor of true romance. Then, the
prosaic buying and selling becomes the "game." A combination of buyers
and sellers becomes the "system." The place where these buyers and
sellers most do congregate and concentrate becomes "Wall Street"--a
sort of anthropomorphic monster which seems to buy and sell the bodies
and souls of men. Seen half a continent away, through the mists of
ignorance and prejudice and partisan passion, "Wall Street" has loomed
like some vast Gibraltar. To the broker's clerk who earns his weekly
salary in that street, the Nebraska notion of "Wall Street" is too
grotesque for discussion.