of romance is illustrated by the history of our railroads. No wonder
that Bret Harte wrote a poem about the meeting of the eastward and
westward facing engines when the two sections of the Union Pacific
Railroad at last drew near each other on the interminable plains and
the two engines could talk. Of course what they said was poetry. There
was a time when even the Erie Canal was poetic. The Panama Canal
to-day, in the eyes of most Americans, is something other than a mere
feat of engineering. We are doing more than making "the dirt fly." The
canal represents victory over hostile forces, conquest of unwilling
Nature, achievement of what had long been deemed impossible, the making
not of a ditch, but of History.
So with all that American zest for camping, fishing, sailing, racing,
which lies deep in the Anglo-Saxon, and which succeeds to the more
primitive era of actual struggle against savage beasts or treacherous
men or mysterious forests. It is at once an outlet and a nursery for
romantic emotion. The out-of-doors movement which began with Thoreau's
hut on Walden Pond, and which has gone on broadening and deepening to
this hour, implies far more than mere variation from routine. It
furnishes, indeed, a healthful escape from the terrific pressure of
modern social and commercial exigencies. Yet its more important
function is to provide for grown-ups a chance to "play Indian" too.
But outdoors and indoors, after all, lie in the heart and mind, rather
than in the realm of actual experience. The romantic imagination
insists upon taking its holiday, whether the man who possesses it gets
his holiday or not. I have never known a more truly romantic figure
than a certain tin-pedler in Connecticut who, in response to the
question, "Do you do a good business?" made this perfectly Stevensonian
reply: "Well, I make a living selling crockery and tinware, but my
_business_ is the propagation of truth."
This wandering idealist may serve to remind us again of the difference
between romance and romanticism. The true romance is of the spirit.
Romanticism shifts and changes with external fortunes, with altering
emotions, with the alternate play of light and shade over the vast
landscape of human experience. The typical romanticist, as we have
seen, is a man of moods. It is only a Poe who can keep the pitch
through the whole concert of experience. But the deeper romance of the
spirit is oblivious of these changes of external fortune, this rising
or falling of the emotional temperature. The moral life of America
furnishes striking illustrations of the steadfastness with which
certain moral causes have been kept, as it were, in the focus of
intense feeling. Poetry, undefeated and unwavering poetry, has
transfigured such practical propaganda as the abolition of slavery, the
emancipation of woman, the fight against the liquor traffic, the
emancipation of the individual from the clutches of economic and
commercial despotism. Men like Colonel Thomas Wentworth Higginson,
women like Julia Ward Howe, fought for these causes throughout their
lives. Colonel Higginson's attitude towards women was not merely
chivalric (for one may be chivalrous without any marked predisposition
to romance), but nobly romantic also. James Russell Lowell, poet as he
was, outlived that particular phase of romantic moral reform which he
had been taught by Maria White. But in other men and women bred in that
old New England of the eighteen-forties, the moral fervor knew no
restraint. Garrison, although in many respects a most unromantic
personality, was engaged in a task which gave him all the inspiration
of romance. A romantic "atmosphere," fully as highly colored as any of
the romantic atmospheres that we are accustomed to mark in literature,
surrounded as with a luminous mist the figures of the New England
transcendentalists. They, too, as Heine said of himself, were soldiers.
They felt themselves enlisted for a long but ultimately victorious
campaign. They were willing to pardon, in their comrades and in
themselves, those imaginative excesses which resemble the physical
excesses of a soldier's camp. Transcendentalism was thus a militant
philosophy and religion, with both a destructively critical and a
positively constructive creed. Channing, Parker, Alcott, Margaret
Fuller, were warrior-priests, poets and prophets of a gallant campaign
against inherited darkness and bigotry, and for the light.
The atmosphere of that score of years in New England was now
superheated, now rarefied, thin, and cold; but it was never quite the
normal atmosphere of every day. On the purely literary side, it is
needless to say, these men and women sought inspiration in Coleridge
and Carlyle and other English and German romanticists. In fact, the
most enduring literature of New England between 1830 and 1865 was
distinctly a romantic literature. It was rooted, however, not so much
in those swift changes of historic condition, those startling
liberations of the human spirit which gave inspiration to the
romanticism of the Continent, as it was in the deep and vital fervor
with which these New Englanders envisaged the problems of the moral
life.
Other illustrations of the American capacity for romance lie equally
close at hand. Take, for instance, the stout volume in which Mr. Burton
Stevenson has collected the _Poems of American History_. Here are
nearly seven hundred pages of closely printed patriotic verse. While
Stedman's _Anthology_ reveals no doubt national aspirations and
national sentiment, as well as the emotional fervor of individuals, Mr.
Stevenson's collection has the advantage of focussing this national
feeling upon specific events. Stedman's _Anthology_ is an enduring
document of American idealism, touching in the sincerity of its poetic
moods, pathetic in its long lists of men and women who are known by one
poem only, or who have never, for one reason or another, fulfilled
their poetic promise. The thousand poems which it contains are more
striking, in fact, for their promise than for their performance. They
are intimations of what American men and women would have liked to do
or to be. In this sense, it is a precious volume, but it is certainly
not commensurate, either in passion or in artistic perfection, with the
forces of that American life which it tries to interpret. Indeed, Mr.
Stedman, after finishing his task of compilation, remarked to more than
one of his friends that what this country needed was some "adult male
verse."
The _Poems of American History_ collected by Mr. Stevenson are at least
vigorous and concrete. One aspect of our history which especially lends
itself to Mr. Stevenson's purpose is the romance which attaches itself
to war. It is scarcely necessary to say nowadays that all wars, even
the noblest, have had their sordid, grimy, selfish, bestial aspect; and
that the intelligence and conscience of our modern world are more and
more engaged in the task of making future wars impossible. But the
slightest acquaintance with American history reveals the immense
reservoir of romantic emotion which has been drawn upon in our national
struggles. War, of course, is an immemorial source of romantic feeling.
William James's notable essay on "A Moral Substitute for War"
endeavored to prove that our modern economic and social life, if
properly organized, would give abundant outlet and satisfaction to
those romantic impulses which formerly found their sole gratification
in battle. Many of us believe that he was right; but for the moment we
must look backward and not forward. We must remember the stern if rude
poetry inspired by our Revolutionary struggle, the romantic halo that
falls upon the youthful figure of Nathan Hale, the baleful light that
touches the pale face of Benedict Arnold, the romance of the Bennington
fight to the followers of Stark and Ethan Allen, the serene voice of
the "little captain," John Paul Jones:--"We have not struck, we have
just begun our part of the fighting." The colors of romance still drape
the Chesapeake and the Shannon, Tecumseh and Tippecanoe. The hunters of
Kentucky, the explorers of the Yellowstone and the Columbia, the
emigrants who left their bones along the old Santa Fe Trail, are our
Homeric men.
The Mexican War affords pertinent illustration, not only of romance,
but of reaction. The earlier phases of the Texan struggle for
independence have much of the daring, the splendid rashness, the
glorious and tragic catastrophes of the great romantic adventures of
the Old World. It is not the Texans only who still "remember the
Alamo," but when those brilliant and dramatic adventures of border
warfare became drawn into the larger struggle for the extension of
slavery, the poetic reaction began. The physical and moral pretence of
warfare, the cheap splendors of epaulets and feathers, shrivelled at
the single touch of the satire of the _Biglow Papers_. Lowell, writing
at that moment with the instinct and fervor of a prophet, brought the
whole vainglorious business back to the simple issue of right and
wrong:
"'Taint your eppyletts an' feathers
Make the thing a grain more right;
'Taint afollerin' your bell-wethers
Will excuse ye in His sight;
Ef you take a sword an' dror it,
An' go stick a feller thru,
Guv'ment aint to answer for it,
God'll send the bill to you."
But far more interesting is the revelation of the American capacity for
romance which was made possible by the war between the States.
Stevenson's _Poems of American History_ and Stedman's _Anthology_ give
abundant illustration of almost every aspect of that epical struggle.
The South was in a romantic mood from the very beginning. The North
drifted into it after Sumter. I have already said that no one can
examine a collection of Civil War verse without being profoundly moved
by its evidence of American idealism. In specific phases of the
struggle, in connection with certain battle-fields and certain leaders
of both North and South, this idealism is heightened into pure romance,
so that even our novelists feel that they can give no adequate picture
of the war without using the colors of poetry. Most critics, no doubt,
agree in feeling that we are still too near to that epoch-making crisis
of our national existence to do it any justice in the terms of
literature. Perhaps we must wait for the perfected romance of the years
1861-65, until the men and the events of that struggle are as remote as
the heroes of Greece and Troy. Certainly no one can pass a final
judgment upon the verse occasioned by recent struggles in arms. Any one
who has studied the English poetry inspired by the South-African War
will be painfully conscious of the emotional and moral complexity of
all such issues, of the bitter injustice which poets, as well as other
men, render to one another, of the impossibility of transmuting into
the pure gold of romance the emotions originating in the stock market,
in race-hatred, and in national vainglory.
We have lingered too long, perhaps, over these various evidences of the
romantic temper of America. We must now glance at the forces of
reaction, the recoil to fact. What is it which contradicts, inhibits,
or negatives the romantic tendency? Among other forces, there is
certainly humor. Humor and romance often go hand in hand, but humor is
commonly fatal to romanticism. There is satire, which rebukes both
romanticism and romance, which exposes the fallacies of the one, and
punctures the exuberance of the other. More effective, perhaps, than
either humor or satire as an antiseptic against romance, is the
overmastering sense of fact. This is what Emerson called the instinct
for the milk in the pan, an instinct which Emerson himself possessed
extraordinarily on his purely Yankee side, and which a pioneer country
is forced continually to develop and to recognize. Camping, for
instance, develops both the romantic sense and the fact sense. Supper
must be cooked, even at Walden Pond. There must be hewers of wood and
drawers of water, and the dishes ought to be washed.
On a higher plane, also, than this mere sense of physical necessity,
there are forces limiting the influence of romance. Schiller put it all
into one famous line:--
"Und was uns alle bandigt, das Gemeine."
Or listen to Keats:--
"'T is best to remain aloof from people, and like their good
parts, without being eternally troubled with the dull process
of their everyday lives.... All I can say is that standing at
Charing Cross, and looking East, West, North and South, I can
see nothing but dullness."
And Henry James, describing New York in his book, _The American Scene_,
speaks of "the overwhelming preponderance of the unmitigated
'business-man' face ... the consummate monotonous commonness of the
pushing male crowd, moving in its dense mass--with the confusion
carried to chaos for any intelligence, any perception; a welter of
objects and sounds in which relief, detachment, dignity, meaning,
perished utterly and lost all rights ... the universal _will to
move_--to move, move, move, as an end in itself, an appetite at any
price."
One need not be a poet like Keats or an inveterate psychologist like
Henry James, in order to become aware how the commonplaceness of the
world rests like a fog upon the mind and heart. No one goes to his
day's work and comes home again without a consciousness of contact with
an unspiritual atmosphere, or incompletely spiritualized forces, not
merely with indifference, to what Emerson would term "the over-soul,"
but with a lack of any faith in the things which are unseen. Take those
very forces which have limited the influence of Emerson throughout the
United States; they illustrate the universal forces which clip the
wings of romance. The obstacles in the path of Emerson's influence are
not merely the religious and denominational differences which Dr.
George A. Gordon portrayed in a notable article at the time of the
Emerson Centenary. The real obstacles are more serious. It is true
that Dr. Park of Andover, Dr. Bushnell of Hartford, and Dr. Hodge of
Princeton, could say in Emerson's lifetime: "We know a better, a more
Scriptural and certificated road toward the very things which Emerson
is seeking for. We do not grant that we are less idealistic than he. We
think him a dangerous guide, following wandering fires. It is better to
journey safely with us."
But I have known at least two livery-stable keepers and many college
professors who would unite in saying: "Hodge and Park and Bushnell and
Emerson are all following after something that does not exist. One is
not much more mistaken than the others. We can get along perfectly well
in our business without any of those ideas at all. Let us stick to the
milk in the pan, the horse in the stall, the documents which you will
find in the library."
There exists, in other words, in all classes of American society
to-day, just as there existed during the Revolution, during the
transcendental movement, or the Civil War, an immense mass of
unspiritualized, unvitalized American manhood and womanhood. No
literature comes from it and no religion, though there is much human
kindness, much material progress, and some indestructible residuum of
that idealism which lifts man above the brute.
Yet the curious and the endlessly fascinating thing about these forces
of reaction is that they themselves shift and change. We have seen that
external romance depending upon strangeness of scene, novelty of
adventure, rich atmospheric distance of space or time, disappears with
the changes of civilization. The farm expands over the wolf's den, the
Indian becomes a blacksmith, but do the gross and material instincts
ultimately triumph? He would be a hardy prophet who should venture to
assert it. We must reckon always with the swing of the human pendulum,
with the reaction against reaction. Here, for example, during the last
decade, has been book after book written about the reaction against
democracy. All over the world, it is asserted, there are unmistakable
signs that democracy will not practically work in the face of the
modern tasks to which the world has set itself. One reads these books,
one persuades himself that the hour for democracy is passing, and then
one goes out on the street and buys a morning newspaper and discovers
that democracy has scored again. So is it with the experience of the
individual. You may fancy that the romance of the seas passes, for you,
with the passing of the square-sailed ship. If Mr. Kipling's poetry
cannot rouse you from that mood of reaction, walk down to the end of
the pier to-morrow and watch the ocean liner come up the harbor. If
there is no romance there, you do not know romance when you see it!
Take the case of the farmer; his prosaic life is the butt of the
newspaper paragraphers from one end of the country to the other. But
does romance disappear from the farm with machinery and scientific
agriculture? There are farmers who follow Luther Burbank's experiments
with plants, with all the fascination which used to attach to alchemy
and astrology. The farmer has no longer Indians to fight or a
wilderness to subdue, but the soils of his farm are analyzed at his
state university by men who live in the daily atmosphere of the romance
of science, and who say, as a professor in the University of Chicago
said once, that "a flower is so wonderful that if you knew what was
going on within its cell-structure, you would be afraid to stay alone
with it in the dark."
The reaction from romance, therefore, real as it is, and dead weight as
it lies upon the soul of the nation, often breeds the very forces which
destroy it. In other words, the reaction against one type of romance
produces inevitably another type of romance, other aspects of wonder,
terror, and beauty. Following the romance of adventure comes, after
never so deep a trough in the sea, the romance of science, like the
crest of another wave; and then comes what we call, for lack of a
better word, the psychological romance, the old mystery and strangeness
of the human soul, AEschylus and Job, as Victor Hugo says, in the poor
crawfish gatherer on the rocks of Brittany.
We must remember that we are endeavoring to measure great spaces and to
take account of the "amplitude of time." The individual "fact-man," as
Coleridge called him, remains perhaps a fact-man to the end, just as
the dreamer may remain a dreamer. But no single generation is
compounded all of fact or all of dream. Longfellow felt, no doubt, that
there was an ideal United States, which Dickens did not discover
during that first visit of 1842; he would have set the Cambridge which
he knew over against the Cincinnati viewed by Mrs. Trollope; he would
have asserted that the homes characterized by refinement, by
cultivation, by pure and simple sentiment, made up the true America.
But even among Longfellow's own contemporaries there was Whitman, who
felt that the true America was something very different from that
exquisitely tempered ideal of Longfellow. There was Thoreau, who, over
in Concord, had been pushing forward the frontier of the mind and
senses, who had opened his back-yard gate, as it were, upon the
boundless and mysterious territory of Nature. There was Emerson, who
was preaching an intellectual independence of the Old World which
should correspond to the political and social independence of the
Western Hemisphere. There was Parkman, whose hatred of philanthropy,
whose lack of spirituality, is a striking illustration of the rebound
of New England idealism against itself, of the reaction into stoicism.
What different worlds these men lived in, and yet they were all
inhabitants, so to speak, of the same parish; most of them met often
around the same table! The lesson of their variety of experience and
differences of gifts as workmen in that great palace of literature
which is so variously built, is that no action and reaction in the
imaginative world is ever final. Least of all do these actions and
reactions affect the fortunes of true romance. The born dreamer may
fall from one dream into another, but he still murmurs, in the famous
line of William Ellery Channing,--
"If my bark sinks, 't is to another sea."
No line in our literature is more truly American,--unless it be that
other splendid metaphor, by David Wasson, which says the same thing in
other words:--
"Life's gift outruns my fancies far,
And drowns the dream
In larger stream,
As morning drinks the morning-star."
V
Humor and Satire
A distinguished professor in the Harvard Divinity School once began a
lecture on Comedy by saying that the study of the comic had made him
realize for the first time that a joke was one of the most solemn
things in the world. The analysis of humor is no easy matter. It is
hard to say which is the more dreary: an essay on humor illustrated by
a series of jokes, or an exposition of humor in the technical terms of
philosophy. No subject has been more constantly discussed. But it
remains difficult to decide what humor is. It is easier to declare what
seemed humorous to our ancestors, or what seems humorous to us to-day.
For humor is a shifting thing. The well-known collections of the
writings of American humorists surprise us by their revelation of the
changes in public taste. Humor--or the sense of humor--alters while we
are watching. What seemed a good joke to us yesterday seems but a poor
joke to-day. And yet it is the same joke! What is true of the
individual is all the more true of the national sense of humor. This
vast series of kaleidoscopic changes which we call America; has it
produced a humor of its own?
Let us avoid for the moment the treacherous territory of definitions.
Let us, rather, take one concrete example: a pair of men, a knight and
his squire, who for three hundred years have ridden together down the
broad highway of the world's imagination. Everybody sees that Don
Quixote and Sancho Panza are humorous. Define them as you
will--idealist and realist, knight and commoner, dreamer and
proverb-maker--these figures represent to all the world two poles of
human experience. A Frenchman once said that all of us are Don Quixotes
on one day and Sancho Panzas on the next. Humor springs from this
contrast. It is the electric flash between the two poles of experience.
Most philosophers who have meditated upon the nature of the comic point
out that it is closely allied with the tragic. Flaubert once compared
our human idealism to the flight of a swallow; at one moment it is
soaring toward the sunset, at the next moment some one shoots it and it
tumbles into the mud with blood upon its glistening wings. The sudden
poignant contrast between light, space, freedom, and the wounded
bleeding bird in the mud, is of the very essence of tragedy. But
something like that is always happening in comedy. There is the same
element of incongruity, without the tragic consequence. It is only the
humorist who sees things truly because he sees both the greatness and
the littleness of mortals; but even he may not know whether to laugh or
to cry at what he sees. Those collisions and contrasts out of which the
stuff of tragedy is woven, such as the clash between the higher and
lower nature of a man, between his past and his present, between one's
duties to himself and to his family or the state, between, in a word,
his character and his situation, are all illustrated in comedy as
completely as in tragedy. The countryman in the city, the city man in
the country, is in a comic situation. Here is a coward named Falstaff,
and Shakespeare puts him into battle. Here is a vain person, and
Malvolio is imprisoned and twitted by a clown. Here is an ignoramus,
and Dogberry is placed on the judge's bench. These contrasts might,
indeed, be tragic enough, but they are actually comic. Such characters
are not ruled by fate but by a sportive chance. The gods connive at
them. They are ruled, like tragic characters, by necessity and
blindness; but the blindness, instead of leading to tragic ruin, leads
only to being caught as in some harmless game of blind-man's-buff.
There is retribution, but Falstaff is only pinched by the fairies.
Comedy of intrigue and comedy of character lead to no real catastrophe.
The end of it on the stage is not death but matrimony; and "home well
pleased we go."