and Poe, only the last two have been sufficiently taken into the
consciousness of the country to have any effect upon its literature,
and even here that influence has been exerted only at second-hand,
and against very definite adverse pressure. It would certainly seem
reasonable for a man of so forceful a habit of mind as Poe, and of such
prodigal and arresting originality, to have founded a school, but a
glance at the record shows that he did nothing of the sort. Immediately
he was dead, the shadows of the Irving tradition closed around his
tomb, and for nearly thirty years thereafter all of his chief ideas
went disregarded in his own country. If, as the literature books
argue, Poe was the father of the American short story, then it was a
posthumous child, and had step-fathers who did their best to conceal
its true parentage. When it actually entered upon the vigorous life
that we know to-day Poe had been dead for a generation. Its father,
at the time of its belated adolescence, seemed to be Bret Harte--and
Harte's debt to Dickens was vastly more apparent, first and last, than
his debt to Poe. What he got from Poe was essential; it was the inner
structure of the modern short story, the fundamental devices whereby a
mere glimpse at events could be made to yield brilliant and seemingly
complete images. But he himself was probably largely unaware of this
indebtedness. A man little given to critical analysis, and incompetent
for it when his own work was under examination, he saw its externals
much more clearly than he saw its intrinsic organization, and these
externals bore the plain marks of Dickens. It remained for one of his
successors, Ambrose Bierce, to bridge belatedly the space separating
him from Poe, and so show the route that he had come. And it remained
for foreign criticism, and particularly for French criticism, to lift
Poe himself to the secure place that he now holds. It is true enough
that he enjoyed, during his lifetime, a certain popular reputation,
and that he was praised by such men as N. P. Willis and James Russell
Lowell, but that reputation was considerably less than the fame of men
who were much his inferiors, and that praise, especially in Lowell's
case, was much corrupted by reservations. Not many native critics of
respectable position, during the 50's and 60's, would have ranked him
clearly above, say, Irving or Cooper, or even above Longfellow, his old
enemy. A few partisans argued for him, but in the main, as Saintsbury
has said, he was the victim of "extreme and almost incomprehensible
injustice" at the hands of his countrymen. It is surely not without
significance that it took ten years to raise money enough to put a
cheap and hideous tombstone upon his neglected grave, that it was
not actually set up until he had been dead twenty-six years, that no
contemporary American writer took any part in furthering the project,
and that the only one who attended the final ceremony was Whitman.
It was Baudelaire's French translation of the prose tales and
Mallarmé's translation of the poems that brought Poe to Valhalla. The
former, first printed in 1856, founded the Poe cult in France, and
during the two decades following it flourished amazingly, and gradually
extended to England and Germany. It was one of the well-springs, in
fact, of the whole so-called decadent movement. If Baudelaire, the
father of that movement, "cultivated hysteria with delight and terror,"
he was simply doing what Poe had done before him. Both, reacting
against the false concept of beauty as a mere handmaiden of logical
ideas, sought its springs in those deep feelings and inner experiences
which lie beyond the range of ideas and are to be interpreted only
as intuitions. Emerson started upon the same quest, but was turned
off into mazes of contradiction and unintelligibility by his ethical
obsession--the unescapable burden of his Puritan heritage. But Poe
never wandered from the path. You will find in "The Poetic Principle"
what is perhaps the clearest statement of this new and sounder concept
of beauty that has ever been made--certainly it is clearer than any
ever made by a Frenchman. But it was not until Frenchmen had watered
the seed out of grotesque and vari-colored pots that it began to
sprout. The tide of Poe's ideas, set in motion in France early in
the second half of the century, did not wash England until the last
decade, and in America, save for a few dashes of spray, it has yet to
show itself. There is no American writer who displays the influence
of this most potent and original of Americans so clearly as whole
groups of Frenchmen display it, and whole groups of Germans, and
even a good many Englishmen. What we have from Poe at first hand is
simply a body of obvious yokel-shocking in the _Black Cat_ manner,
with the tales of Ambrose Bierce as its finest flower--in brief, an
imitation of Poe's externals without any comprehension whatever of his
underlying aims and notions. What we have from him at second-hand is a
somewhat childish Maeterlinckism, a further dilution of Poe-and-water.
This Maeterlinckism, some time ago, got itself intermingled with the
Whitmanic stream flowing back to America through the channel of French
Imagism, with results destructive to the sanity of earnest critics
and fatal to the gravity of those less austere. It is significant
that the critical writing of Poe, in which there lies most that was
best in him, has not come back; no normal American ever thinks of
him as a critic, but only as a poet, as a raiser of goose-flesh, or
as an immoral fellow. The cause thereof is plain enough. The French,
instead of borrowing his critical theory directly, deduced it afresh
from his applications of it; it became criticism _of_ him rather than
_by_ him. Thus his own speculations have lacked the authority of
foreign approval, and have consequently made no impression. The weight
of native opinion is naturally against them, for they are at odds,
not only with its fundamental theories, but also with its practical
doctrine that no criticism can be profound and respectable which is not
also dull.
"Poe," says Arthur Ransome, in his capital study of the man and the
artist, "was like a wolf chained by the leg among a lot of domestic
dogs." The simile here is somewhat startling, and Ransome, in a
footnote, tries to ameliorate it: the "domestic dogs" it refers to
were magnificoes of no less bulk than Longfellow, Whittier, Holmes and
Emerson. In the case of Whitman, the wolf was not only chained, but
also muzzled. Nothing, indeed, could be more amazing than the hostility
that surrounded him at home until the very end of his long life. True
enough, it was broken by certain feeble mitigations. Emerson, in
1855, praised him--though later very eager to forget it and desert
him, as Clemens and Howells, years afterward, deserted Gorky. Alcott,
Thoreau, Lowell and even Bryant, during his brief Bohemian days,
were polite to him. A group of miscellaneous enthusiasts gradually
gathered about him, and out of this group emerged at least one man of
some distinction, John Burroughs. Young adventurers of letters--for
example, Huneker--went to see him and hear him, half drawn by genuine
admiration and half by mere deviltry. But the general tone of the
opinion that beat upon him, the attitude of domestic criticism, was
unbrokenly inimical; he was opposed by misrepresentation and neglect.
"The prevailing range of criticism on my book," he wrote in "A
Backward Glance on My Own Road" in 1884, "has been either mockery or
denunciation--and ... I have been the marked object of two or three
(to me pretty serious) official bufferings." "After thirty years
of trial," he wrote in "My Book and I," three years later, "public
criticism on the book and myself as author of it shows marked anger
and contempt more than anything else." That is, at home. Abroad he
was making headway all the while, and long years afterward, by way of
France and England, he began to force his way into the consciousness
of his countrymen. What could have been more ironical than the solemn
celebrations of Whitman's centenary that were carried off in various
American universities in 1919? One can picture the old boy rolling with
homeric mirth in hell. Imagine the fate of a university don of 1860,
or 1870, or 1880, or even 1890 who had ventured to commend "Leaves of
Grass" to the young gentlemen of his seminary! He would have come to
grief as swiftly as that Detroit pedagogue of day before yesterday who
brought down the Mothers' Legion upon him by commending "Jurgen."
8
_The Cultural Background_
So far, the disease. As to the cause, I have delivered a few hints.
I now describe it particularly. It is, in brief, a defect in the
general culture of the country--one reflected, not only in the national
literature, but also in the national political theory, the national
attitude toward religion and morals, the national habit in all
departments of thinking. It is the lack of a civilized aristocracy,
secure in its position, animated by an intelligent curiosity, skeptical
of all facile generalizations, superior to the sentimentality of the
mob, and delighting in the battle of ideas for its own sake.
The word I use, despite the qualifying adjective, has got itself
meanings, of course, that I by no means intend to convey. Any mention
of an aristocracy, to a public fed upon democratic fustian, is bound
to bring up images of stock-brokers' wives lolling obscenely in opera
boxes, or of haughty Englishmen slaughtering whole generations of
grouse in an inordinate and incomprehensible manner, or of Junkers
with tight waists elbowing American schoolmarms off the sidewalks of
German beer towns, or of perfumed Italians coming over to work their
abominable magic upon the daughters of breakfast-food and bathtub
kings. Part of this misconception, I suppose, has its roots in the
gaudy imbecilities of the yellow press, but there is also a part that
belongs to the general American tradition, along with the oppression of
minorities and the belief in political panaceas. Its depth and extent
are constantly revealed by the naïve assumption that the so-called
fashionable folk of the large cities--chiefly wealthy industrials in
the interior-decorator and country-club stage of culture--constitute an
aristocracy, and by the scarcely less remarkable assumption that the
peerage of England is identical with the gentry--that is, that such
men as Lord Northcliffe, Lord Iveagh and even Lord Reading are English
gentlemen, and of the ancient line of the Percys.
Here, as always, the worshiper is the father of the gods, and no less
when they are evil than when they are benign. The inferior man must
find himself superiors, that he may marvel at his political equality
with them, and in the absence of recognizable superiors _de facto_ he
creates superiors _de jure._ The sublime principle of one man, one
vote must be translated into terms of dollars, diamonds, fashionable
intelligence; the equality of all men before the law must have clear
and dramatic proofs. Sometimes, perhaps, the thing goes further and is
more subtle. The inferior man needs an aristocracy to demonstrate, not
only his mere equality, but also his actual superiority. The society
columns in the newspapers may have some such origin: they may visualize
once more the accomplished journalist's understanding of the mob mind
that he plays upon so skillfully, as upon some immense and cacophonous
organ, always going _fortissimo._ What the inferior man and his wife
see in the sinister revels of those amazing first families, I suspect,
is often a massive witness to their own higher rectitude--to their
relative innocence of cigarette-smoking, poodle-coddling, child-farming
and the more abstruse branches of adultery--in brief, to their firmer
grasp upon the immutable axioms of Christian virtue, the one sound
boast of the nether nine-tenths of humanity in every land under the
cross.
But this bugaboo aristocracy, as I hint, is actually bogus, and the
evidence of its bogusness lies in the fact that it is insecure. One
gets into it only onerously, but out of it very easily. Entrance is
effected by dint of a long and bitter straggle, and the chief incidents
of that struggle are almost intolerable humiliations. The aspirant
must school and steel himself to sniffs and sneers; he must see the
door slammed upon him a hundred times before ever it is thrown open
to him. To get in at all he must show a talent for abasement--and
abasement makes him timorous. Worse, that timorousness is not cured
when he succeeds at last. On the contrary, it is made even more
tremulous, for what he faces within the gates is a scheme of things
made up almost wholly of harsh and often unintelligible taboos,
and the penalty for violating even the least of them is swift and
disastrous. He must exhibit exactly the right social habits, appetites
and prejudices, public and private. He must harbor exactly the right
political enthusiasms and indignations. He must have a hearty taste
for exactly the right sports. His attitude toward the fine arts must
be properly tolerant and yet not a shade too eager. He must read and
like exactly the right books, pamphlets and public journals. He must
put up at the right hotels when he travels. His wife must patronize
the right milliners. He himself must stick to the right haberdashery.
He must live in the right neighborhood. He must even embrace the right
doctrines of religion. It would ruin him, for all opera box and society
column purposes, to set up a plea for justice to the Bolsheviki, or
even for ordinary decency. It would ruin him equally to wear celluloid
collars, or to move to Union Hill, N. J., or to serve ham and cabbage
at his table. And it would ruin him, too, to drink coffee from his
saucer, or to marry a chambermaid with a gold tooth, or to join the
Seventh Day Adventists. Within the boundaries of his curious order
he is worse fettered than a monk in a cell. Its obscure conception of
propriety, its nebulous notion that this or that is honorable, hampers
him in every direction, and very narrowly. What he resigns when he
enters, even when he makes his first deprecating knock at the door, is
every right to attack the ideas that happen to prevail within. Such
as they are, he must accept them without question. And as they shift
and change in response to great instinctive movements (or perhaps,
now and then, to the punished but not to be forgotten revolts of
extraordinary rebels) he must shift and change with them, silently and
quickly. To hang back, to challenge and dispute, to preach reforms and
revolutions--these are crimes against the brummagen Holy Ghost of the
order.
Obviously, that order cannot constitute a genuine aristocracy, in
any rational sense. A genuine aristocracy is grounded upon very much
different principles. Its first and most salient character is its
interior security, and the chief visible evidence of that security is
the freedom that goes with it--not only freedom in act, the divine
right of the aristocrat to do what he jolly well pleases, so long as he
does not violate the primary guarantees and obligations of his class,
but also and more importantly freedom in thought, the liberty to try
and err, the right to be his own man. It is the instinct of a true
aristocracy, not to punish eccentricity by expulsion, but to throw a
mantle of protection about it--to safeguard it from the suspicions and
resentments of the lower orders. Those lower orders are inert, timid,
inhospitable to ideas, hostile to changes, faithful to a few maudlin
superstitions. All progress goes on on the higher levels. It is there
that salient personalities, made secure by artificial immunities,
may oscillate most widely from the normal track. It is within that
entrenched fold, out of reach of the immemorial certainties of the
mob, that extraordinary men of the lower orders may find their city
of refuge, and breathe a clear air. This, indeed, is at once the
hall-mark and the justification of an aristocracy--that it is beyond
responsibility to the general masses of men, and hence superior to both
their degraded longings and their no less degraded aversions. It is
nothing if it is not autonomous, curious, venturesome, courageous, and
everything if it is. It is the custodian of the qualities that make for
change and experiment; it is the class that organizes danger to the
service of the race; it pays for its high prerogatives by standing in
the forefront of the fray.
No such aristocracy, it must be plain, is now on view in the United
States. The makings of one were visible in the Virginia of the later
eighteenth century, but with Jefferson and Washington the promise
died. In New England, it seems to me, there was never any aristocracy,
either in being or in nascency: there was only a theocracy that
degenerated very quickly into a plutocracy on the one hand and a caste
of sterile _Gelehrten_ on the other--the passion for God splitting
into a lust for dollars and a weakness for mere words. Despite the
common notion to the contrary--a notion generated by confusing
literacy with intelligence--New England has never shown the slightest
sign of a genuine enthusiasm for ideas. It began its history as a
slaughter-house of ideas, and it is to-day not easily distinguishable
from a cold-storage plant. Its celebrated adventures in mysticism, once
apparently so bold and significant, are now seen to have been little
more than an elaborate hocus-pocus--respectable Unitarians shocking the
peasantry and scaring the horned cattle in the fields by masquerading
in the robes of Rosicrucians. The ideas that it embraced in those
austere and far-off days were stale, and when it had finished with them
they were dead: to-day one hears of Jakob Böhme almost as rarely as one
hears of Allen G. Thurman. So in politics. Its glory is Abolition--an
English invention, long under the interdict of the native plutocracy.
Since the Civil War its six states have produced fewer political ideas,
as political ideas run in the Republic, than any average county in
Kansas or Nebraska. Appomattox seemed to be a victory for New England
idealism. It was actually a victory for the New England plutocracy,
and that plutocracy has dominated thought above the Housatonic ever
since. The sect of professional idealists has so far dwindled that it
has ceased to be of any importance, even as an opposition. When the
plutocracy is challenged now, it is challenged by the proletariat.
Well, what is on view in New England is on view in all other parts
of the nation, sometimes with ameliorations, but usually with the
colors merely exaggerated. What one beholds, sweeping the eye over
the land, is a culture that, like the national literature, is in
three layers--the plutocracy on top, a vast mass of undifferentiated
human blanks at the bottom, and a forlorn _intelligentsia_ gasping
out a precarious life between. I need not set out at any length, I
hope, the intellectual deficiencies of the plutocracy--its utter
failure to show anything even remotely resembling the makings of
an aristocracy. It is badly educated, it is stupid, it is full of
low-caste superstitions and indignations, it is without decent
traditions or informing vision; above all, it is extraordinarily
lacking in the most elemental independence and courage. Out of this
class comes the grotesque fashionable society of our big towns,
already described. Imagine a horde of peasants incredibly enriched
and with almost infinite power thrust into their hands, and you will
have a fair picture of its habitual state of mind. It shows all
the stigmata of inferiority--moral certainty, cruelty, suspicion
of ideas, fear. Never did it function more revealingly than in the
late _pogrom_ against the so-called Reds, _i. e.,_ against humorless
idealists who, like Andrew Jackson, took the platitudes of democracy
quite seriously. The machinery brought to bear upon these feeble and
scattered fanatics would have almost sufficed to repel an invasion by
the united powers of Europe. They were hunted out of their sweat-shops
and coffee-houses as if they were so many Carranzas or Ludendorffs,
dragged to jail to the tooting of horns, arraigned before quaking
judges on unintelligible charges, condemned to deportation without the
slightest chance to defend themselves, torn from their dependent
families, herded into prison-ships, and then finally dumped in a snow
waste, to be rescued and fed by the Bolsheviki. And what was the
theory at the bottom of all these astounding proceedings? So far as
it can be reduced to comprehensible terms it was much less a theory
than a fear--a shivering, idiotic, discreditable fear of a mere
banshee--an overpowering, paralyzing dread that some extra-eloquent
Red, permitted to emit his balderdash unwhipped, might eventually
convert a couple of courageous men, and that the courageous men, filled
with indignation against the plutocracy, might take to the highroad,
burn down a nail-factory or two, and slit the throat of some virtuous
profiteer. In order to lay this fear, in order to ease the jangled
nerves of the American successors to the Hapsburgs and Hohenzollerns,
all the constitutional guarantees of the citizen were suspended, the
statute-books were burdened with laws that surpass anything heard of
in the Austria of Maria Theresa, the country was handed over to a
frenzied mob of detectives, informers and _agents provocateurs_--and
the Reds departed laughing loudly, and were hailed by the Bolsheviki as
innocents escaped from an asylum for the criminally insane.