Part 17

The most significant history of our national quest for a material happiness is perhaps embodied in the work of Mark Twain, whose much-discussed pessimism may be explained mainly by the fact that, as the spokesman of frontier America living exclusively “in the present,” he served as the faithful mirror to a whole nation in which an Industrial Revolution, philosophic mechanistic determinism, and the collapse of illusions led to despair. His stories illustrate the changing importance of the two planes of consciousness in the frontier mind--the consciousness of a hopeful and radiant illusion, and the consciousness of a hopeless and sordid reality. Take three stories, representing three different periods. _The Jumping Frog_ (1865), dealing with the winning of a bet by roguery, embodies in a humorous way the reckless exuberance and joyousness of the dawning West after the Gold Rush. To this type belong also the books which glorify the “natural man” and the free-born American--_Roughing It_ (1873), _Tom Sawyer_ (1876), _Life on the Mississippi_ (1883), and _Huck Finn_ (1884). In contrast, his first book, _Innocents Abroad_ (1869), represents the frontiersman’s life-long contempt for European tradition and Europe, “one vast museum of magnificence and misery,” groping “in the midnight of priestly superstition for sixteen hundred years.” A story of a second period, _The Million Pound Bank Note_ (1893) mirrors a materialistic “gilded age” in which, lured on by a fabulous hope, men bowed to the Golden Calf while the spectre of reality haunted their thoughts. In this story the two planes of consciousness are in equipoise until the end, when the plane of illusion prevails. It is the tale, briefly, of how a poor tramp masquerades as the owner of a million pound bank note; grim poverty stalks behind him, but every one worships the illusion of his wealth, and he finally wins the girl of his heart as well as the million pounds. The story is a parable of the West: these were the days of illusory fortunes in transcontinental railroads, in iron and steel, the days of the Morgans and Carnegies and Fricks and Goulds. “I am,” said Mark Twain, “frightened at the proportion of my prosperity ... Whatever I touch turns to gold.” In 1895 he was bankrupt. But take a story representative of the third period--_The $30,000 Bequest_ (1907). A poor book-keeper and his wife, learning of a promised fortune at the death of a relative, each night “put the plodding world away, and lived in another and a fairer, reading romances to each other, dreaming dreams, comrading with kings and princes.” They increasingly neglect realities and scorn their associates. “The castle-building habit, the day-dreaming habit--how it grows! What a luxury it becomes; how we revel in them, steep our souls in them, intoxicate ourselves with their beguiling fantasies--oh, yes, and how soon and how easily our dream life and our material life become so immingled and so fused together that we can’t tell which is which, any more.” Just as the Golden West was unable to keep its “dream life,” its illusions, triumphant over its “material life,” its stark reality, so with the brutal news that the “town had to bury” the deceitful relative, the poverty-stricken book-keeper and his wife “lived yet two years, in mental night, always brooding, steeped in vague regrets and melancholy dreams”--like the modern realists!

What did Mark Twain report regarding his early hope for a material paradise? In _The Mysterious Stranger_ (1916) he recorded his final despair, his conviction that life is cruel and meaningless--a “wandering forlorn among the empty eternities”--and in that nightmare of the fancy cowardice, hypocrisy and slavery are all that man can hope for. After the death of his daughter the master of comedy said, “My life is a bitterness, but I am content; for she has been enriched with the most precious of all gifts--the gift that makes all other gifts mean and poor--death.” His _What Is Man?_ and _To a Person Sitting in Darkness_ express the same vein. “There is, of course, a Master Mind, but it cares nothing for our happiness or our unhappiness ... As to the hereafter, we have not the slightest evidence that there is any ...” To him man became “a poor joke--the poorest that was ever contrived!”

Although Hamlin Garland came to believe that “truth was a higher quality than beauty” and set himself down as “an unflinching realist,” one must recall that he comes of a race of “potential poets, bards, and dreamers,” that he traces in general the disillusionment resulting from an idyllic hope based upon an idealistic quest for an American paradise of nature. He records the “deep vein of poetry,” the illusion, through which the pioneer viewed a sordid reality, “the place of the rainbow, and the pot of gold.” “Beneath the sunset lay the enchanted land of opportunity.”

“When we’ve wood and prairie land, Won by our toil, We’ll reign like kings in fairy land, Lords of the soil!”

Here is Pater’s “Sangreal of an endless pilgrimage” transferred to prairie-land. Later he confesses, “I had idealised all the figures and scenes of my boyhood.” “This land of my childhood,” “its charm, its strange dominion,” he has to admit, “did not in truth exist--it was a magical world, born of the vibrant union of youth and firelight, of music and the voice of moaning winds.” Like Wordsworth’s early “light that never was, on sea or land,” Garland’s illusion “has all the quality of a vision, something experienced in another world,” covered with “a poetic glamour.”

However, if the Son of the Middle Border sought a pot of gold at the foot of the rainbow which did not exist, if he is pursuing fancifully a phantom of hope, he is honest enough to record the results of such a quest. As he grew up he noted a “growing bitterness”--“disillusionment had begun.” The Shelleyan rainbow of hope faded into the light of common day. What had been the “marvel of a golden earth before a crimson sky” became merely “Uncle Sam’s domain, bleak, semi-arid, and wind-swept.” “I perceived little that was poetic, little that was idyllic.”

“What purpose does a man serve by toiling like that for sixty years with no increase in leisure, with no growth in mental grace?... At the moment nothing glozed the essential tragic futility of their existence.... The essential tragedy and hopelessness of most human life under the conditions into which our society was swiftly hardening embittered me, called for expression, but even then I did not know that I had found my theme.... Now, suddenly I perceived the futility of our quest....”

It is clear, also, that Garland is attempting a serious generalised study of the outcome of frontier hope. The young orator, meeting his father, is shocked at his sudden appearance of age and gloom: “He had come a long way from the buoyant faith of ’66, and the change in him was typical of the change in the West--in America.” “The almost universal disappointment and suffering of the West was typical.” “All the gilding of farm life melted away. The hard and bitter realities came back upon me in a flood ... Every house I visited had its individual message of sordid struggle and half-hidden despair.” Garland, then, has given us a cross-section of our national history; he has faithfully recorded the “almost universal” despair which greets men who would “reign like kings in fairyland.”

Rolvaag’s _Giants in the Earth_, “A Saga of the Prairie,” is another impressive record of the Odyssey “Toward the Sunset” of the frontiersman and the finding of despair instead of the pot of gold. Per Hansa and his religious wife Beret, Norwegians, journey “straight toward the west, straight toward the sky line,” “deeper and deeper into a bluish-green infinity--on and on, ... for Sunset Land.” Finally they halt and raise a sod hut in “the endless solitude,” the “eternal, unbroken wilderness”; they plant crops, and winter sets in; Beret has a child. Here again we meet the two planes of frontier consciousness--idyllic hope built on illusion and the dread of a sordid and terrifying reality.

“That summer Per Hansa was transported, was carried farther and ever farther away on the wings of a wonderful fairy tale--a romance in which he was both prince and king, the sole possessor of countless treasures. In this, as in all other fairy tales, the story grew ever more fascinating and dear to the heart, the farther it advanced.... Ever more beautiful grew the tale; ever more dazzlingly shone the sunlight over the fairy castle.”

On one side there is the “divine restlessness,” the “enchanting joyousness” of Per Hansa, on the other, Beret’s poignant yearning for human companionship and inner spiritual peace which her dread of the stark reality cannot satisfy. “Bleak, grey, God-forsaken, the empty desolation stretched on every hand ... How could one lift up one’s voice against such silence!” As winter came on Beret saw only the snow, and for her the day “died in a pitch-black night that weighed down the heart.” Her reflections give the key to the book:

“The country did not at all come up to her expectations; here, too, she saw enough of poverty and grinding toil. What did it avail, that the rich soil lay in endless stretches? More than ever did she realise that ‘man liveth not by bread alone.’... Even the bread was none too plentiful at times....

“But no sooner had they reached America than the west-fever had smitten the old settlements like a plague. Such a thing had never happened before in the history of mankind; people were intoxicated by bewildering visions; they spoke dazedly, as though under the force of a spell.... ‘Go west!... Go west, folks!... The farther west, the better the land!’ Men beheld in feverish dreams the endless plains, teeming with fruitfulness, glowing, out there where day sank into night--a Beulah Land of corn and wine!... Ever westward led the course, to where the sun glowed in matchless glory as it sank at night; people drifted about in a sort of delirium, like birds in mating time; then they flew toward the sunset, in small flocks and large--always toward Sunset Land.... Now she saw it clearly: here on the trackless plains, the thousand-year-old hunger of the poor after human happiness had been unloosed!”

As she expects to die in childbirth, she pleads with Per Hansa to take the other children back to civilisation: “Human beings cannot exist here!... They grow into beasts!” And the magic of a fairy tale turns out to be simply nature red in tooth and claw. In the last section of the book, entitled “The Great Plain Drinks the Blood of Christian Men and is Satisfied,” the story is told of how Per Hansa the faithful, the hopeful, the loving husband and father, is frozen to death while going for a doctor to help a neighbour.

“There was the Red Son of the Great Prairie, who hated the Palefaces with a hot hatred; stealthily he swooped down upon them, tore up and laid waste the little settlements. Great was the terror he spread; bloody the saga concerning him.

“But more to be dreaded than this tribulation was the strange spell of sadness which the unbroken solitude cast upon the minds of some. Many took their own lives; asylum after asylum was filled with disordered beings who had once been human.... Then, too, there were years of pestilence--toil and travail, famine and disease.”

The frontier is exhausted, but it should be carefully noted that the quest for a physical, external paradise lives on in the American machine-age, in the dream of an industrial Utopia. To take but one illustration recorded in our fiction, Sherwood Anderson’s _Poor White_--paralleling the frontier stories--traces the transition from the optimism born of untapped resources to the despair of a standardised industrialism. It is the tale of a stolid boy, Hugh McVey, who manages to invent machines from which every one hopes great things; it is supposed to be typical, to present a cross-section of American life.

“In every mind the future was bright with promise. Throughout the whole Mid-American country ... a hopeful spirit prevailed.... The youth and optimistic spirit of the country led it to take hold of the hand of the giant, industrialism, and lead him laughing into the land.... The thing that was happening in Bidwell happened in towns all over the Middle West. Out through the coal and iron regions of Pennsylvania, into Ohio and Indiana, and on westward into the States bordering on the Mississippi River, industry crept. Gas and oil were discovered in Ohio and Indiana. Over night towns grew into cities. A madness took hold of the minds of the people.... Wealth seemed to be spurting out of the very earth.... Farmers owning oil-producing land went to bed in the evening poor and owing money at the bank, and awoke in the morning rich.”

But Hugh McVey, “the poor white, son of the defeated dreamer by the river,” finds mere money and the satisfaction of physical needs insufficient. “He was unfilled by the life he led.” Conscious of “some indefinable, inner struggle,” “he fought to accept himself, to understand himself, to relate himself with the life about him.” For the sanctity of the individual personality America had substituted the worship of mass production, of material gain.

“It was a time of hideous architecture, a time when thought and learning paused. Without music, without poetry, without beauty in their lives or impulses, a whole people, full of the native energy and strength of lives lived in a new land, rushed pell-mell into a new age.”

In place of the free workman, joyously expressing with his own hands the dream of his own mind, came the factory-hand, blindly bitter from the machine-standardisation which thwarted the self-expression which even the farmer enjoyed. In the town of Bidwell, Jim Gibson exults in selling machine-made harnesses and ruining Joe Wainsworth, the old harness maker. Finally, in a fit of rage Wainsworth kills his tormentor. Clara, the wife of Hugh McVey, points the moral:

“In her mind the harness maker had come to stand for all the men and women who were in secret revolt against the absorption of the age in machines and the products of machines. He had stood as a protesting figure against what her father had become and what she thought her husband had become.... As a child she had gone often to Wainsworth’s shop with her father or some farm hand, and she now remembered sharply the peace and quiet of the place.... Everything worth while is very far away.... The machines men are so intent on making have carried them very far from the old sweet things.”

And we have Anderson’s summary indictment of industrialism:

“Modern men and women who live in industrial cities are like mice that have come out of the fields to live in houses that do not belong to them. They live within the dark walls of the houses where only a dim light penetrates, and so many have come that they grow thin and haggard with the constant toil of getting food and warmth.”

Thus those who have sought an American paradise of nature, a physical paradise, have reported finding only despair. In essentials this hope is identical with the primitivistic and industrial hope which Europe found inadequate over a century ago. Wordsworth, the high priest of naturalism, confessed he had “too blindly reposed” his trust, and he had the wisdom to seek the support of the classical and the Christian traditions. And Ruskin and Carlyle exposed the criminal fallacies involved in setting material gain above the sanctity of the individual personality. But when this outworn, exploded philosophy, based upon primitivism, faith in natural goodness, absolute liberty, _laissez faire_, and reliance upon nature and material things, was transplanted to the vast material resources of a frontier land, it was given a new, hysterical lease of life. Now, a century and a quarter later, a disenchanted America agrees with the English naturalist who testified of his infinite “dejection” and his conviction that man

“may not hope from outward forms to win The passion and the life, whose fountains are within.”

III

If those who have entered the American Door of Hope in quest of happiness have reported that it is to be found neither in the Land of the Blue Flower nor in the Land of Sensuous Desire, let us inquire what those have reported who have sought the happiness of self-perfection, of an exalted personal life, of “A Paradise within thee, happier far.” This quest involves a definitely focused aspiration toward, and a disciplined imitation of what is most richly and deeply human, of what is most balanced and poised and complete, of what has in the past been reported to yield lasting contentment and peace. This sort of quest is very old. To Plato and Aristotle, justice, the crown of life, consisted of the ideal balance of all the desires. Behind the Horatian doctrine of the golden mean--_auream mediocritatem_--and Cicero’s praise of _mediocritatem illam quae est inter nimium et parum_ is the ideal of mediation and centrality. The Christian tradition, according to Mr. G. K. Chesterton, is peculiar in its reconciling of opposites, in its synthetic balance. At any rate, the worldly classical and the other-worldly Christian traditions have united in upholding the doctrines of imitation, restraint, of a dualistic conflict in man between appetite and aspiration, and of a definitely focused aspiration which culminates in inner peace. In the Middle Ages the “law for measure” was allied to the theory of the four humours, the balance of which caused health, the excess of any one of which caused “one-sidedness” and disease. In the Renaissance the author of _Everyman in His Humour_ used satire to render eccentricity ridiculous, and the Hamlet who allowed all to be “sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought” recognised that “by the o’ergrowth of some complexion,” by “one defect,” men “take corruption.” He honoured Horatio, his “soul’s choice,” because in him “blood and judgment are so well commingl’d.” The Elizabethans recognised that a great man, like a tall tower, must be balanced at all points, or be drawn down to ruin by his own strength. If space permitted, one might trace through the impetus given scientific specialisation and material progress by Bacon and the Royal Society, through such figures as Congreve and Pope and Edward Young and Rousseau, the gradual evolution of the theory of humours into the theory of the master-passion and the “original genius” of being idiosyncratic. But let us remember that Milton, uniting the Renaissance passion for sensuous delight and the Puritan passion for saintliness, kept his sublime balance, his vision of centrality, his ideal of self-mastery. His exhortation to Adam as he leaves the physical paradise of Eden is his exhortation to us:

“Only add Deeds to thy knowledge answerable; add faith; Add virtue, patience, temperance; add love By name to come called Charity, the soul Of all the rest: then wilt thou not be loth To leave this Paradise, but shalt possess A Paradise within thee, happier far.”

Mindful of the dark impulses of the natural man, the great liberal distinguished sharply between anarchy and the true liberty resulting from the substitution of inner for outer control: “License they mean when they cry Liberty,” he remarks of the Cavaliers, “For who loves that must first be wise and good.” “He who reigns within himself ... is more than a king.... Real and substantial liberty is rather from within than from without.”

Americans may well be proud that this noble hope partially lives on in Emerson, our greatest man of letters, who found Milton “foremost of all men ... to inspire,” to communicate “the vibration of hope, of self-reverence, of piety, of delight in beauty.” Out of materialistic America has come this “friend and aider of those who would live in the spirit,” who strove above all to celebrate “the Ideal and Holy Life, the life within life, ... the spiritual powers in their infinite contrast to the mechanical powers and the mechanical philosophy of this time.” It is true, of course, that Emerson did not altogether escape the contagion of his romantic age; that in his apparent praise of the unique and the individual, in his most un-Miltonic faith in natural goodness, in his belittling of logic, of tradition, and of the aid which culture can give as a guide to conduct, Emerson has a certain kinship with Rousseau. Let us grant it--and guard against it! One must recall, however, that part of his dubious influence has resulted from a superficial and piece-meal reading of Emerson, encouraged by his characteristic oracular device of presenting two conflicting statements rather than a balanced and qualified generalisation. If one reads all of Emerson, however, in an endeavour to relate and define his thought, it is apparent, as Professor Harrison and Professor Foerster have found, that his stronger affinities are not with Rousseau but with Plato and the humanists. His central doctrine of self-reliance turns out to be a reliance on a self which is not unique but common to all men, “a reliance upon man’s share of divinity,” upon his higher, universal self. “We become divine,” he says, not by eccentricity, by revolt, but by “obedience,” by conformity to “the common heart,” to what is normally, typically, and nobly human. In fact he strictly warns us against the “rudeness” of failing to “distinguish between the private and the universal consciousness.” He perceived the unity of man, the need of spiritual concentration; his occasional assumption of good intentions is balanced by his own Spartan virtue and his confession that “because the temptations are so manifold and so subtle,” he agrees with Socrates and the Hindoos in denominating the Supreme Being the “Internal Check.” In common with the Christian tradition, he sharply severs the “law for man” from the “law for thing.” He is aware of “the eternal distinction between the soul and the world,” aware that too great a preoccupation with the outward, sensuous, mundane life about us (the “work” rather than the “workman”) at the expense of “the integrity of your own mind” and deeper spiritual needs, breeds a dread of transience and hence “uneasiness” and despair. Behind the fleeting scenes of daily life he perceived “that which changes not,” permanent human elements common to every one, the cultivation of which gave him that sweet serenity, that “cheerfulness and courage” which Arnold pronounced the outcome of his philosophy, “his abiding word for us.” “Happiness in labour, righteousness, and veracity; in all the life of the spirit; happiness and eternal hope;--that was Emerson’s gospel.”