Part 18
Here, then, in our own native tradition is a sort of hope which led to happiness. Can such a hope, however, be reconciled with the artist’s devotion to beauty? To Emerson, as to the æsthetes, art is simply “the creation of beauty,” “beauty is its own excuse for being,” and “the Beautiful is the highest.” But, unlike the æsthetes, he proclaims the unity and parity of beauty, truth, and goodness--“different faces of the same All.” Beauty has “its source in perfect goodness”; it is “the mark God sets upon virtue.” In other words, the rarest beauty is a by-product of that perfect harmony by which a man realises his complete humanity, his complete happiness. This ideal of beauty was given the support of a literary creed by James Russell Lowell, who never feared to expose the weakness of a romanticism whose ultimate fruit was a “melancholy liver-complaint.” He urged the study and creation of a literature which should be an ideal representation of life, “stripped of all unessential particulars” by an imagination which found “the true ideal” not by escape but by a purposeful selection of the real. For Lowell as for Emerson the “first duty” of the artist “is to be delightful.” He distinguishes, however, between a merely recreational “literature as holiday” and a literature which, ideally “representing life, ... teaches, like life, by indirection.” Such a literature, ministering to all the higher needs of the mind and spirit, yields the greatest delight and the greatest beauty.
Aspiration and art of this quality, however, are rare in American fiction. We looked for them in vain in the seekers for a paradise of supernal beauty, and in the seekers for an American paradise of nature. Great as is Hawthorne as an artist, in my judgment he falls short of an aspiration of the Emersonian quality on account of his penchant for the eccentric, the fanciful, and the morbid. One seeks it in vain in the realists’ transcripts from life, which lack the selection and focusing that distinguish art from experience. There is evidence, nevertheless, that the novel is no longer hostile to the specifically human destiny of normal humanity, no longer oblivious to that rare beauty which is the by-product of the struggle by which a noble character imposes order on the chaos of natural desire and approaches the imaginative ideal of a life richly varied, finely poised, and of exalted happiness.
I have space for but one example in modern fiction--Dorothy Canfield’s _The Brimming Cup_. This deals with the “eternal triangle” in a little Vermont town. Marise Chittenden, whose children have gradually taken her interest from Neale, her husband, becomes lonely when her children all go to school and she senses that “the days of her physical flowering are numbered.” She is loved by Marsh, a wealthy man visiting her elderly neighbour Mr. Wells; Marsh tries to convince her that she is sacrificing “a world of impassioned living” for “an outworn ideal” of “the traditional thing to do.” The characters, not always vividly humanised, symbolise man’s universe. Marise, the “brimming cup,” “filled with some emotion ... gushing up in a great flooding rush,” typifies the surge of impulse. Marsh, a “swirly brook,” to whom life is but a moment’s “blind sensual groping and grabbing” before the “big final smash-up,” typifies unbridled lust and greed. The “steady, visible light” of Neale’s life, Neale who had found true freedom by conquering his “great, fierce, unguessed appetite, the longing for wandering, lawless freedom,” typifies centrality. Mr. Wells, who surrenders “the happiness that comes of living as suits his nature” to help make the world more courteous to negroes, typifies humanitarian sympathy. The much-travelled Eugenia typifies “sophisticated cosmopolitanism,” æsthetic escape: to her “everything’s so common-place”; she cultivates her fading beauty by “breathing in and out through one nostril, and thinking of the Infinite!” Cousin Hetty symbolises tradition; the Indian Touclé, mysticism. Marise sees her conflict as one not between “routine, traditional, narrow domestic life and the mightiness and richness of mature passion,” but as a conflict between the lure of sensuousness and “what is deepest and most living in you.” It is a psychological novel, a novel of introspection: it is based on the quest, not for what is conventionally moral, but for what in the end gives the richest human satisfaction. It presents a struggle based on self-reliance and self-conquest. Neale “wanted her to be herself, to be all that Marise could ever grow to be, he wanted her to attain her full stature.” “Nothing is your own, if you haven’t made it so.” Marise wonders if her mother-love is what Marsh calls “inverted sensuality”; Neale says, “Look into your own heart and see for yourself.” He “longed for her sake to have her strike out into the deep,” he knew that peace could only come from “Marise’s acting with her own strength on her own decision.” He urges not outer but inner control--“as few umpires as possible.” In her conflict Marise sought “what was deepest and most living in her ...; that was what the voices were trying to cry her down from finding.” She longed to be “one with the great current”--Emerson’s “stream of power.” She discovers that she is being lured by “the conventional pose of revolt,” that separation from her children would not be true “growth and freedom, and generous expansion of the soul.” Like Milton and Emerson, she finally becomes free by discovering and obeying what is deepest within:
“She was a free woman, free from something in her heart that was afraid. For the moment she could think of nothing else beyond the richness of that freedom. Why, here was the total fulfilment she had longed for. Here was the life more abundant, within, within her own heart, waiting for her!”
Joyous in her centrality, poise and freedom, she sees Marsh as an “undeveloped and tyrannical soul, the cramped mind without experience or conception of breadth and freedom.” “How narrow and cramped,” and “blinded to the bigness and variety of life” seemed people who thought that “a woman of beauty and intelligence” was wasting her life “unless she was engaged in ... stimulating ... sexual desire.” Marise had the serene joy of her home, her beloved children and her understanding husband; she had the marvel of her music; and she had the surpassing wisdom to seek her happiness not in the miraculous but in the common--in the symbolic neighbourly gathering on the night of the blooming of the Cereus, that rite of beauty; in the calm strength of simple folk whom experience has made wise. And this woman, living out her “heritage, alive and rooted deep,” with her “vivid charm like an aureole of golden mist,” “felt slowly coming into her, like a tide of a great ocean,” the ineffable peace which comes from self-mastery, from the quest of what is most universally and nobly human. Calm and free, she was lifted “high, high above the smallness of life, up to a rich realm of security in joy.”
IV
What are we to conclude from this cursory sketch of the quality of three different sorts of American hope represented in our fiction? To the hope for a paradise of supernal beauty we owe much delicate artistry of a high order; one may maintain, however, as Emerson and Lowell did, that other things being equal, the truthful representation of typical humanity alone produces that harmony which yields the highest beauty. To this hope we owe much which, when read for recreation, can give delight; one takes issue only with those, like Poe and Cabell, who take Arcadianism seriously as a universal way of life and would substitute it for a literary ideal which resolutely confronts life and seeks to solve its meaning. To the hope for a paradise of American nature, a physical paradise, we owe the imposing of order upon the natural chaos of the wilderness; we owe the physical “improvements,” the miracles of the machinery and science of a great nation. Of what ultimate avail, however, are material resources, physical comfort, time-saving machinery, and science unless the time and energy conserved are used for higher intellectual or spiritual ends, for the attainment of happiness? To those who have recorded this hope in fiction we owe the faithful preservation of an important aspect of the social history of America; but literature is greater than social history: it aspires to embody the meaning of life in terms at once timeless and universal and beautiful. Our frontier lands are exhausted, and those who have sought the physical paradise of a standardized industrialism have found nothing but boredom and despair. In place of this dead level of repression and standardisation let us develop a new respect for personality--for personality richly varied and healthily individual. Let us re-direct the joy-giving passion for creation through the matchless resources of the realm of the spirit. If both the rarest happiness and the rarest beauty are the fruit only of the hope of a paradise within, it would appear that American fiction would in the future be wise in dealing not with escape or with externalities but with the infinite variety and eternal mystery of the human soul’s conflict between appetite and aspiration on its quest for an exalted inward happiness. Before we can expect American fiction to do this, however, the way must be prepared by the development of an adequate social imagination. For great art has always been organic with and supported by the life and vision of a whole people. Shakespeare was the “Soul of the Age,” Dante the “voice of ten silent centuries.” A hope must have throbbed in the breasts of a whole age before a writer can body it forth with the concentration, the brooding intensity, and the unerring congruency to human nature demanded of great art. Such a hope, such a social imagination, such an agreement in aspiration, can be developed best, perhaps, through education--through our interpreters of literature in college and university. Mindful of the heritage of heroic pioneers, we must embark upon our intellectual pioneering with the same resolute courage, the same loyal devotion, the same consecration to a high cause. Although our scholars are still being lured aside either to the camp of the æsthetes or the camp of the philologists, America must hereafter strive to develop the “middle-of-the-road” scholar who shall be, as Emerson said, Man Thinking, the delegated mind of society, whose major aim shall be the purposeful and discriminating interpretation of the record man has left, in terms of beauty, regarding “the conduct of life” and the path to peace. When such scholar-critics have developed such a social imagination, such a popular unanimity of hope, we shall be ready to receive the artist of genius who is to write for us the great American novel.
Note--For copyrighted evidence used in the foregoing essay I am indebted as follows: Sherwood Anderson, _Poor White_ (Modern Library, N. Y., 1925); Dorothy Canfield Fisher, _The Brimming Cup_ (Grosset and Dunlap, N. Y., 1921); James Branch Cabell, _The Cream of the Jest_ (Modern Library, N. Y., 1922); _Jurgen_ (Grosset and Dunlap, N. Y., 1927); _Beyond Life_ (Modern Library, N. Y., 1919); _Straws and Prayerbooks_ (Robert M. McBride and Co., N. Y., 1925); Willa Cather, _The Professor’s House_ (Alfred A. Knopf, N. Y., 1925); Floyd Dell, _Moon-Calf_ (Alfred A. Knopf, N. Y., 1921); R. W. Emerson, _Complete Works_ (Houghton Mifflin Co., Boston, 1903); _Journals_ (Houghton Mifflin Co., Boston, 1909-14); _The Correspondence of Emerson and Carlyle_ (Houghton Mifflin Co., Boston, 1888); Norman Foerster, _American Criticism_ (Houghton Mifflin Co., Boston, 1928); Hamlin Garland, _A Son of the Middle Border_ (Grosset and Dunlap, N. Y., 1927); Joseph Hergesheimer, _Linda Condon_ (Alfred A. Knopf, N. Y., 1919); Mark Twain, _Complete Works_ (American Publishing Co., Hartford, 1903); A. B. Paine, _Mark Twain, A Biography_ (Harper and Brothers, N. Y., 1912); F. L. Pattee, “James Fenimore Cooper” (_American Mercury_, Alfred A. Knopf, N. Y.); Gregory Paine, Introduction to _The Deerslayer_ (Harcourt, Brace and Co., N. Y., 1927); O. E. Rolvaag, _Giants in the Earth_ (Harper and Brothers, N. Y., 1929).
_Dionysus in Dismay_
STANLEY P. CHASE
Twenty-five years ago, when my generation were beginning to find their way around in the world of print and paint, a group of us used to meet occasionally to share each other’s discoveries in contemporary thought and literature. You may smile at the association of the date 1904 and contemporary literature, and confessedly some of the objects of our attention were fantastic enough--Elbert Hubbard, Edward Howard Griggs, and even “I, Mary MacLane.” The more daring among us were delving in Haeckel and Henry George; our conservatives, according to their bents, delighted in Kipling and Barrie, or a group of alluring Celts, or became expert in discriminations between the earlier and the later manner of Henry James. We all read, of course, William James and Bernard Shaw and H. G. Wells and Chesterton. In poetry, to be sure, we had no such variegated menu as the contemporary road-house affords; I should say that our diet was easily digestible and a little saccharine. For the most part, as I recall, we followed along the vagabondia trail after Richard Hovey and Bliss Carman. In that old college town near the coast, we could still thrill to such verses as
Three of us without a care In the red September Tramping down the roads of Maine, Making merry with the rain, With the fellow winds a-fare Where the winds remember.
Frost and Sandburg, Lindsay and Masefield, had not come into our world--much less Walter de la Mare or Aldous Huxley or Robinson Jeffers. But we were not so entirely neglected by the contemporary muse as you may suppose. We knew the early work of Yeats, and “The Hound of Heaven” of Francis Thompson; we had discovered the sonnets of Santayana; we could repeat a large part of _A Shropshire Lad_; and of course for our more cosmic moods we had Walt Whitman. Hundreds of other such groups must have existed, like ours callow, inexperienced, bumptious, but very inquisitive, very receptive. Not against us did the “new poetry” (no longer such) have to hurl its bolts.
And even in that distant, unreal decade of the nineteen-hundreds, before President Roosevelt, by a few kindly pages in the _Outlook_, put Edwin Arlington Robinson’s name into every one’s mouth, we knew the poet of “Tilbury Town” (only thirty miles from our own). There was one poem of his whose meaning used to be a great subject of dispute,--for we were than naïve enough to think that a poem must be susceptible of some rational explanation. It was entitled “Cortège,” and had appeared in the _Captain Craig_ volume of 1902.[45]
Four o’clock this afternoon, Fifteen hundred miles away: So it goes, the crazy tune, So it pounds and hums all day.
Four o’clock this afternoon, Earth will hide them far away: Best they go to go so soon, Best for them the grave to-day.
Had she gone but half so soon, Half the world had passed away. Four o’clock this afternoon, Best for them they go to-day.
Four o’clock this afternoon Love will hide them deep, they say; Love that made the grave so soon, Fifteen hundred miles away.
Four o’clock this afternoon-- Ah, but they go slow to-day: Slow to suit my crazy tune, Past the need of all we say.
Best it came to come so soon, Best for them they go to-day: Four o’clock this afternoon, Fifteen hundred miles away.
The half-benumbing, half-intensifying effect of the “crazy tune,” the curious way in which a mere pattern of words can usurp the mind, now stealing its attention from the very grief they point to, and now flashing upon it a new aspect of that grief--something like that, I suppose, accounts for the fascination the poem had for us. But a number of us were dissatisfied with an explanation so simple. No, we wanted to know, first, who and how many persons were being buried at four o’clock to-day, and their relationship to the poet (was it, for instance, a former sweetheart and her husband?), and whether “she” in the third stanza was one of the deceased, and in what sense it could be said that Love “made the grave so soon,” and what “half so soon” meant--was it any different from “twice as soon”? We even calculated that the burial must be taking place some fifteen hundred miles to the _west_, since otherwise, all (Protestant) funerals being held commonly at two o’clock, the poet’s time would be twelve noon instead of four afternoon. All, of course, very silly and irrelevant questions.
Only a few years ago, in a poetry course, I was recalling these old agitations of ours, as a warning, I feel sure, against such literalness of interpretation. But, as will happen with class-room instruction, my admonitions produced quite the opposite effect from that intended, for one member of the class was so intrigued by the problem, even as we had been twenty years before, that he evolved the staggering theory that the poem was not about a funeral at all, but about a marriage. This ingenious view having been communicated, in a circuitous way, to Mr. Robinson, he settled the matter quite simply with the following note to the inquirer:
“I have long given up attempting to interpret my own poetry, but in this instance, would go so far as to suggest a funeral rather than a marriage. I remember this poem chiefly as a more or less reprehensible experiment in sound and feeling--a performance more pardonable thirty years ago--perhaps--than it would be to-day.”
Of course, it was not Mr. Robinson’s performance, but ours, which was reprehensible. We were treating an “experiment in sound and feeling” as we might have treated a deposition in court or an application for the payment of life-insurance; we were bringing to a poem an attitude of mind alien to its character _as a poem_. It was as if one should read Mr. Frost’s “The Thatch” and demand to know _why_ he “would not go in till the light went out.” For “Cortège” in essential matters is not cryptic in the least; it is only irrelevant, external details that are left unexplained. And ultimately, I suppose, what we call a taste for poetry, of any except a very elementary sort, depends upon the possession of tact or intelligence to perceive just such a distinction.
I have used this personal recollection because much more frequently to-day and to a greater degree a somewhat similar feeling of puzzlement assails the reader of contemporary poetry. This simple instance of an obscurity gratuitously created by readers may lead to the consideration of a problem of poetic form more comprehensive than any question of mere technique (though technical elements of poetry are involved in it too), I mean the question of those necessities which are laid on poetry from its being a form of communication between mind and mind. For, I believe, from misapprehension and confusion in this matter, on the part now of poets and now of their readers, springs, to some extent, the unsatisfactory state of poetry at the present time. On the one side, there is reported a feeling of exasperation, by readers competent enough in other kinds of literature or in the older poetry, who “can make nothing of this modernist stuff,” and on the other side the modernists’ rejoinder that such readers are precisely in the position of my group of twenty-five years ago--lacking the intelligence to grasp what is essential and to disregard non-essentials. Surely a consideration of the nature and limits of that community of mind which must be assumed to subsist between the poet and his readers is not foreign to the subject of this book.
I
At the outset we encounter the Crocean view of all art, including poetry, as expression merely, and conversely of all expression as art. But leaving the confusions of Signor Croce to be dealt with by others,[46] we are warranted in assuming, I think, that, generally and typically, the poet desires communication with other persons,--conceivably only one other person, or persons of the future, but at any rate communication and not merely self-expression. Otherwise, he wouldn’t publish or circulate or read his poems, as generally and typically poets do. The theory of Laura Riding and Robert Graves[47] that the poet publishes (or “externalises”) only out of consideration for the rights of the poem, which, like physical offspring, has attained an independent status with a life of its own, is a naïve and superfluous bit of mystification, sufficiently answered by the query, “Why then sign one’s name?”--and I have not remarked any unusually wide return to the practice of anonymity. And one is led to wonder, as one turns the pages of our more advanced periodicals, what possible readers some of these poets are addressing. After a moderate success in comprehending, let us say, such diverse productions as those of the mediæval mystics, the wits of the Roman Empire and the Restoration, the English metaphysical poets, and the symbolist group in France, and after a period of conscientious schooling in the pronouncements of this newest movement, it is disconcerting to find oneself completely balked by the innocent-appearing contents of the latest anthology of verse. Among the ten possible but improbable interpretations of some poem, it seems somehow less than a sporting chance that the one you finally choose as the least implausible will be what was intended.
Take, for instance, this poem of Mr. Wallace Stevens, which I select not as an example of that writer’s often delightful connoisseurship in verse, but as fairly representative of this decline in what has been called “communicative efficacy.”
ANECDOTE OF THE JAR[48]
I placed a jar in Tennessee, And round it was, upon a hill. It made the slovenly wilderness Surround that hill.
The wilderness rose up to it, And sprawled around, no longer wild. The jar was round upon the ground And tall and of a port in air.
It took dominion everywhere. The jar was grey and bare. It did not give of bird or bush, Like nothing else in Tennessee.
Now the elements of this experience--the jar, its shape, colour, and quality, the hill in Tennessee where it is placed, the behaviour or appearance of the wilderness, the bird, the bush--stand doubtless in some kind of relation with each other in the poet’s mind, have possibly certain symbolic values. Since we have no clues to these relationships and values, our mind is free to do anything it pleases with the bare grey jar, the hill, and the wilderness. This freedom, however, and any pleasure we may take in the separate images, in the rhythms, or the placing of the words, are not sufficient compensation for the state of uncertainty and slight irritation in which we are left. Very likely the little poem is meant to suggest nothing more than the superiority, to an intensely civilised person, of the simplest bit of handicraft over any extent of unregulated “nature,” but it has been seriously interpreted to me, by devotees of recent poetry, as, respectively, an _objet d’art_, a sex-symbol, and a burial-urn containing the remains of a valued friend. And so it must remain, for me, not only like nothing else in Tennessee but like nothing else in the universe.