Part 13

In the modern novel as in the modern world religion has come to be more and more a matter of service and aspiration; less and less a matter of accordance with fixed rules and formulas. And upon this, as upon so many other aspects of life, the writer of to-day can express himself with a freedom which only a few years ago would have brought down torrents of wrath upon his head. What in our parents’ time would have been said of _The Trend_, for example, or even of _A Man’s World_?

Thus religion in the modern novel evinces itself principally in four distinct ways: in revolt against the worn-out, cramping traditions; in a broad humanitarianism which has increased sympathy and given a fresh and vivid and impelling meaning to the word duty; in a quickened spirituality that has removed punishment and reward from the hereafter and even from the world of matter to the living human soul; and in a reaching out, vaguely, gropingly, but never futilely, toward “the stillness,” “the Ultimate Force,” “the Unknown Power,” or whatever term men prefer to use in their desire to get away from the old anthropomorphic conceptions, and yet express their consciousness of the Infinite and Divine. For “the obstinate questioning of invisible things” which began so soon as man developed from the primeval ape-forms and became Man, still goes on and will go on, in all probability, so long as the race endures; only the shape and manner of the questioning has changed as humanity has slowly learned something of its ability to mould its own destiny, the duty and privilege which it possesses of working out its own salvation. There have been many periods in the world’s history when that questioning found few to voice it aloud, yet always after such a pause it has been renewed with fresh and greater vigor. One of these pauses came in the last century; to-day the questioning resounds all about us, and one of the means through which it is being uttered most clearly is the modern novel.

GIOVANNITTI

_Poet of the Wop_

KENNETH MACGOWAN

There are probably a lot of technical errors in Giovannitti’s poems.[1] I didn’t notice. And perhaps that is one of the tests of great poetry,—not the faults that you can’t find because they’re not there, but the faults that will not be discovered. Something else absorbs you.

The significant thing is that here we have a new sort of poet with a new sort of song. And doubtless because of this song it will be many years before we see his greatness. For the song that he sings is not a pleasant song. It is the song of the people as he learned it in the Lawrence strike and hummed it over in the jails of Salem. He and his song are products of something that few Americans yet understand. We do not comprehend the labor problem of the unskilled, just as we do not comprehend the I. W. W. that has come out of it. A poet has arisen to explain.

Now the I. W. W. is no mere labor union; the A. F. of L. is enough. Giovannitti is no mere poet of labor; we have had plenty of such. He is not singing of labor alone. He is not prating of the dignity of work—you can’t find it in the situation the I. W. W. faces. He is no aristocrat of handiwork, like the A. F. of L. He sings the people behind the work—active or idle, skilled or not—“Plebs, Populace, People, Rabble, Mob, Proletariat.” He cries the awakening of that great mass of mankind that has always been typified as Labor because earning its bread in the sweat of its brow was its one common attribute—the primordial curse. He looks beyond work to emancipation:

Think! If your brain will but extend As far as what your hands have done, If but your reason will descend As deep as where your feet have gone,

The walls of ignorance shall fall That stood between you and your world….

Aye, think! While breaks in you the dawn, Crouched at your feet the world lies still— It has no power but your brawn, It knows no wisdom but your will.

Behind your flesh, and mind, and blood, Nothing there is to live and do, There is no man, there is no god, There is not anything but you.

Against him Giovannitti finds the world—the world even of his own kind, bound in the chains of the past. The police, the law, the Church, another age shackling this, he has met them all in Massachusetts, arrayed against even the first steps toward his industrial democracy. The business of his verse is to destroy. In _The Cage_—the prisoner’s pen in which he stood for murder—he deals with the mummy of authority. In _The Walker_ he has painted the prison as no man, not even Wilde, has done. And the Church—even the Christ whom so many socialists are confessing that they may be numbered with the sheep—that also he denies. Christ, the heavy-laden carpenter, was still a man of peace. Giovannitti has his own sermon, “The Sermon on the Common”: “Blessed are the strong in freedom’s spirit; for theirs is the kingdom of the earth.”

Materialistic—like all these socialists? Giovannitti has his answer ready for you: “While happiness be not our goal, but simply the way to get there.”

Neither materialism nor happiness is likely to trouble the average American. What bothers him is “violence.” And there is no disguising the fact that violence is an essential part of the I. W. W. and its faith. Love is as great a part, of course; but hate must spring just as quickly from the cruelty of the world of the few as love from the brotherhood of the world of the many. Giovannitti and his friends want something and they want it badly. They are ready to take it peaceably: Giovannitti pictures the spirit of Helen Keller as the Christ of loving forgiveness—the only true Christ—offering peace to the grinder of the faces of the poor. But, if love and forgiveness fail, there is another savior waiting, and a violent savior:

… The sombre one whose brow Is seared by all the fires and ne’er will bow Shall come forth, both his hands upon the hilt.

Whatever its future, the I. W. W. has accomplished one tremendously big thing—a thing that sweeps away all twaddle over red flags and violence and sabotage. And that is the individual awakening of “illiterates” and “scum” to an original, personal conception of society and the realization of the dignity and the rights of their part in it. They have learned more than class-consciousness; they have learned consciousness of self. The I. W. W. is making the “wop” into a thinker. And that is what Giovannitti wrote in his _Proem_ when he said of his own verses:

They are the blows of my own sledge Against the walls of my own jail.

[1] _Arrows in the Gale._ By Arturo Giovannitti. The Hillacre Book House.

EMERSON

_A Mystic Who Lives Again in His Journals_[2]

WARREN BARTON BLAKE

Emerson has been “discovered” again—this time in the France that he tried hard and vainly to understand. It all began with the publication of a critical biography by Madame Dugard in 1907. I was in Paris then, and read it, and was most of all struck by the comically dressy effect, in translation, of the simple lines beginning:

Good-bye, proud world, I’m going home.

In French, they correspond to an Emerson dressed in eighteenth century style, with wig and sword:

Adieu, monde orgueilleux, je retourne au foyer; Tu n’es pas mon ami, je ne suis pas le tien…

Yet the book is a good introduction to Emerson, and, since 1907, Madame Dugard and others have translated several volumes of essays for the French public. I wonder if they have won a reading—outside the university and professionally literary groups; I wonder if Frenchmen see far beyond what Robert G. Ingersoll called the “baked-bean side of his genius”? As the late Perpetual Secretary of the Immortals said, when the French Academy “crowned” the Dugard book:

“Emerson’s influence in America, like Ruskin’s in England, is a curious illustration of the need for an ideal which, at certain moments, the man of action, the Anglo-Saxon, feels. Such was the empire of contemplative monks over barbarian chiefs and of mystics over feudal armies. It was Emerson’s fortune to launch his ideas at a time when America was largely without them…. Emerson, knowing that the great danger of democracy is atrophy of the individual conscience, set himself to preaching individualism—the necessity of a high culture, the search for an ideal.”

II

Eight years ago, when I read Mme. Dugard’s volume, I was youthful—with all of youth’s intolerance. It seemed no mere coincidence that Emerson’s father recorded his birth in his diary between a dry note on the “Election Sermon” and a report of a session of his literary club at Mr. Adams’s. Cheerful youth, not needing reassurance concerning the excellence of this world as an abiding place, is unlikely to set a high value on what contemporary reviewers, even in the American religious press, found to praise in Emerson’s essays: “Their lofty cheer, and spirit-stirring notes of courage and hope.” I certainly had no conception of Emerson’s influence upon my father’s generation—an influence so great that Carlyle called his friend a new era in our history; so great that when some clergymen complained that he was leading young men to hell, Father Taylor remarked: “It may be that Emerson is going to hell, but I am certain he will change the climate there, and emigration will set that way.” Then again, I had no sympathy with Emerson because it seemed to me, in spite of all the long words and imported transcendentalism—or, partly, on account of them—that he didn’t “get anywhere.” (I sometimes feel so still—but the charge is less damnatory. I do not wonder that Moncure Conway wrote of Emerson setting free in his heart—in his _heart_, notice—“a winged thought that sang a new song and soared—whither?”)

Emerson’s dependence upon intuitions and praises of them as the springs of action and organ of inspiration conferring wisdom upon man seemed the less respectable because I hadn’t read Bergson—who has made intuitions more than ever fashionable. Emerson lived in the spirit-world—a quite different place from any trodden by the student in Paris who is at home in the world of the Sorbonne and the Bibliothèque Nationale, and in the world of flesh-and-blood. To healthy youth, nothing is much more repugnant than the Wordsworthian ideal of wise passivity, while the notion of a Buddhistic Nirvana seems murderous of “Nature”—however you define her. Moreover, I know not how to direct my inexorable thoughts, Emerson avows, and scarcely appears to think any direction of them needful. His best thoughts steal upon him in silence, and Truth flies out of the window when Will enters in by the door. “There is never a fine aspiration but is on its way to its body or institution,” he confidently asserts. Too confidently, it seemed to me. Emerson, aged thirty, wrote that a system-grinder hates the truth; he loved the truth, and therefore—therefore?—side-stepped system. It was not till much later that he uttered the heartfelt cry: “If Minerva offered me a gift and an option, I would say, give me continuity. I am tired of scraps….

“‘The Asmodæan feat be mine To spin my sand-bags into twine.’”

Perhaps the scrappiness of Emerson is less distressing to the youthful mind, eternally and quite needlessly refreshed by the comedy of life on every side of it, than the Emersonian “trick of solitariness,” that he played as a Harvard undergraduate not less but perhaps rather more than as the Concord sage. When Madame Dugard’s book on Emerson was published in Paris, I sat down and wrote a critique—stored with Roussellian analogies, à la Irving Babbitt. I was full of Rousseau then, and I piled on sentences that I meant to be cruel and crushing—not of Professor Babbitt, or Jean-Jacques, or Madame Dugard, but of poor Emerson. I showed my article, unfinished, to a dear friend—wiser than I; and then tore it up. Here is a part of the letter I had from my friend commenting on the little essay:

“I find your point that Emerson, the preacher of individualism, was himself thin-blooded and barren of true personality, interesting: whether or not it is true. I never happened to find it put just so before, and should certainly never have thought of it. But I suppose, after all, a certain kind of individuality might be expressed by impersonality as well as by any other instrument. I’ve only glanced through the Dugard book, but the point of view seems to be the conventional one that Emerson was too far removed from the stress and pain of life to touch very closely vibrant, struggling souls. As you translate, ‘he fills only the full, reassures only the optimists.’ I suppose that is true enough. And yet—and yet, is any life so full that it does not need refilling; or any optimism so complete and so unshaken that it does not need reassurance, _expression_, from an articulate, a stronger spirit? Isn’t optimism with many people a religious yearning rather than any truly temperamental attribute; a thing to be struggled for, and cherished, and reinforced from without? Whatever forces from within may have urged Emerson toward idealism and optimism, wasn’t he at least equally an idealist, and optimist, from conviction, or faith, or whatever else you call the semi-religious element? The Emersonian idealism is more, I am sure, than the natural overflow of a serenely poetic disposition—to which you try to reduce it. You must not forget that essay of his on Destiny—Destiny, man’s heroic, large-spirited friend, man’s bolster against Fate (discouraging and enervating personage!).

“I suppose that it is fair enough to complain that Emerson gives light without heat, but how many writers throw off much heat and little light—to say nothing of ‘darkness visible’…. Not many philosophers and poets and friends of ours yield us both forms of power. Perhaps the combination of the two—light and, well, at least _warmth_—is the most remarkable thing about Christ and his system.”

I feel less ashamed of my calfish distrust and dislike of Emerson now that I have read in President Eliot’s centenary essay on the great New Englander his confession that he too, “as a young man,” found the writings of Emerson “unattractive, and not seldom unintelligible, … speculative, and visionary.” It is only after one has suffered from living that one fully values Emerson—only as one is gradually educated himself, in experience’s school, that one appreciates his worth as a prophet of modern education; of the latter day social organization, its maladies and quacks and salves; of what Dr. Eliot calls “natural” rather than supernatural religion.

III

For this descendant of a line of Yankee ministers, there is no dividing line between the secular and the sacred. To Emerson, life is itself sacred; and the universe no less holy than the Ark of the Tabernacle—

So nigh is grandeur to our dust So nigh is God to man.

“Christianity is wrongly conceived by all such as take it for a system of doctrines,” he wrote in his diary as a young man—thereby fortifying in some sort what Augustine Birrell was to say half a century later: “You cannot, however dogmatically inclined, construct a theology out of Emerson.” His stress was placed—as he was persuaded Christ’s was—upon moral truth; and at thirty he wrote: “I feel myself pledged, if health and opportunity be granted me, to demonstrate that all necessary truth is its own evidence.” Demonstrate? Emerson never did succeed in “demonstrating” very much. In Dr. Eliot’s words, here was no logician or reasoner, but “a poet who wrote chiefly in prose.” But his prose is certainly no less poetic than his poetry. The inspiration is in both cases moral; and, to paraphrase—

His every line, of noble origin, Is breathed upon by Hope’s perpetual breath.

Yet Emerson was intolerant of cant about immortality. “I notice that as soon as writers broach this subject they begin to quote. I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.”[3]

Emerson demonstrates, after death, one meaning of immortality by living again in his “Journal”—the tenth volume of which has just come to my book-shelf. Some complain of prolixity, but to read this Journal is to find the measure of the man: and that is all the more cheering to the lazy reader in that Emerson is far from being immeasurable. He set down from day to day not only the record of events and personages who impressed him, but many stray thoughts and reflections. He swept into his Journal all the chips from his workshop, and stored there all the rough materials he meant to carve and fabricate and ornament. Workshop? The word is decidedly unpoetical, and perhaps inapt; for, as Madame Dugard points out, he made of his soul a lyre whose strings vibrated to all the winds of the spirit (_his_ spirit, that is); and in his Journal he notes these passing vibrations in phrases where words like _flow_, _flee_, _flux_, _fugitive_, _fugacious_, _current_, _stream_, _undulation_, occur and recur. Undeniably he sometimes forced himself; he acknowledged that his talent, like the New England soil, is good only while he works it. “If I cease to task myself, I have no thoughts.” And adds: “This is a poor sterile Yankeeism. What I admire and love is the generous and spontaneous soil which flowers and fruits at all seasons.” Many of his memoranda he developed later in the essay form—a procedure suspected by his own contemporaries[4]—but I like the mere scraps. Very perfectly do they express the eagerly searching, earnestly austere man: reflecting all his sincerity and incompleteness just as the beautiful paragraphs they piled up as their sole monuments mirror the minds of Joubert in France and Amiel in Switzerland. There is no humbug here, though there are some few fallacies to reward those who read principally to prove, at the author’s expense, their own astuteness. Emerson fully realized—at fifty—what his deficiencies were; he called himself an intellectual chiffonier, with a Jew’s rag-bag of brocade remnants and velvets and torn cloth-of-gold. Truth to tell, he is all this no less in his essays than in these Journals—and is a literary architect no more than his friend Montaigne. As he repeated his lectures, and they gained in polish and conciseness, the defect still sometimes remained: he built more than one excellent house without stairs. It is in momentary flashes of intuitive communication with the great spirits—lightning flashes that suddenly light up the black night in which we spend most of our time—that his genius shines. Somewhere in his Journal he writes:

“One man sees the fact or object, and another sees the power of it; one the triangle, and the other the cone which is generated by the revolution of the triangle.”

He who has so often been reproached with aloofness looked at many common facts, and saw what we see there—and beyond. His first lesson of religion is that things seen are temporal, unseen things eternal; yet is the temporal much for the eternally-minded, who preserves the all-important sense of wonder. “Now that man was ready, the horse was brought,” he writes; and continues:

“The timeliness of this invention of the locomotive must be conceded. To us Americans it seems to have fallen as a political aid. We could not have held the vast North America together which now we engage to do. It was strange, too, that when it was time to build a road across to the Pacific, a railroad, a ship-road, a telegraph, and in short, a perfect communication in every manner for all nations,—’twas strange to see how it was secured. _The good World-Soul understands us well._”

Nowise was Emerson a Ruskinian. To the railroad he says—“like the courageous Lord Mayor at his first hunting, when told the hare was coming: ‘Let it come in Heaven’s name, I am not afraid on’t.’” And this assurance is all the more welcome as one of the not too frequent flashes of his humor.

IV

While an author is often the worst-qualified critic of individual books or passages in his own work, he has almost always expressed somewhere the final criticism of his total. So it is with Emerson. On one page he defines for us the type of idealism of which he was an exponent:

“We are idealists whenever we prefer an idea to a sensation…. Character is more to us…. Religion makes us idealists.”

On another page, he writes:

“Malthus existed to say, Population outruns food: Owen existed to say, ‘Given the circumstance, the man’s given. I can educate a tiger’: Swedenborg, that inner and outer correspond: Fourier, that the destinies are proportioned to the attractions; Bentham, the greatest good of the greatest number. _But what do you exist to say?_”

It is no tragedy if this sower of good seed said no one thing, and only repeated many unequally wise counsels, and, by the wireless telegraph of sympathetic genius, spelled out the dots and dashes that, for the rest of us, unschooled in science, might have remained dots and dashes till the day of judgment. Emerson’s contemporaries greatly needed the man and his serene preaching—so undisturbed—while

Theist, atheist, pantheist Define and wrangle how they list.

To paraphrase Thureau-Dangan, Emerson’s was the empire of the contemplative monks over barbarian axe-men and sword-bearers. To-day, while the prosperous shudder at every murmur of social unrest, and the not-prosperous are drunk with heady wines; while society is, as in Emerson’s day, still “devoured by a secret melancholy,” disguised in a hundred forms of madness; while the nations still glare at one another from behind their breast-works, and the classes still war or hate (with ever deepening consciousness of class): while all these things are so, democracy’s “great dangers” may well remain the vulgarizing of the arts, contempt of contemplation, “the atrophy of the individual conscience.” Emerson somehow soothes this conscience without putting it to sleep. His courageous faith in Destiny, his cheering theory of compensations, his deathless hope, his healthy, exaggerated individualism: here are counter-irritants for more than one of Time’s diseases. “If thought makes free, so does the moral sentiment. The mixtures of spiritual chemistry refuse to be analyzed.” And Emerson did indeed “make free”; he was Emancipator, “not of black bodies, but of the minds of white men.”

[2] _Journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson: 1820-1872._ With Annotations. Edited by Edward Waldo Emerson and Waldo Emerson Forbes. Boston: Houghton-Mifflin Company. Ten Volumes.

[3] “Emerson refused to dogmatize about what is necessarily obscure at present.”—John Albee, _Recollections of Emerson_. Emerson wrote in his essay on _Experience_: “In accepting the leading of the sentiments, it is not what we believe concerning the immortality of the soul or the like, but _the universal impulse to believe_, that is the material circumstance and is the principal fact in the history of the globe.” This is not far from the point of view of James, Bergson, and, nowadays, Sir Oliver Lodge. If Emerson “refused to dogmatize” about the uncertainties of the future life, he had all the same his nobler convictions. He writes in his _Journal_: “I know my soul is immortal if it were only by the sublime emotion I taste in reading these lines of Swedenborg: ‘The organical body with which the soul clothes itself is here compared to a garment, because a garment invests the body, and the soul also puts off the body and casts it away as old clothes (_exuviæ_), when it emigrates by means of death from the natural world into its own spiritual world.’”