Patterns of Commitment in American Literature 9781487579708

Table of contents :
Preface
Contents
The Hero and the Heroic in American Literature: An Essay in Definition
Hawthorne: Tradition versus Innovation
Melville's Tragic Imagination: The Hero without a Home
The Two Poets of Leaves of Grass
Mark Twain and Victorian Nostalgia
The Many Marriages of Henry James
Stephen Crane's Private Fleming: His Various Battles
Wallace Stevens and Santayana
The Grotesque in Recent Southern Fiction
William Faulkner: The Problem of Point of View
Contemporary American Poetry
Notes on Contributors

Citation preview

PATTERNS OF COMMITMENT IN AMERICAN LITERATURE

PATTERNS OF COMMITMENT IN AMERICAN LITERATURE EDI1!~ MARSTON LAFRANCE

PUBLISHED IN ASSOCIATION .

WITH CARLETON UNIVERSITY BY UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS

© University of Toronto Press, 1967 Printed in Canada Reprinted in 2018 ISBN 978-1-4875-8081-0 (paper)

All quotations from the following works by George Santayana are reprinted by permission of Charles Scribner's Sons, and Constable and Company: The Sense of Beauty © 1896; Interpretations of Poetry and Religion © 1900; The Hermit of Carmel and Other Poems © 1901; Reason in Art © 1905; Reason in Religion © 1905; Winds of Doctrine © 1913; Soliloquies in England and Later Soliloquies © 1922;

Poems© 1923; Platonism and the Spiritual Life © 1927; The Realm of Essence © 1927; Scepticism and Animal Faith© 1929; The Realm of Matter © 1930; Works of Santayana, Triton Edition © 1936; The Realm of Truth© 1938; Persons and Places, 3 vols., © 1944; Paul Arthur Schilpp, ed., The Philosophy of George Santayana © 1951; Daniel Cory, ed., The Letters of George Santayana © 1955.

PREFACE

In the late autumn of 1965 the department of English at Carleton University sponsored a series of six public lectures on American authors. These lectures were presented by Professors Gay Wilson Allen, Milton R. Stern, Roger B. Salomon, Michael Millgate, Munro Beattie, and Marston Lafrance. At the same time five additional papers on American literature were requested from Professors William H. Gilman, Harry Hayden Clark, Daniel Fuchs, Lewis A. Lawson, and Frederick J. Hoffman. The original series of lectures and this book of critical essays together celebrate the inauguration of Carleton University's programme in American literature leading to the master of arts degree in English. The reader may be interested to know that each contributor was assigned a subject in general terms-Professor Salomon, for example, was asked to write about Mark Twain-and then was left entirely free to treat his topic as he wished. Only two requests were made : that his essay be original unpublished material, and that it offer common-sense criticism helpful to students of American literature. Because the book was written under these conditions, certain thematic patterns which have emerged of their own accord seem worth a brief word at this point. The principal pattern-commitment to action based upon the individual's perception of reality-should surprise no one who is acquainted with American literature. Professor Gilman argues that this pattern defines the American hero. Melville's Ishmael, as Professor Stern says, returns home aboard the Rachel with a perception of Ahab's monumental folly and a subsequent acceptance of human limitation. Crane's Henry Fleming is on his way back to his original commitment with his regiment when he receives his red badge of courage. The implications of this pattern are explored in Professor Gilman's essay. The strength of the pattern is evidenced by the way in which it can be traced beneath the surface of essays which are primarily concerned with other aspects of their subjects. For example, Professor Clark calls Hilda the "most representative spokesman" of Hawthorne because she has learned through sorrow to perceive "inevitably the large portion that is unreal, in every work of art." Huck Finn may hope to light out for the territories at the end of the novel, but he has already committed himself to going to hell because of his

V

Preface

refusal to betray Jim. Professor Salomon examines Mark Twain's own perception-the ironist's "double vision" that resulted in the divided commitment which became more and more agonizing as the years wore on. Professor Allen argues that Whitman did not perceive that he, too, was attempting to commit himself to two roles which in some respects were mutually exclusive. And Professor Lawson defines the grotesque mode in recent Southern fiction as "an aesthetic category that is determined only in the subjective perception of the viewer." Many other incidental appearances of this theme may be found throughout the book. Other patterns, links between essays, shared interests of American authors, can be observed. Hawthorne alone, for example, reveals both a concern for the past which reappears beneath the bitter humour of Mark Twain's later work, and a Jamesian urge to compare and contrast the cultures of Europe and America; and his Gothic images reach out across a century toward the fiction of Carson McCullers and Flannery O'Connor. The editor's task has been an extremely pleasant one, and I thank each contributor for friendship, unfailing patience, and enthusiastic co-operation. I also thank the Adult Education Committee at Carleton University for assuming the cost of both the lecture series and the additional essays, and Miss Joanne Tardif, Mrs. Lois Gonyer, Miss Joan Murphy, and Mrs. Ismay Bartrum for typing the manuscript. Ottawa, Canada November 1966

vi

M. L.

CONTENTS

Preface

v

William H. Gilman, The Hero and the Heroic in American Literature : An Essay in Definition

3

Harry Hayden Clark, Hawthorne : Tradition versus Innovation

19

Milton R. Stern, Melville's Tragic Imagination : The Hero without a Home

39

Gay Wilson Allen, The Two Poets of Leaves of Grass

53

Roger B. Salomon, Mark Twain and Victorian Nostalgia

73

Mwuo Beattie, The Many Marriages of Henry James

93

Marston Lafrance, Stephen Crane's Private Fleming: His Various Battles

113

Daniel Fuchs, Wallace Stevens and Santayana

135

lewis A. Lawson, The Grotesque in Recent Southern Fiction

165

Michael Millgate, William Faulkner : The Problem of Point of View

181

Frederick

J. Hoffman, Contemporary American Poetry

Notes on Contributors

193 209

vii

PATTERNS OF COMMITMENT IN AMERICAN LITERATURE

William H. Gilman THE HERO AND THE HEROIC IN AMERICAN LITERATURE: AN ESSAY IN DEFINITION

I take it that if "hero" and "heroic" can be defined at all, the definition must derive from empirical evidence; at the same time it cannot help reflect a theory of some kind. One may probe the facts to uncover a theory; one may hit upon a theory and see if the facts support it. I have done both. What I offer here, then, is a proposition, a thesis; hopefully, it will be convincing. But even if it is not, even if it is only persuasive, I wish to advance it as an alternative to current ideas of the hero and the heroic in American literature.1 A whole body of criticism has grown up which attempts to make Americans heroes by making them gods and eliminating through reductive generalization the very things which make them distinctive. The habit of generalizing, or mythologizing, has given us concepts of the hero in which the status is accorded by mere label. "Natty Bumppo is a saint with a gun." 2 Ahab is Prometheus-or rather, a "false Prometheus."3 Joe Christmas is Jesus Christ -and so is Stephen Crane's Jim Conklin, and Billy Budd, and the old man of the sea, and Faulkner's 33-year-old idiot Benjy-they are all Christ. Melville's Pierre, it turns out, is not himself, but a catalogue-"Pierre," we are told, "is Oedipus-Romeo-Hamlet-Memnon-Christ-Ishmael-Orestes-TimonSatan-Cain-Manfred, or more shortly, an American Fallen and Crucified Angel."4 How this super-hyphenated American can maintain his nationality with such an international passport is left to the bewildered reader. The treatment of heroes as symbolic personages may have some merit. The parallels are frequently invalid-but if they are valid, we may gain something by seeing our heroes as incorporating some of the greatness and representativeness we remember in other heroes. On the other hand, the hero is more likely to be obscured than illuminated by the light of the myth into which he is assimilated. Distinctions between the essential and the existential, lThis essay is a revision of part of a paper delivered to the Journal Club of the Department of English at the University of Rochester in 1960. At that time the paper constituted a report on research towards a larger work on the concept of the hero in American literature. Reducing such a paper to a size appropriate to this volume has meant the elimination of much historical and critical background, which will prob-

ably harm the essay. But the central thesis of my argument is here. It will have a much broader base when it is developed at length. 2 D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature (New York, 1953), p. 59. 3 Richard Chase, Herman Melville (New York, 1949), pp. 45-47. 4 Henry A. Murray, Introduction to his edition of Herman Melville's Pierre, or, The Ambiguities (New York, 1949), p. xx. 3

Hero &: Heroic between the generalized ideal and the specifically real, get lost. A man, a hero, is distinguished first of all by being himself, not by the resemblances he may bear to somebody else. The hero virtually disappears when he becomes merely the first factor in a simple equation of which the second factor is a universal figure. Xis Christ; Y is Oedipus; Z is Hamlet. Some criticisms seem to have a fatal fascination for such simplifications. 5 One would like to believe that the usage designates a merely metaphorical intention-that the critic means that X is like Christ, and Y is like Oedipus, and Z is like Hamlet. In practice, we are seldom sure of this. But even if the metaphorical intention is really there, the equation diverts us to something other than what the hero is in himself. Interpretations of this sort have been offered in numerous critical articles and sections of books. Only two book-length studies of the hero in American literature are in print, and each has weaknesses.6 Blanche Davis' The Hero in American Drama,1 though based on the resolute reading of some five hundred plays, is almost completely descriptive. It classifies heroes-and for that matter, heroines-by social status, and runs on about the level of language spoken and the kinds of clothes worn. Again, the method is external; and mere classification tells us very little about the hero. The first really formidable attempt to discuss the American hero on a general scale is, of course, R. W. B. Lewis' The American Adam.8 Its virtues have already made it something of a classic. I would simply pay my respects to them and go on to register what seem to me to be severe defects. For one thing, though the book talks about heroes and the hero, it is primarily concerned not with l>Malcolm Cowley takes Richard Chase to task for using "is" as a sign of identity; significantly, he insists that "symbols are not equivalents or identities of the values symbolized; they are real persons or objects that suggest those values among others." For example, saying that Isabel in Melville's Pierre "is Darkness or Babylon" is like saying that she's "no more than" either, and hence "is not a human being .. . or even truly a character in a novel" ("Mythology and Melville," New Republic, CXXIII [Oct. 30, 1950], 25). See also Harry Levin's gently ironic indictment of the critic's "addiction to the copula" in Contexts of Criticism (Cambridge, Mass., 1957), p. 193. 6J am not overlooking Ihab Hassan's Radical Innocence: Studies in the Contemporary American Novel (Princeton, 1961). Hassan has written extensively about the concept of the hero in American literature, focusing on the hero in fiction since the Second World War. To Hassan, however, "the 4

modern hero . .. is an anti-hero" (p. 327), and when he talks about him as " 'hero' " he does so only "in hope and charity" (p. 23) . This "'hero'" seems to be the last stage in "the gradual process of the atrophy of the hero"-a process distinguished in the past as in the present by severance of "the traditional bond between the hero and his society" (p. 21) . Since Hassan is concerned with the anti-hero and I am concerned with the hero, I do not discuss Radical Innocence. Because they do not study the hero generally I do not take up works like John L. Longley's The Tragic Mask : A Study of Faulkner's Heroes (Chapel Hill, 1963), Edwin A. Engel's The Haunted Heroes of Eugene O'Neill (Cambridge, Mass., 1953), or Joseph Defalco's The Hero in Hemingway's Short Stories (Pittsburgh, 1963). 7 New York, 1950. 8Copyright © 1955 by the University of Chicago Press. All quotations by permission of the University of Chicago Press.

William H. Gilman

individuals but with the role which a few fictional characters play in the development of what Lewis calls the American myth. From the stories of selected individuals, and from observations by a variety of thinkers on human nature and man's condition in America, Lewis constructs the mythical history of a mythical figure, the Adamic man, who is said to be "the hero of American fiction generally" (p. 91). This figure, and I am not shrinking the image significantly, is born the Deerslayer, baptized (by virtue of his proximity to a lake), and christened Hawkeye by a dying Indian he has shot-an experience by which he becomes mature without shedding a particle of that innocence which belongs to him as representative of Adam before the fall. Since all this takes place in the last of five novels in which Natty Bumppo is the major figure, Lewis, like D. H. Lawrence, believes that it is the culmination of the true myth of America, in which man moves backward "'from old age to golden youth'" (p. 103) and becomes reborn. The hero of the myth is the American Adam, is "the hero in space," who "takes his start outside time," in "the area of total possibility" (p. 91). Seen this way, the centre of dramatic tension lies in the conflict between the spatial hero and the products of time-the village, social institutions, relationships shaped by history, and all "complexities, involvements, and corruptions" (p. 99). In this context the hero's success as hero consists in non-involvement, indeed in outright severance, in actual escape. Like "Huck Finn," says Lewis, the Adamic hero is "normally ... able to light out again for the 'territories'" (p. 100).9 A further stage in the biography of the Adamic, the American hero, is represented by Nathan Slaughter, the Quaker in R. M. Bird's Nick of the Woods, who kills Indians furtively and maliciously in revenge for the murder of his wife and children. He is "the outraged Adam, hurled out of Eden by a visitation of the devil" (p. 109). (He is also "the inverted Christ," whatever that may be [ibid.].) The next phase is Adam "before and during and after the Fall" (p. 111)-an episode explored and documented by Hawthorne in certain sketches and stories, in The Scarlet Letter (where Hester, by the magic of critical legerdemain, is apparently the hero), and especially in The Marble Faun. In Donatello, Hawthorne dramatized "the transformation of the soul in its journey from innocence to conscience: . . . the tragic rise born of the fortunate fall." It is, says Lewis, "the New World action . .. what has to 9Lewis is writing, at this point, about Cooper's heroes, as exemplars of the myth. Specifically, he refers to heroes in those novels whose setting is "the untracked American forest." In at least one of the Leather-Stocking Tales, as I shall show below, taking off into the forest does not carry with it the freedom and the release from civilized man's cares that Huck's in-

tended flight to the territories implies. And if I am right in thinking that Lewis' larger intention is to suggest that Leather-Stocking and Huck symbolize the American hero's everlasting opportunity to escape civilization, then it is necessary to observe that very seldom, especially in major literary works, does the hero achieve any such severance. 5

Hero & Heroic

happen to 'golden youth' if it is to mature" (p. 122). (Significantly, to me at least, Lewis makes the "progression of insight and recognition ... the core of the story" [p. 122]. Donatello only partly sees the significance of his fall; Miriam recognizes it completely, as she does her own, and, as Lewis puts it, "that recognition is the means of accepting it, appraising the experience, and knowing what to do about it" [p. 125].) At any rate, "The Marble Faun completed a cycle of adventures carrying a representative American fictional hero from his ritual birth (in Cooper) through a 'fall' which can be claimed as fortunate because of the growth in perception and moral intelligence granted the hero as a result of it" (p. 127). Melville carries on the good work by incorporating in his various heroes not only the story of Adam but also the story of Christ. Redburn, Ishmael, and Billy Budd are the heroes who play the various roles in the Adamic myth-and the latter becomes "the scapegoat hero, by whose sacrifice the sins of his world are taken away" (p. 151). The Adamic story and the Adamic hero are central in the work of Henry James. Finally, vestiges of the Adamic hero still turn up in the work of Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Salinger, Bellow, and others. Lewis' method, as I have said, submerges the individual in the mythical biography. Another major objection is that the method narrows much too closely the concept of the hero in American literature. Most of the "heroes" are heroes by appropriation; only those parts of their stories which suit Mr. Lewis' purpose are used. So far as imaginative literature is concerned, Lewis ignores American drama and poetry, except for Whitman, and rests his conclusions upon the examination of only six novels in any depth. Yet he asserts the belief that he is describing "the hero of American fiction generally."10 It is true that we can easily, too easily, think of other illustrations of Mr. Lewis' hero, whose artificial myth involves "the birth of the innocent, the foray into the unknown world, the collision with that world, the 'fortunate fall,' the wisdom and maturity which suffering produced" (p. 153).11 But we can think of characters who are heroes for quite different reasons; and we can remind ourselves that America has never been a monolithic culture, but a pluralistic one, and that we must resist attempts to reduce its multiplicity to a single phenomenon. It is futile, I believe, to talk about one 10The novels are Brown's Arthur Mervyn, Cooper's The Deerslayer, Bird's Nick of the Woods, Hawthorne's The Marble Faun, and Melville's Moby-Dick and Billy Budd. A total of fifteen novel titles are listed in the Index, plus some short stories. More works of fiction are mentioned in the text, but only of those authors who support Mr. Lewis' thesis. James's work is synthesized, but Howells is ignored, like Simms, Kennedy, Poe, DeForest, all the women who 6

wrote fiction in the nineteenth century, and most of the other men. Yet Mr. Lewis can say that "American fiction is the story begotten by the noble but illusory myth of the American as Adam" (p. 89). 11 It is significant that most of the terms of this formula for "the peculiar American rhythm of the Adamic experience" may be found in Joseph Campbell's formula for the universal hero. See The Hero with a Thousand Faces (New York, 1959), passim.

William H. Gilman

and only one kind of hero in American literature. Who talks about the English hero, or the French hero, or the Italian hero? I would further object that frequently Mr. Lewis fails to make clear exactly why his American hero is heroic. For example, the innocent individual in space may assert or preserve himself by lighting out for the territories. But this involves escape from the very sort of trial which should prove that he is a hero; and it involves a resource not usually available to the average man, either in a physical or a moral sense. 12 Finally, I would object that inadvertently or otherwise Mr. Lewis has contributed heavily to the image of the young man as the image of America itself. It is a persuasive image indeedthis national symbol of newness, innocence, severance, freedom, and a future unlimited by the dismal experience of the human race in Europe, or the burden of original sin. In part, it is true. But it is certainly not the whole image of a society whose leaders were mature, thinking men, capable of creating a Constitution, and a Bill of Rights, and a Gettysburg Address. Furthermore, it is not nearly as historically representative of early American experience with the forest, with space, as is, say, young Basil, in James Kirke Paulding's The Backwoodsman. Americans 150 years ago may have fled the cities, and the corruptions and engagements and complexities of civilization, but they did so usually in order to secure land and start civilization again in the wilderness, and rise in society. And not only does Basil maintain his innocence and freedom in the wilderness, but he rises from pioneer to yeoman farmer, to Alderman, Mayor, and finally United States Senator. Whether or not my reading of Lewis is correct, it would still seem clear that heroes cannot be understood or even identified if they are viewed only as bit players enacting symbolic parts in a fabricated myth. It may be further argued that attempts to talk about the hero in American literature with no reference to what, at any time, has been considered heroic must suffer the consequences of all provincialist criticism. To talk about the hero without talking about the heroic is surely to avoid a major responsibility of the critic. Each age, of course, will define its own heroes, its own ideas of what the heroic actually is. In both classical and medieval civilizations, the hero as a man of action gives way historically to the intellectual hero. 13 In Puritan times in America the hero is marked essentially by pietas; he may be called the ethical hero, a combination of the pious Aeneas and the Christian gentleman. The late eighteenth century and early nineteenth century in western Europe saw the emergence of the romantic hero, the defiant rebel, the morally self-sufficient 12Unus, the thumb-and-blanket sucker in the comic strip "Peanuts," carries this escape theme to its logical absurdity: "No problem is so big or so complicated that it

cannot be run away from." See Time, April 9, 1965, p. 81.

13See H. V. Routh, God, Man, and £pie Poetry (2 vols., Cambridge, 1927), I, ch. VJ; II, ch. vm.

'7

Hero & Heroic

quester after the unattainable. On the other hand, the more typical and more popular hero, from the late eighteenth to the late nineteenth century, was the "socially acceptable character," who was always on the side of "the law, the church, ... and the head of the family ." 14 In most of these and other concepts of the hero, however, it is possible to detect some norms, some qualities or processes which seem to define the hero no matter where or when he emerges. He will be admirable, and he will be courageous. A hero cannot, finally, be despicable; nor, finally, can he be a coward. Characteristically, he is exceptional; at the same time he is representative. He is social; he has some relation to other men. 15 He is involved in action, in process. In the pursuit of his ends he shows unusual intensity of thought or feeling. He is willing to risk something. Above all, if I judge correctly, he must be capable of significant perception and of significant response to his perception.16 The perception I mean is that embodied in the dialectical process as Kenneth Burke and Francis Fergusson have formuated it. Action and the ability to see, to understand, constitute the dialectical process which Burke calls poiema, pathema, and mathemata.11 Fergusson translates these terms into purpose, passion, and perception and calls the process the tragic rhythm. 18 For Burke, "the tragic hero's action, involving his passion (or undergoing of experience), attains its rest and summation in his understanding. 1119 For Fergusson, the constant interplay of purpose, passion, and perception-the intricate process by which the hero's eyes are continually opened, and his concepts are reshaped by experience leading to new conclusions, which themselves are altered through new experience until the final discovery of the truth occurs-this process constitutes the story of the ideal tragic hero, Oedipus. But this process, as Burke makes clear, is not limited to tragedy. Tragedy is simply a special case of the dialectical process. Burke in effect invites us to apply the process to other types of hero than the tragic. It is true that Burke does not offer the process as the means of identifying 14So Sean O'Faolain sees it, in The Vanishing Hero (Boston, 1957), p. xii. 15Certain romantic heroes, of course, are exceptions, are positively anti-social, like Manfred. 181 take these to be norms because I find them in a wide variety of studies of the hero in literature. Not every quality appears as a norm in every study, but each appears in enough different works to warrant accepting it. Some of the sources for the norms are: Aristotle, Theory of Poetry and Fine Art, ed. with notes by S. H. Butcher (New York, 1951); W. H. Auden, The Enchafed Flood; or The Romantic Iconography of the Sea (New York, 1950); C. M. 8

Bowra, From Virgil to Milton (London,

1948) and Heroic Poetry (London, 1952);

Kenneth Burke, A Grammar of Motives (New York, 1945); Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces; Chase, Herman Melville; Henry Fielding, Tom ]ones; W. P. Ker, Epic and Romance (New York, 1957); Henry A. Myers, Tragedy: A View of Life (Ithaca, 1956); Lord Raglan, The Hero (New York, 1956); Routh, God, Man, and Epic Poetry. 17 A Grammar of Motives, p. 39. 18 The Idea of a Theater (New York, 1955), pp. 30-31.

19 A

Grammar of Motives, p. 41.

William H. Gilman

heroes. But its validity as ·a criterion is persuasive if we merely look at such diverse stories as those of Job, of Dante and Tom Jones, of Milton's Adam and Austen's Darcy, Dickens' Pip and Eliot's Becket, Achilles and Everyman. One may also argue for its validity because of the striking way in which it corresponds to, and in some respects unites, various theories of the hero, or major parts of those theories. Joseph Campbell's folk heroes and mythological heroes, in their movement through the pattern of separation, initiation, and return, perform actions, commit themselves to a purpose, suffer, or go through, the necessary reactions which their purpose begets, and ultimately see the effects of their purpose and passion in a culmination which gives them knowledge instead of ignorance. (The importance which Campbell puts upon this process as a requisite for all men is only partially measured by his identification of it in modern terms with the psychoanalytical process by which we come to know our real selves.) 20 To the extent that a theory of the hero lies behind Cedric Whitman's incisive study of Achilles, the pattern is there, especially the anagnorisis or discovery; for it is Achilles' perception of his true position when Patroclus dies that separates him from human ties, brings out "the inner, divine force" in him, and unifies his will, where before it had been divided. 21 Burke's triad easily assimilates the main motions in Aristotle's theory of the tragic hero, especially anagnorisis, an indispensable component of tragedy. Even more clearly does it frame Maxwell Anderson's derivative The Essence of Tragedy. Discovery, for Anderson, was "almost invariably the mainspring in the mechanism of a modern play." The "hero must pass through an experience which opens his eyes to an error of his own. He must learn through suffering."22 Whatever the form of the play, the hero recognizes his fault, alters his behaviour, and becomes nobler. In at least one of Auden's categories of heroes, the ethical, what typifies the hero is his constant movement from passion and ignorance towards freedom and knowledge of the truth.23 And although Carlyle's theory of the hero relates chiefly to non-fictional figures, we may remind ourselves that for him the ability to see through the shows of things into reality, to draw power from the vision, and thence to exercise control over necessity, or at least to assert its limits, is not merely one of the hero's distinctions-it is his chief distinction. 24 The capacity for perception, the nature and the quality of the perception, and the effects of the perception upon the perceiver would seem to be of at least as much importance as a norm for the hero as anything else; I, at least, am 20See The Hero with a Thousand faces, passim. 21Cedric Whitman, Homer and the Heroic Tradition (Cambridge, Mass., 1958), pp. 202, 203,204.

22Washington, D.C., 1939, pp. 6, 9.

23The Enchafed flood, p. 97. 24See Heroes and Hero-Worship, ed. Archibald MacMechan (Boston, 1901), pp. 62-63 and passim. Emerson's true hero would do much the same thing as Carlyle's. 9

Hero & Heroic

prepared to argue that it is the first test for the hero. Conversely, the argument should hold that if the would-be hero has no capacity for perception, he cannot be a hero. 25 If he has the capacity, but his perception is narrow, or of little consequence, so that he gains little command over the mind or the imagination, he is a failure. And if his perception results in no serious change, if his discovery leaves him pretty much as he was, or arouses only disgust with life, or bitterness, or nihilism, he is not a hero. 26 I am inclined to think that the hero, the complete hero, is the man who can see the truth and respond to it; and who in so doing affirms meaning in life, or asserts the dignity of man, or shows the power either to reconcile the world he desires with the world that exists or to accept the differences. The reductive generalization, the mere description, the undiscriminating classification, the invocation of myth-these are some of the typical approaches to the hero in American literature. What I propose is an application of the dialectical process, the process involving the workings of purpose, passion, and perception-not considered as the tragic rhythm, but as one means by which a hero may be distinguished. I forgo discussion of the criteria of courage, admirability, respresentativeness, sociality, and intensity. Those criteria, or most of them, seem to be generally met by the hero of the dialectical process. But it is only with that process that I am immediately concerned, and my illustrations have that as their focus. Among the many triumphs of Natty Bumppo is one which has less to do with his role as woodsman, natural man, and mainstay of the myth of Adam before the fall than with his success as a moral hero, a hero of the pattern. Mabel Dunham's father, the Sergeant, has, in the European way, proposed a marriage between Mabel and Natty. Natty resists; he is too uneducated, too wild, too low, and too old. But as the charms of Mabel and the persuasions of the Sergeant work upon him, he begins to weigh his loneliness against the promise of companionship in marriage. Before long-and though he keeps reminding himself of the gap which separates him and Mabel-he has submerged reason, yielded to feeling, and fallen in love. When the Sergeant dies, he leaves Mabel to the Pathfinder. Shortly, Natty discovers that young Jasper Western also loves Mabel. Intent upon having nothing but the truth, Natty forces upon Mabel a choice between him and his young rival. For the sake of propriety, and out of gratitude to Natty, Mabel tries to assure him of 21>This view draws some support, I think, from Burke's argument that where no vision occurs as the result of a process of action, there can be no tragedy-and presumably no tragic hero. Burke's example is that in which the protagonist is victimized by circumstance; the upshot is not vision · but mere frustration. See A Grammar of Mo10

tives, p. 39. 261n lhab Hassan's terms, he might well be an anti-hero. But even the anti-hero affirms something. Hassan says the anti-hero is "the rebel victim." And "the rebel denies without saying No to life, the victim succumbs without saying Yes to oppression" (Radical Innocence, p. 31).

William H. Gilman

a love she does not feel. But for the Pathfinder, only that is right which "leads to justice and fair dealing," however "painful" it may be. He tells Mabel what Jasper has never told her: that Jasper admires her grace and beauty, her warmth and generosity, her justice and truth. Her spontaneous cry to Jasper constitutes the terrible moment of revelation to the Pathfinder. He perceives not only that Mabel loves Jasper but that he must renounce her and return to the loneliness of the forest he had hoped to escape. He knows that his desires have outrun his good sense, that the world he wished for is not the world that he knows to exist. His resolute though tortured insistence that Mabel marry Jasper makes him a hero-and not in purely sentimental terms, either. For when Mabel, true to the literary tradition which requires females to utter the milkiest of sentiments, cries out, "When old you will come to our dwelling and let me be a daughter to you," Natty acknowledges without really accepting the ironic truth: "You're more fitting to be my daughter than ... my wife." The Pathfinder's wrestling with the angel of truth and his stern submission to what must be, make him more of a hero than his rescues of maidens from Indians and bobcats, or his individualistic defiance of civilized law and order. At the climax-the moral climax-of Huckleberry Finn, the young boy undergoes a painful examination of conscience. He has done wrong, he thinks, committed sin, in helping Jim to escape. The Lord has made a judgment upon him. But though "wicked, . . . low-down and ornery" he has been rescued from the very brink of perdition by the illumination of the right way. All he has to do is write Miss Watson about Jim's whereabouts and maybe he, Huck, will be saved from eternal damnation. So he writes the letter, and for the first time in his life he feels good, "and all washed clean of sin." The ways of the Lord are wonderful to his fallen children. Then Huck makes the big mistake. He begins to think, not with his mind, but with his heart. He thinks of Jim's companionship, and his goodness, and the sacrifices he has made for him, and the way he sat up nights standing Huck's watch, and how he worried about him when he was lost, and rejoiced when he returned safe. Huck's spiritual troubles return, multiplied and a thousand times mixed up. How can he return Jim to his owner, and risk having him sold down the river? The answer comes abruptly. He can't. In a now-famous act of renunciation, he tears up the letter. "All right," he says, "I'll go to hell." The flood of perception of the real truth has washed away all civilized scruple, all religious and social training. Huck has, in ironic reflection of an equally famous passage in Emerson's "Self-Reliance," yielded to an impulse from below. ("If I am the Devil's child, I will live then from the Devil.") So Huck. Mark Twain's satiric purpose is eminently clear to the reader. Huck only knows that he has had to go against all that society has taught him in order to be himself. But it is the final perception and the consequent dedication to his newly found 11

Hero &: Heroic

purpose which saves Huck from being a merely clever juvenile rogue and makes of him a hero. The climax of Moby-Dick is generally understood to occur during and at the end of the three days' chase. Here is the final dramatic engagement of opposing forces-Ahab and the whale, or, as Ahab sees it, man on the one side, malignant nature and a malignant deity on the other. The tragic catastrophe occurs. The commanding figure of the novel undergoes crushing defeat; but he attempts to assert his inviolable manhood and his indestructible integrity -what Melville calls "mortal indomitableness"-by a speech committing himself to eternal defiance, and accepting eternal hell as the condition of the defiance. The echoes of Milton's Satan are unmistakable. But even though the main figure's end is the almost total blindness which life visits upon the solipsist, Ahab is granted a moment of perception which illumines his pathetic darkness. The sinking of his ship crystallizes his awareness of his isolation. It caps the aching loneliness he has known for forty years. But the grief that ensues has its compensation, in the flash of perception about its meaning. The grief is the innate, the fated counterpart of greatness. "Oh, now I feel my topmost greatness lies in my topmost grief," he observes. He comes to know, he sees, as a fixed condition of life, that one cannot be great and escape profound suffering. For a moment, the tragic hero escapes from the prison shell of his monomania and sees life as it really is. It is this moment of perception, as antidote to the solipsism and inhumanity dividing Ahab from mankind, which greatly advances his claims to heroic status.27 But the perception begets no alteration, no heroic acceptance of the difference between the life we think and the life we discover. The sequel is the Satanic defiance. Ahab may raise himself to the level of a god, but the god he emulates is the god of hatred, of annihilation. At any rate, our estimates of him as hero will depend upon whether we agree that a man is fully admirable who wilfully elects to spend eternity in a state of rage and hate. Perhaps there are heroes in hell. As Burke has said, "an author can most ably arouse grief over the death of a hero when he and we are in complete agreement as to what qualities are heroic." 28 Be that as it may, there is another climax in Moby-Dick involving a character in quite a different-and I think a more meaningful-sequence of purpose, passion, and perception. Though in fear and in horror, and with no such overt intensity as Ahab, Ishmael risks the pursuit of the white whale. Still, he is consumed like Ahab with the passion for knowledge, for certainty: does the universe, does life, have no end but annihilation; and is it possible that no God exists? Metaphysically, the questions are of a higher order than those which Ahab asks; and the possible answers can invest life with even more 27My interpretation of Ahab as hero owes something to Myers, Tragedy, pp. 70-72.

12

28 Counter-Statement

(Chicago, 1953), p. 162.

William H. Gilman suffering than the grief which Ahab discovers. The climax-or most of itto Ishmael's quest comes when he discovers, by looking too long in the face of the fire, what Ahab can never perceive-that the pursuit of evil in the effort to destroy it turns the pursuer into the very thing he abhors, and conjoins him with the very evil he would crush. Ahab's final hate must be, like Satan's, self-hate, as its effect is self-destruction. But Ishmael in his tortured perception abandons in horror the quest for self-annihilation. He secures no answer to his questions-at the very end of the book he is "only another orphan"-but he has perceived the truth, and it is a greater truth than what Ahab sees. It profoundly alters him and improves him. And though he lacks Ahab's eminence, and Ahab's passion or purpose, and Ahab's god-like quality, he would seem to be much more a human hero. He may be objected to as unheroic because he prefers life to death-in H. A. Myers' terms, he prefers duration to intensity. 29 He may be merely Aristotle's golden mean. But even such a man can become heroic if only once in his life he takes a heroic stand. Had Ishmael lacked the capacity for this complex and supreme insight, he would have been just another member of the crew. With the insight and the alteration he becomes a hero. In the eleventh book of The Ambassadors, Lambert Strether journeys to the country for a respite from his arduous ambassadorship. In the accumulation of perceptions which is his steady aim, he has arrived at a happy plateau. Sent to Europe by his intended bride Mrs. Newsome to rescue her son Chad from the arms of what Woollett assumes is a typical Parisian adventuress, he undergoes, through the resolute practice of discrimination, a reversal of expectation. Chad, it turns out, has not been despoiled and corrupted by the sensuality of a designing French mistress. He has been improved, in manners, taste, and sensitivity by a gracious and charming married woman. Chad needs no rescue, and Strether bravely risks his fortune in Woollett to stand by Chad and Madame de Vionnet. For, as Strether makes clear to himself, the relation is virtuous. Untainted by carnality, it reflects the purified relation so much idealized in American, especially in New England, notions of friendship between men and women. But it offers a cosmopolitan enlargement, an OldWorld sophistication, and the vitality of which New England was never capable. Having satisfied himself, Strether feels young again, and alive, and refreshingly moral. So he goes to the country, where Nature, in New England terms, so beautifully assures man of the eternal morality of things and supports him by absorbing him in a harmonious union. Strether is apparently at the peak of his career as a moral hero. Then there occurs the dramatic perception and reversal which are the real climax of Strether's effort to be himself and not what Woollett society expects 29Tragedy, p. 136.

13

Hero & Heroic him to be. He accidentally meets Chad and Madame de Vionnet; through a series of impressions he learns that they have passed the night together in the country and knows they have done this before; he knows that they are intimate; and he feels that, bad as it is to have to acknowledge this, the lying pretences which Madame de Vionnet puts on as the only alternative to openly continuing their tryst and thus shutting him out of their company are worse than the revelation that the relation is not virtuous. But Strether is equal to the occasion. Though he seems to have ranged himself "on the side of the fierce, the sinister, the acute," though he knows he has got mixed up in "the typical tale of Paris," and that his mistake, all along, was to have supposed nothing about Chad and Madame, he realizes too that his very attitude towards them in the past has "aided and intensified their intimacy, ... and that ... he must accept the consequences of that." And though the Woollett in him tempts him to meet Madame de Vionnet for the explanation on grounds that would make it awkward, or dangerous, or at least inconvenient for her, he accepts a meeting which allows her to be, "on a great occasion, . . . natural and simple." He meets her fineness by being natural and simple himself; and further, by committing himself to a woman who, having given everything to Chad and deplored her instinct for getting something in return, is still afraid for her life. So Strether makes the full reversal. The ethic to which he has committed himself requires the finest and fullest response to the most pressing needs of others-on the grounds that only by this means can he be most completely himself. Madame de Vionnet is never more magnificent than in the confrontation scene-the scene James thought the most beautiful and interesting in the book. Strether, to cap his career, must equal her magnificence. He does-though he feels compelled now to urge Chad to stay with Madame. "You'll be a brute," he says, "if you forsake her." And as the last act in his career, he renounces the love of Maria Gostrey. Madame de Vionnet has already observed that "it's never a happiness ... to take. The only safe thing is to give." Strether's final perception is that he wasn't, "out of the whole affair, to have got anything" for himself. The cycle of purpose, passion, and perception is complete, and Strether is a hero. In the last act of Winterset, Mio Romagna is still seeking revenge on Garth Esdras, the man who might have saved Mio's father from the electric chair. But Track's gunmen are waiting in the dark, ready to silence Mio. The chance for revenge comes. Through his friend Carr, Mio can get a message past the gunmen to the police, and not only expose Garth but perhaps save his own life. But the message sticks in his throat. He rejects the chance. The perception of the consequences comes, and it is overwhelming. His escape, his revenge, will bring sorrow to Garth's old father and to his sister Miriamne, to whose 14

William H. Gilman

love Mio is almost committed. Instead of renouncing them, Mio renounces the enemy within: I've lost my taste for revenge if it falls on you. Oh, God, deliver me from the body of this death I've dragged behind me all these years! 30

He prays Miriamne to teach him "how to live and forget hate!"; and she opens his eyes to what he had forgotten-that his own persecuted father forgave his enemies. With this perception comes the power to perfect his love for Miriamne. The end is death at the hands of the gunmen; but Mio has seen the truth, and acted on it, and this has made him a hero. For the purposes of this essay I have selected a few figures in American literature whose heroism can apparently be measured in terms of their actions, what they consequently undergo, and particularly what they discover and how they respond to their discovery. But the class they represent is large, and though other members illustrate the principle to a lesser degree than those I have described, the principle nevertheless applies. It is there in Arthur Dimmesdale's horrified awakening, after planning to undo his seven years of suffering by running away with Hester, to the fact that he has actually embraced evil, so that the world without seems all as black as the world within. The consequence is seemingly his perception that he owes a soul to God; he carries out what he has been hypocritically avoiding for seven years, the public confession which will simultaneously lose Hester, demolish his reputation, and save his soul. But his heroism, I think, consists less in his determined effort at salvation than in his perception of and refusal to accept a moral state the very contrary of what he wishes. In renouncing immersion in total evil he is being true to his real self, being what he wants to be. A similar discovery rounds off the tragic Lanciotto, hero of Baker's Francesca da Rimini. Embittered by his ugliness and distorted body, convinced, like Natty Bumppo, that he is unfit for marriage, passionately demanding to know the truth-about himself, about what others think of him-he refuses to believe that Francesca can love him. Persuaded almost against his reason that she does, he marries her. The malignant Pepe exposes the love affair between Francesca and his brother Paolo. When he confronts them they candidly admit their love. Because honour must be sustained, Lanciotto kills them both. Immediately pity ousts passion; the terrible perception bursts upon Lanciotto 30Maxwell Anderson, Winterset. Copyright © 1935 by Anderson House. Copyright renewed 1963 by Gilda Anderson, Alan Anderson, Terence Anderson, Quentin An-

derson, and Hesper A. Levenstein. All rights reserved. Quoted by permission of Anderson House.

15

Hero & Heroic that he loved his brother more than honour; but the act is irretrievable, and Lanciotto falls in helpless grief on Paolo's body. Fortunately Baker's poetry builds enough conviction into the scene to elevate it above mere conventionality. But without the perception and the moral alteration from hate to love, Lanciotto would have been just another defeated and frustrated victim. It is perception, and improvement as the result of the perception, which distinguish, or round off, or help to qualify as heroes such diverse figures as Barker's Marmion, Dunlap's Major Andre and Leicester, Hawthorne's Donatello, Howells's Theodore Colville, Silas Lapham, Basil March, and Dreyfoos, James's Christopher Newman, Harold Frederic's Theron Ware (though the improvement gets lost in Ware's renewal of vulgar ambitions), Crane's Henry Fleming, Robinson's Captain Craig, Fernando Nash, and Roman Bartholow, and, in our times, Babbitt, Jake Barnes, Tom Joad, Joe Keller, Boone Caudill, and Yossarian. And however heterodox the thought, it is perception which makes Starry Vere the hero that Billy Budd fails to be. Conversely, it may be tentatively asserted that lack of perception, or even jejune perception, disqualifies man as hero. The failures again range over American literature since the early nineteenth century. Spartacus in Bird's The Gladiators has a certain grandeur of passion, but he dies convinced that life breeds nothing but hell in the human heart. Pierre dies convinced that because he has been a fool there is no justice at all in the world. In the very last sentence of The Mysterious Stranger, the boy Theodor Fischer is left appalled, for he believes that what Philip Traum, the Devil, has said is true: that "there is no God, no universe, no human race"; that nothing exists except himself, and he is only a vagrant, useless, homeless thought, "wandering forlorn among the empty eternities." Something more would seem to be required of a hero than the vacuous perception that everything means nothing. Norris' McTeague is left at the end of his story staring "stupidly" around him at Death Valley, thinking nothing. For Hemingway's Frederic Henry, life is meaningless because death has taken Catherine from him, and there is left only the darkness and the rain. The Emperor Jones, under pressure of rebellion, slowly reverts into his racial and psychic past, sheds the garments of manhood as well as those of civilization, and spends his last moments grovelling on the ground, lost in a state of irrational terror. Elmer Rice's Mr. Zero, of The Adding Machine, learns even less in the afterworld than he does in this; his fate, when he returns to the earth, is to pursue Hope in the form of a curvaceous female; only the author and the audience know that Hope is a total illusion. Dos Passos' Charley Anderson dies in a coma, obstinately convinced that if he can only get on his feet again, he can undo all the stupidity that has brought him to his deathbed. Studs Lanigan also dies in a coma, knowing and seeing nothing, unaware that the great and meaningful death rites of the church have been conducted for the good of his soul. And Willy Loman, who 16

William H. Gilman seems to be the one candidate for heroic status that most Americans support in our times, is like all the other doubtful heroes or non-heroes-he cannot or will not see reality. Before closing, I would point to some of the collateral advantages of looking at the hero in American literature in terms of the dialectical process of purpose, passion, and perception. No social status is required, and thus the standard adapts itself to the demands of an equalitarian society. Huck Finn comes from the class of poor whites, Natty is an unlettered woodsman, Mio the displaced son of an immigrant, Ishmael a former schoolteacher and merchant sailor, Ahab a sea captain, Oimmesdale a learned minister, Lanciotto an Italian nobleman, Strether a well-bred New England dilettante. The hero can be a youth or a mature man. Huck is thirteen or fourteen, Mio Romagna nineteen, Ishmael possibly in his early twenties, Natty in The Pathfinder forty, Strether fifty-five, Ahab fifty-eight. Finally, no special region, no historical context, no special situation, and no special properties are required-no war or battle, no woman in distress, no defence of a narrow place, no killing of the king or the tyrant or any other enemy of democracy, no murder of the father or incest with the mother, no suicide, no dedication to one or another ideology, no splitting of rails or boring of holes in rocks, no ringed-tail roaring or fanning of guns, no messages to Garcia, no decaying houses, no mountain tops or forests or prairies, no horses, no biplanes, no rockets, and no myths. A male character in American literature may be a hero in almost any circumstance; all he must do is struggle, see things as they really are, and benefit from his knowledge.

17

Harry Hayden Oark

HAWTHORNE: TRADITION VERSUS INNOVATION

Nathaniel Hawthorne apparently brooded over his own and New England's ancestral past more than any other major American author. Scholars such: as F. 0 . Matthiessen1 have even considered him "unique" among Americans in thinking that his country never could have been young or without a past. And A. N. Kaul, introducing his useful Collection of Critical Essays on Hawthorne,2 emphasizes "two aspects of his nature which constituted for James and Eliot the chief distinction of his imagination: a passionate interest in 'the deeper psychology' and an equally passionate 'historic consciousness.' " As Mr. Kaul concludes (p. 6), these two central interests are in Hawthorne "seldom disjunct," and one might well call his major theme "something like historical psychology or deeper historicity." Hence, Hawthorne's works are especially illuminating to students interested in his attitude toward the sum of human experience in the past versus a free-willed departure from the past in the name of innovation or progress. This essay will consider both of these aspects of tradition by approaching Hawthorne's work as a kind of dialogue, both hostile and sympathetic, on this topic. Hawthorne's over-all view of the past is apparently conditioned by four general assumptions which must be considered before our dialogue begins. Hawthorne thought the myths of the Golden Age (such as the Pandora myth) involved "everything that is most abhorrent to our Christianized moral sense." When he "Gothicized" these myths from Homer, Ovid, and Anthon's Classical Dictionary in The Wonder Book (1851) and Tanglewood Tales (1853), however, he had his narrator (Eustace Bright) defend them as having originated in a prelapsarian Golden Age in which "evil had never yet existed." Hawthorne thus enabled himself to accept these myths and either om.it or tone down the abhorrent features he considered a "parasitical growth, having no essential connection with the original fable." 3 1 American

Renaissance (London and New York, 1941), p. 322. 2Englewood Cliffs, 1966. 3 Douglas Bush, in discussing parallel English use, thinks such classical myths were at this time welcomed as a protest against current mechanizing trends associated with the Industrial Revolution. Hawthorne's use of classical myths in terms of "The Child-

hood of Man" has been sensitively discussed under this title by Daniel G. Hoffman in Roy Harvey Pearce, ed., Hawthorne Centenary Essays (Columbus, Ohio, 1965), pp. 197-219. See also Hugo McPherson, "Hawthorne's Mythology : A Mirror for Puritans," University of Toronto Quarterly, XXVIII (April, 1959), 257-78. 19

Hawthorne

The concept of the Fall of Man, especially as it is embodied in Puritanism and "the mighty genius of Milton," draws Hawthorne "ever toward that antecedent corruption and decay," as E. H. Davidson argues at length in Hawthorne Centenary Essays. Such a tendency is evident in the novels and in such tales as "Young Goodman Brown," "The Gentle Boy," "The Wedding Knell," "The Hollow of the Three Hills," "Lady Eleanore's Mantle," and "Rappaccini's Daughter." Hawthorne's character-types, as Davidson says (p. 152), "were part of the vast and mysterious ethical system in existence long before they were created, and their actions through the course of an invented narrative achieved dignity and power by reason of that antecedent system" involving the Fall of Man. Hawthorne also had a strong preference for Jacksonian democracy, a preference associated with the "depths of philosophic thought" in his patron George Bancroft's History of the United States and coloured by organic metaphors involving the Edenic myth. 4 This preference leads Hawthorne-in such stories as "The Gray Champion," "Edward Randolph's Portrait," and "Howe's Masquerade"-to darken his many portraits of Royalists and others who try to trample upon colonial liberties. His social-political bias also helps him endow his presentations of the past with the psychological associations of November (as in Hepzibah of The House of Seven Gables) which contrast with the May (as in Phoebe) of current and self-reliant democracy. Finally, Hawthorne gained from classical studies and his education at Bowdoin, especially under T. C. Upham,5 a great respect for the ideal of a balance between the head and the heart. Hence, it follows that in The English Notebooks (VII, 477-78) Hawthorne should identify the head with rationalistic innovation, and the heart, "which remains the same in all ages," with the best aspects of tradition-the permanent, predictable, and emotionally satisfying. In short, Hawthorne's reading leads him to see both sides of the question, to uphold an ideal of balance between the head and the heart which, as we proceed, should be kept in mind as the hypothesis which may resolve apparent contradictions: that, in general, Hawthorne thinks it wise to try to keep the rival claims of tradition and innovation in fruitful tension and to check the extremes of either by invoking the authority of the other. This tension or polarity between tradition and innovation gives vitality to his artistic and dramatic appeal. 4See Merrill Lewis, "Organic Metaphor and Edenic Myth in George Bancroft's History of the United States," Journal of the History of Ideas, XXVI (Oct.-Dec., 1965), 58792. For Hawthorne's devotion to Andrew Jackson, see : G. P. Lathrop, ed., Complete Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Standard Library Edition (Boston, 1882), X, 363-64, and XII, 105. Hereafter, capitalized Roman , ,

20

numerals refer to the volumes of this edition. 5 Concerning Upham's ideas, see: Marvin Laser, "'Head,' 'Heart,' and 'Will' in Hawthorne's Psychology," Nineteenth-Century Fiction, X (Sept., 1955), 130-40; and J. W. Fay, American Psychology before William James (New Brunswick, N.J., 1939), pp. 91109.

Harry Hayden Oark II

Hawthorne is quite able to express hostility toward the past in general, and toward America's Puritan past in particular. In "The Custom House," his predisposition toward sympathy and brotherhood6 leads to his taking "shame" upon himself for his ancestors who were guilty of cruelty to the Salem witches and Quakers-a matter which he also mentions in "Main Street" and "Young Goodman Brown." A witch condemned by Hawthorne's great-great-grandfather, a judge in the Salem trials, had cursed him with the words his greatgreat-grandson was to give to the original Maule : that God would give him blood to drink. Hawthorne considers Puritanism, as a way of life, to be subject to transformation just as his fictional characters, such as Donatello, are transformed in his work. Thus, in "Main Street," Hawthorne admits that the first colonists, who believed they had lighted their lamps at a "divine source," probably had a faith that was sincere, pure, and inspiring. But he also suggests that the third or fourth generations, who had the faith secondhand, often degenerated into narrowness, rigidity, bigotry and hypocrisyJaffrey Pyncheon is perhaps the best illustration. And in The English Notebooks Hawthorne applies this same progressive transformation to the religious system the Puritans denounced : after disparaging the "mummery, which seemed to be worse than papistry," in York Cathedral, he concludes that the "Puritans showed their strength of mind and heart, by lopping away all these externals, into which religious life had first gushed and flowered, and then petrified."7 When Hawthorne revolts against Puritanism, then, he has in mind not the originators but the later spokesmen who upheld "petrified" beliefs. He claims that we might well be thankful for having such first-generation ancestors as the Apostle Eliot and Roger Williams whom he praises in Grandfather's Chair. But we should be equally thankful that "each successive generation" is "one step further" in the march of ages from the later Puritans and their way of life which "was sinister to the intellect, and sinister to the heart" (III, 459-60). No group of people, he argues, could have been less capable of passing judgment on an erring woman's heart than the Puritan hierarchy that imposed the scarlet letter upon Hester Prynne. "The scarlet letter had not done" the office intended by Hester's Puritan superiors. One of these superiors, after all, was her betrayer, and was too proud until the end to admit publicly that he had been led to "add hypocrisy to sin" (V, 89) . In brief, Hawthorne attacks the 6See: R. R. Male, "Hawthorne and the Concept of Sympathy," PMLA, LXVIII (March, 1953), 138-49; D. L. Ringe, "Hawthorne's Psychology of the Head and Heart," PMLA, LXV (March, 1950), 120--32; L. 5. Hall, Hawthorne: Critic of Society (New Haven,

1944). 7 Randall Stewart, ed., The English Notebooks (New York, 1941), p. 451. Hereafter cited as EN. Hawthorne's story, "Dr. Bullivant," details this attitude toward the evolution of Puritanism.

21

Hawthorne

Puritans for prideful intolerance ("The Man of Adamant"); for distrust of others and the belief in being able "to penetrate, in every bosom, the deep mystery of sin" ("Young Goodman Brown"); for persecution of those such as the Quakers who dissented from their own kind of dissent ("The Gentle Boy"); for a belief in predestination and the view of conduct as all a "dark necessity" (V, 210; cf. Chillingworth said to have become a fiend); for a general gloom ("Maypole at Merry Mount"); for the greed which made representatives of later generations, such as Judge Pyncheon, "subtle, worldly, selfish, ironhearted, hypocritical" ;8 for imputing secret sin to everyone and viewing it as "a symptom of mental disease," as Elizabeth tells the Reverend Mr. Hooper (CNHP, p. 878); and for persecution of witches ("Alice Doane's Appeal" and Grandfather's Chair). 9 Hawthorne also attacks consistently that aspect of the past which, before the American Revolution, involved political tyranny or "the deformity of any government that does not grow out of the nature of things and the character of the people" (CNHP, p. 836). "Edward Randolph's Portrait," "The Gray Champion," and "Howe's Masquerade" all voice a similar hostility to tyranny and exalt ordered liberty. Whatever their other faults, the "primitive statesmen" of early Massachusetts-men such as "Bradstreet, Endicott, Dudley, Bellingham"-had, as "the choice of the people" in times past when tyranny was a "peril," stood up for "the welfare of the state like a line of cliffs against a tempestuous tide" (CNHP, p. 225). John Hancock, speaking to "Old Esther Dudley," the now senile hostess at the Royal Governor's mansion, says: "You have treasured up all that time has rendered worthless ... you are a symbol of the past. And I, and these [Revolutionists] around me,-we represent a new race of men,-living no longer in the past, scarcely in the present,-but projecting our lives forward into the future. Ceasing to model ourselves on ancestral superstitions, it is our faith and principle to press onward, onward! Yet," continued he, turning to his attendants, "let us reverence, for the last time, the stately and gorgeous prejudices of the tottering Past!" [CNHP, p. 989]

However, Hawthorne has Holgrave, before he wins Phoebe's love, make an especially devastating attack on the tyranny of the past. Holgrave feels that 8Norman Holmes Pearson, ed., Complete Novels and Selected Tales (New York, 1937), p. 413. Hereafter cited as CNHP. 0Hawthorne's attack, in "The New Adam and Eve," on socially mediated traditions including libraries-not entirely representative-may be in accord with Milton's view of "right reason" and the dissenter's fear of rationalistic pride or the lust for knowledge -see Paradise Lost, VII, 11, 102-30; VIII, 66--202; noted by H. G. Fairbanks, The Lasting Loneliness of Nathaniel Hawthorne

22

(Albany, 1965), p. 220. More characteristic of Hawthorne is "Earth's Holocaust" in which his reformer's attack on books as part of the past is countered at the end by the preservation of the great books. Hawthorne's partial sympathy with the colonial Puritan's stand for liberty against tyranny, for one kind of concern with introspection and motivation, and for a due regard for the inwardness of sin and selfreform will be discussed later.

Harry Hayden Oark "in this age, more than ever before, the moss-grown and rotten Past is to be

torn down, and lifeless institutions to be thrust out of the way and their dead corpses buried, and everything to begin anew." In fact his revulsion from the decaying old Pyncheon house on its ill-gotten land is but a "reverberation" of "the influences of the Past" in general. Although his love for Phoebe later modifies his view, Holgrave at this point goes into a tirade about getting "rid of this Past": · It lies upon the Present like a giant's dead body! In fact, the case is just as if a young giant were compelled to waste all his strength in carrying about the corpse of the old giant, his grandfather, who died a long while ago.. .. What slaves we are to bygone times,-to Death . . . . A dead man, if he happen to have made a will, disposes of wealth no longer his own; or, if he die intestate, it is distributed in accordance with the notions of men much longer dead than he. A dead man sits on all our judgment-seats; and living judges do but search out and repeat his decisions. We read in dead men's books! We laugh at dead men's jokes, and cry at dead men's pathos! We are sick of dead men's diseases, physical and moral, and die of the same remedies with which dead doctors killed their patients! We worship the living Deity according to dead men's forms and creeds. Whatever we seek to do, of our own free motion, a dead man's icy hand obstructs us .... And we must be dead ourselves before we can begin to have our proper influence on our own world, which will then be . .. the world of another generation, with which we will have no shadow of a right to interfere. [CNHP, p. 352-53]

The counterpart of such iconoclasm is, of course, the earlier part of "Earth's Holocaust" (1844). Reformers in this story, hoping to destroy the causes of evil, make a bonfire of all the "wornout trumpery" of the past-such external things as "coats of armour, the crests and devices of illustrious families, pedigrees that extended back .. . into the dark ages," and other symbols of caste and inequality. They also try to burn all books of the past, all "robes of royalty," bank notes, physicians' equipment, instruments of prisons and torture, and even "marriage certificates," in their effort to "get rid of the weight of dead men's thoughts" (II, 430-45) . But the best books-the Bible, Shakespeare, Milton, Bunyan-will not burn, and Hawthorne says the reformers have made a fatal "error": if the individual will but "purify that inward sphere," his own heart, the evils that haunt the outward sphere will "vanish of their own accord." In "The Celestial Railroad" Hawthorne follows the Puritan Bunyan and holds that Transcendental followers of Kant will never reach heaven if they refuse to shoulder their individual burdens of sin.10 lOit should be noted that when the terrestrial railroad came to Salem Hawthorne said an "important change awaits the venerable town. An immense accumulation of musty prejudices will be carried off by the free circulation of society" (I, 379-80). Tech-

nology is a kind of tool, neutral in itself, which if rightly used may help to free mankind from the mustiness of the past and thus provide a better or more balanced life. 23

Hawthorne

Hawthorne also looks critically at the past of England and Italy. The English Notebooks and Our Old Home contain considerable adverse comment on England and British traditions. He notes the anti-democratic caste system, the politically established Church, some evidence of English sympathy for the South in the ante-bellum era, and he even comments on the corpulence of British ladies. Interpreters such as Newton Arvin have emphasized this aspect of Hawthorne and assembled the evidence. Let us here note only that, in Dr. Grimshawe's Secret, Hawthorne ridicules the caste system and says he "would rather be the poorest and lowest man in America" than feel an Englishman's loyalty to his superiors, for an American is most proud of the assumption that "there is no man above me." 11 Hawthorne occasionally tries to convince himself that England is in total bondage to a past which is surely dying. H. G. Fairbanks has expertly documented the evidence, pro and con, of Hawthorne's attitude toward Italy and the Roman Catholic Church. 12 From at least one angle of vision, that of the heir of two centuries of a dissenting tradition, Hawthorne is extremely critical: he regards Rome as a corpse, her Church as moribund, and her priests and monks as hypocritical about their celibacy. In The Marble Faun this dissenting vision holds Miriam, Hilda, and Kenyon to a constant awareness of their place in history, of their temporal perspective. Such awareness is revealed, for example, on their way to the Tarpeian Rock in their comment on "the chasm into which Curtius precipitated his good steed and himself," followed later by "all Rome" including the palace of the Caesars (VI, 191 ff.) . To Miriam, the unhappiness of one person like herself seems less unnatural when viewed against the deserved collapse of a whole empire. III

Hawthorne's respect for tradition may rest upon his belief that "little that is high and ennobling can have other foundation than genuine Christianity."13 He accepts the following traditional beliefs: a beneficent Creator; immortality; the symbol of Eden and the Fall of Man who was henceforth an "amalgam" of good and evil in conflict; the Bible as man's most lofty and imperishable ethical guide; pride as the cardinal sin which through self-righteousness may tempt even the scientist, the philanthropist, and the artist from the threshold 11Julian Hawthorne, ed., Dr. Grimshawe's Secret (Standard Library Edition, XIII), 198200.

12See Fairbanks, Loneliness of Hawthorne, pp. 185 ff. Norman Holmes Pearson's unpublished three-volume edition of Hawthorne's French and Italian Notebooks

24

(1941), available in the Yale Library, provides elaborate notes on what he used in The Marble Faun as well as on his general attitudes toward France and Italy. 1 3Julian Hawthorne, Nathaniel Hawthorne and His Wife (Boston, 1885), I, 258. Hereafter cited as H & W.

Harry Hayden Oark of heaven to the pit of hell; and a humble sense of "how dependent on one another God has ordained us to be, insomuch that all the necessities of mankind should incite them to mutual love" (XII, 188). His active distaste for agnosticism appears in his famous comment about his walk with Melville by the sea, in England, in 1856. His friend "began to reason of Providence and futurity, and of everything that lies beyond human ken," and Hawthorne found Melville's agnostic "wandering to-and-fro over these deserts, as dismal and monotonous as the sand hills amid which we were sitting. He can neither believe, nor be comfortable in his unbelief." (EN, pp. 432-33) Hawthorne is no fatalist or determinist in his commitment to Christian tradition-in spite of the apparent implications of certain passages. In The Scarlet Letter, for example, he states that "the stern and sad truth [must be] spoken, that the breech which guilt has once made into the human soul is never, in this mortal state, repaired. It may be watched and guarded.... But there is still the ruined wall, and, near it, the stealthy tread of the foe that would win over again his unforgotten triumph." (V, 241) But in The Marble Faun he debates the possibilities of the Fortunate Fall, of good coming out of evil if the sinner is repentant. And The House of Seven Gables offers both points of view. Its "weighty lesson" supposedly concerns the "little-regarded truth, that the act of the passing generation is the germ which may and must produce good or evil fruit in a far-distant time" (CNHP, p. 245); but the tale clearly illustrates the fact that evil can be worn out in time if characters such as Phoebe and Holgrave exercise free-willed responsibility. 14 Such free-willed responsibility, however, has to overrule mere natural instinct. If The Scarlet Letter focuses upon the question of what Dimmesdale is to do, then this novel centres upon a conflict between the way of nature and the way of repentance and confession according to the socially mediated Christian tradition. Hester "had wandered, without rule or guidance, in a moral wilderness," and hence had "hardly more reverence than the Indian" (V, 239). Speaking against the appropriate background of the forest, the excellent symbol of "that wild, heathen Nature ... never subjugated by human law, nor illumined by higher truth" (V, 243), Hester urges Dimmesdale to escape with her to Europe. She throws away the scarlet letter, and says, "Let us not look back. ... The past is gone!" (V, 242) But little Pearl refuses to return to her mother until she resumes the letter the child is accustomed to; and Dimmesdale has to choose "between fleeing as an avowed criminal, and remaining as a hypocrite" (V, 240). He at first accepts Hester's plan to flee, and regards her 14Joseph M. Schwartz, "Nathaniel Hawthorne and Freedom of the Will" (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Wisconsin, 1952) assembles all the complex evidence and concludes that Hawthorne makes amP.le

allowance for a considerable degree of freewilled responsibility which places him within the bounds of the older versions of traditional Christian teaching. 2S

Hawthorne

as his "better angel" (V, 242). But he soon realizes that in acquiescing he has "yielded himself, with deliberate choice [or free will], . .. to what he knew was deadly sin" (V, 265). The evil effect of such yielding has just been illustrated for him by his five distorted encounters in the village narrated in the chapter on "The Minister in a Maze." Dimmesdale' s whole development, from Oxford on, had made him "a true priest, a true religionist, with the reverential sentiment largely developed, and an order of mind that impelled itself powerfully along the track of a creed, and wore its passage continually deeper with the lapse of time. . . . it would always be essential to his peace to feel the pressure of a faith about him, supporting, while it confined him within its iron framework." (V, 151) And his creed taught him that "no evil of the past [can] be redeemed by better service" to others (V, 162) contrary to what Hester had urged. Thus, when he finally chooses public confession before the "uninstructed multitude," this man of a traditional creed turns his dying eyes to Hester:" 'Is not this better,' murmured he, 'than what we dreamed of in the forest?'" (V, 300)-better, that is, than flight according to nature. 15 Hawthorne regards the minister's ignominy as "triumphant" because one who had added "hypocrisy to sin" had eventually disciplined himself to "Be true! Be true!" (V, 307), according to the Christian tradition. The disciplined will needed to destroy the long transmission of evil from generation to generation, however, does not often gain the ascent over man's nature. The House of Seven Gables 16 concerns a "legend prolonging itself, from an epoch now gray in the distance [of over a century and a half], down into our own broad daylight, and bringing along with it some of its legendary mist." According to the Preface, the tale's "moral" is that "the wrong-doing of one generation lives into the successive ones, and, divesting itself of every temporary advantage, becomes a pure and uncontrollable mischief" (CNHP, p. 243). More precisely, the original Pyncheon, who secured the original Maule's property by falsely accusing him of witchcraft, passes on his greedand Maule's curse-to some seven generations. The theological theme of the sins of the fathers being visited upon the sons is given a would-be biological parallel in the inheritance of the curse of being given blood to drink-i.e., dying of inherited high blood-pressure causing apoplexy and hemorrhage. The present Judge Pyncheon, who had his cousin Clifford falsely imprisoned for 15Kenyon remarks concerning Donatello's tum to nature that, while intercourse with nature might soothe ordinary cares and griefs, nature's "mild influences fall short in their effect upon the ruder passions, and are altogether powerless in the dread fever-fit or deadly chill of guilt" (CNHP, pp. 73132). See also J. F. Ragan, "Nature in Hawthorne's American Novels," Dissertation Abstracts, XV (1955), 2214. Charles Rys-

26

kamp has treated "The New England Sources of The Scarlet Letter" in American Literature, XXXI (Nov., 1959), 257-72. 16See: A. J. Levy, "The House of Seven Gables: The Religion of Love," NineteenthCentury Fiction, XVI (Dec., 1961), 189-203; and Darrel Abel, "Hawthorne's House of Tradition," South Atlantic Quarterly, Lil (Oct., 1953), 561-78.

Harry Hayden Clark

thirty years and who closely resembles the portrait of the original Pyncheon, has inherited a full measure of both his ancestor's greed and biological weakness. The moral continuity is modified in both families in the new generation, however. Holgrave, a Maule whose occult power is now called mesmerism instead of witchcraft, chooses to exercise self-control and refrain from taking advantage of Phoebe Pyncheon. And Phoebe, in turn, persuades Holgrave to change from cold-hearted observation of Hepzibah's plight to sympathetic involvement. In short, both the ancient feud and the long transmission of evil are ended by the love and approaching marriage of Phoebe and Holgrave. In winning Phoebe's love and hence the hope of endowing a family of his own, Holgrave also does away with his fulminations against the past, especially as represented by the stability of the once-proud Pyncheon house; Holgrave now wants a house not of wood but of stone. "Then, every generation of the family might have altered the interior, to suit its own taste and convenience; while the exterior, through the lapse of years, might have been adding venerableness to its original beauty, and thus giving that impression of permanence which I consider essential to the happiness of any one moment" (CNHP, p. 433). Holgrave's happy compromise allows leeway for both the moderate innovations of one generation and the continuity and permanence associated with tradition. And this compromise agrees with Hawthorne's editorial comment that the "error" of the earlier Holgrave "lay in supposing that this age, more than any past or future one, is destined to see the tattered garments of Antiquity exchanged for a new suit, instead of gradually renewing themselves by patchwork" (CNHP, p. 351). 17 Seven Gables also implies that American society is gradually evolving toward self-reliant democracy and away from pride in caste: Hepzibah, the would-be lady, is a "fair parallel" to November when compared with the May of the self-reliant Phoebe. And Gothic18 overtones darken the superstition of the early Puritans and witchcraft, while the present generation is associated with the sentimental tradition of love as an all-powerful redemptive force. Holgrave's self-restraint and his love for Phoebe preserve him from the destructive pride to which Hawthorne's reformers seem particularly vulnerable. Since Hawthorne considers evil to be eradicable only through each individual's purging his own inward heart and rectifying his own motives-as stated in the conclusion to "Earth's Holocaust"-it logically follows that he should be generally unsympathetic to those who relied on mere outward or 17Cf. Grandfather's Chair in which Hawthorne claims that Edmund Burke, who advocated gradualism and opposed the violent French revolutionary reforms, was our "wisest statesman." 18See: N. F. Doubleday, "Hawthorne's Use of Three Gothic Patterns," College English,

VII (Feb., 1946), 250-62; Jane Lundblad, Hawthorne and the Gothic Romance (Cambridge, Mass., 1946); and Maurice Charney, "Hawthorne and the Gothic Style," New England Quarterly, XXXIV (March, 1961), 36-49.

27

Hawthorne institutional reform.19 His major attack on such innovators, through the character of Hollingsworth whose philanthropic passion Hawthorne calls monstrous, was written in 1852 in the house of Horace Mann, his sister-inlaw' s husband and one of the age's foremost spokesmen for all kinds of reform; and the vehemence of The Blithedale Romance may be regarded as its "most unmalleable" author's countering his in-laws' equally vehement espousal of institutional reform. Hawthorne criticizes the original Blithedale planeconomic reform through co-operative or "communistic" farming in the vintage of 1852-by stating that the bond uniting his reformers "was not affirmative, but negative. We had individually found one thing or another to quarrel with in our past life, and were pretty well agreed as to the inexpediency of lumbering along with the old [competitive] system any further. As to what should be substituted, there was much less unanimity." (V, 391) And he notes ironically that through their effort to escape competition the Blithedalers had placed themselves in more drastic competition with the "neighboring farmers" whose "pure envy and malice" were aroused (V, 393). If Blithedale has shortcomings in plot structure, it is noteworthy as Hawthorne's most subtle psychological demonstration of the way in which the reformer, Hollingsworth, is "an exemplification of the most awful truth in Bunyan's book"20-that "from the very gate of heaven there is a by-way to the pit" (V, 595). This reformer becomes the victim of self-righteousness and pride. Hollingsworth begins with noble motives, but he hypocritically tries to double-cross his friends who espouse the reform of co-operative farming: he makes love to Zenobia to get her money in order to turn Blithedale into a place for the rehabilitation of desperate murderers. His falsity and his preference for Priscilla, who appeals to his protective instinct, cause Zenobia to drown herself. Although Zenobia expresses distaste for the Blithedale kind of economic innovation, she herself has been an ardent crusader for feminist reform. Hollingsworth cruelly ridicules such reform as he and the ladies and Coverdale have Sabbath talks at a "certain rock ... known to us under the name of Eliot's pulpit, from a tradition that the venerable Apostle had preached there, two centuries gone by, to an Indian auditory" (V, 454). Coverdale denounces Hollingsworth' s opposition to Zenobia's feminist reform19See: Arlin Turner, "Hawthorne and Reform," New England Quarterly, XV (Dec., 1942), 700-14, and his "Autobiographical Elements in Hawthorne's The Blithedale Romance," University of Texas Studies in English, XV (1935), 39-62; Darrel Abel, "Hawthorne's Skepticism about Social Reform," University of Kansas City Review,

28

XIX (Spring, 1953), 182-93; and Hall, Hawthorne. 20 See: S. W. Johnson, "Hawthorne and 'The Pilgrim's Progress,'" Journal of English and Germanic Philology, L (April, 1951), 15566; and Robert Stanton, "Hawthorne, Bunyan, and the American Romances,'' PMLA, LXXI (March, 1956), 155-65.

Harry Hayden Oark ism as a "horrible injustice." And he remarks that by "projecting our minds outward" toward various supposed improvements "we had imparted a show of novelty to existence, and contemplated it as hopefully as if the soil beneath our feet [near Eliot's pulpit] had not been fathom-deep with the dust of deluded generations, on every one of which, as on ourselves, the world had imposed itself" (V, 466). Although Coverdale characterizes Zenobia's unexpected submission, just before her suicide, as the "result of ages of compelled degradation" suffered by women in general (V, 461), the main target in this book remains the reformer. Hollingsworth is portrayed as a man who has surrendered himself to one "overruling purpose," a "stern and dreadful peculiarity," the "great excrescence of a philanthropic scheme" (V, 409). Because of this surrender he is "thrown completely off his moral balance" in his personal relations with Zenobia and Priscilla whose initial admiration aroused "his dark self-delusive egotism" (V, 409-10). Such men "have no heart, no sympathy, no reason, no conscience" (V, 399). Hollingsworth's "philanthropic absurdities" lead him to a sense of his own righteousness which makes him view all "mankind" as "but another yoke of oxen" in comparison, "stubborn, stupid, and sluggish" (V, 433) . His friends' original reformist idea that physical labour would lead to increased wisdom Hollingsworth denounces as "a wretched, unsubstantial scheme" (V, 468). He is blinded by his own philanthropic dream of assembling murderers with their "great black ugliness of sin" in order to try "the experiment of transmuting it into virtue" (V, 472). "The besetting sin of a philanthropist," as Coverdale tells Hollingsworth, "is apt to be moral obliquity," the throwing "aside his private conscience" (V, 471). And Zenobia, without Coverdale's characteristic mildness, denounces the philanthropist as "a cold, heartless, self-beginning and self-ending piece of mechanism" (V, 566). Hawthorne's opposition to other external reforms-as in his wholesale satiric attack in "Earth's Holocaust"-is well known, even though L. 5. Hall's Hawthorne: Critic of Society shows that he did write the Secretary of State long letters urging reform in the officers' treatment of sailors. His campaign biography of Pierce in 1852 aroused protest because it tried to dismiss even the crusade to abolish slavery as "the mistiness of a philanthropic theory" (XII, 370-71) . More reasonably, the conclusion of "The Snow Image" suggests that what one person believes will be helpful may well turn out to be destructive. Hawthorne's seven years in Europe were of immense value to his preoccupation with the conflicting claims of tradition and innovation. When feeling patriotic he could occasionally disparage England as too much given to aristocracy. But frequently he could also feel, in returning after his ancestors had left for America in 1635, "as if I myself had been absent these two 29

Hawthome hundred and eighteen years . ... It brings the two far separated points of time very closely together, to view the matter thus." (EN, p. 92) And during an ecclesiastic tour, he says, "I had a feeling as if I had seen this old church before, and dimly remembered," a feeling for which he suggests a hereditary reason: "perhaps the image of them [the churches], impressed into the minds of my long-ago forefathers, was so deep that I have inherited it; and it answers to the reality" (EN, p. 124). Hawthorne's Redclyffe, like James's "Passionate Pilgrim," has an instinctive feeling of "coming home after an absence of centuries." Hawthorne's reading was, of course, mainly in the English and European masters who were naturally slanted-except for a few such as Godwin, whom Hawthorne in his youth had liked along with Shelley-toward tradition; and Hawthorne generally revered Scott as the spokesman of the British past. His exposure to the actual survivals in Scott's Britain, many of them appealing and picturesque, intensified his sense of the conflict between past and present. And despite occasional irritations with the English, Hawthorne's deeper feeling seems to be that at their best-and especially in architecture-the English are skilful in merging the old and the new, that their innovations grow organically out of something essentially continuous and vital in the English past. "If mankind were all intellect, they would be continually changing, so that one age would be entirely unlike another. The great conservative is the heart, which remains the same in all ages; so that common-places of a thousand years standing are as effective as ever." (EN, p. 45) Yet the conflict was never settled. From the early pro-revolutionary stories opposed to the British as monarchical tyrants, to the seven preliminary versions and two drafts of Dr. Grimshawe's Secret at the very end of his life Hawthorne was plagued by the force of the aristocratic past and the hope for a democratic future. Rudolph Von Abele and Mrs. Millicent Bell think he was finally stymied by the fact that, much as he sought after a semi-Platonic or idealized art, he also had a strong private conviction-as suggested in "The Artist of the Beautiful"-that the artist has no real place in a democratic society, and that (as Abele says) his writing "necessarily appeals to an elite."21 One of his directions regarding Dr. Grimshawe's Secret, written to himself, reads as follows: The great gist of the story ought to be the natural hatred of men-and the particular hatred of Americans [yet caricatured and made ungracious in the gruff and bibulous Grimshawe]-to an Aristocracy; at the same time doing a good deal of justice to the aristocratic system by respecting its grand, beautiful, and noble characteristics . . . . It must be shown, I think, throughout, that there is an essential difference (caused Millicent Bell, Hawthorne's View of the Artist (New York, 1962), pp. 34-35, 100-1, 202-3; Rudolph Von Abele, The 21 See:

30

Death of the Artist: A Study of Hawthorne's Disintegration (The Hague, 1955),

pp. 5-6, 99, 101-10.

Harry Hayden Oark

more by environment than their common heredity?] between English and American character, and that the former must assimilate itself to the latter, if there is to be any union. 22

Christo£ Weglin claims that Hawthorne had what most earlier American belletristic writers "lacked: a historical sense. And his contrast therefore goes deeper than a mere opposition of political systems. Rather does he oppose two ways of life: that of America, freely looking toward the future, and that of England, bound to the past by the pretensions of an aristocracy on the verge of being outmoded."23 E. H. Davidson emphasizes Hawthorne's centring his attention in Dr. Grimshawe's Secret upon the theme of the past versus the future, and recognizes Hawthorne's uncertainty about the wisdom of having his American claim an ancestral European estate. 24 Hawthorne doggedly tried in vain to work his way out of several uncertainties in this tale. One of his marginal directions to himself (p. 105) is noteworthy because he states that, unlike his own earlier concern, this "story must not be founded at all on remorse or secret guilt [i.e., involving one's personal past]-all that Poe wore out." 211 And another directive (p. 22) insists that tradition is to be a vital force in this story: "It shall seem as if dead men still were active agents. How? how? how? I don't know, really. How in heaven?" Even if one allows for the state of Hawthorne's health and his befuddlement over the Civil War, such an admission strongly implies that one deep cause of his mental stalemate was a final indecision regarding the conflicting claims of tradition and innovation. According to Davidson, a "special bias" was a part of Hawthorne's view: Hawthorne had only one range of vision: to see the past and the present as they met

in a timeless continuum which is the heart of man. In England, the meeting place, or the focus of his vision, was symbolized in cathedrals, ivy-grown towers dating back

to the Middle Ages, and other intensely interesting relics of the past which brought both past and present into "constant contact" and relief. His tours through England were charted in order to avoid the cities and seats of government where he might have seen English politics, English manufacture, in short, nineteenth-century English life. Thus, as a romancer-critic of England Hawthorne shifted his focus away from the immediate and the present; he preferred the past which, in England, arose before him as vividly as had seventeenth-century Salem.26 22Edward H. Davidson, ed., Hawthorne's Dr. Grimshawe's Secret (Cambridge, Mass., 1954), pp. 22, 21. All references are to this edition of the work. 23''Europe in Hawthorne's Fiction," English Literary History, XIV (Sept., 1947), 235. For this essay Weglin (p. 232) drew upon Davidson's work then in the form of an unpublished Yale dissertation. 24 Pp. 1-3, 7-13. Reviews of Davidson's work accept this emphasis: see Randall

Stewart in American Literature, XXVII (Jan.,

1956), 595-96; and Carvel Collins in New England Quarterly, XXIX (June, 1956), 25861.

25Cf. Poe's "William Wilson." 26 Pp. 7-8. Davidson's observation and the Grimshawe "plot suggestions bring home with a fresh emphasis how deeply Hawthorne's imagination, from his early youth, had been impregnated by European Gothicism" (Stewart, in American Literature,

31

Hawthorne

An analogous perplexity is suggested by the claim that Europe may have taught Hawthorne the doctrine of the Fortunate Fall and the educative value of sin-that he "discovered in [Catholic] Europe that the Fall was necessary and prelapsarian purity a rather unenviable form of innocence, which there was no point in trying to recover." 27 But the indecisiveness in Hawthorne's view of this doctrine (rejected by Hilda and Kenyon in The Marble Faun) reproduces his indecision regarding tradition and innovation. Yet another lure of tradition, for Hawthorne, lay in the artistic possibilities of heredity, and he is something of a pioneer among American novelists in his pre-Darwinian stress on heredity (though he, of course, never assumes complete determinism). In "The Custom House" he remarks that his first American ancestor "still haunts me, and induces a sort of home-feeling with the past" (CNHP, p. 88). Hepzibah thinks of the grasping Judge as she pauses before the portrait of the first Pyncheon, concludes that the Judge "was the old Pyncheon come again" (CNHP, p. 278), and tells the Judge that his greed has cursed the family for two centuries. James Russell Lowell began a long critical tradition by immediately telling Hawthorne that "the 'House' is the most valuable contribution to New England history that has been made. It is with the highest art that you have typified (in the revived likeness of Judge Pyncheon to his ancestor the Colonel) that intimate relationship between the Present and the Past in the way of ancestry and descent, which historians so carefully overlook." (H & W, I, 391) Hawthorne never pretends to understand heredity in any scientific way: "it is too fruitful a subject, this of hereditary resemblance." Instead, it is "the rude old potency" that reasserts itself-in the Pyncheon greed and the successive males being given "blood to drink," in the carpenter Maule (who bewitched Alice) having inherited some of his wizard grandfather's questionable traits (III, 356-59). Hawthorne concludes that XXVII, 596), such as he found in Walpole, Beckford, Mrs. Radcliffe, and in Scott's Demonology which-according to Paul Elmer More-in part was vitalized for Hawthorne by his ancestral involvement in witchcraft. Grimshawe, for example (p. 260), tells Mountford about the South American spider as large as a dinner plate: "I have learned from his web how to weave a plot, and how to catch my victim and devour him!" i.e., learned how an American may absorb traditionalism and overcome it. Carvel Collins (in New England Quarterly, XXIX, 258) thinks other similarly Gothic passages suggest that to Hawthorne the sinister spider over Grimshawe's head is "a symbol of the weight of the dead past." At any rate, the Gothic image and tone, al32

though still strong and meaningful, did not lead Hawthorne out of his quandary over the rival claims of tradition and innovation. 27Roger Asselineau, "Hawthorne Abroad" in Pearce, ed., Hawthorne Centenary Essays, p. 379. So much has been written on Hawthorne's tentative debate about good coming out of evil if the sinner is repentant that one only needs to mention the subject which culminates in the conclusion of The Marble Faun. Melvin W. Askew, "Hawthorne, the Fall, and the Psychology of Maturity," American Literature, XXXIV (Nov., 1962), 335-43, summarizes the scholarly debate. Askew argues that Hawthorne eventually viewed his characters as falling not so much into any theological hell as into a human condition not without some free-willed responsibility.

Harry Hayden Oark inbreeding, especially when a family line becomes evil or sickly, is undesirable. He humorously illustrates his point by means of the degenerated family of Pyncheon chickens and the fact that even Pyncheon potatoes cease to flourish when continually planted in the same soil. Thus, he suggests that it is best for "human blood . . . to . . . run in hidden streams": the benign Phoebe has some ancestors who are not tainted by the Pyncheon blood (Ill, 222). 28 However, the whole subject of scientific rationalism interested Hawthorne immensely. 29 Some of his sharpest comment, both adverse and favourable, is evoked by this subject, and his interest in scientific rationalists cannot be entirely confined to either the past or the present. In "Ethan Brand," "The Birthmark," and "Rappaccini's Daughter," his three famous stories offering detailed portraits of scientific rationalists, Hawthorne uses his norm of a desirable "counterpoise between . . . mind and heart" (CNHP, p. 1194) to dramatize the tragedy of those who deviate from this traditional norm. Thus, "Ethan Brand became a fiend .. . from the moment that his moral nature [his heart] had ceased to keep the pace of improvement with his intellect." His intellect, in its obsessive quest to isolate the Unpardonable Sin, had raised him from an uneducated labourer to a "star-lit eminence" (CNHP, p. 1194), but had left a corresponding abyss within his heart. In a "cold and remorseless" way he had exploited the affections of Esther Humphrey for "a psychological experiment, and wasted, absorbed, and perhaps annihilated her soul, in the process" (CNHP, p. 1191). His impenitence makes his sin unpardonable and justifies the revelation of his "marble heart" after his suicide: "Freely, were it to do again, would I incur the guilt. Unshrinkingly I accept the retribution!" (CNHP, p. 1189) In acknowledging his sinful lust for knowledge, which is "seven times hotter" than other "sinful passions," Ethan spoke (says Hawthorne, who associates heartless scientists with fanatics) "with a pride that distinguishes all enthusiasts of his stamp." His Faust-like pride in heartless intellectual quests is "a sin that grew within my own breast ... nowhere else! The sin of an intellect that triumphed over the sense of brotherhood with man and reverence for God, and sacrificed everything to its own mighty claims! The only sin that deserves a recompense of immortal agony!" (CNHP, p. 1189) And, after discussing Ethan's education, so different from Donatello's penitent education through the emotions, Hawthorne editorializes: But where was the heart? That, indeed, had withered,-had contracted,-had hardened,-had perished! It had ceased to partake of the universal throb. He had 2 8For detailed study, see Charles E. Boewe, "Heredity in • . . Hawthorne, Holmes and Howells" (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Wisconsin, 1955). 29See Elizabeth R. Hosmer, "Science and

Pseudo-Science in the Writings of Nathaniel Hawthorne" (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Illinois, 1948); recent relevant studies are cited in Fairbanks, Loneliness of Hawthorne, pp. 97-121.

33

Hawthorne lost his hold of the magnetic chain of humanity. He was no longer a brother-man, opening the chambers or the dungeons of our common nature by the key of holy sympathy, which gave him a right to share in all its secrets; he was now a cold observer [cf. Holgrave before the ministry of Phoebe's redemptive love], looking on mankind as the subject of his experiment, and, at length, converting man and woman [during his world-wide quest of eighteen years] to be his puppets, and pulling the wires that moved them to such degrees of crime as were demanded for his study. [CNHP, p. 1194] In "The Birthmark" and "Rappaccini's Daughter" the scientists unintentionally cause the heroines' death. Both Aylmer and Rappaccini use science to attain a prideful power, to play God in reverse; and both lack warmth of heart or human sympathy, humble piety, a recognition of nature's limits, and even mere temporal perspective. 30 Rappaccini's first human "creation" is Beatrice (the story contains several allusions to Dante) and she is compounded of poison in the "garden" which is likened to the Eden of this prideful god. The rival scientist, Baglioni, whose antidote is the immediate cause of Beatrice's death, is a kind of jealous serpent in this Eden. Aylmer determines to remove his bride's birthmark, the symbol of potential sin-the human condition. He draws upon a "scientific library" which includes the works of philosophers of the middle ages, such as Albertus Magnus, Cornelius Agrippa, Paracelsus, and the famous friar who created the prophetic Brazen Head. All these antique naturalists stood in advance of their centuries, yet were imbued with some of their credulity.... Hardly less curious and imaginative were the early volumes of the Transactions of the Royal Society. [CNHP, p. 1028] 31 Aylmer may have "redeemed himself from materialism by his strong and eager aspiration towards the infinite," but his exclamation to his victimized bridewho acquiesces-indicates that he, like Rappaccini, is quite willing to accept worship as a god because of his involvement in unique greatness: "what will be my triumph when I shall have corrected what Nature left imperfect in her fairest work!" (CNHP, p. 1024) Hawthorne concludes that, "had Aylmer reached a profounder wisdom, he need not thus have flung away" Georgiana's life: "he failed to look beyond the shadowy scope of time, and, living once for all in eternity, to find the perfect future in the present" (CNHP, p. 1033).32 30Neither of these stories can be considered to involve scientists contemporary with Hawthorne (Agazziz is the only contemporary scientist he mentions). Aylmer's tragic experiment is set "in the latter part of the last [eighteenth] century" in the era of Condorcet, and Rappaccini's experiment happened very "long ago" (Hawthorne's source being Sir Thomas Browne who drew upon legends of Alexander the Great). 31 The Royal Society was founded in 1662

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by men who were educated mainly in the ancient classics. 32Cf. Hawthorne's explanation of Dr. Chillingworth's acceptance in Puritan Boston in 1649: "Skilful men, of the medical and chirurgical profession, were of rare occurrence in the colony. They seldom, it would appear, partook of the religious zeal that brought other emigrants across the Atlantic. In their researches into the human frame, it may be that the higher and more subtile

Harry Hayden Oark

Hawthorne, however, has every admiration for the scientist whose intellect is balanced and motivated by heartfelt compassion. In Grandfather's Chair Cotton Mather's credulity in helping to condemn witches is partially offset by the fact that he courageously pioneered in scientific inoculation to save fellow Bostonians from an epidemic of smallpox. Even Chillingworth, before Hester wronged him, as she herself admits, had in England used his scientific gifts compassionately for human welfare. Franklin, of course, had used his science to advance his belief that "the most acceptable worship of God is service to man"; and Hawthorne, who thought it difficult to "warm into life" other American heroes, concludes that compared to Franklin "I do not think we have produced a man so interesting to contemplate" (X, 28). And in the "Legends of the Province House" Doctor Clarke, "a physician, and a famous champion of the popular party" in 1718, diagnoses the proud Lady Eleanore's incipient smallpox and points Hawthorne's moral: "I could well-nigh doubt the justice of the Heaven above us if no signal humiliation overtake this lady, who now treads so haughtily into yonder mansion. She seeks to place herself above the sympathies of our common nature, which envelops all souls. See, if that nature do not assert its claim over her in some mode that shall bring her level with the lowest!" (CNHP, p. 974) Most important of all, the concern for restraint and obedience to spiritual law which pervades Hawthorne's work appears to have been reinforced by his passionate glorification of a great scientist, Sir Isaac Newton. This scientist, who "felt no pride in the vastness of his knowledge" (XII, 163), secured in the seventeenth century a fame "which will be as endurable as if his name were written in letters of light formed by the stars upon the midnight sky" (XII, 164). While seeking "with reverential curiosity" (XII, 161) the power which kept the stars in their courses, he discovered the "force of gravitation." Newton "searched out all laws by which the planets are guided through the sky," and thus illustrated the "infinite wisdom and goodness of the Creator" (XII, 163-64). Hawthorne· mentions David Rittenhouse among those who domesticated Newtonianism in America; and he must have known his illustrious fellow Salemite, the Newtonian Nathaniel Bowditch, noted for his American Practical Navigator. Given Hawthorne's devotion to symbolism and faculties of such men were materialized, and that they lost the spiritual view of existence." (V, 146) Yet the method of this "diabolical" (V, 156) agent's revenge, his psychological torture of Dimmesdale-a "remorseful hypocrite" given to "constant introspection"-strikingly resembles the method of modern psychotherapy as Chillingworth probes into his victim's "recollections" and past. It should also be noted-

lest we suppose Hawthorne had some special animosity against scientific quests as such-that "The Prophetic Pictures," in which the artist's pictorial prophecy induced the bridegroom to attempt murder, implies that Hawthorne believed the prideful artist could also be tempted to exceed his normal obligations. In this story, however, the artist relents and saves the intended victim from folly.

35

Hawthorne correspondences, his reverence for Newtonian god-given laws illuminates the concern over decorum and steadfastness which appears at the end of "Wakefield." A man is in great danger the moment he ceases to conform to ethical laws which, in this story, are as inexorable as cosmic laws. "Amid the seeming confusion of our mysterious world, individuals are so nicely adjusted to a system, and systems to one another and to a whole, that, stepping aside for a moment, a man exposes himself to a fearful risk of losing his place forever. Like Wakefield, he may become, as it were, the Outcast of the Universe." (CNHP, p. 926) And we should recall that the capricious little Pearl illustrates no principle "save the freedom of a broken law" (V, 164), while Phoebe's portrayal implies the principle of comely orderliness. Hawthorne's doctrine of the evil of an individual's alienation 33 and the advantages for one who "rectifies his mind by other minds . . . so as seldom to be lost in eccentricity" (CNHP, p. 1006) is well known. His wide reading and observation, both at home and abroad, led him to an acquaintance with a tradition of excellence-in architecture, painting, and in excellent men of the past such as Marcus Aurelius. If at times he became overly conscious of the evil in the past, his respect for the emulation of the magnanimous and great, voiced in "The Great Stone Face" and elaborated later, led him to be increasingly critical and to view the past and the present as providing mutual criticism and illumination (VI, 358). He concludes that "good pictures are quite as rare as good poets . . . . One in a thousand, perhaps, ought to live in the applause of men, from generation to generation" as time winnows the excellent few from the many (X, 122). The "titan of innovation," awed to find the great books invulnerable to any iconoclastic holocaust (II, 449-54), has to learn that these works embody those few insights which time has found to be eternal. To write at one's best, therefore, one must be conscious of being inspired by the "true and noble thoughts, and elevated imaginations" of the great traditional spokesmen of wisdom and art (XII, 68-69) . The individual alone is impoverished and needs a selective tradition; he needs to be sustained by the faith that a "hereditary spirit . .. must ever be the pledge" that sons of the present "will vindicate their ancestry" (CNHP, p. 866). The availability of a tradition worthy of emulation assumes great importance in view of Hawthorne's long preoccupation with the Gothic symbol of the elixir of life. This symbol is central to The Dolliver Romance left unfinished at his death; and thirty-five years earlier, in "Dr. Heidegger's Experiment," the elixir of life was used to point the moral that human nature is constant, that even if given another chance to benefit by past experience man would merely make his prior mistakes over again. Human life, in short, is essentially 33See, in addition to Fairbanks, Darrel Abel, "The Theme of Isolation in Hawthorne," Personalist, XXXII (Jan., April, 1951), 42-

36

58, 182-90. Newton Arvin's Hawthorne (Boston, 1929), centres on this theme but his interpretation has Marxist implications.

Harry Hayden Oark circular, an outgoing and return to the starting point, rather than a linear progress or "an ascending spiral curve" as the mentally disturbed Clifford Pyncheon remarks (CNHP, p. 399) . Most of Hawthorne's fiction involves the circular or mythic theme of withdrawal or alienation, initiation, and return with a steadying emphasis on the "constants" which he thought were essentially common to most human experience and to the builders of the winnowed tradition of excellence who combined allegiance to both the head and the heart. In a way, perhaps Hawthorne's most representative spokesman is Hilda. This daughter of the Puritans suffers a vicarious experience of sin, for which she repents; and she thus learns that pride is the most deadly sin, and that she herself has been guilty of it in her own untested innocence. Her final befriending of Miriam implies that she has conquered her virginal pride, and has chosen the traditional Christian course of action: "must a selfish care for the spotlessness of our own garments keep us from pressing the guilty ones close to our hearts, wherein, for the very reason that we are innocent, lies their securest refuge from further ill?" (VI, 439) Hilda humbly subordinates her own individuality to become an inspired copyist of the Old Masters. And Hawthorne says she thus chose "the better and loftier and more unselfish part" in making herself the "handmaid of those old magicians, instead of a minor enchantress within a circle of her own" (VI, 78-79) . Most important of all, Hilda's "generous self-surrender" opens her eyes. She is "instructed by sorrow." Thus, she found "she could not yield herself up to the painter so unreservedly as in times past; her character had developed a sturdier quality, which .. . taught her to distinguish inevitably the large portion that is unreal, in every work of art" (VI, 427) . And Hilda, finally, is to bring this dearly bought critical lesson, learned in the Europe of tradition, back to her native land of relative innocence and inexperience.

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Milton R. Stern

MELVILLE'S TRAGIC IMAGINATION: THE HERO WITHOUT A HOME

The American writer, until the Civil War, did have certain optimistic assumptions, identified with his nation, that he could make about the nature of man and man's fate. Those assumptions, championed by the Transcendentalists, existed in the adolescent cheerfulness of a new nation whose expectations were that it was indeed going to be the triumph of a history that had long existed in the European imagination, the regaining of Eden. Developing out of that imagination, America was a progressive symbol, as de Crevecoeur noted, of divine, pastoral, and economic benevolence. 1 Looking at American nature, the American romantic found in the cosmos an actual home in which the New Man, which is to say, the American, would find an absolute and unrestricted new identity. When the early Emerson said to his compatriots, "Build, therefore, your own world. As fast as you conform your life to the pure idea in your mind, that will unfold its great proportions,"2 he meant it literally. The idea of America became the actualization of all the old myths about the New West yet to be found. The places of the New West, the names of "home," for the American were objective place names for a state of being, that golden day when the unrestricted new self takes permanent and totally liberated occupancy of the new land. To name the home places in the modern moment is to engage in a homesickness for a supposititious past, a nostalgia in which America was once as huge and pure as heaven itself. "I have fallen in love with American names," wrote Stephen Vincent Benet, during his expatriation after the First World War, The sharp names that never get fat, The snakeskin-titles of mining-claims, The plumed war-bonnet of Medicine Hat, Tucson and Deadwood and Lost Mule Flat. Seine and Piave are silver spoons, But the spoonbowl-metal is thin and worn, There are English counties like hunting-tunes Played on the keys of a postboy's horn, But I will remember where I was born. 1 1 have in mind aU but the last portions of St. Jean de Crevecoeur's Letters from an American Farmer, especially anecdotes like

"Andrew the Hebridean." Emerson's Nature, section vm, "Prospects."

2 See

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Melville I will remember Carquinez Straits, Little French Lick and Lundy's Lane, The Yankee ships and the Yankee dates And the bullet-towns of Calamity Jane. I will remember Skunktown Plain. I will fall in love with a Salem tree And a rawhide quirt from Santa Cruz, I will get me a bottle of Boston sea And a blue-gum nigger to sing me blues. I am tired of loving a foreign muse. Rue des Martyrs and Bleeding-Heart-Yard, Senlis, Pisa, and Blindman's Oast, It is a magic ghost you guard. But I am sick for a newer ghost, Harrisburg, Spartanburg, Painted Post. Henry and John were never so And Henry and John were always right? Granted, but when it was time to go And the tea and the laurels had stood all night, Did they never watch for Nantucket Light? I shall not rest quiet in Montparnasse. I shall not lie easy at Winchelsea. You may bury my body in Sussex grass, You may bury my tongue at Champmedy. I shall not be there. I shall rise and pass. Bury my heart at Wounded Knee.3

What Benet understood was simple. As expatriate, he remembered with hunger the sunlit association with the Good Place that traditionally clings to the American sense of the West as a defence against history and the recognitions of the tragic sense. The neighbourhood has various names, from Eden to Utopia to Atlantis to California to Hemingway's Big Two-Hearted River, where the fishing is always mind-cleansing above the tragic swamp. It has nothing and everything to do with geography. It is easy to say that in many ways the good New West was a delusion, but as a force of the imagination, the idea of paradise dies hard in American expectations of human possibility, and the anti-tragic expectations had no negligible effect on literature. Thematically impelled by the providential greed of the conquistadores, in which our sense of the West is born, by the typology and certainty of the 3"American Names" from Ballads and Poems." Copyright 1931 by Stephen Vincent Benet. Copyright© 1959 by Rosemary 40

Carr Benet. Reprinted by permission of Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc., Publishers, New York.

Milton R. Stem

seventeenth century, in which our sense of millennialism is born, by the rational theories of perfectibility of the eighteenth-century deist, in which our perennial political optimism is born, and by the Transcendental hopes of the nineteenth century, in which our sense of the liberated, existential self is born, the birth of American letters into a modern moment created a literature seismographically sensitive to tremors at the poles of absolute affirmation and debunking despair. The depth of despair is measured by the height of the hope, and our literature tends to gauge its emotional topography as though by the lyrics of the folksong: the hills don't get any higher, but the hollers get deeper and deeper. As de Tocqueville predicted, it is a literature that has a penchant for the extreme and the violent in metaphysical stance as well as in narrative action.4 So, like the exiles that Malcolm Cowley described, all our serious writers from Cooper on have measured their acceptances and repudiations, hope and hopelessness, by what they calculate as their distance in national experience from the landscape of home. They all know what home is. It is that imagined American name that lasts into hopes for the future even after it has been touched by history and found wanting. As Robert Frost defined it in "Death of the Hired Man," it is "something you somehow haven't to deserve." If the hope of finding that golden American name place is the reality, as with the early Whitman, then the measurement of things becomes a lyrical disclosure of the beauty of a metaphoric America, that Utopian condition possible in the inner, spiritual life, and of which the natural and national facts are but statisticating symbols that one can catalogue. But if the touch of history is the reality, as it was with Melville, then the measurement of things becomes an agonizing disclosure of limitation rather than liberation, of what has been lost in a universe whose American names are redefined by experience. The tragic, rather than the lyric, imagination is enlarged. It has been fashionable to call Melville's imagination tragic, but to do so demands a certain precision of terms. I think that Melville's vision is not tragic in a classic sense, but rather in the pained discovery that the end of life is not a divinely ordained grand entry into the ultimate American name. Modern as it is, Melville's vision tends toward the naturalistic and the existential in its sense of death, or the consciousness thereof, as a basis for value. What Melville, as American writer, was confronted with was not so much the definition of tragedy as his tragic sense of mortal limitation; he knew the modern need to come to terms with the circular westward flight from history, 4In Democracy in America (1835), Alexis de Tocqueville observed approximately the same scene in space and time that de Crevecoeur observed, but speculated less simplistically about American institutions and

saw acutely many of the divergences between American historical directions on the one hand and American ideologies and selfimages on the other.

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Melville

which, as Hawthorne and Twain and James and Fitzgerald and Hemingway and Faulkner knew, was always there from the beginning to meet the flight head on. Perhaps it would do to recall the bare bones of Moby-Dick. Ishmael, an outcast wanderer, goes to sea with hatred in his heart and damp, drizzly Novembers in his soul. He ships aboard the Pequod, captained by Ahab. Ahab, too, is crazed by the anguish of limitations that experience has brought him. Frustrated into monomania, he knows too well that he is on earth, not in Eden, and his final, total loss of the green Tahiti of the soul is represented by the loss of his leg in the jaws of Moby-Dick. Unable to come to terms with history (it is necessary to remember that Ahab was enraged before he encountered the whale), he declares war on the great white whale, who is to him the symbol of all the malice sinewing the universe and who is to Ishmael, if he is anything, the very nature of things, the gliding phantom of life itself. Ahab would lead man out of history, would kill the man-limiting forces of dumb, blind, ubiquitous actuality-and we remember that the whale is dumb, blind, and ubiquitous. But what does this attempt result in? The sinking of the human community-that Anacharsis Clootz expedition-and the death of all but Ishmael. Ishmael, who lives to tell the tale, has learned that Ahab's direction is not the true one; that man lives not by the fiery desires to transcend history, but that he lives, after all, in the human community, educated and humanized by both the failure and the necessity of his hopes, his dreams, his visions, in the endless sea of monstrous mortal limitation. He is saved in theme by his recognition of the interdependence of all mortal humanity as he is in fact by the perfectly appropriate object, the coffin of a friend. Because Melville knew that "the great shroud of the sea rolls on as it rolled five thousand years ago," 5 he knew too that Ishmael could not learn where he was going until he had learned the meaning of where Ahab had been. Perhaps it is tragic to admit that one's ultimate condition is mortal, after all, but tragedy requires something more than a journey into pain. What, then, do I mean if I imply that Melville's tragic view does not produce tragedy? In the supposition advanced by Bradley and Spencer and others, one component of tragedy is a communally accepted background of moral values. 6 These moral values may have little to do with mores except in so far as we are concerned with the historical conditions of a particular tragedy, which is beside the point here. The background is not necessarily one of sociology but of balance, of nemesis, of religious belief. The community accepts an assessment of the universe in which impersonal and absolute justice pervades the 5 The

Works of Herman Melville, Standard Edition (London, 1922-24), VIII, 367. All citations of Moby-Dick, hereafter included in the text, refer to this edition.

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C. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy (London, 1904), lectures I and u et passim: and Theodore Spencer, Shakespeare and the Nature of Man (New York, 1942), passim.

6 A.

Milton R. Stem

cosmos and provides criteria for the possible alternatives of behaviour. I emphasize the community because, according to this view, the nature of the universe is not to be seen as the individual product of one man's reading, but rather as an objective, external metaphor of morality anterior to human wishes. The universe is run by the gods, whose apparently personal caprice and whimsies are not always clear to men, but which are instrumental in the perpetuation of cosmic balance. This balance and its laws provide what is fitting, just, possible, and decorous in human behaviour. The nature of the cosmos becomes a justification of the history of man. The essential point, for my purposes here, is the existence of a moral universe, which regulates and provides a basis for human action. The resolution of all action is the return of balance by a disinterested divine adjustment of human wishes. The action of the tragedy is the working out of a violation of the universal laws by which the community may continue to exist. Watching the action we are excited to pity by the doomed, blind passion of the protagonist and to terror by his destruction of the basis for sane human conduct. In this view, tragedy is essentially optimistic. After the dramatized course of events, things are changed: I have in mind the Oresteia. The restoration of balance and the cessation of hostilities means that an enlarged human condition has been gained-the Good Place of American Names, home, has been achieved. This resolution of action I shall call the politics of tragedy. The second component lies in the dramatic foreground, in the realm of human wishes, in the audience itself. The pity and terror that earn catharsis result in a chastened hopefulness for human continuity. The pity and terror and hopefulness I shall call the psychology of tragedy. The psychology and the politics of tragedy are inseparable from each other. Either there is the explicit reconciliation dramatized as at the end of the Oresteia, or there is a re-educated state to be achieved in the action that we imagine takes place after the play is over, as in Lear or Hamlet. Yet, in Melville's peculiarly modern vision, the stasis reached by the great shroud of the sea rolling as it rolled five thousand years ago, after all the pity and terror excited by Ahab's actions, does not leave the viewer in that breathless combination of the politics and psychology of tragedy wedded in one purging resolution and reconciliation of forces. Consider: by the time we reach Melville's moment in literature, we reach an American moment when individualism has carried the day in the ideologies of the nation, in the metaphysics of the romantics, in the cultural effects of a consolidated Protestant revolt, and in the economics of robber baron capitalism. For the modern, particularly for the American writer, problems of law and value are not so much a matter of static communal belief, much less of tradition, as they are a matter of one's own perception of the meanings of his experience. By Melville's time the Quakers and the Romantics had long since triumphed 43

Melville over the Puritans and the Unitarianism of Andrews Norton. As James Baird points out in Ishmael, Melville signals the fact in literature that modern multiplicity of beliefs has reduced once ruling symbols to a state of cultural exhaustion.7 One symptom has been a shift from theology and idealism to secularism and an emphasis upon experience. Indeed, as almost every commentator on the American literature that has been produced from the Romantics on has observed, value is determined by the imperatives of the self rather than the imperatives of orthodoxy. Of course the Romantics did reinvest nature with emotion, life, and meaning, but in a way that began what Hegel called the secularization of spirit. That is, in their insistence upon human perception as the divine agent of coalescence of the inner and outer worlds, the Romantics produce an experimental condition in which the creator of value is not God or the gods in a traditional sense, but the human perception of experience. The emphasis falls not upon theology, but on point of view and the self, on psychology, on all that has made the technical problems of point of view the central concern of writers and critics alike. One of the consequences of the new existential judgment of character was to find meaning not in a universe whose relations and morality are regulated by the gods, but in character. As Robert Langbaum says, in his splendid little book, The Poetry of Experience, the psychologically read play or novel depends for its success upon a central character with an experiential point of view definite enough to give meaning and unity to the events, and the presence of a character with the strength of intellect, will, and passion to give the work its own reality and force.8 With Ishmaels and Ahabs one does not advance in terms of actions and resolutions, of things really being changed as they are in the politics of tragedy. Rather, one progresses in insight, in the self-awareness and self-expression of the perceiver through whose eyes the events are filtered. The modern plot, the romantic plot, the existential plot-call it what you will-is not so much concerned with what happens next as it is with a re-seeing of all that has gone before-a rolling on of the great shroud of the sea in which, as far as events are concerned, the end brings you to the beginning point. A communal vision is not quite the same, after all, as the sum total of multiple visions. The unity of pre-modern communal belief, which Henry Adams so longed for as he looked at Chartres, is fractured into the contexts of one's own experience, in which the absolute truth cannot be encompassed and in which there are, instead, relative truths. Directly to the point here is the doubloon scene in Moby-Dick. Ahab has nailed a gold doubloon from Equador to the mainmast, and it will be the prize of the man who first sights the great white whale. The coin has strange designs, whose meanings are obscure, and one by one the members of the "Baltimore, 1956, pp. xv, 3-50.

44

8London, 1957, p. 177.

Milton R. Stern crew approach it and read therein different symbolic messages, as Pip, the mad cabin boy, watches. The midmost, equatorial mystery of the earth, of life itself, belongs to the man who first sights the total meaning of existence, the enigmatic whale himself. The coin, of course, will go to that man who thinks he has an absolute reading of the universe, and it is a false payment that Ahab makes to Ahab. For just as no two crewmen's meanings for the coin are the same, so Ahab's meaning is not Melville's. The mad wisdom of Pip adjusts the meaning of meaning for us. As each man reads the coin, Pip says, "I look, you look, he looks; we look, ye look, they look" (VIII, 194). For Melville meaning does not reside absolutely in the object itself or in the seer, but in the coalescence of both, in the experiential moment of perception, in an indefinitely extended possible number of contexts. This nexus between Melville and his idealistic contemporaries is precisely, at the same time, the point at which he tends toward naturalism. For unlike the idealism of Thoreau or Emerson, Melville's contexts do not become unified in an absolute, supranatural, higher law. The young Platonist on the masthead learned too late that actuality is not a symbolic proof of the higher reality he envisions, that the axioms of physics are not necessarily translations of the laws of ethics, as Emerson would have had it. So Pip mutters his oracular mutter a second time: "I look, you look, he looks; we look, ye look, they look." This from the Pip who has seen God's foot upon the treadle and has seen not unifying moral purpose but what Melville calls "the joyous, heartless, ever-juvenile eternities, ... the multitudinous, God-omnipresent, coral insects, that out of the firmament of waters heaved the colossal orbs" (VIII, 169). It is exactly the recognition of an overwhelming, infinite process of blithe, blind, eternal, dumb, white being that does not display moral purpose or loving teleology or conscious understanding that "drowned the infinite of [Pip's] soul" (VIII, 169). Experience sounded at the depths does not confirm the human perceiver's desperate moral need and wish for a purposeful, meaningful universe. For the third time Pip makes his observation about observation, "I look, you look, he looks; we look, ye look, they look," out of an "insanity [that] is heaven's sense," out of an experience that leaves him feeling as "uncompromised, indifferent as his God" (VIII, 170, my italics). When Pip speaks the fourth time, he utters the comic pronouncement that denies a true attribution of total cosmic meaning to any human perception, which, in its contextual traps, is too crazily blind to absolutely encompass the incredible totality of all possible diverse and shattering multiplicities of experience: "And I," adds Pip, "you, and he; and we, ye, and they, are all bats" (VIII, 194). The force that sends the modern imagination to experience rather than to dogma for truth is necessarily a recognition of the limitations of human perception-a man in his experience is not absolute, not lord of the level lodestone, and he must find his identity in the limited, mortal, historical 45

Melville circumstances of his existence. In Ishmael's terms, he must learn to lower, or at least shift, his conceit of attainable felicities. Integrity to experience does not provide any basis for establishing human identity as that absolute condition one hopes for in the ultimate good place of American names. Man's theology becomes less pertinent to the truth; his politics, in the widest sense of the word, become more so. As Melville saw in his earlier book, Mardi, heaven has no roof. There is no humanly available, operative resting place to the absolute, no final cosmic moral order or Truth. Rather there is the bitterness of orders and truths within historical contexts, and the agony of that recognition Melville voiced in Billy Budd. I suggest that Melville's modern view of man orphaned and bastardized in the universe increases the possibility for the psychology of tragedy-indeed demands it-but reduces the optimism. The modern disequilibrium between what the self knows to be true in experience and the traditions of idealism, this disequilibrium intrudes to separate the politics from the psychology of tragedy. The basis for the politics of tragedy is destroyed and, in the terms already specified, Melville is not a tragic writer for just those reasons that he is a modern writer who sees a universe in which the absolutes are dead. The psychology, the pity and terror for the human condition, is found in the chapter called "The Whiteness of the Whale." Ishmael, who in "The Try Works" chapter finally dissociates himself from Ahab's fiery hunt for the absolute, asks Is it that by its indefiniteness it [whiteness] shadows forth the heartless voids and immensities of the universe, and thus stabs us from behind with the thought of annihilation, when beholding the white depths of the Milky Way? .. . is it, that as in essence whiteness is not so much colour as the visible absence of colour [purpose, meaning], and at the same time the concrete of all colours [all the diverse possibilities of experience, all imputed purposes]; is it for these reasons that there is such a dumb blankness, full of meaning, in a wide landscape of snows-a colourless, allcolour of atheism from which we shrink? [VII, 243-44] The optimism of tragedy is reduced to circumstances and history in a universe in which the gods are either dead or witless. Yet, from the death of God comes a new identity and possible nobility: morality is now not externally dictated by God or gods, but is an internal necessity for mutual love that all renegades, mariners, castaways, bastards, orphans, and slaves co-operatively share. If man does not give man morality and brotherly protection, there is no God or universe that will. All men are mutually bound by the line of mortality that whizzes out faster than any one can recall it; the universal thump gets passed around to all shoulders. "Who ain't a slave?" asks Ishmael (VII, 5). Exactly when he is redeemed from the "damp drizzly Novembers" in his soul, Ishmael "perceived that in all cases man must eventually lower, or at least shift, his 46

Milton R. Stem

conceit of attainable felicity; not placing it anywhere ... but in the wife, the heart, the bed, the table, the saddle, the fireside, the country" (VIII, 172). So too, madly wise Pip would lead Ahab not to the non-existent absolute purposes Ahab seeks ahead, but to all the harbours of human community they have left behind. Go home, he constantly tells Ahab. Go home. Yet we must be careful not to fall into the very trap that Melville discloses in "The Doubloon": it is dangerous to assign a single, final meaning to the doubloon-like prose that Melville writes. A Squeeze of the Hand," for instance, not only suggests a lowering or shifting of conceits of attainable felicity, but is itself a satire on the felicity attainable on Aunt Charity's lee shore. If there are attainable felicities, there are no final ones. In keeping with this, and what I have said about plot, I think we may obtain a wider view of the loss of the politics of tragedy from a brief consideration of a consistent aspect of all of Melville's books-their general inconclusiveness. In Typee, the first book, we return to the same world which we have deserted: there is no viable alternative to the history into which we are born. In Omoo, the adventures are to be continued, and Mardi, the third book, leaves Taji, its hero, impossibly sailing on through the white seas of death in endlessly unfulfilled quest; in Redburn young Wellingborough never finds the dependable world of the past promised in his father's prosy old guide book. White Jacket, the hero of the fifth book, is changed, but the world of circumstance, the navy, is not. In Moby-Dick the devious-cruising Rachel picked up but one more orphan when it rescued Ishmael; his perception was saved, but the society in which he lived was not. In Pierre the only "resolution" is the complete destruction of the house of Glendinning, of all the central characters, and, nearly, of the reader; but the "kraken" problems Melville fished up were never settled. In Clarel we are told that death but routes life into victory, but one of the failures of the poem is that this is a rhetorical rather than a dramatized statement. The question of belief and its absolute objects is never resolved. In Billy Budd, not quite finished before Melville died, the heroes and villains all die and the meanings of their encounters are lost forever in the distortions of official accounts. Vere had to turn in death to the very absolute he had to condemn in life, and the closing accents are those of Billy in the darbies at the bottom of the sea, as eternally undead as the spirit of Claggart, the conflict between the two eternally unresolved. The fact that does remain, however, is not universal justice but human life that has always existed east of Eden, and I think that is what Solomonic and unchristian Melville intended in his insistent references to original sin, now forgotten in a world of "progress" into that place name of the new American golden West. In short, politically nothing is changed by the events dramatized in Melville's fictions. We are never led beyond experience; in fact, all attempts to transcend it always lead deeper into it, as it expands like a spiral galaxy. The widening circles of the 11

47

Melville whirlpool in which Ishmael is borne back to life are the circles of Melville's own imagination. If the paradisiac green Tahiti of the soul is neither societal nor universal, what conclusion, then, can we derive from an attempt to read Melville as a tragic writer? What is demanded, I think, is either a statement that Melville is not a writer of tragedy or an alternative set of conditions for tragedy. The choice is unimportant in so far as it is a matter of forcing Melville into a category. It is important, though, as an index of the possibilities of human identity accommodated by Melville's imagination. One general view of tragedy has been provided by the neo-Aristotelians. This view replaces the politics of tragedy with a rephrasing of the Aristotelian problem of agency; the psychology of tragedy arises from sources other than those available from Bradley's formula. The constant here would be not necessarily a pervasive divine justice, but a terrible loss suffered by the hero and partly created by the hero. The hero initiates or perpetuates actions which have unanticipated harmful consequences-consequences which are, necessarily, the result of his limited vision and power, and the drama of his situation accrues from his growing awareness of the crime and his attempt to expiate it. The pity and terror in this case arise from our identification with human meagreness, and the psychology of tragedy is the effect of our watching a representative self, in his attempt to rectify circumstances, heroically struggling and enduring beyond the demands of expectation. We stand in awe of the unguessed frontiers of human strength. Man's nobility, in this view, grows simply because he attempts to direct his aspirations according to his own goals even though-because, really-the universe might not be on his side. Tragic heroism becomes not an education, through hubris, into nemesis and balance and divine and cosmic justice, but rather an education into the astonishing endurance of which man is capable in a universe that doesn't know about his existence, in a world of experience that confronts him with eternal series of mysteries boiling up from the depths beneath appearances and against which he tests his ability to understand and endure. The heroes of Melville live in the same literary community with the outraged, amazed, and enduring heroes of Faulkner. The epitome of this secular heroism is provided by Melville in his description of the collective, backbreaking, sleep-destroying labour that the crew of the Pequod undertakes in order to boil out whales. After days without sleep, the crew restores its community to cleanliness and holystones the decks and thinks it has mastered the labour of experience--only to hear the cry go up once more from the crow's nest: "There she blows!" The terror is the terror of the endlessness of the deep; the pity is pity for everyman whelmed by it, pity demanded by the pathetic necessity for mutual interdependence in a monkey-rope world. I think that that is what Moby-Dick is all about and what Ishmael tries to tell us. 48

Milton R. Stem

The values and materials of such drama may be completely secular and even relativistic. With his eye on the shift of attainable felicities, if Melville is to be called a tragic writer, it must be in terms of his constant anti-absolutism. The education of Ishmael is an education into relative states of being, into an awareness that experiences are not the same as experience. There is a difference between the Ishmael who narrates and the Ishmael who acts. The former is the man who sees himself in the events all over again after escape from the whirlpool. The latter is the man who is in the act of undergoing the process of learning to see himself anew. If it is true that Ishmael goes to sea uninitiated into the meanings of Ahab's quest, it is also true that he goes to sea for the same reasons Ahab does. He too is driven to fury by the sinewy malice of the universe, and in his own suicidal and monomaniacal misanthropy he goes to single out the "ungraspable phantom of life ... the great floodgates of the wonder-world swung open, and in the wild conceits that swayed me to my purpose, two and two there floated into my inmost soul, endless processions of the whale, and, midmost of them all, one grand hooded phantom like a snow hill in the air" (VII, 7). In short, we are told by Ishmael the narrator that whether Ishmael the actor knew it or not, he too went to sea to find Moby-Dick. Queequeg's humanizing influences, as well as Pip's, result in Ishmael's rejection of Ahab's reading of the white whale as an absolute, though evil, conscious, cosmic directive force. When he learns to identify himself as a mortal, subject to all the identities that his immortality-hungering self can admit for other, external selves, the two Ishmaels merge and, with Ishmael, the only possible human identity is saved. Ishmael's repudiation of Ahab is given most clearly in "The Try Works." Says Ishmael, "The rushing Pequod, freighted with savages, and laden with fire, and burning a corpse, and plunging into that blackness of darkness, seemed the material counterpart of her monomaniac commander's soul" (VIII, 180). Reversing his own soul-position, Ishmael warns, "Look not too long in the face of the fire, 0 man!" (VIII, 181). The fire has already been imagistically identified with the smouldering monomania in Ahab's hot heart, identified with a fiery hunt for the absolute triggered by a refusal to accept the identities of mortality. It is not Christian acceptance that Melville advocates, but existential recognition of a very unchristian universe. Ishmael's warning is that no set of absolutes, Christian like Aunt Charity's silly assumptions or Father Mapple's tortured ones, or Promethean like Ahab's, can result in a safe total reading of cosmic morality. A zero, even infinite and eternal, is not moral. And that, indeed, is a cause for the sickness unto death. Certainly for the deep, diving man who searches out mysteries not coped with by Aunt Charity's pickles, bibles, and flannels, for the man who leaps away from the easy conformity of the lee shore's belief in a conscious and purposive God, most of the world does lie in darkness. But 49

Melville

if the fire man brings to the darkness burns toward final cosmic identity, toward absolute cosmic morality, it can only intensify "the redness, the madness, the ghastliness" and end in burning murder quenched only by the great, impersonal shroud of the sea. Ishmael and Ahab share an initial heat of metaphysical rage, but Ishmael's becomes human warmth whereas Ahab's continues the process of dehumanization. Any attempt to deny the mortal condition as real is to deny the essence of humanity. "Look not too long in the face of the fire, 0 man!" Certainly, like Bulkington, man must wearily hoist himself up to fish up new leviathans, must return endlessly-therein his heroism!-to the seas of eternal and infinite experience. But the voyagings and mysteries are secularly oriented : the whale is boiled out, after all, to light and heat the mortal world of men. To hunt the whale to strike at God is to strike at nothing through the mask. Indeed, the mask is all. This is what Ishmael must tell us, for this is the direction of Ishmael's experience, to which he must be true. A modernromantic-naturalistic-existential hero, his morality after all is defined not by the decorum of traditional religious or political belief, but by the measure of his fidelity to his experience. The pertinent modernism of Melville in our time can be glimpsed in the following quotation: "We declare ourselves in favor of the philosophy of the jester, that is, for an attitude of negative vigilance in the face of any absolute . . . . It is the option for a vision of the world that provides prospects for a slow and difficult realignment of the elements in our human action that are most difficult to align : goodness without universal toleration, courage without fanaticism, intelligence without apathy, and hope without blindness. All other fruits of philosophy are of little importance." These Melvillean words are not the words of Melville in 1859, but of the brilliant young Polish philosopher, Leszek Kolakowski in 1959, in his famous essay, "The Priest and the Jester." 9 Ishmael, the jester, has his sympathy and admiration for the priestly hero Ahab, but more community with the hero who, like his shipmate Bulkington, fearlessly and relentlessly and repeatedly makes the necessary fearful voyages into the mysteries of the world : "Bear thee grimly, demigod! Up from the spray of thy ocean-perishing-straight up, leaps thy apotheosis!" (VII, 133) But the mysteries of the world are one thing. The absolute is another. A modern jester indeed, Ishmael can direct us toward secular felicities. But when it comes to harpooning the cosmic phantom itself, one can only say with weary comic terror, like the man in the crow's nest, "Jesu! What a whale!" The hero can no longer be defined in the terms available to the classical 9Tw6rczosc, X (Warsaw, 1959). Kolakowski has been noted for his professional and personal participation in anti-absolutist movements. 50

Milton R. Stern

tragedian or to the medieval and Renaissance Christian, for man no longer occupies a central and symbolic position in an anthropocentric, purposive, moral universe. From Melville on, the absolutely liberated romantic hero is no longer a serious literary possibility in the assessment of man in America. The heaven-assaulting Ahab does not prefigure heroes to come as much as does Ahab, the limited, romantic outcast. In his independence of belief, in his passion, is his grandeur and godlikeness; but in his absolutism if he is grand he is also wicked : if he is active his act is murder. A grand godlike ungodly man is Ahab in whose topmost greatness lies his topmost grief. The orphan hero, Ishmael, is left without that grand cosmic father and that grand cosmic home that offered all the assurances of the good name-places of immortality. The hero must be found in new guise, either as a man defined in society by history, or as a man defined by an apocalyptic and inner self. In any case, he will occupy a landscape more indifferent or hostile than that of the golden West. Our writers inherit from Melville the consciousness of a tremendous change in the possibilities left open for the depiction of the hero. Home is changed and its old landscape is lost. The cadences of one of our undeservedly neglected poets, Trumbull Stickney, at the turn of the century proclaimed in "Mnemosyne" a sense of the country as the landscape of possibility that is very different from Benet's. It does not bespeak a memory projected into the future in which the golden paradise will be regained and the place names found. Rather the diminished landscape of home bespeaks a golden past sadly and dimly lost when we look at the country we remember. It's autumn in the country I remember. How warm a wind blew here about the ways! And shadows on the hillside lay to slumber During the long sun-sweetened summer-days. It's cold abroad the country I remember. The swallows veering skimmed the golden grain At midday with a wing aslant and limber; And yellow cattle browsed upon the plain. It's empty down the country I remember. I had a sister lovely in my sight : Her hair was dark, her eyes were very sombre; We sang together in the woods at night. It's lonely in the country I remember. The babble of our children fills my ears, And on our hearth I stare the perished ember To flames to show all starry thro' my tears. 51

Melville It's dark about the country I remember. There are the mountains where I lived. The path Is slushed with cattle-tracks and fallen timber, The stumps are twisted by the tempests' wrath. But that I knew these places are my own, I'd ask how come such wretchedness to cumber The earth, and I to people it alone. It rains across the country I remember.

To see experience a certain way might be unbearably sad. It might even be sinful. But telling one of its infinite number of truths is not itself a sin. "I have written a wicked book," said Melville to Hawthorne. And feel spotless as the 11

lamb."

10

10Merrell R. Davis and William H. Gilman, eds., The Letters of Herman Melville (New Haven, 1960), p. 142.

52

Gay Wilson Allen THE TWO POETS OF LEAVES OF GRASS

No other American poet has been so many times painted, sketched, and sculptured as Walt Whitman. Any one at all familiar with American literature must know a considerable number of these images, from the shirt-sleeves, open-collar, rakish-angle-hat frontispiece of the first edition in 1855 (engraved from a posed photograph) to the "Santa Claus" photograph by George C. Cox in 1887, from which Thomas Johnson made an etching which has circulated in hundreds of copies. Even in the photographs two personalities are evident, the ascetic, almost Christ-like face of 1855 and the fleshy, shaggy, hedonist of most of the later photographs, though not all : in some of the middle-age photographs Whitman looks like a Hindu prophet, and one is popularly known as the "Moses photo." Two famous portrait artists, Thomas Eakins and J. W. Alexander, painted the poet only two years apart (1887 and 1889), and yet one would hardly know that the same man sat for both portraits. The Eakins Whitman is a fat, jolly, rosy-cheeked Dutchman; the Alexander Whitman is a whitehaired saint, who might have passed for a Victorian image of God. The Eakins and the Alexander portraits could serve as the archetypes of my "two poets" of Leaves of Grass, but I would like to use two twentieth-century graphic interpretations of these twin poets. One is by the Norwegian artist Kai Fjell, the other by a Brazilian painter who signed his work "Carybe," the pseudonym of Hector Julio Paride Bernabo. In the Norwegian drawing the poet has a thin, triangular face (as in the 1855 frontispiece) and he is chained to a ship, which is filled below deck with naked, tortured people who look like the inhabitants of purgatory or some limbo of lost souls. I am not sure that I understand all the artist's esoteric symbolism, but he obviously regards the poet, dressed in sailor garb, as some kind of prophet-martyr, chained to suffering humanity. Whether the poet's message will deliver the people from their sinking ship or merely bless their souls as he sacrifices himself in their common fate, I do not know. But it is a very suggestive interpretation of the role the poet plays in "Song of Myself"-and this illustration was made for a translation of this one poem into Norwegian by Per Arneberg. 1 lWalt Whitman: Sangen om Meg Selv, oversettelse og innledning ved Per Arneberg, tegninger [illustrations] av Kai Fjell (Oslo, 1947).

53

Whitman

The other drawing, by Carybe, made for a Spanish translation of some Whitman poems by Armando Vasseur,2 shows a giant with long hair and shaggy beard walking in a busy city street, his head in perspective towering up like the skyscrapers in the background while the Lilliputian human figures flow around him in the foreground. But he is not a Gulliver; his size symbolizes only the power of his message. His costume identifies him with the proletariat, whose spokesman and prophet he appears to be-though I do not imply that the depiction is grossly propagandist. Actually, Carybe's image epitomizes the Whitman best known in his own country, one which he himself encouraged by his dress, manners, self-advertising, and garrulous old-age talk to Horace Traubel. 3 The two questions which immediately arise are: Which is the true image? And if one is false, how did it get started? The truth of the matter is that eitheror both, if you will-can be supported by quotations from Whitman's prefaces and poems-sometimes even from the same poem. Both, therefore, convey an element of truth. Nevertheless, I think I can explain which came first, and how and when the confusion got started. This is important not only for its bearing on Whitman's reputation-for defining his place in American or world literature-but for basic understanding of Leaves of Grass. What I am leading up to is that Whitman began as one kind of poet and then almost immediately forgot, or misunderstood, his initial achievement and began playing a role which so impressed the world (though not always favourably) that the poet he actually was in "Song of Myself" (and even in most of his later poems) is only in recent years beginning to be understood. II

Of course the idea that Leaves of Grass seems to have been written by more than one mind is not entirely new, though it is not well known. In writing my biography of Whitman, The Solitary Singer,4 I tried to solve the problem by treating it somewhat in terms of Eliot's theory of personality in poetry: when Whitman forgot himself in his subject-in what might be called his more "inspired" moments-he attained greater power than in the poems in which he self-consciously exploited his own personality: his size, strength, ruddy complexion, unconventional dress, nonchalance, etc. I still think this is true, 2This is one of several illustrations in Walt Whitman, Poemas, Version de Armando Vasseur, con diez ilustraciones de! pintor Carybe y dos fotografias fuera de texto (Buenos Aires, [1943?]). 3With Walt Whitman in Camden, by Horace Traube!, has been published in five volumes, the first, covering March 28 to

54

July 14, 1888, in Boston: Small Maynard and Co., 1906, and the latest in Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1964. Enough conversations remain in manuscript for several more volumes. 4 The Solitary Singer: A Critical Biogra17hy of Walt Whitman (New York, 1955). ·

Gay Wilson Allen but self would have been a better word than personality, and the distinction should be between the self and my self. The original (1855 version) of "Song of Myself" was more about selfhood than Walt Whitman's personal self. Mr. Malcolm Cowley had a very similar distinction in mind when he declared in his Introduction to a reprint of the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass that "Song of Myself" has been "widely misprized and misinterpreted, especially by scholars, ... [because] they have paid a disproportionate share of attention to its sources in contemporary culture."5 They have compared it to the wron 6 books, even though Whitman may have made minor use of them. Cowley thought that the "real nature of the poem becomes apparent" when it is compared to a very different group of books, some of which Whitman may not have known at all. These include the Bhagavad-Gita, the Upanishads, Christopher Smart's long crazy inspired poem Jubilate Agno, Blake's prophetic books (not forgetting The Marriage of Heaven and Hell) Rimbaud's Illuminations, The Chants of Maldorer, and Nietzsche's Thus Spake Zarathustra, as well as The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna and a compendious handbook, The Philosophies of India, by Heinrich Zimmer (New York, 1951). It was this latter work that gave Mr. Cowley his new insight into Whitman's poems. "Song of Myself" should be judged [he continues] as one of the great inspired (and sometimes insane) prophetic works that have appeared at intervals in the Western world, like Jubilate Agno (which is written in a biblical style sometimes suggesting Whitman's}, like the Illuminations, like Thus Spake Zarathustra. But the system of doctrine suggested by the poem is more Eastern than Western, it includes notions like metempsychosis and karma, and it might almost be one of those Philosophies of India that Zimmer expounds at length. Are those Hindu doctrines of "karma," "metempsychosis," "transmigration," really in "Song of Myself"? I think one section will show that they are. Let me quote section 49 (using the later numbering, for the 1855 poem had no sectional numbers) : And as to you death, and you bitter hug of mortality . ... it is idle to try to alarm me. To his work without flinching the accoucheur comes, I see the elderhand pressing receiving supporting, I recline by the sills of the exquisite flexible doors . . .. and mark the outlet, and mark the relief and escape. 6Leaves of Grass: The First (1855) Edition, with an Introduction by Malcolm Cowley (New York, 1959), pp. x-xi. Copyright ©

1959 by the Viking Press, Inc. Quoted by permission of the Viking Press, Inc. 55

Whitman

(Note that the doors give entrance and exit to birth and death-they are "exquisitely flexible.") And as to you corpse I think you are good manure, but that does not offend me, I smell the white roses sweetscented and growing, I reach to the leafy lips .... I reach to the polished breasts of melons, And as to you life, I reckon you are the leavings of many deaths, No doubt I have died myself ten thousand times before.

(Repeat: "I have died myself ten thousand times before.") I hear you whispering there O stars of heaven, 0 suns .. .. 0 grass of graves .. .. 0 perpetual transfers and promotions . .. . if you do not say anything how can I say anything?

(Note: "perpetual transfers and promotions.") Of the turbid pool that lies in the autumn forest, Of the moon that descends the steeps of the soughing twilight, Toss, sparkles of day and dusk .. . . toss on the black stems that decay in the muck, Toss to the moaning gibberish of the dry limbs. I ascend from the moon ... . I ascend from the night, And perceive of the ghastly glitter the sunbeams reflected, And debouch to the steady and central from the offspring great or small.

Again in section 51 the poet proclaims in his ecstatic vision : The past and present wilt .. .. I have filled them and emptied them, And proceed to fill my next fold of the future.

Obviously the "I" who fills and empties past and present and proceeds to its "next fold of the future" is no ordinary mortal, not the ego of a finite human being, but an immortal soul (or Brahma, or call it what you will) animating all forms of being and undiminished by the "perpetual transfers and promotions." These passages come near the end of the poem, its climax, and have been dramatically prepared for by preceding passages which vividly detail the joys of the physical life which houses the spark of divinity. It is true that Walt Whitman the man believed "in the flesh and the appetites," but in this poem he has a right to "dote on myself" (sec. 24) because they are animated by this divine spark, this Elan, which through the sexual emotions quivers "me to a new identity" (sec. 27). I have very briefly suggested the basic meaning of the whole poem. Ill

But if this is really what the poem is about, and not about a man who personifies America in his vigour, bold independence, democratic comradeship, self56

Gay Wilson Allen

reliance, social rebelliousness, etc., how did it come to be written? Especially, how did it come to resemble those works Mr. Cowley mentions, and to seem almost more oriental than occidental? Of course the meaning of the poem is what really counts, and not its origins, but it is a little difficult to accept this remarkable resemblance to those ancient Hindu poems unless there is some explanation for it. Mr. Cowley thinks that probably Whitman knew very little about these works, and that the resemblance can be accounted for by the psychology of mysticism. (Incidentally, I made the same suggestion in my Walt Whitman Handbook in 1946.) Of course this explanation presupposes a "mystical experience," and Whitman does seem to describe one in section 5, in which he details the sensations of a union with his soul, in the imagery of a sexual union. The resulting sense of brotherhood, peace, joy, and unity with Godwhat William James calls the "noetic" results of a mystical experience6almost exactly parallels the classic examples of mysticism (II. 82-89) : Swiftly arose and spread around me the peace and joy and knowledge that pass all the art and argument of the earth; And I know that the hand of God is the elderhand of my own, And I know that the spirit of God is the eldest brother of my own, And that all the men ever born are also my brothers .. . . and the women my sisters and lovers, And that a kelson of the creation is love; And limitless are leaves stiff or drooping in the fields, And brown ants in the little wells beneath them, And mossy scabs of the wormfence, and heaped stones, and elder and mullen and pokeweed.

However, there is no external evidence of Whitman's having had a mystical experience, and it is still an open question whether the mystical doctrines of this poem were the product of the psychological state usually following such an experience, or were derived from literary influences. In view of the known literary influences on Whitman, his own assertion that he owed nothing whatever to books or other poets7 cannot be taken at face value. This subject is now being studied by Indian scholars, and I expect significant evidence to be turned up very soon. One of these scholars is a visiting professor from India, T. R. Rajasekharaiah. Whitman's brother George said that Walt spent many hours in New York libraries while he was writing the first poems of Leaves of Grass,8 and Professor Rajasekharaiah has found in the 1854 catalogue of the 6The Varieties of Religious Experience (New York, 1902), pp. 380-81; reprint (New Hyde Park, 1903), same pagination. Summarized by Gay Wilson Allen, Walt Whitman Handbook (Chicago, 1946), p. 243. 7Self-written review, "Walt Whitman and

His Poems," reprinted from U.S. Review in In Re Walt Whitman, ed. his literary executors, Horace L. Traubel, Richard Maurice Bucke, Thomas B. Hamed (Philadelphia, 1893), p. 16. Hereafter cited as In Re. BJn Re, p. 39.

57

Whitman

Astor Library 9 over two hundred items on India which would have been available to Whitman. This scholar writes me that "even if we ignore the material in German and French, history as well as translation ... and twentythree Oriental journals, I find there was enough material about India there to give Whitman a thorough knowledge of the fundamentals of Indian philosophy."10 At present, of course, I have only a strong "hunch" that "new light on Whitman" will soon be forthcoming, but I mention this to indicate that there may have been intellectual sources for the major ideas in "Song of Myself." It is not impossible, however, for the poem to have been the product of both reading and emotional experiences of a "mystical" kind. Nor do I deny that the poet drew upon his own personal experiences and dream life for imagery-in this way, at least, his poem was based on native sources. The union of the poet's "I" and his "soul" in the passage I have quoted is what James calls "sporadic mysticism," 11 meaning an ecstatic state of consciousness which lasts only a short time. It may be repeated, but often the mystic has only one such experience in a lifetime. But James also admits (p. 396, n. 1} that there is such a thing as "chronic mysticism," in which the subject has a continuous though usually less ecstatic feeling of union with God or the realm of spirit. This may, of course, be less a feeling than an intellectual conviction, something like a strong belief in what Emerson calls the "Over-soul." The most recent interpretation of Whitman's mysticism is by another Indian scholar, V. K. Chari, in a book called Whitman in the Light of Vedantic Mysticism. 12 Chari is concerned with the poet's "chronic mysticism," with the basic thought running throughout Leaves of Grass. As he says in his chapter on "Polarity versus Intuition: The Nature of Consciousness" (p. 18}: The theme of self, of relating the self to the world of experience, is central to the comprehensive intent of Whitman's poems. This self, though it is the concern of metaphysics, is not to be thought of as an abstract concept or an occult matter but should be understood as that unity of experience which is basic in all human consciousness. For the subject matter of Whitman's poetry is no other than the nature of experience itself [italics mine], an intimate and vital concern with and a close attentiveness to the fact of human consciousness. Thus, Whitman's poetry records the dimensions and depths of consciousness itself more than objectifications of experience in symbol and myth. Hence, the most profitable way to approach the great bulk of Whitman's poetry is to read it as a direct dramatization of the act of consciousness rather than as a symbolization embodying that act. 9[ndex of Books in the Astor Library, published by the trustees, 1854. lOLetter dated Sept. 7, 1965. 11 Varieties of Religious Experience, p. 395.

58

12 Foreword by Gay Wilson Allen. Copyright © 1964 by the University of Nebraska Press. Quoted by permission of the University of Nebraska Press.

Gay Wilson Allen Whitman himself said in his 1855 Preface that people expect the poet "to indicate the path between reality and their souls." And in a later poem, "As They Draw to a Close" (1871), he reasserted this to be his purpose (II. 12- 14) : To put rapport the mountains and rocks and streams, And the winds of the north, and the forests of oak and pine, With you O soul. "In other words," says Chari, "the problem that Whitman addressed himself to in his poetry is a metaphysical one, namely, the exploration of the nature of subject-object relationship, that is, the nature of self-consciousness itself" (p. 19). Although totally untrained in philosophy, Whitman himself thought there was some direct relation between his ideas and those of German Idealism-of Fichte, Schelling, Kant, and especially Hegel. 13 But Chari points out that their method of reconciling the "me" and the "not me" is dialectical, opposites merging and becoming a single unity; however, Whitman, he contends, like the Vedantic mystics, believed that True knowledge is the non-dual knowledge of the real. It is a knowledge devoid of distinctions (jiiiinam advayam) . While thought is a unity-in-difference, there is an inner nature in thought, "the felt unity," which is the immediate center of all mediate experience.. .. The Upanishads teach that we possess a power more interior than intellect, by which we come into intimate contact with the real. .. . The most outstanding feature of Indian philosophy is that it asserts the possibility of a direct intercourse with the central reality by a species of intuitive identification. . . . Intuitive experience is a form of mergence, a dissolution of the "other" sense in pure consciousness. This state of pure being is described in the Upanishad by an analogy : "As a lump of salt thrown in water becomes dissolved in water and there would not be any of it to seize forth as it were, but wherever one may take it is salty indeed, so, verily, this great being, infinite, limitless, consists of nothing but knowledge." Intuition is knowing by being. It arises by an intimate fusion of the knower and the known. [pp. 26-27] Notice that, according to this interpretation, the "merging" so characteristic of the "I" of Whitman's poems is not dialectical but a knowing of a thing by imaginatively and intuitively becoming that thing. Here I shall begin quoting my own examples and leave Chari's book for the present. In "Song of Myself" the poet says, "I am the man . . . . I suffered .... I was there" (sec. 33, I. 827). This identification is what D. H. Lawrence so scornfully condemns as "sympathy and charity." 14 But sympathy and charity were not the poet's object. He did of course feel sorry for "the hounded slave 13Jbid., p. 136 ff. See also Allen, Walt Whitman Handbook, pp. 255-58.

14D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature (London, 1923); reprinted

(Garden City, 1953), ch.

xn.

59

Whitman that flags in the race and leans by the fence" (l. 830) but he also wanted to know what it was like to be the suffering man (11. 834-39): I wince at the bite of the dogs, Hell and despair are upon me . . . . crack and again crack the marksmen, I clutch the rails of the fence . .. . my gore dribs thinned with the ooze of my skin, I fall on the weeds and stones, The riders spur their unwilling horses and haul close, They taunt my dizzy ears . ... they beat me violently over the head with their whip-stocks. Perhaps the poet did not literally believe that his poetic intuition could bring about a miraculous transubstantiation, but he was striving for the psychological feeling that it had (IL 840-42): Agonies are one of my changes of garments; I do not ask the wounded person how he feels .... I myself become the wounded person, My hurt turns livid upon me as I lean on a cane and observe. Although Whitman in his vicarious suffering did play the Christ-role to the extent of proclaiming that all humanity should follow him in the truth he proclaimed, his ego-identifications in "Song of Myself" are cosmic as well as redemptive. The "perpetual journey" he tramps is not confined to the landscapes of nations or the highways of human history (sec. 46, 11. 1217-19): This day before dawn I ascended a hill and looked at the crowded heaven, And I said to my spirit, When we become the enfolders of those orbs and the pleasure and knowledge of every thing in them, shall we be filled and satisfied then? And my spirit said No, we level that lift to pass and continue beyond. Notice that the poet says "we" instead of "I," and this is important. His own experiences are only a means of attaining a truth about all egos, and the universe in which they exist. In another 1855 poem, "To Think of Time," Whitman indicates what he means by "identity" (sec. 7, 11. 75-79) : It is not to diffuse you that you were born of your mother and father-it is to

identify you, It is not that you should be undecided, but that you should be decided; Something long preparing and formless is arrived and formed in you, You are thenceforth secure, whatever comes or goes.

The threads that were spun are gathered . ... the weft crosses the warp • •• • the pattern is systematic. Implicit in this cosmic process is another doctrine which I can do little more than mention, called by Whitman "prudence,m6 and by the Hindus "karma": 16See Allen, Whitman Handbook, pp. 34647; also his Solitary Singer, pp. 187-88.

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Gay Wilson Allen

what the human being does during his physical existence in this world also contributes to the full development of the soul's purpose. Sometimes Whitman calls this realizing his soul, and the realization includes both recognition and an intuitive extension of the recognition into the whole realm of existence (sec. 8 and 9, 11. 126-35): 0 my soul! if I realize you I have satisfaction, Animals and vegetables! if I realize you I have satisfaction, Laws of the earth and air! if I realize you I have satisfaction. I cannot define my satisfaction .. yet it is so, I cannot define my life .. yet it is so. I swear I see now that every thing has an eternal soul! The trees have, rooted in the ground . ... the weeds of the sea have ... . the animals. I swear I think there is nothing but immortality! That the exquisite scheme is for it, and the nebulous float is for it, and the cohering is for it, And all preparation is for it . . and identity is for it .. and life and death are for it.

It is not my purpose to expound the total philosophical meaning of Leaves of Grass, but I hope I have at least indicated that Walt Whitman was an ontological poet. As William James says, "a passionate and mystic ontological emotion suffuses his words." 16 In his 1855 Preface he declared : "The poets of the kosmos advance through all interpositions and coverings and turmoils and stratagems to first principles." And in "Song of Myself" (sec. 30, I. 647; sec. 20, 11. 404-5): All truths wait in all things, To me the converging objects of the universe perpetually flow, All are written to me, and I must get what the writing means.

This is the poet we are finally discovering in Leaves of Grass, but it is not the popular conception of the "poet of Democracy," screeching his "barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world" (sec. 25, I. 1323). Perhaps no other line of his has been so often misapplied. IV

How did the other interpretation of Whitman's poems get started and flourish? The major contributor to the misinterpretation was Walt Whitman himself, and almost immediately after the printing of his first edition. It is well known that he himself wrote and published anonymously three reviews 16Varieties of Religious Experience, p. 85.

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Whitman

of his book. Some of his defenders say that in the face of his overwhelming opposition he felt that he had to do something in his own cause. That may have been true, and it is also true that such deviousness is not unique in the history of literary criticism. But the saddest part of the story is that no critic did Whitman as much harm as his own self-written reviews. They first started this other mythical (not mystical) poet who confused the role of the ontological poet with that of a national spokesman, jingoist, and exhibitionist. One of these reviews, published in the United States Review (at one time called Democratic Review), began: An American bard at last! One of the roughs, large, proud, affectionate, eating, drinking, and breeding, his costume manly and free, his face sunburnt and bearded, his postures strong and erect, his voice bringing hope and prophecy to the generous races of young and old. We shall cease shamming and be what we really are. We shall start an athletic and defiant literature. We realize now how it is, and what was most lacking. The interior American republic shall also be declared free and independent.... One sees unmistakably genteel persons, travelled, college-learned, used to be served by servants, conversing without heat or vulgarity, supported on chairs, or walking through handsomely carpeted parlors, or along shelves bearing well-bound volumes ... and china things, and nick-nacks. But where in American literature is the first show of America? Where are the gristle and beards, and broad breasts, and space, and ruggedness, and nonchalance, that the souls of the people love? [etc. etc. ]1 7 The Brooklyn Times review began: To give judgment on real poems, one needs an account of the poet himself. Very devilish to some, and very divine to some, will appear the poet of these new poems, the "Leaves of Grass;" an attempt, as they are, of a naive, masculine, affectionate, contemplative, sensual, imperious person, to cast into literature not only his own grit and arrogance, but his own flesh and form, undraped, regardless of ... modesty or law, and ignorant or silently scornful, as at first appears, of all except his own presence and experience, and all outside the fiercely loved land of his birth, and the birth of his parents, and their parents for several generations before him. Politeness this man has none, and regulation he has none. A rude child of the people!-No imitation-No foreigner-but a growth and idiom of America. 18 The third review in the American Phrenological Review contained many of the same ideas but also stressed Whitman's phrenological endowments which gave him the talents and powers to be a poetic spokesman for his nation. Now of course not all details of this self-created image were false. Whitman was defying the genteel conventions of Longfellow and Lowell. In writing these startlingly original poems of the first Leaves of Grass (in almost complete contrast to the conventional, sentimental poems in rhyme and metre 11Jn

62

Re, pp. 13-14.

18Ibid.,

p.

23.

Gay Wilson Allen

which he himself had published the previous decade in the popular magazines, such as Democratic Review) 19 he had used prosodic forms, realistic words and images, and physiological subjects which seemed revolutionary and indecent to most contemporary readers. He had also used imagery of size and strength to symbolize the fecundity and plenitude of nature and of the soul in its "transfers" and "promotions" through the geological ages. Then in his own personal life Whitman had tried after publishing Leaves of Grass in 1855 to act out the role of the "rude child of the people." But the poems themselves had little specifically about American democracyand considering what happened only a few years later, the boasted American democracy was already diseased in its vital parts. If Whitman had really represented his contemporary society, as he kept saying in his various prefaces and self-representations that he was trying to do, he would not have presented a strong, healthy, spiritually sound society, which was the ideal of his poems. His practice was better than his theory. In the Phrenological Journal review Whitman insisted that, "This poet celebrates natural propensities in himself; and that is the way he celebrates all." And again, "His whole work, his life, manners, friendships, writings, all have among their leading purposes an evident purpose to stamp a new type of character, namely his own, and indelibly fix it and publish it, not for a model but an illustration, for the present and future of American letters and American young men." 20 Thus he insists that "Song of Myself" is literally about himself, and that his poems are intentionally personal in the most obvious and egotistical manner. "What good is it to argue about egotism?" he asks, implying that of course they are egotistical. Once again he has taken a partial truth and exaggerated it into a falsehood. In these self-written reviews he seems to have forgotten the major intention to indicate for his readers "the path between reality and their souls." He will simply show them his personality and hold it up as an example of a typical--or perhaps better, an idealAmerican. This is almost a parody of the God-intoxicated poet of the 1855 poems, and even a travesty of the Preface in which the character of the new poet is defined. As Cowley points out, however, the Preface was evidently written after the poems, when already the intuition (Cowley calls it a mystical experience) which produced the poems had begun to fade. Whether Cowley is right or not about the mystical experience, it is apparent that something did happen not long after the appearance of the first edition in July, 1855. The change could have been the effect of Emerson's letter greeting Whitman "at the beginning of a great career." As I have remarked in my biography, this letter seems to 19These have been collected and edited by Thomas L. Brasher in The Early Poems and Fiction [part of the Collected Writings of

Walt Whitman] (New York, 1963). 20 In Re, p. 24. 63

Whitman

have gone to the head of the young poet, causing him to write a very foolish and incredibly boastful reply in his open letter to his "Master." 21 Yet again several poems in the second edition contradict the personality displayed in the open letter. One of these is what Whitman then called "SunDown Poem," later the masterly "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry," in which there is no boastfulness whatever-hardly any indication of the personality of the author, except for his love of ferries and crowds and his native Brooklyn hills. The crossing becomes a symbolical annihilation of time for him: as he thinks of the people who have crossed this very river on this same ferry before him and will cross the same way after him, he feels his identity with them, and they become one. This poem is one of Whitman's finest examples of such identification, but instead of parading his own ego he actually merges it in universal egoism; the experiencing self becoming universal selfhood. The period between the second edition (1856) and the third (1860) was a painful one for Whitman, as his biographers have discovered. 22 But his failures and disappointments seem only to have increased his ambition to be a poet of nationalism. In his third edition he arranged twenty-two poems in a group called "Chants Democratic," taken partly from the two previous editions (not written to illustrate nationalism) and partly written for this group, such as the introductory "Apostroph" (wisely omitted in all succeeding editions) . The first poem of this group was a "program" poem, which finally became "By Blue Ontario's Shore." In 1860 it had no title, and was No. 1 in "Chants Democratic." The poem began: A nation announcing itself, (Cf. "By Blue Ontario's Shore," sec. 2, 11. 9-15.) I myself make the only growth by which I can be appreciated, I reject none, accept all, reproduce all in my own forms. (The "I" is of course the Nation, not the poet himself.) A breed whose testimony is behavior, What we are We ARE-nativity is answer enough to objections; We wield ourselves as a weapon is wielded, We are powerful and tremendous in ourselves. Not all of the poem is as blatantly nationalistic as these lines (in fact, chunks of the 1855 Preface were transferred to the poem almost intact), but the poet asks arrogantly : 21Solitary Singer, p. 178; Leaves of Grass

(Brooklyn, 1856), pp. 346-58. 22See Frederik Schyberg, Walt Whitman,

64

trans. Evie Allison Allen (New York, 1951), pp. 157 ff.

Gay Wilson Allen How dare a sick man, or an obedient man, write poems for These States? Which is the theory or book that, for our purposes, is not diseased? Here it might be recalled that throughout Whitman's critical essays23 runs the demagogic conviction that Shakespeare's plays are feudal and moral poison for American democracy, though he always acknowledged Shakespeare to be the greatest poet in the English language. But to return to "Chants Democratic," No. 1 (cf. "By Blue Ontario's Shore," sec. 16, 11. 262-65): Underneath all is nativity, I swear I will stand by my own nativity-pious or impious, so be it; I swear I am charmed with nothing except nativity, Men, women, cities, nations, are only beautiful from nativity. This may be good patriotism-my country right or wrong!-but it does not seem to have been written by the same poet who wrote "Song of Myself" and other major poems in Leaves of Grass. It is significant, too, I think, that an examination of "Proto-Leaf"24 (later "Starting from Paumanok") shows unmistakably that the poet had been tom between two conflicting ambitions: (1) to be the poet-leader of his nation and (2) to be the poet of a private love between two men, in an attachment which made him willing to renounce his nationalistic role. The drama of this psychological struggle is scarcely apparent in the final version, in which love of individuals for each other is presented as the innate strength of the compact of states, the "many in one." Whatever we may think of the poet's homoerotic25 emotions, they at least helped him to recover from his nationalistic neurosis. Nearly all critics agree that the outstanding poem in the third edition is the pathetic "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking," which has nothing whatever to do with nationalism. The framework of this poem is a narrative of an incident from the poet's childhood, when he heard a mocking-bird on the seashore of Long Island sing an elegy (or so he supposed) for its lost mate and thereby was taught the burden of his own future songs. In 1859 this poem was called "A Word Out of the Sea," and the prelude introducing the "Reminiscence"26 states that the poet is Floyd Stovall, ed., Prose Works 1892 [part of the Collected Writings of Walt Whitman] (New York, 1963), II, 388, 393,

2 3 See

402, 421, 471, 475, 490, 502, 517, 720-21.

24See Fredson Bowers, "Whitman's Manuscripts for the Original 'Calamus' Poems" in Studies in Bibliography: Papers of the Bibliographical Society of the University of Virginia, VI (1953-54), 257-63; also Allen, Solitary Singer, pp. 221 ff. 251 used this term (borrowing it from

psychoanalysis) in The Solitary Singer instead of "homosexual" because the latter term implies perverted physical practices, for which no definite evidence has been found; "homoerotic" implies only that other men aroused sexual emotions in Whitman. 26The 1859 version of this poem has been reprinted by Thomas 0. Mabbott and Rollo G. Silver in A Child's Reminiscence (Seattle, 1930).

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Whitman

A man-yet by these tears a little boy again, Throwing myself on the sand, confronting the waves, I, chanter of pains and joys, uniter of here and hereafter, Taking all hints to use them-but swiftly leaping beyond them, A reminiscence sing. The word the sea whispers to the boy and future poet is "death," the "sweetest" and most "delicious" word of all words. This poem is a dress rehearsal for Whitman's famous elegy for Lincoln, "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd," which is much less about Lincoln than about death; or, if one prefers, a reconciliation to Lincoln's death because he is (11. 149-50) Lost is the loving floating ocean of thee, Laved in the flood of thy bliss O Death. Although on the psychological level this joyful acceptance of "lovely and soothing death" may raise questions, on the philosophical level it is consistent with the role of the poet as intermediary between the realms of matter and spirit, which he announced in his 1855 Preface and reasserted in his old-age poem "Passage to India." Critical opinion varies regarding the literary merit of "Passage to India," but everyone agrees that it is a major effort. As I have pointed out in my biography, 27 it was originally two separate poems, one on the meaning of the earth (sec. 5, 11. 81-82), 0 vast Rondure, swimming in space, Cover'd all over with visible power and beauty, and the other on the spiritual significance of the engineering feats which had circled the globe with communication facilities : the Suez Canal, the spanning of the North American continent by rail, and the completion of the telegraphic cable between Europe and the United States. Though two of these achievements were American, this was not what interested Whitman in the poem, but their potentiality for consolidating the human race into one vast family. This, incidentally, was a worthy and appropriate purpose for the poet who explored the dynamic potentialities of the self in his 1855 Leaves of Grass. The poet now in "Passage to India" sees the whole of human history as fulfilling a divine plan (11. 88-92): Down from the gardens of Asia descending radiating, Adam and Eve appear, then their myriad progeny after them, Wandering, yearning, curious, with restless explorations, With questionings, baffled, formless, feverish, with never-happy hearts, With that sad incessant refrain, Wherefore unsatisfied soul? and Whither O mocking life? 21Solitary Singer, pp. 410 ff. 66

Gay Wilson Allen

The answer is that "the first intent remains, and shall be carried out." After the explorers, scientists, and engineers have done their work (IL 109-15), All these separations and gaps shall be taken up and hook'd and link'd together, The whole earth, this cold, impassive, voiceless earth, shall be completely justified, (The repetition of the word justify several times throughout the poem is a clear indication that the poet was conscious of Milton's epic, and that Whitman too was attempting to "justify the ways of God to man.") Trinitas divine shall be gloriously accomplish'd and compacted by the true son of God, the poet, (He shall indeed pass the straits and conquer the mountains, He shall double the cape of Good Hope to some purpose,) Nature and Man shall be disjoin' d and diffused no more, The true son of God shall absolutely fuse them. This poem on Milton's epic subject (though without any of his poetic machinery) has none of the chauvinistic nationalism which marred the "Chants Democratic." So that the "true son of God" (the phrase is not either arrogant or sacrilegious in the context of the poem) can interpret the divine purpose which is being fulfilled, the poet invokes his soul to travel back to the beginnings of religion and human thought (sec. 7, 11. 165-74): Passage indeed O soul to primal thought, Not lands and seas alone, thy own clear freshness, The young maturity of brood and bloom, To realms of budding bibles. 0 soul, repressless, I with thee and thou with me, Thy circumnavigation of the world begin, Of man, the voyage of his mind's return, To reason's early paradise, Back, back to wisdom's birth, to innocent intuitions, Again with fair creation. To recapitulate, Whitman celebrates the physical "passage to India" made possible by modern science and technology as providing an opportunity for man's return to the wisdom of the "budding bibles" and "reason's early paradise." He no longer shouts that old-world values are so much poison for "These States," or proclaims that American democracy has produced new standards and ideals for the rest of the world. In fact, he does not assert at all what his country has to offer to India (except possibly by implication technology), but what he and modern man can learn from a return to the first sources of religion and philosophy-perhaps also, even beyond these, to 67

Whitman something like the primordial mind in Jung's theory of the origin of myth and symbol (sec. 9, 11. 224-29) :28 Passage to more than India! Are thy wings plumed indeed for such far flights? ... Soundest below the Sanscrit and the Vedas? Then have thy bent unleash'd. What did he mean by "below the Sanscrit and the Vedas?" In the previous section of the poem he had asserted that "with the mystery of God we dare not dally" (I. 184) and "I shrivel at the thought of God" (1. 206). Yet he is confident that his soul can master the orbs, mate with Time, and smile "content at Death." One meaning of these lines seems to be that the soul is immortal and therefore transcends all physical limitations. But soul in this poem might also be called consciousness-or perhaps the human psychefor in the final section of the poem, following the sounding below Sanscrit and Vedas (II. 230-55): Passage to you, your shores, ye aged fierce enigmas! Passage to you, to mastership of you, ye strangling problems! You, strew'd with the wrecks of skeletons, that, living, never reach'd you. Passage to more than India! 0 secret of the earth and sky! ... 0 sun and moon and all you stars! Sirius and Jupiter! Passage to you! ... 0 my brave soul! 0 farther farther sail! 0 daring joy, but safe! are they not all the seas of God? 0 farther, farther, farther sail! I assume that the soul's passage to Sirius and Jupiter is entirely symbolical. Yet if the purpose of our celestial navigation is, as we believe, to discover the secrets of the cosmos, then our purpose is the same as the poet's in this poem. And this is the poet who wins and holds my respect. He does not attempt to exhibit his personality or posture as a New World democrat. In fact, there is nothing nationalistic at all in the consciousness of the "I" of the poem, thought it might be said that it represents Faust man, which is perhaps equivalent to Western man. However, it is not inappropriate that Western man should be urged to return to the East for a spiritual rebirth. Psychology and Symbol : A Selection from the Writings of C. G. Jung (Garden City, 1958). 28See

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Gay Wilson Allen V

My two poets also appear in what Whitman said about poetic technique in contrast to the artistry he displayed in his best compositions. Since I have already discussed his prosodic principles in several places,29 and have nothing really new to say on the subject, I will only mention it briefly here. But I must point out that what Whitman said, apparently in all sincerity, and what he did, seem almost the product of two separate minds. In his old age Whitman remarked to his would-be Boswell, Horace Traube}: "I have never given any study merely to expression: it has never appealed to me as a thing valuable or significant in itself: I have been deliberate, careful, even laborious: but I have never looked for finish-never fooled with technique more than enough to provide for simply getting through; after that I would not give a twist of my chair for all the rest."30 And in one of the self-written reviews which I quoted earlier: "The style of these poems, therefore, is simply their own style, just born and red. Nature may have given the hint to the author of the 'Leaves of Grass,' but there exists no book or fragment of a book which can have given the hint to them." 31 Whitman also professed to be indifferent to the "music of words." 32 Whitman's admission that he was "deliberate, careful, even laborious" is certainly borne out by his manuscripts, which show that he improvised freely and then corrected almost endlessly. Maybe his guiding principles were more felt than carefully thought out. But actually most of the above statements are false. {1) He did have a definite technique of his own, which I have attempted to rationalize in my American Prosody, Walt Whitman Handbook, and more discursively in other works. 33 His use of "thought rhythm," or parallelism, is closely analogous to the structural technique of the biblical poets,3 4 but just where he got it I still do not definitely know. But because he had abandoned (for the most part) the more rigid techniques of rhyme and metre, he could have believed that he composed instinctively or intuitivelythough in that case one wonders why the intuitions were so often unsatisfactory to him and needed such extensive revision. However, when Whitman said that "there exists no book or fragment of a book which can have given the hint" to his poems, he must have known that he was not telling the truth. No one book, perhaps, but no "fragment of a book"-well, the fragments are too numerous to name here. And the "hints" 29"Biblical Analogies for Walt Whitman's Prosody," Revue anglo-americaine, X (aout 1933), 490-507; American Prosody (New York, 1935), pp. 217-42; Walt Whitman Handbook, ch. v. 30Horace Traubel, With Walt Whitman in Camden III (New York, 1914), 84.

Re, p. 16. 32Traubel, With Walt Whitman in Camden,

31 1n

I, 163.

33Gay Wilson Allen and Charles T. Davis, eds., Whitman's Poems (New York, 1955), Introduction. 34See Allen, "Biblical Analogies." 69

Whitman

are still being explored, now by Indian scholars, as I mentioned earlier. Anyone who is curious can read the numerous studies of this subject. 35 All I want to do right now is to say that this poet who denies that he has ever given thought to poetic technique, or sought for music in his lines, or received "hints" from his reading, which was vastly more extensive than his first biographers realized, is the same who wrote those three misleading reviews of his book in 1855. On the matter of music, Whitman first wrote for the initial line of his mocking-bird reminiscence, "Out of the rocked cradle," then changed it later to "Out of the cradle endlessly rocking," which suggests the rhythm of the ocean itself. He may not have realized that he had a "falling rhythm": dactyl-trochee-dactyl-trochee. But he certainly realized that the rhythm suggested his symbolical "cradle." As a matter of fact, in another self-written review in reply to an attack on his "Mocking-Bird-Chant," he asserted that, "Walt Whitman's method in the construction of his songs is strictly the method of the Italian Opera." 36 This, too, is an exaggeration, but in this poem, and later in "Lilacs," he did make use of the operatic aria and recitative.37 Yet when he states in this same essay that the appeal of this poem is wholly to the emotions (he says "soul"), and not to "the intellect, to which Walt Whitman has not, as far as we remember, addressed one single word in the whole course of his writings," we are right back with Senor Carybe's image. The analogy with Italian opera was made by Whitman in an article with the gauche title "All About a Mocking-Bird," which was published in the New York Saturday Press, January 7, 1860.38 This journal of literary criticism was edited by Whitman's personal friend, Henry Clapp. Whether the editor or Whitman himself wrote a long review published in the Saturday Press on May 19, 1860, is not positively known, though scholars suspect that Whitman at least had a hand in writing it. 39 It began, in the tone of P. T. Barnum, "We announce a great Philosopher-perhaps a great Poet-in every way an original man." Actually, this statement was true, though 1860 was a bit early to proclaim it. Most of the remainder of the essay gave a fair summary of the ideas and motifs of the poem. For example: The leading idea in the philosophy of the "Leaves of Grass" is the idea of grandeur and supremacy in the Individual. It asserts that there is nothing more divine than 350ne of the most valuable identifications of sources is David Goodale, "Some of Whitman's Borrowings," American Literature, X (May, 1938), 202-13. 36 See Robert D. Faner, Walt Whitman and Opera (Philadelphia, 1951); also Solitary Singer, pp. 112-15, 232-33.

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371n both poems the bird songs (arias) are distinctly separated from the poet's comment (recitative) on the songs. 38Mabbott and Silver, A Child's Reminiscence, pp. 19-21. 39/bid., p. 41 : "clearly the work of Whitman."

Gay Wilson Allen the human soul, and impels to a knowledge of living motive behind each thing and every action. It will have the singer and not the psalm, the preacher and not the script he preaches [i.e., the thing is important, not the symbol]. It will not ignore the Body, but asserts its beauty and the divine harmony of Body and Soul. .. . [The lines in "Song of Myself" describing the mystic union of the poet and his soul are then quoted.] It finds all things embraced and comprehended in the individual to whom indeed the universe belongs and who belongs to the universe. It recognizes the common brotherhood of mankind, and the same human nature repeated in every person. Its aspiration is for a noble race of human creatures, healthy and beautiful, living delightfully, in sympathy with Nature, their perfect lives in a perfect world. . . . Everywhere [these poems] evince the philosophic mind, deeply seeking, reasoning, feeling its way toward a clear knowledge of the system of the universe.40

I am sure that Walt Whitman did comprehend his own poems well enough to have written this. But at the very time this essay appeared in print, his publisher was distributing a brochure for the edition of 1860 which I am quite sure Whitman had also written. In this piece of advertising we read: FOR THE FIRST TIME IN AMERICAN HISTORY A NATIVE POET SINGS TO US OF AMERICA.

Your ---'s, and ---'s, and ---'s-your male-men writers of all sorts, and your female-women writers of all sorts, may, if they please, and as they please, ignore America and its grand people and institutions, the struggles, battles, and conquests, the hopes, and loves, and hates, and all the fiery passions of the people; may write themselves unbelievers in the destiny of American civilization, atheists to their country, and go along to their lives' end, singing their dead songs about dead Europe, and its stupid monks and priests, its chivalry, and its thing-a-my-bobs called kings-but not to this new comer, and great believer, THIS DEVOUT AND PROPHETIC SON OF AMERICA, BORN OF THE PEOPLE AND THE SOIL. 41

Entirely aside from the chauvinism, this claim did not honestly represent Leaves of Grass, and any purchaser who looked in it for American history (in any coherent presentation) must have been disappointed. Nor was it true that all the other contemporary poets ignored their own country-not even Longfellow, though he did write much also about chivalry and kings; and certainly not Bryant, Whittier, or Lowell. In one sense the claim in the brochure was much too modest, for Walt Whitman was not a national poet so much as a cosmic one. 42 But this would have been hard to advertise. I have dwelt at length on Whitman's own contribution to the misunderstanding of what kind of poet he was and the nature of his poems to show that we still have difficulty in seeing the poems for what they are because of the author's distracting gestures in front of them. I am not one of those who 40Jbid., pp. 24-25. 41 Ibid., p. 33. 42See Gay Wilson Allen, "Cosmos Inspired"

in his Walt Whitman as Man, Poet, and Legend (Carbondale, Ill., 1961), pp. 27-46.

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believe that literary criticism should be divorced from biography; yet I confess that biography-or perhaps it is only autobiography-can obscure the real worth of Whitman's poems. And at times I have strong suspicion that many teachers of American civilization courses make the same mistake that Whitman did, not only with his poems but also with American culture in general. While we should not underrate our own history and institutions, we should also never forget that they were not entirely home-produced. The nationalist Whitman is a chauvinist, and a caricature of the great mind that wrote "Song of Myself" and "Passage to India." The poet of these poems is one of the great poets in world literature, and only incidentally an American and a "poet of democracy."

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Roger B. Salomon

MARK TWAIN AND VICTORIAN NOSTALGIA

There is no better place to begin a study of Mark Twain than with the warm yet perceptive criticism of his lifelong friend William Dean Howells. I am thinking, in particular, of an essay in the North American Review of February, 1901, in which Howells describes Twain as a writer of the American West, a creature of conditions. "He found himself placed in them and under them," writes Howells, so near to a world in which the natural and primitive was obsolete, that while he could not escape them, neither could he help challenging them. The inventions, the appliances, the improvements of the modem world invaded the hoary eld of his rivers ... and while he was still a pioneer, a hunter, a trapper, he found himself confronted with the financier, the scholar, the gentleman. They seemed to him, with the world they represented, at first very droll, and he laughed. Then they set him thinking . . . and he thought over the whole field. . . . When they had not their answers ready, without accepting tlie conventions of the modern world as solutions or in any manner final, he laughed again, not mockingly but patiently, compassionately. Such, or something like this, was the genesis and evolution of Mark Twain.

This laughter Howells describes elsewhere as tinged "with a suggestion of that resentment which youth feels when the disillusion from its trust and hope comes."1 This paragraph is rich in implications. In the first place, Howells is describing the central scenario or myth of Mark Twain's writing: the sharp confrontation of one society, one set of values, one point of view with that which is markedly different. The plot of a Twain book almost always involves a militant invasion: the innocent goes to Europe, the tenderfoot travels west, the older man returns to a changed Mississippi River, Huck goes down the river into the slave-holding South, the Duke and Dauphin board the raft, the Yankee violently attacks medieval England, the free-thinking Pudd'nhead Wilson comes to Dawson's Landing, Joan of Arc enters the venal world of French politics, and, of course, the Mysterious Stranger drops in on Eseldorf-one could extend the list almost indefinitely. 1 Reprinted

in Clara and Rudolf Kirk, eds., European and American Masters (New York, 1963), p. 151. 73

Mark Twain

Equally important, Howells, in his North American Review essay, puts his finger on the fundamental perspective or point of view in Mark Twain's fiction: what I would call the quality of "double" vision-vision that I will identify with the tradition of Cervantes and the world of mock-heroic. In its primary form this double vision manifests itself in the differing points of view of the invader and the world he invades. In a more complex fashion it involves an ambivalent relation between the author and even his most sympathetic characters. In Twain's boy stories, for example, the point of view of boyhood is rendered with great fidelity while we are never allowed to forget the fact of adulthood. Indeed, it is our awareness of adulthood that gives these stories their full meaning. As he himself said in a well-known comment: "I have never written a book for boys; I write for grown-ups who have been boys." 2 Involved in two worlds, Twain, as Howells notes, can fully subscribe to neither and becomes the most ambiguous figure in his own fictions. Again the example of Cervantes is instructive and must be pursued further. We have not, however, exhausted the implications of Howells's comment. In linking Twain with a region, Howells implies that he is a so-called regional writer, and, in so doing, helps to define what was to become an important sub-genre of literary realism during the later nineteenth century. According to Howells, the regional writer is emotionally and imaginatively involved with a natural and primitive world whose obsolescence he intellectually acknowledges and may, indeed, even approve. Life on the Mississippi, for example, celebrates the earlier years of the river in the first part of the book and glorious nineteenth-century civilization in the second. Double vision is endemic to the regional impulse. The regionalist describes with loving attention to fact and detail-with, indeed, a desire to re-create for an ignorant present-a time and age which he well knows cannot and does not any longer exist. As Twain wrote concerning his articles on piloting later incorporated into Life on the Mississippi: "I am the only man alive that can scribble about the piloting of that day ... it is about the only new subject I know of."3 Twain implies that, paradoxically, the newness of his subject is the very measure of its obsolescence; its appeal is not at all to our sense of the present but rather to our desperate need to remember things past. John Hay, born forty miles upriver from Hannibal, wrote Twain after one of his piloting articles appeared in the Atlantic that "it is perfect-no more nor less. I don't see how you do it. I knew all that, every word of it-passed as much time on the levee as you ever did, knew the same crowd and saw the same scenesbut I could not have remembered one word of it all. You have the two 2Notebook University quoted in the Image

74

35 (1902), Mark Twain Papers, of California Library, p. 20; Roger B. Salomon, Twain and of History (New Haven, 1961),

p. 156.

3 Henry

Nash Smith and William M. Gibson, eds., Mark Twain-Howells Letters (Cambridge, Mass., 1960), I, 47.

Roger B. Salomon greatest gifts of a writer, memory and imagination."4 The regionalist, in short, acknowledges, describes, and, in his own way, mourns loss. He appeals, in particular, to our nostalgic sense, which might be defined as our need to remember that which we know we can no longer have. Howells's essay in the North American Review has led us finally from Twain's regionalism to what I feel to be the most distinctive quality of Victorian literature here and abroad-a nostalgic mood finding expression through various strategies of double vision. It is precisely this question of vision which gives so much of Victorian literature its characteristic ambivalence-one thinks, for example, not only of Twain, but Dickens, Tennyson, Browning, Arnold, Clough, and Henry James. It is no coincidence which makes the experiments in narrative point of view of Twain, Browning, and James the great contribution to literary style of the period. Equally significant is the development of the literature of childhood after 1860, and I have already noted the concurrent growth of regional writing. What I want to emphasize is that Mark Twain stands at the convergence of many streams, American, English, and European. We have tended to make him too much an"American" writer, too little a figure close to the centre of the entire Victorian imagination. What Howells calls his Westernism is unique in flavour, not in substance. Part of the brilliance of Howells's entire analysis is that it has far more ramifications than he is aware of. It is, therefore, with only the faintest of apologies that I want to introduce Cervantes and his immortal knight into a discussion of Victorian literature. I am particularly concerned with the changing nature of mock-heroic literature. What begins (let us say in Chaucer) as the equipoise of two equally valid worlds-the mundane and the heroic-each vulnerable to irony but neither destroyed by it, becomes in Don Quixote a split between fact and value, truth and imagination, world and self, objectivity and subjectivity, present and past. Chauntecleer's heroic rhetoric and the values it embodies are absurd, but no more so than the barnyard world with which they are in constant contrast. As Charles Muscatine has noted, The Nun's Priest's Tale offers us merely "a continuously humane suggestion of the relativity of things."5 Cervantes, on the other hand, begins by attacking heroic romances in the name of a "truer" empirical reality, then shifts somewhere in the middle of the book to a celebration of imagination and the moral values of idealism, and finally forces upon his hero a deathbed recantation and closes ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

men's contempt for all fabulous and absurd stories of knight errantry ."6 Or is this Cervantes speaking at all? You will remember that early in the 4Quoted by Twain in a letter to Howells, ibid., p. 55. 5Chaucer and the 'french Tradition (Berke-

ley, 1957), p. 242. Quixote, trans. J. M. Cohen (Baltimore, 1950), p. 940.

6 Don

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novel he begins to attribute the story of Don Quixote to the historian Cide Hamete; by the end, Don Quixote is even running into other "fictional" versions of his adventures. Cervantes has, I suspect, created the epistemological problem as a way of sustaining irreconcilable positions without the necessity of resolution, as a way of preserving a divided commitment. For resolution is now necessary. Cervantes' novel does not describe the equal absurdity of two complete, viable worlds which exist in equilibrium. His hero rather is an anachronism, born in an age of iron and dedicated to the futile task of reviving the age of gold. The knight and his way of life cannot hope to survive, but when he dies, much that is good dies with him. Don Quixote, in short, presents us with a polarized world, united, if at all, by the author's ambivalent vision: the paradoxical depth of his commitment to two irreconcilable points of view, the curious sad humour that is so distinctive a part of the book. On one side are the heroic virtues of love, honour, and moral truth sustained by memory and imagination; on the other, man's practical intelligence sustained and affirmed everywhere by empirical reality. In Cervantes the heroic has become less a possibility than a nostalgic need. Quixotic literature-a new version of mock-heroic-can be defined in terms of its fundamental scenario: it involves dramatic confrontation of noble illusion with harsh fact. It finds the author torn between the values of his hero and the facts of society as he knows them; it finds him with a need to affirm both values and facts even though these values have become illusory, archaic, and without serious empirical justification. The characteristic tone of quixotic literature is what I would call nostalgic irony-the sense, that is, of the absurdity of what we find most emotionally compelling. The tone moves between elegy and satiric comedy, containing elements of both but expressing neither in a pure form. In its wavering, of course, it expresses the fundamental ambivalence of the author-his double vision, to reintroduce the term I used earlier. As the nineteenth century advanced, everything conspired to make such duality of vision appealing to the mind of the period. With the decline of romanticism (the last serious attempt to achieve a unified sensibility) Western literature polarized into the extremes of realism and symbolism, both of which, in part at least, were responses to the problem of change, of alienation from the past, of psychic disinheritance which was so sharply felt among Victorian writers. 7 Charles Dudley Warner and Twain wrote in The Gilded Age that "the eight years in America from 1860 to 1868 uprooted institutions that were centuries old, changed the politics of a people, transformed the social life of half the country, and wrought so profoundly upon the entire 7See my article, "Realism as Disinheritance: Twain, Howells, and James," American Quarterly, XVI (Winter, 1964), 531-44. 76

Roger B. Salomon

national character that the influence cannot be measured short of two or three generations." 8 War, of course, was only the most dramatic form taken by the political and industrial revolutions of the century. Writers whose lives straddled the period tended to feel at some point superannuated like Henry Adams or, as Henry James put it, "ruptured" from their own biography.9 The later Ruskin spoke of himself as "of the old race-few of us now leftchildren who reverenced our fathers . . . few of us now standing here and there, alone, in the midst of this yelping, carnivorous crowd, mad for money and lust." 10 Tennyson wrote to a friend: "To me the far-off world seems nearer than the present, for in the present is always something unreal and indistinct, but the other seems good solid planet, rolling round its green hills and paradises to more steadfast laws."11 Literary realism, to put the problem in its simplest terms, is the aesthetics of Sancho Panza. In its more extreme forms, it denies the relevance of imagination and memory, it defines the writer as a reporter describing empirical "facts" or a scientist recording observable phenomena, and it makes a virtue of temporal discontinuity by arguing that a writer must deal only with immediately contemporary materials. The final aim of literature, says one French critic of the 18S0's "is a thing real, existing, comprehensible, visible, palpable: the scrupulous imitation of nature." 12 In spite of the classical overtones of the latter phrase, we are really dealing here neither with what Dr. Johnson called "the just representation of general nature," nor with the romantic interest in facts and particulars transformed by imagination. 13 Instead, literary realism ideally approaches the state of photography: it is the direct objective depiction of external particulars. Symbolism, the most sophisticated literary response to realism, is, in effect, the other side of the coin. It is Quixote's pursuit of the illusory Dulcinea or, as Arthur Symons describes it, "a literature in which the visible world is no longer a reality, and the unseen world no longer a dream." 14 Symbolism is deliberately escapist, fundamentally hostile to the material object and a temporal present, and passionately dedicated 8The Works of Mark Twain, Definitive Edition (New York, 1922-25), V, 176-77. 9The Art of Travel, ed. Morton Dauwen Zabel (New York, 1958), p. 518. lOfors Clavigera, quoted in John D. Rosenberg, The Darkening Glass : A Portrait of Ruskin's Genius (New York, 1961), pp. 19~91.

11 Letter to Emily Sellwood in Hallam Lord Tennyson, Alfred Lord Tennyson: A Memoir (New York, 1897), pp. 171-72; quoted in James Kissane, "Tennyson: The Passion of the Past and the Curse of Time," English Literary History, XXXII (March, 1965), 87. Using Tennyson as an example,

Kissane exhaustively explores Victorian dislocation and nostalgia. 12Quoted in Bernard Weinberg, French Realism: The Critical Reaction, 1830-1870 (Oxford, 1937), p. 122. The translation is my own. 1 3See The Darkening Glass, p. 15. Rosenberg notes that imagination for the romantics was the key middle term between close observation of particulars and the act of creation. Drop the middle term and you have realism. 14 The Symbolist Movement in Literature (New York, 1958), p. 2.

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Mark Twain to the life of memory, imagination, and inner being. If realistic art is photographic, symbolic art approaches the condition of music. Cervantes' vision of life, of course, embraces both Don Quixote and Sancho Panza; my concern is not so much with extremes as with the more characteristically Victorian attempt to accommodate both worlds at once. Victorians -English and American writers in particular-were by and large too dutiful, too consciously dedicated to the real, the positive, and the progressive to embrace systematically symbolist doctrines. Significant attempts of this kind were not to be made until the so-called decadent years toward the end of the century. At the same time, Victorian optimism is, as Harold Nicolson has defined it, "at best ... a courageous confrontation of the ruins of an easier, happier world."15 Victorian nostalgia, conversely, is the repository of values of the intellectually committed realist; it makes a place for the "happier world" while remaining fully conscious of its loss. Central to the strategy of accommodation is the Victorian cult of childhood: the development, that is, of children's literature and, more important, the development of literature about childhood written primarily for adults. Where Cervantes had made use of knight errantry, the Victorians, even more heavily than the romantics before them, turned to childhood as the embodiment of a different, more innocent, more imaginative, more ideal state of being. Abandoned were Calvinist dogmas of natural depravity; rather the child, in Wordsworth's well-known words, came from afar, "trailing clouds of glory" and made a heaven of his infancy.16 Moreover, the Victorian writer, living in a disorienting present, found it easy to idealize his own personal past. Twain wrote to Thomas Bailey Aldrich late in life after he had read The Story of a Bad Boy: "by the time I had finished it, at three in the morning, it had worked its spell and Portsmouth was become the town of my own boyhood-with all which that implies and compels: the bringing back of one's youth, almost the only time of life worth living over again, the only period whose memories are wholly pathetic-pathetic because we see now that we were in heaven then and there was no one able to make us know it, though no doubt many a poor old devil tried to."17 Here psychic needs have, so to speak, completely assimilated themselves with a concept common to the entire century; a deeply felt personal utterance is, at the same time, a distinct echo of Wordsworth. For many and complex reasons the child or youth becomes the quixotic hero in Victorian fiction and, characteristically, either grows up into disillusionment or exists without growth as an isolated, alienated, often persecuted innocent in t5Tennyson (New York, 1962), p. 11. 16for a discussion of the change in America from Calvinist to romantic notions about children see Albert E. Stone, Jr., The Innocent Eye: Childhood in Mark Twain's Ima78

gination (New Haven, 1961), pp. 5-14. the Clemens Collection, Houghton Library, Harvard University; quoted in The Innocent Eye, p. 31. 171n

Roger B. Salomon the midst of a hostile society. On the one hand, to mention only the most obvious, we have novels like Flaubert's Sentimental Education, Stendhal's Red and Black and The Charterhouse of Parma, Eliot's Middlemarch, and James's Portrait of a Lady; on the other, Dostoyevsky's The Idiot, much of Dickens, and most of the work of Mark Twain. This is to ignore, of course, the prevalence of the Quixote theme in the poetry of the period. 18 In the case of the disillusioned hero, part of the double vision of the book comes from the hero's increasingly nostalgic perspective on his own life. In Flaubert's Sentimental Education, for example-one of the seminal books of the century-the last scene is one of melancholy reminiscence. The hero and his friend, a once ambitious politician, "exhumed their youth," says Flaubert. "They asked each other after every sentence: 'Do you remember?'" They realized "that they had both failed, one to realize his dreams of love, the other to fulfil his dreams of power." They agree finally that the happiest time they ever had was a certain absurd and libertine episode of their youth. 19 Love and honour or power, the traditional pursuits of the knight errant, in the Sentimental Education are exposed as illusions by the practical exigencies of life in the France of the 1840's. Nor does Flaubert sentimentalize the past; the scene most nostalgically remembered by the hero and his friend involves their first abortive trip to a whorehouse. Yet more, clearly, has been lost than has been gained; the tone lightly but firmly sounds the elegiac note so common to Victorian literature. I am reminded of Pudd'nhead Wilson's aphorism: "Don't part with your illusions: when they are gone you may still exist but you have ceased to live" (XXI, 246). Where the child hero exists as an isolated innocent, double vision involves not only sharp contrasts between the child's point of view and that of surrounding society, but also a distinct gap between the heroic child adventuring in the past and an adult author living in the present who has an ironic awareness of the literal absurdity or irrelevance of the child's world. While the author cannot identify emotionally with the society hostile to the child, neither can he affirm intellectually attitudes which he is well aware do not exist in an adult world. This is the kind of double vision I have already associated with Mark Twain; but before turning to a detailed examination of his work, I would like to deal briefly with two English contemporaries, Lewis Carroll and Kenneth Grahame, in order to demonstrate further some of the implications of the child image for the Victorian mind. I deliberately use English writers because I think the image has for too long been considered the exclusive property of American literature. For Kenneth Grahame in The Golden Age and Dream Days, his two adult 18See, e.g., Walter Houghton's comments in The Poetry of Clough (New Haven, 1963), esp. his analysis of Dipsychus, pp. 156-207.

19Trans. Robert Baldick (Baltimore, 1964), pp. 418-19.

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books recounting the adventures of childhood, child life is the last refuge of heroic man-free, magical, imaginative, and intimately responsive to a natural rather than a social order. For the individual, at least, child life is also inevitably lost and completely irrecoverable. "A saddening doubt, a dull suspicion, creeps over me," writes Grahame in the Prologue. "Et in Arcadia ego-I certainly did once inhabit Arcady. Can it be that I also have become an Olympian?"20 The ironic awareness in this passage and the explicit evocation of Vergilian nostalgia are completely characteristic of the tone of the entire book. The Olympians so-called are the inhabitants of the adult world who hedge in the children with harsh discipline and social duties. They represent, in Grahame's words, the "right and social" mind, the world of "fact" which has completely usurped the mature life of this culture to the exclusion of what he calls "the higher gift of imagination" (pp. 25, 45). Episode after episode involves a mock-heroic adventure in which the child imaginatively tries to duplicate the feats of antique heroes only to be "awakened of a sudden to the harshness of real things and the unnumbered hostilities of the actual world." In one, for example, the child in his picturebook journeys over the sea with a crowd of knights and ladies toward a "happy island" only to "stumble out of an opalescent dream into the broad daylight" with the fingers of an angry aunt holding him "tight by the scruff of the neck" (p. 188). In another story children duplicate the voyage of the Argonauts, until an irate farmer intervenes to seize his stolen boat. A third significantly links the child with an artist he meets by the roadside. They communicate their longings to each other, so much so that the child thinks the artist may be a vanished knight from the Golden City. Both are wanderers; both admire the heroic life. "I'm a sort of Ulysses," says the artist, "-seen men and cities, you know. In fact, about the only place I never got to was the Fortunate Island" (p. 94) . Only the child and the artist, in other words, continue their quixotic search for values irrevocably lost to their society. Grahame mourns them while recognizing fully their romantic absurdity. In Grahame's work the child is associated with the garden world of nature, and both, in turn, are related to nonsense. In one scene in particular the child responds to the passion of the morning with a song. In his own words: I ran sideways, shouting . . . I hurled clods skywards at random; and presently I somehow found myself singing. The words were mere nonsense-irresponsible babble; the tune was an improvisation, a weary, unrhythmic thing of rise and fall : and yet it seemed to me a genuine utterance, and just at that moment the one thing fitting and right and perfect. Humanity would have rejected it with scorn. Nature, everywhere singing in the same key, recognized and accepted it without a flicker of dissent. [p. 16) 20The Golden Age and Dream Days (New York, 1964), p. 22. 80

Roger B. Salomon

The point of view here is significant and one I have repeatedly tried to define: nominally that of the child, actually that of an adult who is projecting himself ambivalently into both worlds at once. Even more important, however, is the concept of nonsense utterance as the characteristic and meaningful style of an important state of being-at the same time, a fugitive form "rejected with scorn" by the adult world. It is precisely this insight which Lewis Carroll exploits in Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. Again we have the nominal child's point of view carefully framed and limited by the nostalgic yet mature sensibility of the author. The tone and backward vision of Carroll's books are instantly set in the dedicatory verses to Alice in Wonderland: Alice! A childish story take And, with a gentle hand, Lay it where childhood dreams are twined In memory's mystic band. Like pilgrim's wither'd wreath of flowers Pluck'd in a far-off land. It is a dream world that Carroll is describing, and we must wake from it into an adult world of "dull reality" just as Alice wakes from it at the end of each of her adventures. 21 Yet before we wake, we have gone into the garden or through the looking glass into a magic realm of dream transformation that, in Robert Frost's words, operates as a "momentary stay against confusion." As Carroll puts it in another poem, speaking of "childhood's nest of gladness": The magic words shall hold thee fast: Thou shalt not heed the raving blast. 22 In the looking-glass room, the fire is warmer because, says Alice, "there'll be no one here to scold me away from the fire." She immediately senses her liberation: "Oh, what fun it'll be, when they see me through the glass in here, and can't get at me." The objects in the old room she has left are "quite common and uninteresting"; from her new point of view "the pictures on the wall next to the fire seemed to be all alive, and the very clock on the chimneypiece (you know you can only see the back of it in the looking-glass) had got the face of an old man, and grinned at her." The new room is "not so tidy as the other."23 Tidiness, of course, is only the most obvious manifestation of the constriction of the "adult" reality from which Alice is escaping. Huck Finn puts the whole thing more explicitly in his description of his own escape from in Wonderland and Other Favorites (New York, 1960). The quoted stanza is from the poem preceding the first page of Alice. The phrase "dull reality" is used on

21Alice

p. 112 to describe the alternative to Alice's Wonderland. 22Alice in Wonderland, p. 115. 23Jbid., pp. 127-35.

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Mark Twain the world of Widow Douglas: "The Widow Douglas she took me for her son and allowed she would sivilize me; but it was rough living in the house all the time, considering how dismal regular and decent the widow was in all her ways, and so when I couldn't stand it no longer I lit out. I got into my old rags and my sugar-hogshead again, and was free and satisfied" (XIII, 2). His later nakedness on the raft completes his transformation into another mode of being which is at the same time a new point of view. Alice, significantly, rushes into the garden to preserve and extend her imaginative vision. Nonsense style is Carroll's own particular device for projecting this vision. Critics have noted the resemblances between nonsense and many of the stylistic devices of modern fiction, but they have not emphasized enough the immediate function of nonsense as a systematic parody of literary realism and all that it represents. Fracturing or disruption of empirical reality, temporal rearrangement where effect comes before cause, destruction of logical communication in favour of non sequitur and pun-these are Carroll's methods, and they are nothing but the tenets of realism turned upside down. For the Victorian writer, however, the nonsense world remains ultimately one of nostalgic "play." Only a later literary generation, less intimidated by empirical criteria and more openly responsive to symbolist influences, would use nonsense outside the quixotic frame to suggest the nature of reality itself. Mark Twain turned to regional fiction for the same reason that Carroll turned to nonsense and Kenneth Grahame to the English country house environment: it was, as I have already noted, a form of quixotic compromise with the dominant realism of the age--at its best, a far more subtle and complex compromise than the strategies of Carroll and Grahame. Robert Langbaum's description of later eighteenth-century picturesque poetry as a place where "feelings" could find empirical justification can be used even more appropriately to define the fundamental significance of regionalism. 24 On the one hand, the regional writer prides himself on his faithful rendering of actual experience and carefully distinguishes his own point of view from that of the romantic sentimentalist; in fact, he uses the sentimentalist position in order to reinforce our sense of actuality. Mary N . Murfree, for example, in one of her stories of the Tennessee mountains describes a cultivated outsider who looks at the backwoods community from "an ideal point of view." "He looked upon these people and their inner life only as picturesque bits of the mental and moral landscape," says Miss Murfree : "it was an aesthetic and theoretical pleasure their contemplation afforded him." 25 The outsider misses both the primitive savagery of the mountaineers and the moral purity of the heroine. In Twain's "Old Times on the Mississippi" the "outsider" is the boy hero himself, initiated into the life of the river at the expense of his romantic 24The Poetry of Experience (London, 1957), pp. 38-39.

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2 5Jn the Tennessee Mountains 1884), pp. 134-35.

(Boston,

Roger B. Salomon point of view. He discovers the "very real and worklike" nature of piloting; he discovers, too, that empirical knowledge of the "signs" of the river destroys its picturesqueness. "No, the romance and beauty were all gone from the river," Twain wrote of his education. "All the value any feature of it had for me now was the amount of usefulness it could furnish toward compassing the safe piloting of a steamboat" (XII, 47, 80) . In Roughing It, as critics have noted, a similar process initiates the greenhorn into the hard realities of western living. While Twain was writing "Old Times," Howells admonished him to "stick to actual fact and character in the thing, and give things in detail." 26 During his fifteen years with the Atlantic Monthly Howells was to give similar advice to many regional writers. On the other hand, Howells, Twain, and others found in regional literature a repository of feelings and values that they could not locate in the contemporary world. The regional setting, for all its fidelity to factual detail, is still the magic wonderland of dream transformation, full of moral, spiritual, and imaginative possibilities for the hero. Howells defined with great precision the regionalist strategy in his comments on what he called the "spiritual" realism of the Norwegian writer Bjornstjerne Bjornson: "The facts are stated with perfect ruggedness and downrightness when necessary, but some dreamy haze seems still to cling about them, subduing their hard outlines and features like the tender light of the slanting Norwegian sun on the craggy Norwegian headlands."27 The regional setting is characteristically isolated, remote, located in the past or a vestige of the past in the present, in any case free from the Victorian burden of time: Bjornson's Norwegian fiords, Murfree's Tennessee mountains, the rural New England of Sarah Orne Jewett or Alice Brown, or the small town, the raft, and the river of Mark Twain. The regional setting, in short, incorporates many of the qualities of the more general Victorian symbols of garden and island so familiar to idyllic poetry of the period-Tennyson's Avalon or Land of the Lotos-Eaters, the Innisfree of early Yeats or the retired haunts of Arnold's Scholar Gipsy, again to mention but a few examples. And, of course, regionalism comes at the end of a long tradition of American pastoralism so ably traced by Leo Marx in his recent book The Machine in the Garden.28 The characters who inhabit this regional world are by no means all good, noble, and true; most, in fact, are limited, narrow-minded, often cruel and vengeful and treated with unsparing severity by the better writers. Nevertheless, it is the habitat of the quixotic hero just as surely as through the looking glass is the habitat of Alice; it is a place where the qualities he embodies can be made literally conceivable and, what is more important, imaginatively 26Twain-Howells Letters, I, 46. Italics are Howells's. 27European and American Masters, p. 35.

2 8 The Machine in the Garden : Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (New York, 1964).

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Mark Twain compelling. At the same time, these qualities can be ironically limited not only by the nature and actions of the other characters in the fiction, but also by the adult, responsible point of view of the author, who ultimately identifies himself, in part at least, with the larger world outside the region. Regionalism, in other words, has many of the qualities of nostalgic play that I have previously associated with Kenneth Grahame and Lewis Carroll. Though it is full of the particularity so dear to literary realism, it is nevertheless a partial turning away from what the Victorian writer knows to be the "facts" of life. Alice Brown admits this with unusual candour in her introduction to MeadowGrass: Tales of New England Life, a volume of short stories published in 1895. "We who are Tiverton born, though false ambition may have ridden us to market, or the world's voice incited us to kindred clamouring, have a way of shutting our eyes, now and then, to present changes, and seeing things as they were once, as they are still, in a certain sleepy yet altogether individual comer of country life." 29 Nostalgic pastoralism seems to originate, as Leo Marx has pointed out, "in a recoil from the pain and responsibility of life in a complex civilization."30 The passage from Meadow-Grass describes this recoil with great precision, but it also suggests how the spasmodic and fugitive nature of recoil leads to the double vision of the regional writer: backward into the past with the momentarily shut eyes of memory; present and forward with the open eyes of empirical knowledge, which are only too well aware of the changing surface of the world and the fallen nature of man. Although they are one in their prelapsarian innocence, the quixotic heroes of regional fiction fall into two rough categories: so-called shiftless figures, young people and occasionally adults who refuse to conform to the mores of the community; and older people who exist as lonely, misunderstood, and functionless anachronisms in a changing society. Over all, the archetype of the child Quixote hangs heavy. Alice Brown, to return to our previous example, makes this clear by directly invoking the world of her own childhood in a first story which clearly operates as a frame for the rest of the volume. "We knew everything in those days, we aimless knights-errant with dinner pail and slate," she writes, the dry, frosty hollow where gentians bloom ... the sunny banks where violets love to live.. .. At noon [i.e., school recess], we roved abroad into solitudes so deep that even our unsuspecting hearts sometimes quaked with fear of dark and lonesomeness; and then we came trooping back at the sound of the bell, untamed, happy little savages, ready to settle, with a long breath, to the afternoon's drowsy routine. Arrant nonsense that! the boundary of British America and the conjugation of the verb to be! Who that might loll away the hours upon a bank in silken ease, needed aught even of computation or the tongues? He alone had inherited the earth. 29Boston, 1895, p. 1.

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a0 Machine in the Garden, p. 22.

Roger B. Salomon

Here the tone is the same nostalgic irony we have met before-lyricism undercut by an adult sensibility aware of the absurdity of what it is affirming. Here, too, is the familiar encounter of the child of nature with school, his first and most benign engagement with an organized adult society that will impinge on him ever more threateningly. Here, we might note, is the world of Tom Sawyer, while Huckleberry Finn takes the boy as shiftless figure and brings him into a fundamental encounter with the most destructive cruelties of the adult world. Alice Brown ends her story with a recital of how harshly life has dealt with the children she remembers. For Twain also the central tragedy of life was the fact of growing up. His notebooks record the terrible fates of childhood friends, and this personal revulsion against maturity becomes almost the first premise of his imagination. He was unwilling and unable, he admitted, to turn one of his boy heroes into an adult. A well-known late notebook entry tells us what would have happened if he had tried: "Huck comes back sixty years old, from nobody knows where-and crazy. Thinks he is a boy again and scans always every face for Tom, Becky, etc. Tom comes at last from sixty years' wandering in the world and attends Huck and together they talk of old times ; both are desolate, life has been a failure, all that was lovable, all that was beautiful is under the mold. They die together." 31 Nostalgic literature, it should be observed, begins in elegiac celebration and ends in despair; it offers us ultimately neither the catharsis of tragedy nor the social reintegration of comedy.32 As a nostalgic writer, Mark Twain moves directly from Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, and Life on the Mississippi to Pudd'nhead Wilson, Joan of Arc, and The Mysterious Stranger. Perhaps, however, not quite directly. In between lies the Connecticut Yankee, a desperate attempt to shatter the nostalgic image and build a literature and a sustaining faith on the present and the future. In Twain's earlier work despair is kept at bay by the duality of commitment which Howells described in the North American Review and which I have been calling in this paper double vision : the gap between the idealized hero and his environment; the ambivalent author identifying completely with neither but torn between what he knows and what he wants to believe. In Twain, boys' literature and regional literature reach their apotheosis. In Twain, finally, the strengths and weaknesses of the Victorian nostalgic imagination stand revealed. Central to all of Twain's work is the image of the child as heroic figure-child as king we might say. The "prince and the pauper," identical children playing both roles interchangeably-the prince as pauper, the pauper as prince: this is B. Paine, ed., Mark Twain's Notebook (New York, 1935), p. 212. s21 am indebted here to Thomas Greene's 3 1 A.

excellent discussion of Vergil in The Descent from Heaven: A Study in Epic Continuity (New Haven, 1963), esp. pp. 89-95.

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Mark Twain a paradigm of Twain's fiction. There are echoes of it in all the pairings so characteristic of his work: cub and pilot; Tom and Huck; Huck and Jim; King Arthur and Hank Morgan; Joan of Arc the country girl and Joan the national leader (or Joan and the boy narrator in the novel); even Judge Driscoll, the social leader of Dawson's Landing, and Pudd'nhead Wilson, the maverick lawyer. The latter two, of course, like Arthur, Hank Morgan, Jim, and the river pilots, are not actually children, but they do embody the freedom and independence--the heroic possibilities-that are found at the top and bottom of society, among the all-powerful and the powerless, and nowhere in between. Driscoll and Wilson, significantly, are the only two members of the local free-thinkers organization. According to Twain, "Judge Driscoll could be a free-thinker and still hold his place in society, because he was the person of most consequence in the community, and therefore could venture to go his own way and follow out his own notions. The other member of his pet organization was allowed the like liberty because he was a cipher in the estimation of the public, and nobody attached any importance to what he thought or did." (XVI, 40) For Twain there is a certain identity among the most disparate forms of alienation. In Huckleberry Finn, to take an extreme example, critics have noted how Colonel Sherburn's long speech attacking the cowardice of the average man is a violation of the thematic indirection created by the firstperson point of view of the rest of the book. This is technically true. I would prefer to emphasize, however, that a technical violation conceals a larger truth. In their courage, their independence, their ability to act in the face of heavy odds against massed society, Sherburn and Huck are in a class by themselves-in spite of the fact that Sherburn has committed a vicious murder and Huck is a moral innocent. But it is in The Prince and the Pauper itself that the identity between king and outcast can be examined in its purest form. While not literally regional fiction, the book employs the central strategy of regionalism: creation, that is, of an accurately rendered but carefully remote past time in which heroic values can operate credibly. Early manuscript fragments indicate that Twain first attempted to place the story in the late nineteenth century; the Prince of Wales was originally Albert Edward, Victoria's son. A second version of the manuscript begins: "In the ancient city of London on the 12th of October, 1537."33 The final text reads: "In the ancient city of London, on a certain autumn day in the second quarter of the sixteenth century" (XI, 1). Later in the manuscript Twain made every effort to blur the exact age of his child heroes at the time of their adventures by similar elimination of precise tern83from the manuscript in the Huntington Library, San Marino, Calif., pp. 6, 26-28, 35-37, 51-52. For permission to quote I am 86

indebted to the Mark Twain Co. and the Huntington Library. Quotation © copyright 1967 Mark Twain Co.

Roger B. Salomon

poral references. One invokes them and their world by neutralizing the temporal question-in any case, by avoiding the "real" world of present time. The child hero, like Alice in Wonderland, even grows larger or smaller as the particular adventure demands; he exists as symbol before he lives in fact. Having introduced his identical heroes from either end of the social spectrum, Twain involves them in the mock-heroic initiation that we have previously seen to be a staple of nineteenth-century realistic fiction and a characteristic part of Twain's other works such as Roughing It and the first part of Life on the Mississippi. But where, let us say, Flaubert's characters are shattered and destroyed by their initiation, left at best with only the wistful memory of childhood, Twain's drop their romantic illusions only to enter into a more profound moral and spiritual life. They are initiated, not into resigned acceptance of human realities, but into more fundamental forms of heroic activitynot into society but away from it into genuine personal identity. At the beginning of The Prince and the Pauper both Tom Canty and Edward Tudor have absurdly romantic and inaccurate conceptions of how the other lives. One has wild fantasies about the princely life; the other longs for the freedom of the poor. They change clothes to realize their fantasies, and almost instantly the process of disenchantment begins. By the end of the first day Edward has been beaten and tormented by mobs. Tom learns that he will be shut up forever in a "gilded cage" where men are executed on the slightest whim of a ruthless king. "Turn where he would," writes Twain, "he seemed to see floating in the air the severed head and remembered face of the great Duke of Norfolk, the eyes fixed on him reproachfully. His old dreams had been so pleasant; but this reality was so dreary!" (XI, 33) Such disillusionment, however, is by no means the final insight of the book; it is, in fact, not an end but a beginning and involves only the early episodes. The bulk of The Prince and the Pauper takes place on the roads of rural England and describes the adventures of the unrecognized little king and his adult companion Miles Hendon as each of them fends off the cruelties of society and attempts to affirm his heroic identity. The child's claims are not even acknowledged by his friend, who thinks him mad. Hendon, I should add, is a gay, brave, chivalric young man who has returned a penniless scarecrow from overseas wars in order to reclaim his title to ancestral estates. Both boy and youth are disinherited, both are, in effect, knights errant whose claims are derided by the world at large, and, most important, both display courage and moral decency in a world characterized chiefly-as it so often is in Twain-by savage laws and mob action. Meanwhile in London the beggar boy Tom Canty demonstrates equal independence on the throne of England. In the end, everything works out happily; in spite of all the historical apparatus Twain brings to bear, we are left with little doubt that the book is a fairy tale. "Lo, the lord of the Kingdom of Dreams and Shadows on his 8'1

Mark Twain

throne," says Hendon when he first sees his little friend in state (XI, 267). He has used this phrase earlier in the novel to describe what he thought was the fantasy world of his companion. It is now no longer literally applicable. Yet, like Hendon' s astonishment, it lingers in the reader's mind, for we have been on a journey through "the Kingdom of Dreams and Shadows," a play world where goodness and freedom not only exist but prevail. We should remember that Twain's other actual child knight errant is Joan of Arc, and she is burned at the stake for her claims. In the earliest manuscript fragments of The Prince and the Pauper Tom Canty is called Jim, the name of the Negro slave in Huckleberry Finn. The two books were written more or less together and clearly grew out of the same imaginative nexus. 34 When we first meet Huck, he is playing Sancho Panza to Tom Sawyer's Don Quixote--that is, he responds to Tom's bookish romanticism with a practical pragmatic realism.35 Huck's own journey begins with a withdrawal from society, but it also involves the complete purgation of the spirit of Tom Sawyer. As Huck puts it after he has tried in vain to rub a genie out of an old tin lamp : "So then I judged that all that stuff was only one of Tom Sawyer's lies. I reckoned he believed in the A-rahs and the elephants, but as for me I think different. It had all the marks of a Sunday-school." (XIII, 20) Here Twain, from Huck's strongly empirical point of view, explodes the entire play world of his earlier novel and, indeed, equates it with the adult conventions it was supposed to contravene. But Huck is purged of false romance only to enter a realm where nostalgia encounters the central moral dreams of man. In Huckleberry Finn the imaginative possibilities of childhood so often described by Victorian writers find ultimate realization in the creative moral imagination of the hero as he gropes toward the articulation of pity and love in the face of hostile society and even his own conscience. On the island, under the stars, down the river on the raft, time stops, the burden of history eases. From these retreats the heroic child, now a more authentic Quixote, armed with only the ultimate illusions, ventures forth to do battle with society and with himself. At the same time, we are always aware that Huck is a child. The first-person point of view is a far more subtle instrument than the heavy-handed commentary of Kenneth Grahame or Alice Brown, but, by its very authenticity, it continually reminds us of the inevitable limitations of Huck's perception and understanding. It is obviously more limited than that of the author, who, 34This

assumption has, of course, been tested with great brilliance by Walter Blair, Mark Twain and Huck Finn (Berkeley, 1962). 88

35 1bid., pp. 117-19. See also Olin H. Moore, "Mark Twain and Don Quixote," PMLA, XXXVII (June, 1922), 337-38. Blair says that Twain read Cervantes in 1860.

Roger B. Salomon in fact, treats Huck in many scenes with considerable irony. Even Huck's famous decision to "go to Hell" rather than turn Jim in to the authorities is a quixotic absurdity. In the light of our more sophisticated "adult" knowledge, he is jousting with windmills, though they are for him very real, his courage very touching, and his moral instincts sound. Certainly the characteristic ambivalence of nostalgic mock-heroic makes resolution almost impossible. I have already described how Cervantes himself raises an epistemological smoke screen in the later parts of his novel in order to avoid the question of final choice between fact and value. In Huckleberry Finn Twain avoids the question by returning to the "boy's" world of historical romance from which Huck has escaped early in the novel. At this less profound level of play, the child is almost literally king, and fact and value can be reconciled as they are in the final pages of The Prince and the Pauper. Huck, significantly, returns to the role of Sancho Panza until he can once again, at the very end, make his escape. A notebook entry made during the time Twain was writing his stories about children suggests that Cervantes' great hero had very different possibilities for him. He writes in 1880: "Don Quixote is defended against Arabian Nights Supernaturals by Telephone Telegraph etc. & successfully."36 Here we have the germ of the Connecticut Yankee: the isolated, independent hero as an adult, the Victorian realist and believer in social progress who invades and attempts to destroy the "child's" world of an Arthurian England located somewhere in the vague past. Quixote in this case is not an anachronism but a progenitor. The initial pattern of the Connecticut Yankee is very much that of the travel books such as Innocents Abroad and the second part of Life on the Mississippi, in which the brash outsider, representing a more advanced technological culture, challenges the pretensions of the past and celebrates the present and the future. Arthur and his fellow countrymen are everywhere described as "big children," "great simple-hearted creatures" who live in a vivid and imaginative but brutal nonsense world. "They were a childlike and innocent lot," says the Yankee, "telling lies of the stateliest pattern with the most gentle and winning naivete. . . . It was hard to associate them with anything cruel or dreadful; and yet they dealt in tales of blood and suffering with a guileless relish that made me almost forget to shudder." (XIV, 19, 21, 111)

The Yankee, on the other hand, is the practical man of affairs, the inventor of "anything a body wanted," the rationalist who, as he himself admits, is 36Notebook 15, p. 2, Mark Twain Papers, quoted in Salomon, Twain and the Image of History, p. 77. See my entire discussion of the origins of the book, pp. 77-78, 114-17.

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Mark Twain "nearly barren of sentiment, I suppose--or poetry, in other words," the advocate of sound laws and good education (XIV, 5). He has every hope of taking over and instituting vast changes in short order. The book, of course, turns out very differently, and, as its direction begins to waver, so does the role of the Yankee. There is an ambivalence from the very beginning: the Yankee is glib, overconfident, aggressive, aesthetically and intellectually limited; Arthur, Launcelot, and Galahad have "manliness .. . noble benignity and purity ... majesty and greatness ... and high bearing" (XIV, 22). Most important, the opening description of what Twain called in a subtitle the "Lost Land" is an invocation of the isolated and serene regional setting so common to the imagination of the age: "It was a soft, reposeful summer landscape, as lovely as a dream, and as lonesome as Sunday. The air was full of the smell of flowers, and the buzzing of insects, and the twittering of birds, and there were no people, no wagons, there was no stir of life, nothing going on." (XIV, 10) The Yankee wants to transform or destroy this landscape, but he ends up its victim, disillusioned in his plans for mankind and longing for the past that has been denied him. After his return to the nineteenth century, he describes himself as "a stranger and forlorn in that strange England, with an abyss of thirteen centuries yawning between me . . . and all that is dear to me, all that could make life worth the living" (XIV, 449). He has, in other words, finally become the anachronistic Quixote, the nostalgic spokesman for a lost golden age where love, illusions, and heroic activity are a possibility. He yearns, in fact, for the world found so often in Twain's fiction. In the bulk of the novel, the Yankee and King Arthur play the conventional role of Twain's child heroes; they wander unrecognized through the countryside, persecuted by a cruel society, but attempting at the same time to aid other victims of this society. They act with courage, independence, and moral concern, though the king is hampered by corrupt aristocratic habits just as Huck is hampered by conscience. Moreover, the mature Huck whom Twain described in the notebook entry which I quoted earlier as sixty years old and crazy and lamenting his past resembles the shattered Yankee of the final scenes, who has, in effect, "grown up" by being forced to leave the past and come back into the present. In the Connecticut Yankee Twain set out, with an adult hero, to affirm a real and positive present; by the end of the book his adult looks obsessively backward toward a more "youthful" state, and Twain has revealed to himself and the reader the despair that lurks in the depths of the nostalgic vision. Like 1oan of Arc, the Connecticut Yankee makes explicit some of the darker implications of the regional world of Huckleberry Finn. The Connecticut Yankee violated the regional world in the name of progress, and uncovered despair; The Mysterious Stranger violates the same world 90

Roger B. Salomon directly and blatantly in the name of despair. The drowsy and isolated little village, the "paradise . . . for boys," still sleeps "in peace in the deep privacy of a hilly and woodsy solitude where news from the world hardly ever came to disturb its dreams" (XXVII, 3-4) ; but the town is called "Eseldorf",,Assville" it might be translated-and its children are craven rather than heroic in the face of the familiar social persecution. In The Mysterious Stranger potency has become divorced from morality-the "king" figure is not a Don Quixote but a Satan who creates and destroys indiscriminately and at will. Eseldorf is, in fact, the play world of the Victorian imagination in ruins. The Mysterious Stranger bears the same relation to the regional impulse that Huysman's A Rebours bears to the entire symbolist tradition. The hero of that latter book, we should recall, appalled by the ugly and stupid present, retreats to an isolated house where he can live in the fanciful past of his imagination. But the nostalgic refuge becomes a trap, dreams too artificially cultivated turn into nightmare, and the past, in spite of his best imaginative efforts, does not prove to be life-sustaining. Huysman's invocation of traditional religion on the final pages is as futile an attempt to reverse the direction of the novel as Twain's use of solipsistic argument in The Mysterious Stranger. Both books, on the whole, are reluctant but honest and compelling witnesses to the death of a point of view. "The nostalgic cup had been applied to my lips . . . before I was conscious of it," writes Henry James, and he speaks for his entire generation. 37 Howells's discussion in the North American Review of the genesis of Mark Twain likewise suggests the inevitability of nostalgia for the writer with roots fixed so firmly in an obsolescent world. Henry Adams, in The Education of Henry Adams-to cite one final example--saw himself as a nostalgic Quixote wandering through the hard, practical, and venal world of post-Civil-War America. Obviously we are dealing here with a widespread phenomenon; to study the forms taken by Victorian nostalgia is to penetrate to the heart of the imagination of the period. In this context, if for no other, the work of Mark Twain remains of fundamental significance. 31The Art of Travel, p. 18.

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Munro Beattie

THE MANY MARRIAGES OF HENRY JAMES

"Never trust the artist. Trust the tale."1 Lawrence's dictum is irresistible even when the tales in question are those of an artist so deliberate and selfregarding as Henry James. The policy can be endorsed by a comparison of the notebooks with the stories and novels in their published forms. During the act of composition the tale, more often than not, was transformed, taking unto itself an emphasis or moving off in a direction hardly hinted in the notebook outline. Of many of his tales, indeed, James might have said what Dencombe, in "The Middle Years," says of one of his: "The result produced in his little book was somehow a result beyond his conscious intention; it was as if he had planted his genius, had trusted his method, and they had grown up and flowered with this sweetness."2 Or as James more ecstatically testified on his own behalf in a notebook entry: "Make your little story, find your little story, tell your little story, and leave the rest to the gods !"3 Nothing in either the notebooks or the prefaces betrays whether James had ever noticed how frequently, not to say obsessively, his novels and tales centre upon a particular relation, move toward it or away from it-the relation of marriage. Might it not appear that of the major story-tellers in our language marriage was especially of the essence for Henry James? This means marriage not only as a theme but as an instrument of composition, controlling and defining the pattern of a tale or a novel. And in marriage must be included, of course, all its parerga and by-products: wooings, courtships, engagements, vows kept and vows broken, adultery, divorce-renunciations, frustrations, and triumphs. To such a view of James's fiction support is strangely and strongly given by the most teasing of his tales: "The Figure in the Carpet."4 This story James conceived and composed during October and November of 1895. It comes out of one of the most creative periods of his career. He planned it while he was still working his way through The Spoils of Poynton, was preparing for What Maisie Knew, and was looking forward to the handling of material that 1 0. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature (New York, 1955), p. 13 (originally published 1922). 2 In The New York Edition of Henry lames (New York, 1907-9, reissued 1961-64), XVI. Hereafter cited as NY.

3 F. 0. Matthiessen and Kenneth B. Murdock, eds., The Notebooks of Henry lames (New York, 1961), p. 157 (originally published 1947). Hereafter cited as Notebooks. 4 First published in Cosmopolis (Jan.-Feb., 1896); reprinted in Embarrassments (London, 1896); in NY, XV.

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James

in time was to bring to birth The Wings of the Dove, The Golden Bowl, The Awkward Age, and a variety of shorter things. 5 Moreover, "The Figure in the Carpet" belongs to the crucial year in which his life as a writer reached and rounded a turning point. On the evening of January 5 of 1895 had occurred the premiere of his play Guy Domville. That evening at the St. James Theatre, as it proceeded, brought forth signs of discontent and disquiet and it ended in disaster. Guy Domville was a failure; and no one who has read it can deny that it deserved to be a failure. It was not James's last play, but it brought to an end his dream of winning renown-and making some money-as a dramatist. Worse still, when the curtain calls were being taken the manager of the company ill-advisedly-or maliciously-thrust James forward to receive full in the face a volley of boos and hisses scarcely mitigated by enthusiastic applause from the more expensive seats. 6 As a piece of symbolic action-the repudiation of the artist by his public-it was agonizing; it could have been annihilating. The sequel strikingly exemplifies the recuperative power of genius. James survived his hour of anguish-survived it, transcended it. From his dramatic years James drew lessons that he was able to apply to his own proper craft, the craft of fiction, and, strengthened rather than diminished as an artist, go forward to achieve the greatest works of his career. If that has been [he wrote in his notebook] one side of the moral of the whole unspeakable, the whole tragic experience, I almost bless the pangs and the pains and the miseries of it. If there has lurked in the central core of it this exquisite truth-I almost hold my breath with suspense as I try to formulate it; so much, so much, hangs radiantly there as depending on it-this exquisite truth that what I call the divine principle in question is a key that, working in the same general way, fits the complicated chambers of both the dramatic and the narrative lock; IF, I say, I have crept round through long apparent barrenness, through suffering and sadness intolerable, to that rare perception-why my infinite little loss is converted into an almost infinite little gain. 7

"The Figure in the Carpet" is a story about a writer, like James a novelist, whose novels, like James's in the 1890's, are read and esteemed by only a select few and wholly understood by practically no one. They are novels that are animated by an unperceived yet vital "divine principle." So the novelist, Hugh Vereker, discloses to a young journalist who serves as the narrator of the story. For "The Figure in the Carpet" is characteristically Jamesian in method as well as theme. The telling of the story, as was becoming more and more James's way, is turned over to a first-person narrator, one 0 Notebooks, pp. 214-29, 233, 235. 6Leon Edel, ed., The Collected Plays of

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Henry James (New York and London, 1949), pp. 465-83.

7Notebooks, p. 188.

Munro Beattie of the characters in the story who is something more than a looker-on, something less than a participant in the main action. "A coerced spectator" he calls himself. To this young man, a slightly simple-minded reviewer for The Middle, one of the intellectual weeklies, in a talk late one night during one of those long country weekends without which one can hardly imagine the stories of James, Vereker confides that there has always been a "particular thing I've written my books most for." There's an idea in my work without which I wouldn't have given a straw for the whole job. . .. It stretches, this little trick of mine, from book to book, and everything else, comparatively, plays over the surface of it. The order, the form, the texture of my books will perhaps some day constitute for the initiated a complete representation of it. [NY, XV, 230-31]

The young reviewer is so stimulated by Vereker' s disclosure that upon his return to London he searches through the works of the master for that "general intention ... the organ of life . . . the exquisite scheme . . . the figure in the carpet"-but in vain. He passes on Vereker' s tantalizing revelation to a fellow worker on The Middle, George Corvick. Presently Vereker regrets his nocturnal admission and calls back his secret. Too late; Corvick knows and what's more has hurried off to pass on the exciting news to his fiancee, a minor novelist upon whom James conferred the atrocious name Gwendolen Erme. Corvick and Gwendolen have been captivated by Vereker's riddle and combine their intellectual and analytic powers in a passionate probing of Vereker's novels. I was out in the cold [goes on the narrator] while, by the evening fire, under the lamp, they followed the chase for which I myself had sounded the horn. They did as I had done, only more deliberately and sociably-they went over their author from the beginning. There was no hurry, Corvick said-the future was before them and the fascination could only grow; they could take him page by page, as they would take one of the classics, inhale him in slow draughts and let him sink all the way in. They would scarce have got so wound up, I think, if they hadn't been in love: poor Vereker's inner meaning gave them endless occasion to put and to keep their young heads together. [243]

Corvick is sent off to India on a commission from another magazine, still striving to divine the secret. There, in the East, he at last penetrates to the heart of the mystery. So he triumphantly informs Gwendolen by cable from Bombay; and Vereker, when Corvick seeks him out in Rapallo on his way back to England, confirms. Yes, Corvick has traced out unmistakably the figure in the carpet. Corvick returns to London, marries the exalted Gwendolen, is killed in an accident during their honeymoon, but not, evidently, before passing on the sublime secret to the wife of his bosom. Gwendolen Corvick, however, utterly refuses to divulge the mystery to the still baffled 95

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reviewer-narrator. He is more out in the cold than ever. "I have heard everything," writes the widow, "and I mean to keep it to myself!" (263) And she does. She remarries after a decent interval, and dies several years later in childbed. Now at last, the reviewer-narrator exults, from her second husband he will learn the exquisite answer to Vereker's exquisite riddle. But no! The widower, Corvick's successor but not apparently his equal in Gwendolen's esteem, has never heard of it. He doesn't even know what his questioner is talking about. So the story ends : He listened with deepening attention, and I became aware, to my surprise, by his ejaculations, by his questions, that he would have been after all not unworthy to be trusted by his wife. So abrupt an experience of her want of trust had now a disturbing effect on him; but I saw the immediate shock throb away little by little and then gather again into waves of wonder and curiosity-waves that promised, I could perfectly judge, to break in the end with the fury of my own highest tides. I may say that to-day as victims of unappeased desire there isn't a pin to choose between us. The poor man's state is almost my consolation; there are really moments when I feel it to be quite my revenge. [277] II

It is usual to read "The Figure in the Carpet" as one of the great parables of literature for our times, an exemplum and a gospel for a whole generation of close textual analysts. So Andre Gide referred to it in his Journal 8 and T. 5. Eliot conferred extraordinary prestige upon it by his allusion in the Introduction to G. Wilson Knight's The Wheel of Fire, 9 where, however, he miscalled it the pattern in the carpet. As a parable the story may even have autobiographical implications. Is Hugh Vereker one of the impersonations of Henry James? Does the tale tell us of something in James's own fictions that he prized with special pride and that was missed by the superficial readers and reviewers of his day? One might go so far as to speculate upon what for James in his own work constituted the "divine principle" that Vereker attributes to his, the "unifying scheme" that makes a design throughout the entire body of his writings. Might it be, for instance, his preoccupation with the limited point of view? Or his need to project the events of a story through the consciousness of one of the characters and thus avoid "the mere muffled majesty of irresponsible 'authorship,' " 10 or his deliberate policy of alternating the "pictorial" method with the "dramatic" method of story-telling? Was it, rather, an all-embracing view of life, of good and evil, derived, as Quentin Anderson11 would have it, from his father's, Henry James Sr.'s, odd and exhilarating philosophy of love and freedom? 8 Journal,

1889-1939 (Paris, 1948), p. 847. 9The Wheel of Fire: Interpretations of Shakespearian Tragedy (London, 1930).

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10"Preface" to The Golden Bowl, NY, XXIII. 11 The American Henry James (New Bruns-

wick, N.J., 1957).

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Could it be that the story intimates that for James marriage possessed a special affinity with the art of fiction? "The Figure in the Carpet" is an intensely literary story, on the surface, having to do with writers and reviewers and critical discoveries. Yet how curiously the literary theme is involved with feelings and events that are by no means literary-with love, with marriage, with the communion of lovers and the sharing of sacred secrets within the bonds of marriage. Contemplate the following oddities, mere narrative encumbrances unless they are to be taken as significant: Corvick's involvement with Gwendolen provides the direct, and unexpected, occasion for the narrator's first meeting with Vereker. Corvick's and Gwendolen's engagement is mysteriously "off" so long as the secret is unguessed; "on" again, even more mysteriously, the instant she receives Corvick's "Eureka" from Bombay. The secret serves not only as a bond between married lovers; it is also a barometer and a means of discriminating between husbands. Gwendolen's second is loved with a lesser passion that disqualifies him from sharing the supreme confidence. The narrator sharply feels himself an outsider, excluded from emotional as well as intellectual gratification, while Gwendolen and Corvick put their young heads together. At the end, he is still a victim of-odd phrase in the context-"unappeased desire." So intermingled are his concerns and motives that he is almost prepared to offer marriage to Gwendolen when, after Corvick's death, she has become a handsome young widow. "Was I prepared to offer her this price for the blessing of her knowledge? Ah that way madness lay! . .. I could see meanwhile the torch she refused to pass on flame away in her chamber of memory-pour through her eyes a light that shone in her lonely house." (265-66) "Was the figure in the carpet," he wonders, "traceable or describable only for husbands and wives-for lovers supremely united?" So it might be, for Vereker had said something very strange and suggestive when the narrator had admitted to passing on the secret to Corvick which Corvick had passed on to Gwendolen: Vereker seemed struck with this. "Do you mean they're to be married?" "I dare say that's what it will come to." "That may help them," he conceded, "but we must give them time!" (240] III

"The Figure in the Carpet" is one of the tales collected by F. 0. Matthiessen as James's Stories of Writers and Artists.12 In these stories James raised questions from out of his own life as a writer that still have the power to agitate 12New York, 1944.

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the artist and the critic. Is the artist justified in inflicting upon us a vision of life that shocks and disturbs us, affronting our sense of decency? How does the artist reconcile his integrity as an artist with the need to earn a living, to support a wife and children? By what means and in what measure should the artist prevent himself from being lionized, turned into a celebrity by the popular press and the culture vultures who have no real sense of his worth as an artist? Should the artist dedicate himself utterly to his art, renouncing all claims of family and private affections? These are literary and aesthetic themes. Yet in the working out of each story the artist's problem curiously mingles itself with a personal and private dilemma having to do, in every story, with marriage. A principle of plotmaking so persistent almost invites us to seek out a significance. James cannot have been merely concerned about the "love interest" which he conceded to be a requisite of popular fiction but which, as surely as Virginia Woolf a generation later,13 he mistrusted and deplored. In "The Author of Beltraffio" (NY, XVI), for instance, the wife of the author chooses to let her little son die rather than be contaminated by his father's pernicious ideas and books. James characteristically refrains from specifying the nature of the corruption, but the story clearly specifies the arena of the struggle-the domestic scene-and the contenders for power-a husband and a wife. Ray Limbert in "The Next Time" (NY, XV) writes beautiful novels that are "exquisite failures." The critics overwhelm them with praise, his readers constitute a cult, but the vast reading public prefers the confections of his sister-in-law, Jane Highmore. Earnestly Limbert strives to turn out-the next time-a novel that will sell. And why the endeavour to exploit his art? So that he can afford to marry, and, as the years go by, keep the pot boiling for the sustenance of his wife, his children, and his wife's mother. Young Doctor Hugh who, in "The Middle Years" (NY, XVI), becomes the companion and comforter of the dying novelist Dencombe does so only at some cost. Marriage, it is intimated, is one of the sacrifices required by his devotion. The marital motif is most tenuous in this story, perhaps because the characteristic relation is transferred to the two men, Dencombe and Doctor Hugh, whose devotion is almost wifely. The narrator of "The Death of the Lion" (NY, XV) issues more felicitously from his involvement with a dying novelist. Fanny Hurter, the lovely, black-haired, blue-eyed American girl, is the only person in the story strong and sensitive enough to refrain from taking any part in the devastation of Neil Paraday; even the narrator, as he obliquely admits, is not free of guilt. But he has his reward nevertheless. 13"Modem Fiction" in The Common Reader (London, 1925).

98

Munro Beattie Paraday dies, his last manuscript disappears, but the narrator is not alone in his grief and his search for the lost masterpiece. Fortunately I've a devoted associate in the person of a young lady who has every day a fresh indignation and a fresh idea, and who maintains with intensity that the prize will still turn up. Sometimes I believe her, but I've quite ceased to believe myself. The only thing for us at all events is to go on seeking and hoping together, and we should be closely united by this firm tie even were we not at present by another. [154]

In "The Lesson of the Master" (NY, XV) marriage provides the motive, the crisis, and the climax. The master is the eminent novelist Henry St. George. St. George warns the aspiring young writer Paul Overt against the perils of the married condition, the perils for the artist of taking on, as St. George has done, a wife, children, a household-all the demands and distractions of domesticity. This is the lesson of the master. Overt half-convinced goes off for a period to think over the master's admonition, turning half-reluctantly away from the charming Miss Fancourt for whom he has faintly felt the first stirrings of passion. When he comes back the master, recently become a widower, has married the girl. It is hard to resist supposing that the joke is meant to be on young Overt. The lesson of the master is that for an artist there can be no lesson where the heart and the sensibilities are concerned. If you haven't the gumption to love a woman, don't try to make an artistic principle out of your deficiency. Surely we must hear a sardonic note in the final words of the story: "Nature had dedicated him to intellectual, not to personal passion." Surely the place for Paul Overt is among the half-men of James's stories, from Winterbourne in "Daisy Miller" to Marcher in "The Beast in the Jungle," who have never known "the awful daring of a moment's surrender," the ancestors and uncles of J. Alfred Prufrock. Questions of other kinds are raised in two stories that might have been included in Matthiessen's collection: "The Coxon Fund" and "The Aspern Papers." Is the artist, in the end, helped or hurt by patronge, the largesse of a wealthy benefactor or the favour of a foundation? This question, which was to become considerably more pertinent in the years after James's career was over, is taken up in "The Coxon Fund" (NY, XV) . But it is dealt with only marginally. The story, after all, centres not so much upon the fund and its possible beneficiary, the Coleridge figure Frank Saltram, as upon the contention between Ruth Anvoy-another charming American devotee of the arts-and her fiance, George Gravener, the member for Clockborough, over how they ought to use the money that her uncle intended for the endowment of research. The Coxon Fund, as it turns out, quite extinguishes the last spark of Saltram's creative energy. What is of more moment in the 99

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story, it puts a period to the possibility of marriage between Gravener and Miss Anvoy. The Aspem papers are, in the ending of the story, inextricably and fatally involved with marriage (NY, XII). The narrator of events-the "publishing scoundrel" whose nefarious researches are frustrated by Miss Bordereauis offered the papers by Miss Bordereau's niece, Miss Tina, as her own dowry. When he shamefully discloses his incapacity to respond, Miss Tina bums the precious documents one by one. The sole moment of beauty brought to pass in the to-do over the papers has nothing to owe to the dead poet Jeffrey Aspern or to his long-surviving mistress, Juliana Bordereau, or to the papers themselves. Transfiguration is achieved by Miss Tina's vision of possible love and marriage. Poor Miss Tina's sense of her failure had produced a rare alteration in her, but I had been too full of stratagems and spoils to think of that. Now I took it in; I can scarcely tell how it startled me. She stood in the middle of the room with a face of mildness bent upon me, and her look of forgiveness, of absolution, made her angelic. It beautified her; she was younger; she was not a ridiculous old woman. This trick of her expression, this magic of her spirit, transfigured her, and while I still noted it I heard a whisper somewhere in the depths of my conscience: "Why not, after all-why not?" [141-42] IV

A look through James's shorter fictions in general-all 112 of them recently reissued in the dozen handsome volumes of The Complete Tales of Henry James edited by Leon Edel1 4-reminds us that their pages are strewn by the score with suitors and sweethearts and husbands, with wives and widows and widowers, with engagements entered upon or ended, and with adultery-a minor speciality of the master. The very first of the short stories to be published, in February of 1864, is a triangular trifle in which a Frenchwoman of a kind young Henry James could have become acquainted with only in the fiction of Balzac or Merimee plots the murder of her husband but brings about, instead, the death of her lover. 15 James's art of fiction was to undergo a wondrous development, the theme of marriage was to be wondrously diversified, between this death by the knife and death by betrayal in The Wings of the Dove forty years later. James's career began as the Civil War was ending. From direct experience of the war he was debarred, both by temperament and by "a horrid even if an obscure hurt" incurred one night as a volunteer firefighter in Newport 14 New York and London, 1962. Hereafter cited as CT.

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15"The

Tragedy of Error" in CT, I, 23-47.

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when he was nineteen. 16 War could have been, in any event, no fit subject for James. In the earliest stories battle rages, it is true, but far beyond the horizon. Though some of the principal characters are young soldiers carried home to recuperate or to die of their wounds, the emotional centres of these stories are in their relations with young women as suitors or husbands-to-be. One of these early tales, "The Story of a Year" (CT, I), relates how a girl engaged to a young soldier-when she hears, mistakenly, that he has been fatally wounded-transfers her affection to another soldier; her fiance, however, survives, only to succumb in the end to the shock, vindictively administered by his mother, of learning of his sweetheart's perfidy. Another tale, "A Most Extraordinary Case" (CT, I), similarly associates love with death in a time of war: the death of a young soldier, supposed to be convalescent, when he realizes that he can only hopelessly long for a young woman engaged to another man. Still another of these early stories, "Poor Richard" (CT, I), is a rigmarole of rival soldier suitors, prevarications in the name of love, and at last disillusionment and spinsterhood for the young woman of the tale. James found his true subject-matter in the social scene of the troubled and expansive period between the end of the war and the opening of the twentieth century. This was an era when America was confronting the nations of Europe with new demands and expectations, seeking to understand and to be understood by the rest of the world. James found fulfilment as an interpreter. The international theme came readiest to his pen. "I aspire to write in such a way," he explained to his brother William in a letter of 1888, "that it would be impossible to an outsider to say whether I am at a given moment an American writing about England or an Englishman writing about America ... and far from being ashamed of such an ambiguity I should be exceedingly · proud of it; for it would be highly civilized." 17 James most frequently figures forth the clash of cultures as an encounter between a marriageable American girl and a European young man, and the young man's family and friends. However the affair might end, marriage was the means of making the story's point. James's American girls, so lovely and lively and nubile, excessively nubile--Daisy and Bessie and Lily and Laura and Francie and Nancy-give off to European eyes a special kind of radiance. It is at times a troubling kind of radiance that derived from what used to be known as American innocence--and it evidently used to exist, too-from what James once wrote of as the American girl's "moral spontaneity . . . intellectual grace." 18 The American girl of the seventies and eighties gave off James, Notes of a Son and Brother (London, 1914), p. 277; see also Leon Edel, Henry lames : The Untried Years, 18431870 (New York and London, 1953), pp.

16Henry

173-83.

17 The Letters of Henry James, selected and edited by Percy Lubbock (New York, 1920),

I, 141-42. I, 26.

18 Ibid.,

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to European eyes radiance of another sort-the glitter of papa's millions. Papa might have been a robber baron or merely a fortunate drudge in the world of high finance brought into being by the Civil War, in an era of "transcendent calculation and imaginative gambling" (as Adam Verver remembered his years of darkness) "the creation of 'interests' that were the extinction of other interests, the livid vulgarity even of getting in, or getting out, first" (NY, XXIII, 144). However come by, the millions might enhance an eminent European title or shore up a fine old European house fallen on thriftless days. Marriage was the golden bridge between America and Europe. In the seventies and eighties the transfer of wealth by marriage was a topical theme, Sunday supplement stuff, in an age when magnificent American dowries-Vanderbilt, Astor, Gould, Goelet millions-went to market for European titles and names. 19 In James's stories of international courtship and marriage, the young woman from America was almost always in difficulty. If she married, she was bound to be perplexed by customs and expectations alien to any she had known back home: by racial and religious peculiarities, as in "The Last of the Valerii" (CT, Ill); by continental notions about the duties of wife to husband, husband to wife, as in "Madame de Mauves" (NY, XIII); by a new and confusing code of honour and a strange view of a man's place in the world, as in The Golden Bowl. Unmarried, the American girl in Europe must pick her way with care among inhibitions and suspicions that seem to her hypocritical or superfluous. Else the terrible question will rise to the lips of her kin and compatriots: Has she been compromised? Silly stubborn little Daisy Miller is innocently but fatally entangled in the meshes of European opinion (NY, XVIII). Laura Wing, in "A London Life," does compromise herself-or so she thinks-as she struggles to cope with an adultery and a divorce (her sister's) played out according to the English rules (NY, X). In-laws afford further complications. Francie Dosson, in "The Reverberator," is the means of exposing her French fiance's family to the crudities of American journalism. Miss Gunton of Poughkeepsie cancels her engagement to an Italian prince rather than submit to a snub, by American standards, from his aristocratic mother. In "An International Episode," a Newport belle rejects a London lord after a brief tussle with his mother, the Duchess of Westminster, and his sister, the Countess of Pimlico (NY, XIV). But in "The Siege of London," a shady lady from the far west not only provokes a proposal from a youthful peer but extorts recognition from her prospective mother- and sister-in-law (NY, XIV). In "Lady Barberina," the mirror of marriage is tilted at another angle: Lady Barberina 19Elizabeth Eliot, Heiresses and Coronets: The Story of Lovely Ladies and Noble Men (New York, 1957).

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marries a well-to-do Yankee but, in the end, cannot endure life imprisonment as his wife in America (NY, XIV) . Now and again, especially in his final period, James-the prolific old virtuoso of fiction-was carried away a little by his passion for pattern-making, and turned out some extremely odd little stories of marriage. One of these queer stories achieves a melancholy kind of beauty : "The Bench of Desolation," an excursion into Arnold Bennett country (CT, XII) . A young woman wins a breach of promise suit (this too an aspect of marriage!), saves and profitably invests the money awarded her, and years later comes back to be the aid and solace and salvation financially of the man who jilted her. In "Mora Montravers" (a sally into H. G. Wells territory), a young woman, one of the advanced young women of the Edwardian era, dismays her relatives by repudiating marriage, as a proof of high principle, and going off to "live with" her artist lover (CT, XII). In "The Special Type" (suggested, the Notebooks [p. 232] inform us, by the Vanderbilt divorce) a woman falls in love with the man whom, quite chastely, she has helped to obtain a divorce so that he may marry another woman (CT, XI). And in an early story, entitled II A Problem," a couple manage to be married twice (CT, I). Some kind of limit is arrived at in "Maud-Evelyn" (CT, XI). A young man is taken up, virtually adopted, by a wealthy middle-aged couple whose only child, Maud-Evelyn, has been dead these fifteen years. They still keep in touch with her, however, by means of seances and table-tappings. Determined that their dead daughter shall not, in their memory of her, have missed out on life's most precious experience, they persuade the young man-whose name, alas, is Marmaduke-to assume over the years that follow their meeting him a succession of roles : as Maud-Evelyn's grieving suitor, then as her former fiance, then her husband, and at the last her widower. With Marmaduke as their accomplice, Maud-Evelyn's parents have made over the past. In the end, after his patrons have died leaving him well provided for, Marmaduke lives on in Kensington but maintains, and regularly visits, the house in Westboume Terrace furnished for the young couple that never was and decked out with the gifts for a wedding that never took place, never could have taken place. This macabre little masterpiece curiously extends the theme of marriage beyond the limits of time and space, beyond even the limits of reason and probability. V

Marriage is so prevalent in the novels that we might well ask which of them is conceivable without it. Passions spin the plots but marriage defines and directs the action : marriage longed for or schemed for, marriage postponed, 103

James

marriage thwarted, marriage triumphant. In Roderick Hudson, to begin with, Christina Light's marriage to Prince Casamassima serves a double function: to represent Christina's enslavement to a corrupt and conventional society and to supply the climactic impetus for Roderick's ultimate act of self-destruction. The American is one of James's fictional studies in the contrasts between two societies. The means by which he dramatizes and gives narrative shape to the abstractions of cultural history is a marriage; rather a marriage that is prevented from coming to pass, the marriage that might have been between the American Christopher Newman and Claire de Cintre, the daughter of an old and repressive French family. Another marriage is frustrated in Washington Square, and the novel is wholly about this. The marriage in view not only imposes a design on the action of the novel but also shows forth the characters of Dr. Sloper, his daughter Catherine, and the fortune-seeking suitor, Morris Townsend. Isabel Archer's destiny in The Portrait of a Lady presents itself in the archetypal plot device of a choice among three possibilities-for Isabel, three marriages: with Lord Warburton, with Gilbert Osmond, with Caspar Goodwood. She fatally makes the wrong choice; marriage provides the occasion for her error in understanding and self-understanding; marriage is her doom and the mise-en-scene of her suffering. The Spoils of Poynton illustrates the fashion in which as he worked out a story James transformed it from the "germ" as recorded in his notebooks to something richer and rarer. What began as a story of strife over some exquisite pieces of furniture deepened into a struggle of conscience, in the fine high-pitched moral sensibility of Fleda Vetch, and the controlling circumstance is an engagement. Divorce and remarriage produce the phantasmagoria of Maisie's world in What Maisie Knew, a world understood in bits and pieces by the child. Like Lewis Carroll's Alice-another little girl lovingly created by a Victorian bachelor-Maisie must interpret for herself a world disordered by the iniquities and fatuities of the grown-ups. A slightly older girl-child, Nanda Brookenham, is the centre of the shifting scene brilliantly recorded in The Awkward Age, a novel which, like What Maisie Knew, derives its momentum from matrimonial shifts and schemes. Marriage, finally, is of the very texture of each of the three great novels of the final period. A marriage is in question when Lambert Strether, in The Ambassadors, seeks out Chad Newsome in Paris. The denouement is of marriages: the marriage that at last Chad is probably about to choose, for the wrong reason; the marriage that Strether renounces for the right reason. In The Wings of the Dove Kate Croy's determination to be married without loss of splendour is the soil out of which springs the evil flower, a lustrous dark blossom, of the scheme to acquire Milly's millions. And The Golden Bowl? Here is James's supreme work and the greatest novel of marriage in the language. It must receive further consideration later. 104

Munro Beattie VI

"But enough of this," as Dryden has said; "there is such a variety of game springing up before me that I am distracted in my choice, and know not which to follow." It would be more profitable, at this point, to speculate on the question: Why did marriage so persistently provide the dynamics of James's fiction? Answers of various kinds suggest themselves. If such an institution as marriage had not existed, James would have had to invent it, being the kind of novelist he was. His art as a story-teller was less an affair of structure than design, pattern and complication: a close and intense cluster of relations that he might modulate through shifts of consciousness and understanding, centred in a problem or stratagem that needed working out; or, as a character in "The Story In It" puts it, "The subject the novelist treats is the rise, the formation, the development, the climax, and for the most part the decline of [a relation]" (NY, XVIII, 425). By such a distribution of elements James achieved line-"the only thing I value in a flction." 20 What could be a more compelling centre for narrative organization than a marriage in the stages of becoming or failing to become? Moreover, James had it in his mind to emulate the novelist whom, on the whole, he ranked as chief of their profession: Balzac. James, too, aspired to create a comedie humaine, to be the moral historian of his era, even though on a considerably smaller scale than Balzac's. "I want," he wrote to Stevenson, "to leave a multitude of pictures of my time, projecting my small circular frame upon as many different spots as possible and going in for number as well as quality, so that the number may constitute a total having a certain value as observation and testimony." 21 Accordingly, he chose a central human theme, the "great relation between men and women, the constant worldrenewal,"22 as he felt it to be, in the manifestation most characteristic of his time. It was a manifestation that gave fullest play to the kind of art he wished to create and was able to create. For the English novel first realized itself as a distinct genre when it found its way into Lady Booby's boudoir or into the "great parlour" of the Harlowe family; and since the eighteenth century its peculiar province has been domestic, familial, matrimonial. Marriage has, for the novelist, the double value of providing an occasion and a focus for feeling and conflict and, at the same time, placing the particular situation in a context 20Leon Edel, ed., Selected Letters of Henry lames (London, 1956), p. 193. This is from a letter to Hugh Walpole, whom James affectionately but firmly chides for having allowed his line, in Maradick at Forty, to have been "replaced by a vast formless feather-bediness."

21Janet Adam Smith, ed., Henry lames and Robert Louis Stevenson: A Record of Friendship and Criticism (London, 1948), p. 175.

22Leon Edel, ed., The Future of the No-oel: Essays on the Art of Fiction (New York, 1956), p. 39.

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of customs, conventions, and manners, the pressures and complicities of class, the values and taboos of an entire society. The novelist's subject is the world, or those corners of the world he best knows as they represent and illustrate the life of his times. Henry James' s world tends, on the whole, to be the world of the wealthy, the cosmopolitan, the fashionable, the privileged; a world in which, greatly to his convenience, the characters, released from mere money-grubbing or housekeeping, can devote their energies to the cherishing of scruples and the analysis of motives and reactions. James was no snob. He did not deny the rich the right to suffer and to be morally judged. He knew this glittering world for what it was. He knew its dark quarters and its murky depths. Both his letters and his sister Alice's journal-notes on their conversations make it clear that he missed none of the upper-class iniquities of his day. In the decade of sensational divorces in high society, scandals that touched even the throne itself, he wrote, on one occasion, for example, of the hideous ... divorce case, which will besmirch exceedingly the already very damaged prestige of the English upper class. The condition of that body seems to me to be in many ways very much the same rotten and collapsible one as that of the French aristocracy before the revolution-minus cleverness and conversation; or perhaps it's more like the heavy, congested and depraved Roman world upon which the barbarians came down .... Much of English life is grossly materialistic and wants blood-letting. 23

James knew, too, as well as Shaw did (the Shaw of Widowers' Houses), and probably without ever having read a blue-book, from what sinister sources the wealth of the upper and middle classes of England and America had been derived: "the black and merciless things that are behind the great possessions."24 And, after all, James was temperamentally and hereditarily disposed to feel that life is a dark jungle. "I have the imagination of disaster," he confided to A. C. Benson, and see life indeed as ferocious and sinister."25 His readers, then, should not be surprised that in his pictures of the world marriage frequently figures as a refuge against the world-against treachery, cruelty, humiliation, disillusionment, misunderstanding, loneliness. "Ah, love, let us be true to one another," he might, like another eminent Victorian, have pleaded, "for the world ... 11

Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light, Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain. 2SLubbock, ed., Letters, I, 124.

24"Notes for The Ivory Tower" in NY, XXV, 295.

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25 Henry James, Letters to A . C. Benson and Auguste Monod: now first published and edited with an introduction by E. F. Benson (London and New York, 1930), p. 35.

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Especially in the later stories, his baffled and battered heroes, or non-heroesSpencer Bryden of "The Jolly Corner," White-Mason of "Crapy Cornelia," Stuart Strait of "Broken Wings," Herbert Dodd of "The Bench of Desolation" -seem each of them to subside at last, gasping with relief rather than ardour, into the almost maternally solicitous arms of a faithful woman. Each of the women, and this is a curiously recurrent motif of these later tales, offers the sanctuary of a charming room exquisitely though somewhat meagrely furnished with a few fine old pieces. 26 Earlier tales, as well, represented marriage as a haven, an alliance against troubles and griefs. In "The Marriages" Adela Chart tells a whopping great lie to prevent her father's remarriage. At one stroke she deprives her father of the comfort and companionship that a well-to-do widow is eager to share with him, and her brother of aid in extricating himself from an entanglement with an adventuress. Hence the plural of the title: for the marriage that was prevented, and the marriage that, unhappily, came to pass. Adela in all her maiden awfulness delighted Robert Louis Stevenson when he first read the story in the Atlantic Monthly of August, 1891. From Samoa he wrote to James, "a whoop for Adela. 0 she's delicious, delicious .... You never did a straighter thing and never will." His enthusiasm for Adela provoked him to verse: Adela, Adela, Adela Chart, What have you done to my elderly heart? Of all the ladies of paper and ink I count you the paragon, call you the pink ... I pore on you, dote on you, clasp you to heart, I laud, love, and laugh at you, Adela Chart, And thank my dear maker the while I admire That I can be neither your husband nor sire. 27

Adela Chart perceives when it is too late what despoilment she has wrought. In the midst of family tribulations, the burden might have been lessened for her father simply by his having someone to talk to: "Adela dropped her hands, staring; she felt that she had walked in darkness. 'So that he had to meet it alone?'" (NY, XVIII, 300) The story concludes as she pronounces a life sentence upon both her father and herself: "Papa defended me, he refused to sacrifice me, and this led practically to their rupture. Papa gave her up, as it were, for me. Fancy the angel, and fancy what I must try to be to him for the rest of my life!" (304) Falsehood and marriage come together also in "The Liar" (NY, XII). The painter Oliver Lyon, whose point of view ostensibly controls the narrative, 26CT,

XII, 196, 204, 359-60, 438.

2 7 Smith,

206-8.

ed., James and Stevenson, pp.

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discovers that Colonel Capadose is a deliberate and incessant liar. What most horrifies Lyon is that Capadose's beautiful wife skilfully backs up his most flagrant falsehoods and serves, at the end, as his accomplice in destroying Lyon's all too revealing portrait of Capadose. Lyon's ultimate judgmentsuspect because of his former love for Mrs. Capadose and his envy of her husband-is that the wife has been contaminated. "Truly, her husband had trained her well." "The Liar" is a striking instance of James's ambiguity of intent. By any usual moral standard Mrs. Capadose might well be decreed a hypocrite and a prevaricator. Yet if the reader tilted the story round in his mind so that light shone off another facet, he might concede that her complicity is, rather, the sign and seal of her devotion. This Lyon should have divined when, seeing her for the first time in many years, he watched her down the long dinner table at Stayes: "She was leaning forward a little, she remained in profile . ... She was listening, but her eyes moved, and after a moment Lyon followed their direction .... She was looking at Colonel Capadose as if she had been in love with him-an odd business for the proudest, most reserved of women." (320-1) Lyon is the outsider, like the journalist of "The Figure in the Carpet." So, in a slighter measure, is the artist who tells the story of "The Real Thing." In a slighter measure because he does, after all, recognize the source from which Major Monarch and his wife draw the staunchness with which they endure their stylish indigence. The Monarchs are failures as models, pathetic in their fashionable faded grooming and behaviour; but their love is strong enough to hold them straight. When they were separate his occupation was gone-and they never had been separate. I judged rightly that in their awkward situation their close union was their main comfort and that this union had no weak spot. It was a real marriage, an encouragement to the hesitating, a nut for pessimists to crack. Their address was humble ... and I could fancy the lamentable lodgings in which the Major would have been left alone. He could sit there more or less grimly with his wife-he couldn't sit there anyhow without her. [NY, XVIII, 324) Readers there are, no doubt, who will find a little sombre and subdued these consolations and benefits of marriage. They might be more elated by the more aggressive partnership entered into in the story called "Pandora" (NY, XVIII). Pandora Day, one of the new self-made girls of the era, goes to Washington, and by her free and charming way with the President wins for her husband an important diplomatic posting. More excitement, too, seems likely to be generated by the marriage that impends at the conclusion of The Bostonians: 11 'Ah, now I am glad!' said Verena, when they reached the street. But though she was glad, he presently discovered that, beneath her hood, she was in tears. 108

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It is to be feared that with the union, so far from brilliant, into which she was about to enter, these were not the last she was destined to shed." 28 Ransome has succeeded in snatching Verena Tarrant from the Boston Music Hall and from domination by Olive Chancellor but seems likely to be carrying her into a restless even if more rewarding relation. The marriage of Felix Young and Gertrude Wentworth at the close of The Europeans is likewise an act of liberation; Gertrude is emancipated from an oppressive New England attitude to life. Gertrude and Felix, we are told, "were imperturbably happy and they went far away"-that is, to Europe--but back across the Atlantic comes "the echo of a gayety of her own, mingled with that of her husband."29 Vll

An objection, however, has been raised, and by a few critics pretty loudly. A vital something, they complain, is lacking in James's tales of love and marriage: sexual passion. Surely, those who deplore the inadequate carnality of Henry James-for instance, E. M. Forster,30 from whom the complaint comes a trifle curiously-have missed those three tremendous kisses, possibly the most overwhelming kisses in modern literature, though, in point of strict accuracy, all three occur outside of marriage. 31 The trouble, in part, was that James had to work within ineluctable limits of which he was well aware. One was defined by what the British public would tolerate-the B.P., as he irritatedly referred to it, contrasting it with the French reading public and contrasting what was permitted to French authors with what English (and, of course, American) authors could hope to get away with in the treatment of the "man-woman relation." Half of life [he lamented in 1880] is a sealed book to young unmarried ladies [that is, the chief part of the novelist's public in the eighties] and how can a novel be worth anything that deals only with half of life? ... It may be said that our English system is a good thing for virgins and boys, and a bad thing for the novel itself ... considered as a composition that treats of life at large and helps us to know. 32

As late as 1894, he deprecates, in his notebook, the difficulty of developing a notion that had come to him for a story: "What is of the essence is the whole question, difficult to present to English readers, of the 'sexual' side of the business, the element of pursuit, possession, conquest etc., on the men's part and of danger, response, desire, surrender, etc., on the part of the women." 33 28New York, 1945, p. 378 (originally published 1886). 29f, O. Matthiessen, ed., The American Novels and Stories of Henry James (New York, 1956), p. 161. SOAspects of the Novel (London, 1927), ch.

VIII. 3 1 The

Portrait of a Lady, ch. 55; The Wings of the Dove, Bk 6, ch. II; The Golden Bowl, Bk. 3, ch. v. (All refer to NY.) 32£del, ed., The Future of the Novel, p. 94. 83Notebooks, p. 157.

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This was of a story that he never wrote, probably because he well knew that no editor would touch it. It is to be doubted whether in this respect James was greatly a loser, when his passages of sexuality are compared with the anatomical specifications permitted to authors of our own day. There is surely no kind of writing in which the law of diminishing returns sets in more quickly and more deadeningly, or in which individuality of human character is so obliterated. James was wise enough to provoke the reader's collaboration through the fine principle of the power of suggestion. "Had he spoken plainly," William Lyon Phelps remarked of The Turn of the Screw, "the book might have been barred the mails." 34 At the same time, it has to be said, James was obliged to recognize, as well, the limits imposed by temperament and experience. He once rebuked his young friend and fellow novelist Hugh Walpole, whose novel Maradick at Forty he thought displayed "the prime defect of your having gone into a subject-Le., the marital, sexual, bedroom relations of Maradick and his wife ... since these are the key to the whole situation-which have to be tackled and faced to mean anything. You don't tackle and face [?them]-you can't."35 An impudent guess might be that James's treatment of passion in his earlier novels betrays a deficiency in his own emotional life and a distrust of his own instinct. The best-documented instance is in something evasive, something ambiguous, about the letters he wrote in 1870 when he received the news of Minny Temple's death. 36 More than likely, it was his own uncertainty about passion that animated or inhibited Isabel Archer in her resistance of the most ardent of her suitors, her only ardent suitor, the young American tycoon Caspar Goodwood-resistance to "each thing in his hard manhood .. . each aggressive fact of his face, his figure, his presence, justified of its intense identity and made one with this act of possession" (NY, IV, 436). Isabel's marriage to Gilbert Osmond is, whether James so recognized or intended it or not, a retreat from the demands of passion. Later, James knew better. He understood, by an astonishing enlargement of insight, what it was, above all, that Minny Temple had missed out on. When, in The Wings of the Dove, the great London physician tells Milly Theale that she must take the trouble to "live" (NY, XIX, 246), the source of life that he urges is love in the fullest measure between man and woman-love of the kind that vibrates between Kate Croy and Merton Densher, and at last is consummated in Venice, where Milly turns her face to the wall, never having experienced love of that sort. Finally, in The Golden Bowl, Maggie is compelled by a passion for her husband, the magnificent Prince Amerigo, so 34Quoted by Oscar Cargill in "Henry James as Freudian Pioneer," Chicago Review, X (Summer, 1956), 28. 35Edel, ed., Selected Letters, p. 193. 110

365ee Robert Leclair, "Henry James and Minny Temple," American Literature, XXI (March, 1949), 35-48; Edel, The Untried Years, pp. 323-33.

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intense that it frightens her, threatens to deflect her from her campaign to restore the equilibrium of the two marriages, her own and her father's, and justifies, in the end, the ruthlessness with which she works her way to final triumph. Here is the beautiful paradox with which this survey of marriages must conclude. Henry James was surely the most inveterate bachelor in the history of modern letters and probably a life-long celibate as well, though that is not the kind of information likely to be elicited by research. Nevertheless, in The Golden Bowl he has created the supreme novel of marriage in the languageby default, it may be. Other renowned novels of marriage-Madame Bovary, for example, Anna Karenina, Middlemarch, Jude the Obscure, Lady Chatterley's Lover-tell of marriages that fail or are broken away from. The Golden Bowl celebrates marriage that is redeemed and fulfilled. This is, of course, to speak crudely and simple-mindedly of a novel peculiarly, even for James, complex, ambiguous, and paradoxical. Its theme is in one aspect James's most persistent and pervasive theme: the clash between two codes of love and marriage, the American and the European. Forty years earlier, in "Madame de Mauves," no final reconciliation was possible between the American girl and her French husband; in The Golden Bowl, Maggie Verver, the American girl who marries an Italian prince, contrives a solution and a salvation for a difficult marriage. Her motives are so mingled, her feelings so diverse, her method so subtle-and James's style, of his all but ultimate period, so dense and discriminating-that the reader is at times put to the necessity of balancing in his imagination an almost intolerable mass of disparates. For all that, the novel splendidly unfolds its theme. To compare it with Marriage by H. G. Wells-the work of an author who plumed himself, no doubt, upon his superiority to James both as a theorist and a practitioner in this field-is to perceive how utterly Wells's story of marriage, in 1912 so topical as to be almost ahead of its time, has lost its lustre with the passage of the years; whereas The Golden Bowl is only coming into its own sixty year$ or more after its creation. Maggie Verver, whose story it principally is, must come to terms with marriage and learn to fill her place as wife and princess. There are moments when, curiously, she seems to epitomize all the stout-hearted, chin-up heroines of nineteenth-century popular fiction, those indomitable little women from Elsie Dinsmore to the Katy of What Katy Did, whose prime object in life is to keep papa contented and the family out of trouble. The little woman of The Golden Bowl operates, we know, with immeasurably greater subtlety and patience, under the discipline of silence and cunning-and exile, too, at times-to re-order a sorry situation into a pattern of justice and love. She is both toughminded and tender-hearted in carrying out her unswerving mission. Her vision by the end of the story has grown wide enough to embrace compassion even 111

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for Charlotte under her double doom of separation from her lover-without quite understanding what has happened-and condemnation to live out the rest of her life in the United States. Maggie is able, indeed, to imagine the very words that Charlotte will never have the opportunity of uttering: You don't know what it is to have been loved and broken with. You haven't been broken with, because in your relation what can there have been, worth speaking of, to break? Ours was everything a relation could be, filled to the brim with the wine of consciousness; and if it was to have no meaning, no better meaning than that such a creature as you could breathe upon it, at your hour, for blight, why was I myself dealt with all for deception? Why condemned after a couple of short years to find the golden flame-oh, the golden flame!-a mere handful of black ashes? [NY, XXIV, 329-30]

Only Maggie's imagination is equal to this vision of passion, for Maggie has not been "stupid," as the Prince declares and we perceive Charlotte to be. By the story's end Maggie has put into effect qualities that show her worthy to be a wife: fortitude, patience, humility, disinterested and all-embracing love, and at the same time quick response to her husband's masculinity. The figure that Maggie has woven in her carpet is unquestionably an emblem of marriage redeemed and fulfilled.

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Marston LaFrance

STEPHEN CRANE'S PRIVATE FLEMING: HIS VARIOUS BATTLES

Today The Red Badge of Courage, easily Stephen Crane's most widely read story, lies all but buried beneath layer upon layer of criticism which has been accumulating since December, 1894, when the novel first appeared-brutally reduced to about eighteen thousand words-in several American newspapers. Fortunately, the thickest layers of this existing criticism are easily identified by a generally apologetic argument which apparently stems from an error in critical method: that is, the novel is wrenched out of its proper context, its place among Crane's other writings; a different context-either historical or critical -is assumed by the critic; and the argument is developed to force the novel to conform to the shape of this new mould into which it stubbornly refuses to fit. The two most popular contexts to be found in this apologetic criticism are the naturalistic and the symbolic, and a careful look at these two critical party lines should clear the air for a common-sense reading of the novel. At perhaps the most obvious level of error, the assumption of a naturalistic context1 for The Red Badge has given rise to several studies of "sources" or "influences." This is the literary historian's attempt to identify Crane's literary fathers as Zola, Tolstoy, Stendhal, Ambrose Bierce, or John W. DeForest: 2 The Red Badge is literary naturalism; so young and ill-educated a man as Crane could hardly have created a major work of literary naturalism intuitively; therefore, Crane studied authors A, B, or C, and the novel is derivative. But The Red Badge, of course, is not literary naturalism at all; and thus Crane had no real need of reading any of these authors. He may well have read them, among others-most young writers read established practitioners while lTo avoid confusion with "realism," on one hand, and "romanticism," on the other, "naturalism" has to be defined as "a manner and method of composition by which the author portrays life as it is in accordance with the philosophic theory of determinism (exemplified in Zola's L' Assommoir). In contrast to a realist, a naturalist believes that man is fundamentally an animal without free will. To a naturalist man can be explained in terms of the forces, usually heredity and environment, which operate upon him." (Lars Ahnebrink, The Beginnings of Naturalism in American Fiction [New York, 1961], pp. vi-vii). Cf. V. L.

Parrington, Main Currents in American Thought (New York, 1930), III, 324; Oscar Cargill, Intellectual America (New York, 1941), pp. 13, 53; C. C. Walcutt, "Harold Frederic and American Naturalism," American Literature, XI (March, 1939), 11. For a less exclusive definition, see Donald Pizer, "Nineteenth-Century American Naturalism: An Essay in Definition," Bucknell Review, XIII (Dec., 1965), 1-18. 2A standard treatment is available in R. E. Spiller et al., Literary History of the United States (3rd ed., rev., New York, 1963), II, 1020-26. 113

Crane trying to attain a distinctive style-but Crane's works strongly imply that specifically naturalistic fiction would have bored him. 3 Henry Fleming possesses a will of his own and a conscience; he is no more determined by heredity or environment than Melville's characters are. In fact Henry's relations with his environment are often just the reverse of what naturalism assumes they ought to be: instead of the environment determining Henry, Henry's "weak mental machinery" usually determines his environment, so far as his own view of it is concerned-a matter which can be verified by anyone who reads the chapters in which Henry wanders about in the forest. The entire naturalistic interpretation of the novel rests primarily upon three claims: the prevalence of animal imagery, the "moving box" episode (and the similar one in which Fleming throws a pine cone at a squirrel), and the belief that Henry undergoes no change of character or moral development in the course of the action. Each of these claims is easily refuted once the novel is returned to its rightful context. For the moment let us merely have faith that The Red Badge was written by an important ironist, not by a Zola or a Dreiser. But to call Crane an ironist is to question further the typical literary historian's approach to this author. An ironist is best defined, perhaps, simply as one who possesses a double vision, a peculiar ability which, like other such organic quirks, is most readily described in terms of its effect: it can be the capability of contemplating Stella or Vanessa and seeing simultaneously the shadowy image of a woman flayed; it can result in so acute a penetration into the characters of Elizabeth Bennet and Fitzwilliam Darcy that the reader "knows" their fictional marriage will never end in divorce; or it can be the uncanny ability to pierce through all the shams-religious, social, literary-of America's flabbiest decade to the bedrock reality beneath. However it may be described, the point is that such a capacity, in itself, can by no means be explained by historical context (which only provides grist for the ironist's mill) or by literary antecedents (which help to account for an individual style). The ironic vision in any age will immediately reject, see through, much of whatever is accepted as reality by the majority of people, who do not possess such an awareness; and, after disposing of these "enormous repudiations,"• 3The historian's case for naturalism is clarified by a comic variation of the same argument. Since 1894 altogether too many people have wasted their time in amazement at a "great Civil War novel" having been written by a mere lad who was not born until half a dozen years after the war ended. In reality, "there is nothing about the Civil War in this book which could not have been learned by a moderately intelligent and historically minded high school junior, in a few brief sessions with [the

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Century's] Battles and Leaders [of the Civil War] or whatever general secondary historical source the student chose" (MacKinlay Kantor, "The Historical Novel" in Three Views of the Novel, by Irving Stone, John O'Hara, and MacKinlay Kantor [Washington, D.C., 1957], p. 33). 4See H. G. Wells, "Stephen Crane from an English Standpoint," North American Review, CLXXI (Aug., 1900), 233-42; reprinted in Edmund Wilson, ed., The Shock of Recognition (Garden City, 1943), pp. 661-71.

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the ironist is left with whatever least common denominator of reality his perception allows him to accept. The best statement Crane ever made concerning the bleak outpost of reality which he found acceptable implies that the essential subject of his important work, including The Red Badge, comes straight from his ironic perception of the human situation, not at all from Zola or Tolstoy: I understand that a man is born into the world with his own pair of eyes, and he is not at all responsible for his vision-he is merely responsible for his quality of personal honesty. To keep close to this personal honesty is my supreme ambition. There is a sublime egotism in talking of honesty. I, however, do not say that I am honest. I merely say that I am as nearly honest as a weak mental machinery will allow. This aim in life struck me as being the only thing worth while. A man is sure to fail at it, but there is something in the failure. 5 The world Crane's man is born into is Melvillean, a godless, amoral, flatly indifferent universe which is merely the external setting in which man's moral life has to be lived. 6 Hence, if moral values are to exist and man's life is to be meaningful, morality must be the creation of man's weak mental machinery alone. And even the best of men, the most personally honest, is prone to error and liable to bring misery upon himself and others because the mental machinery often distorts that reality which he must perceive correctly if his personal honesty is to result in a morally significant commitment. Crane's essential subject is the weak mental machinery as it labours under the stress of some emotion, usually fear, to perceive correctly an area of reality which is not yet within the compass of the protagonist's experience. As such, Crane's work belongs to a tradition which reaches back well beyond Zola and Tolstoy. Seneca essentially defined Henry Fleming's basic problem with dubia plus torquent mala-uncertain evils torture us the more; an awareness of this eternally human situation obviously lies behind some of the great scenes in Macbeth and Othello; Fielding and Hazlitt were certainly aware of Henry's troubles. 7 Thus, it seems reasonable to insist that the subject of Crane's attention in his important work is not particularly dependent upon either historical 5R. W. Stallman and Lillian Gilkes, eds., Stephen Crane: Letters (New York, 1960), p. 110. All quotations from Crane's writings by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. 6This view of the universe can reasonably be called naturalistic; but Crane's acceptance of this view does not make his work naturalistic any more than Matthew Arnold's acceptance of ultimately the same view makes his poetry naturalistic. 7 See Seneca's Agamemnon, III, 1, 29. Fielding: "Indeed, fear is never more uneasy

than when it doth not certainly know its object; for on such occasions the mind is ever employed in raising a thousand bu_gbears and phantoms, much more dreadful than any realities, and . . . seems industrious in terrifying itself" (Amelia, Bk. VI, ch. 4). Hazlitt: "The imagination is that faculty which represents objects, not as they are in themselves, but as they are moulded by other thoughts and feelings. . . . It conveys the impression which the object under the influence of passion makes

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context or literary ancestors: Seneca, Shakespeare, Fielding, and Hazlitt all had to muddle along as best they could without the benefit of having read Ambrose Bierce. The Red Badge does have an obvious source which is available to anyone who wishes to investigate it; but the assumption of a naturalistic, a factually realistic, or a specifically literary context leads one in the wrong direction. The real source of the novel seems to me to be simply the ironist's incredible awareness of human nature. Our amazement should not be directed at Crane's mastery of the techniques of naturalism, or knowledge of the Civil War, or Jamesian grasp of Western literature, but at so young a man's ability to create so superb a psychological portrayal as Henry Fleming. The attempt to impose a symbolic context upon The Red Badge still lures innocent converts; otherwise it would today be gratuitous to argue against it. 8 The symbolist critic seizes upon those images which provide the key to the conundrum the novel presents in the guise of a story. Once these key "symbols" are extracted, the rest of the novel-and anything Crane said about it, all of Crane's other work, and everything known of Crane the man-is largely discarded as useless and misleading. This approach can easily be avoided if one merely remembers that "symbols exist, and exist only, in context."9 When Crane's red sun is considered in context its wafer-like appearance should not imply the wafer of the Mass. Crane never mentions any dogma, religious ritual, or god external to man except in terms of ironic attack or contempt; and his poems do not suggest he was even a Christian, let alone a Catholic. At least five chapters in this novel end with a reference to the sun, as Edward Stone has noted.10 This fact alone suggests-not to Stone, unfortunately-that the sun is used throughout as a general image of external nature, and that one should be extremely wary of making a specific mention bear a symbolic burden which the other examples cannot assume. The mention of this enigmatic sun at the scene of Conklin's death and Fleming's futile rage and grief on the mind. Let an object .•. be presented to the senses in a state of agitation or fear -and the imagination will distort or magnify the object, and convert it into the likeness of whatever is most proper to encourage the fear." (Lectures on the English Poets, Lecture I) 8The standard example is R. W. Stallman's widely reprinted interpretation. Among the many opponents of this view of the novel the best are Isaac Rosenfeld, "Stephen Crane as Symbolist," Kenyon Review, XV (Spring, 1953), 310--14; Rudolph Von Abele and Walter Havighurst, "Symbolism and the Student," College English, XVI (April,

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1955), 424-34, 461; Philip Rahv, "Fiction and the Criticism of Fiction," Kenyon Review, XVIII (Spring, 1956), 276-99; Stanley B. Greenfield, "The Unmistakable Stephen Crane," PMLA, LXXIII (Dec., 1958), 562-72; Norman Friedman, "Criticism and the Novel," Antioch Review, XVIII (Fall, 1958), 356-61; Eric W. Carlson, "Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage," Explicator, XVI (March, 1958), item 34. 9 Von Abele and Havighurst, "Symbolism and the Student," p. 429. 10Edward Stone, "The Many Suns of The Red Badge of Courage," American Literature, XXIX (Nov., 1957), 322-23.

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most obviously suggests the complete separation of man from externals, the total indifference of the heavens to death, war, heroism, blasphemy, and whatever else man may say or do. 11 Given this fairly obvious meaning which is strongly reinforced by the rest of the novel, the use of "wafer" and "pasted" implies the seal at the end of a legal document and thus suggests completion, finality-the separation between man and externals is absolute, just as death is, and nothing can be done by Fleming to change it. Similarly Jim Conklin, in spite of his initials and wound in the side, can hardly be a Christ figure. Initials in American literature can be devil's advocates: for every Joe Christmas there is a Jason Compson, for every Jim Casy a John Claggart. And Conklin received his wound in the side from dramatic necessity: he has to die slowly, remain in his right mind, and retain full use of both arms and legs-that is, he has to wander back from the front, recognize Henry, and dance the hideous hornpipe so that his death will horrify Henry. Given all these requirements during America's mauve decade when no one would dare be wounded in the groin, the side is about the only spot available. Crane consistently condemns Conklin's characteristic qualities throughout twelve volumes of writing: Conklin is a rumour-monger, a vain, pompous, loudmouthed, brawling, cursing lout whose greatest joy in life is eating, and who apparently possesses the one virtue of patience in the face of impending danger. And, in view of his other qualities, even this virtue has to be attributed less to calm courage than to mere mindlessness; he is not afraid simply because he does not have enough imagination to frighten himself with. He is one of several Crane characters who "have merely a stomach and no soul." 12 If even the thought of creating a Christ figure had occurred to Crane he surely could have done better than this. However, the symbolist critic's whole approach to The Red Badge should immediately be stalled by a consideration of Crane's other work. Nothing in either the earlier or the later work implies a mind which conceives its fiction in terms of conceptual patterns of symbols. Crane's work obviously abounds with emblematic imagery-the saloon in Maggie and George's Mother, the wind tower in "The Open Boat," the cash register in "The Blue Hotel," the wounded soldier on the altar in "War Memories," the fire in "The Monster"but all of these symbolic images seem to me to arise naturally out of the process of writing a story after it has been imaginatively conceived in terms of a specifically structural pattern, or "plot," of psychological progression to awareness. As the following examination of The Red Badge will suggest, Crane's vivid imagery results from an artistic labour of craftsmanship, not primarily from the conceiving imagination. llSee Scott C. Osborn, "Stephen Crane's Imagery: 'Pasted Like a Wafer,'" American Literature, XXIII (Nov., 1951), 362.

Schoberlin, ed., The Sullivan County Sketches of Stephen Crane (Syracuse, 1949), p. 46.

12Melvin

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Crane II

Crane's early news articles in the New York Tribune, the Sullivan County Sketches, and Maggie provide the only context in which The Red Badge may be placed with certainty. And we should add The Black Riders, which came immediately after this novel was completed, and George's Mother, which I believe was begun before The Red Badge and finished after it. These works surround the novel in the chronology of Crane's development; and a careful reading of them provides the best possible preparation for understanding The Red Badge because this novel does not greatly differ from these other works in its essential plot, situation, protagonist, and philosophy-even though it differs radically in its technique and resolution. 13 The little man of the sketches, Maggie Johnson, George Kelcey, and Henry Fleming are all cut from the same bolt: all are young, naive, untried, subject to fear, given to silly illusions, the environment or society in which they find themselves seems hostile to the ideals they posit for their own lives, and all four protagonists struggle to bridge the gap between their romantically impossible daydreams and harsh realities. We seldom have much of an idea of the physical appearance of these characters. None of them can reasonably be called heroic in any traditional sense of the word. Each comes alive only through Crane's acute awareness of human imperfections-vanity, anger, fear, laziness, the capacity for whining self-pity, self-delusion, and rationalization-the human limitations which are common to all mankind. And none of these weaknesses is lacking in Henry Fleming. It was the coincidence of this typical Crane protagonist and a war-setting that produced the prototype of the modern, anti-romantic treatment of war. Henry Fleming, Dos Passos' three soldiers, Frederic Henry, Robert Jordan, Yossarian possess only "the common virtues of the ordinary man; their vices [are] those which experience teaches all people to recognize as typical. The significant thing about this modern hero of war literature is that his limitations constitute the essence of his reality ."14 Fleming is distinguished from Crane's earlier protagonists only because he has been endowed with two new qualities which make the conquest of the self at least possible. Fleming is given an imagination worthy of Macbeth, and hence he is aware to a degree of sensitivity far beyond that of Maggie or the little man; and he is given a strong conscience, a quality which in Crane's work is inextricably fused with awareness. If awareness permits a man to 13Mutual resemblances should surprise no one. The Red Badge was being read in manuscript when the first edition of Maggie appeared. See Marston LaFrance, "A Few Facts about Stephen Crane and 'Holland,' "

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American Literature, XXXVII (May, 1965), 201.

14 Sophus K. Winther, "The Realistic War Novel," University of Washington Chapbooks, no. 35 (Seattle, 1930), p. 15.

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see what is actually in front of his eyes to be seen, conscience provides for the sense of personal honesty through self-criticism. Without awareness a Crane character-such as the militant dogmatists of the poems, who would impose their will upon others by any means-remains unable to acquire the restraint and humility which signify a healthy conscience. However, if a man does have these two qualities, and the strength of will to utilize them, then a knowledge of himself and his place in the world-the only "salvation" that Crane ever offers-is possible. (No example of such a character can be drawn from Crane's earlier work because Fleming is the first one; such characters, in the later work, are the correspondent in "The Open Boat," the lieutenant of "An Episode of War," Manolo Prat, and Doctor Trescott.) As The Red Badge depends so entirely upon the characterization of Henry Fleming, any qualities which Crane gave for the first time to this protagonist should provide the basis for whatever distinctions from his earlier work this novel reveals. The most distinctive innovations in The Red Badge are, quite obviously, the technical feats attained through the use of the third-person limited point of view, and the fact that Fleming emerges from his experience with self-knowledge and moral growth. Henry's vivid awareness makes possible the use of the third-person limited narrative technique; the story is tense and exciting only so far as Henry's imagination reacts intensely under the terrific pressures of fear, pride, and conscience. Actually, in view of the narrative technique used throughout, this awareness of Henry's is itself the "action," the life and force of the entire novel. And the new ending of the story, Henry's success rather than failure, may be attributed to his conscience, that force which makes him turn his awareness upon his own actions, judge them, and thereby learn self-knowledge. The little man of the sketches never does this at all; Maggie tries, but is not intelligent or aware enough to judge properly; George Kelcey has both the conscience and sufficient awareness to judge, but-as with the professional tramps of the Bowery sketches-he lacks the force of will to face and accept his own judgment. Henry Fleming has all three qualities: awareness, conscience, and-more obviously in the latter part of the novel-the necessary strength of will. However, to call the ending of the novel an innovation is to imply that, except for this ending, the structure or shaping plot of The Red Badge is not new in the chronology of Crane's work. And if we reduce the structural plot of this novel to its barest essentials, we will be left with a psychological progression to awareness, a pattern of action which in one form or another can be found again and again in the Sullivan County Sketches-most obviously in "Four Men in a Cave" and "The Mesmeric Mountain": a character is faced with an unknown quality or situation which for some reason he soon has to experience; because he fears what he does not yet understand, his imagination creates all sorts of terrifying illusions about 119

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himself, external nature, and the coming experience; these illusions become the immediate cause of fear, and both fear and illusions increase together up until the moment the unknown becomes experienced; then, as the reality of experience never even begins to measure up to the scenes of the imagination, the prosaic fact pierces and dissipates both fear and illusions; only the remembrance of both is left, and ideally this remembrance should make the protagonist ashamed of himself. In The Red Badge, as in Crane's other important work, the significant action always takes place within the mind of the protagonist. Also, as in most of Crane's short stories, the great bulk of this novel is concerned with the first part of the pattern-with what the protagonist reveals of himself during the period of mounting tension up until the unknown is experienced. The Red Badge, therefore, is a novel with a short story's structure. III

The novel opens with that sense of uncertainty which plagues Fleming throughout most of the story. He hears Conklin's rumour that the regiment is about to engage in combat, and immediately withdraws to his hut to think about his own problems-and not at all about Conklin's rumour, by the way; he merely assumes the rumour will prove true (as it does not) and gives his whole attention to worrying about how he will act during the coming battle. Thus, Fleming's intensely active imagination is presented at once: the really significant battles in this novel are already raging in full career within Henry's mind long before the first shot is fired in any external skirmish. He had dreamed of "bloody conflicts that had thrilled him with their sweep and fire," in which he imagines "peoples secure in the shadow of his eagle-eyed prowess."16 Henry had enlisted, voluntarily fled the dullness of his life on the farm, because of these vain-glorious desires set in the impossibly romantic view of war which his imagination has evoked from village gossip and luridly distorted news reports. The flashback to the farewell scene can serve almost as a structural precis of the novel. Henry "had primed himself for a beautiful scene. He had prepared certain sentences which he thought could be used with touching effect." (p. 230) But his mother merely peels potatoes and talks tediously of shirts and socks. The result is Crane's usual deflation of vanity, comic here because of Henry's romantic and sentimental foolishness. Nevertheless, buried in his mother's prosaic commonplaces is precisely the view of himself and his duty to which Henry gradually has to inch his way in painful experience throughW. Stallman, ed., Stephen Crane: An Omnibus (New York, 1952), p. 229. All citations of The Red Badge, hereafter in-

15R,

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eluded in the text, refer to this edition, which reprints Crane's deletions from earlier manuscript versions.

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out the remainder of the novel : "Yer jest one little feller amongst a hull lot of others, and yeh've got to keep quiet an' do what they tell yeh. . . . never do no shirking, child, on my account. If so be a time comes when yeh have to be kilt or do a mean thing, why, Henry, don't think of anything 'cept what's right." (p. 231) Fleming is not the undiscovered Achilles of his grand illusions; he is just another lad who has to learn to be a man. And to be a man in Crane's world is to perceive the human situation as it is, accept it, and remain personally honest in fulfilling the commitments such a perception demands of the individual. The fact that Henry has to suffer the experiences of the whole novel even to approach this simple truth reveals one of the great ironies woven into The Red Badge, a bitterly sardonic irony implicit in the psychological journey to self-knowledge upon which the novel is based : the protagonist undergoes all his suffering in order to perceive, to "see," a constant reality which has been present and available to him before his progression through experience to the perception of it even began. Henry's weak mental machinery is at this point so busy with visions of glory and he is so impatient to leave that he hardly hears his mother's advice; but his shame, when he turns to see her praying and weeping among the potato peelings, distinguishes him from Crane's earlier protagonists, and implies that eventually he will learn the truth of what he has just been told-that the real hero, in such a world as this, is the quiet, nameless man who can discern what is right and do it, simply because it is right and because he is a man. Henry's education has already begun before the reader first encounters him. He has experienced the dreariness, boredom, filth, and part of the misery of a soldier's life. The prolonged inaction has left his imagination free to concentrate on that part of his problem which experience has not yet clarified for him, and thus he is first seen lying in his bunk trying "to mathematically prove to himself that he would not run from a battle" (p. 234). He contemplates the "lurking menaces of the future" in the only way he can, as these menaces exist within his own mind; and given Henry's imagination, it is no wonder that his thoughts scare him. When Conklin' s rumour proves false and still more waiting has to be endured, Henry's tension becomes almost unbearable; and his imagination leads him to two illusions which Crane exploits throughout the novel : the notion that moral qualities exist in external nature -"The liquid stillness of the night enveloping him made him feel vast pity for himself. There was a caress in the soft winds; and the whole mood of the darkness, he thought, was one of sympathy for himself in his distress" (p. 243)-and the belief that he is unique, separated by fear from the other men in the regiment. After timidly broaching the hint of fear to Wilson only to have the conversation end in an abrupt quarrel, Henry "felt alone in space . . . . No one seemed to be wrestling with such a terrific personal problem." (p. 245) The other men are also afraid; but without Henry's imagination they fear 121

Crane only the fact of combat and, as external fact is always comparatively inconsequential in a Crane story, such men can play poker while Henry suffers. Henry no longer fears the actual fact : "In the darkness he saw visions of a thousand-tongued fear that would babble at his back and cause him to flee, while others were going coolly about their country's business. He admitted that he would not be able to cope with this monster." (p. 245) Such is Henry's state of mind when he is suddenly awakened one morning and sent running toward his first skirmish. Crane introduces the "moving box" episode with the flat statement that Henry "was bewildered." Barely awake and intensely excited, he has to use "all his faculties" to keep from falling and being trampled by those running behind him. The passage in question constitutes Henry's first reaction to this situation : he instantly saw that it would be impossible for him to escape from the regiment. It inclosed him. And there were iron laws of tradition and law on four sides. He was in a moving box. As he perceived this fact it occurred to him that he had never wished to come to the war. He had not enlisted of his free will. He had been dragged by the merciless government. And now they were taking him out to be slaughtered. [p. 248] This passage is pure rationalization without a hint of naturalism in it. The "iron laws of tradition and law" are made by men and changed by men. And Henry did enlist of his own free will; he was not dragged to this commitment by any force except his own own wish to go to war. About all this passage really reveals is that Henry is so badly frightened he is considering flight even before a shot is fired . When Henry's curiousity leads him to charge over a rise only to be confronted with still more inaction, Crane unambiguously presents his basic trouble:

If an intense scene had caught him with its wild swing as he came to the top of the bank, he might have gone roaring on. This advance upon Nature was too calm. He had opportunity to reflect. He had time in which to wonder about himself and to attempt to probe his sensations. [pp. 249-50] Hence, a house acquires an "ominous look," shadows in a wood are "formidable," and Henry feels he should advise the generals because "there was but one pair of eyes" in the regiment. Henry's excitement again obscures his perception : he does not seem to grasp the significance of Wilson's giving him the packet any more than he had heard his mother's advice. He soon witnesses the rout of some troops who run blindly back through his own regimental line, and he intends to wait only long enough to see the "composite monster" which has frightened these men. But when the charge finally comes, he does not run; he stays and fights. 122

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This episode must have taken considerable thought, for Crane had to find a means of letting Henry engage in battle, an incident to which the previous four chapters have pointed, and still not undergo the unknown experience he fears. In other words, Crane's treatment at this point would commit him one way or the other: if Henry experienced the unknown here the result would be a short story; if this experience could be further delayed the result would be a novel. Crane solved his problem by having Henry fight this skirmish in a trance, a "battle sleep" induced by fatigue and rage; and because of this Henry later does not accept this combat as the attainment of the experience he has been anticipating. Thus, Crane in this episode is able to repeat the irony of Henry's farewell scene. When the fight begins, he allows Henry to attain the real bearing of responsible manhood at war-for a few moments: He suddenly lost concern for himself, and forgot to look at a menacing fate. He felt that something of which he was a part-a regiment, an army, a cause, or a country-was in a crisis. He was welded into a common personality which was dominated by a single desire .... There was a consciousness always of the presence of his comrades about him. He felt the subtle battle brotherhood more potent even than the cause for which they were fighting. It was a mysterious fraternity born of the smoke and danger of death. He was at a task. [p. 261]

This is a quiet statement, without irony, of the ideal which Crane was to honour repeatedly in his writings about the Spanish-American War. But at this point Henry enters his battle sleep. Then, after the charge has been repulsed, and before Henry emerges from his trance, he feels II a flash of astonishment at the blue, pure sky and the sun gleamings on the trees and fields. It was surprising that Nature had gone tranquilly on with her golden process in the midst of so much devilment." (p. 265) And this statement implies the mature man's unsentimental view of nature as an amoral external machine. But then, when Henry emerges from his trance, his old weaknesses reassert themselves, and he is entirely unable to recall either the achievement or the perception which came to him at either edge of his battle sleep. Once again the reality he is seeking lies within his grasp; and once again his mental turmoil prevents his awareness of it. This episode also contains some of Crane's famous animal imagery; and, given a correct reading, Crane's use of this very imagery argues against naturalism. Crane does not use animal images until Henry begins to slip into his battle sleep (p. 261). There is no hint of such imagery, for example, in the above description of Henry's moment of manhood before his trance begins. But as Henry descends from full consciousness and becomes something less than a man he perceives in terms of non-human images: he feels "the 123

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acute exasperation of a pestered animal, a well-meaning cow worried by dogs"; he rages like a "driven beast"; men "snarl" and "howl"; a coward's eyes are "sheep-like ... animal like" (pp. 261-62). And this sort of imagery ends when Henry regains full consciousness. This use of imagery is fairly consistent throughout the novel. Thus, the demands of dramatic propriety insist that the primary function of such imagery is to represent Henry's agitated mind as it struggles from lurid distortions to an understanding that reality is, after all, but reality. The imagery always becomes most vivid when Henry's perception is most distorted, and such a state of mind is the extreme of the condition which Henry labours to transcend by applying his awareness, conscience, and force of will to his experience. Crane's use of such imagery in this novel, in short, strongly implies that he is a humanist, not a naturalist. When Henry emerges from his battle sleep to find the charge has been withstood, he becomes vain in complacent admiration of his part in this success; and all his self-congratulation is illusory. Nothing is "over" for him; no trial has been passed. Henry uncritically admires actions which were done in a trance. And no Crane character ever feels such pompous self-satisfaction, even for real accomplishment, unless he is a vain fool. Complacency is a delusion in a world where nothing but death is final, where no ideal can ever be possessed because man has to reckon with externalities beyond his control, a stoic's world in which a continuous present poses a continuous demand upon man's moral and physical endurance. The attack is immediately renewed; and this time, after having seen so many others flee that he believes he will be left alone, Henry runs away. One must insist that he runs only nominally from the advancing enemy; what he really runs from is his own imagination. Crane's statement is bluntly unambiguous: "on his face was all the horror of those things which he imagined" (p. 268). He loiters in the rear long enough to learn that the line has held and repulsed the charge a second time; then, cringing "as if discovered in a crime," he moves into the forest. Henry's journey through this forest, like Marlow's journey up the river into the heart of darkness, charts a pilgrimage within the mind. This moral forest is the "direful thicket" full of "singular knives" through which the brave man of the poems has to plunge to find truth. Henry's journey is intensely painful because these knives of the mind-fear, guilt, shame, hatred of those who remained and fought, vanity, self-pity, rage, his suffering as he sympathetically experiences Conklin's death, the self-loathing evoked by the tattered man-these moral knives slash deeply as Henry's weak mental machinery, racing at the edge of collapse, flounders against them. His journey through this metaphorical forest of his inner self can be divided into four parallel scenes or episodes-the structural device Crane had mastered in Maggiewhich are easily identified: each begins with a specific illusion, a direction of 124

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Henry's thought which is followed until the pathway becomes blocked; when the illusion is destroyed-or when the barricade is encountered and Henry has to seek a new direction-the episode ends and the next one begins. His first illusion arises from his attempts to rationalize his cowardice. It begins when he attempts to draw illusory justification from sentimentalized nature, and it expands to include an equally sentimental religious feeling. The "landscape gave him assurance. A fair field holding life. It was the religion of peace. It would die if its timid eyes were compelled to see blood. He conceived Nature to be a woman with a deep aversion to tragedy." (p. 274) He throws a pine cone at a squirrel, and the squirrel, to Henry's immense satisfaction, runs away: "There was the law, he said [conveniently forgetting that a man is not a squirrel]. Nature had given him a sign." (p. 274) Although he then observes a "small animal" pounce into black water and "emerge directly with a gleaming fish," Henry needs stronger medicine; and he soon gets it. He blunders into the forest "chapel" with its "gentle brown carpet," its "religious half light"; and the way in which he perceives this empty hole in the woods should recall his earlier view of death as a means of getting "to some place where he would be understood" (p. 253). This sentimental religious feeling is equated with Henry's sentimental view of nature, and both illusions are brutally shattered when he finds a rotting corpse in the "chapel" where one would expect to find the altar. This putrid matter being eaten by ants does not suggest that death is any gateway to understanding, that nature has any aversion whatsoever to such tragedies, or that some sort of Christian doctrine is the theme of the novel. Rationalization which overrides one's personal honesty can only lead to moral death: death literally blocks Henry's way, and he has to find a new direction. The new direction comes when Henry, out of curiosity, runs toward a great roar of battle. This first tentative step toward emerging from the forest is consciously determined, and Henry is aware that it is "an ironical thing for him to be running thus toward that which he had been at such pains to avoid." He wants "to come to the edge of the forest that he might peer out" (p. 277). But then Henry meets the tattered man--one of Crane's finest characters-whose question, "Where yeh hit, ol' boy?" causes Fleming to panic; and his guilt and isolation immediately lead him to another illusion: "he regarded the wounded soldiers in an envious way. He conceived persons with tom bodies to be peculiarly happy. He wished that he, too, had a wound." (p. 282) To reveal to Henry the real absurdity of such thoughts, to puncture this insane illusion, Crane lets him witness the appalling death of Jim Conklin. And if this seems too slight an accomplishment for so intensely written a scene, one should remember that this whole section of the novel is, after all, a virtuoso performance in prolonging the delay of Henry's actual experience of combat. Also, in its presentation of human 125

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suffering considered specifically against the immense backdrop of the amoral universe, it is a very young author's first attempt at coping with a theme that immensely interested him. Finally, the text offers absolutely no evidence that Conklin's death accomplishes anything else. Shortly thereafter, Henry commits his greatest sin: he deliberately deserts the tattered man who selflessly worries about others even when he is himself at the edge of the grave. Because of the importance of the tattered man in Henry's journey to awareness, I tend to consider this episode a parallel scene comparable to the two just described. That is, the desertion of this dying man is in itself Henry's illusion. His bitter and immediate self-loathing-"he now thought that he wished he was dead" (p. 290)-foreshadows what Crane makes explicit in the final chapter: the tattered man will always haunt Henry, not because of anything he does to Henry, but because of what Henry does to him. This desertion is Henry's farthest penetration into the direful thicket of cowardice, selfishness, and immaturity; and as he can go no further he again must seek a new direction-metaphorically the only one left to him-a way out of the "forest" and back to his original commitment. Henry's subconscious desire to find his way back is revealed by his envying the men of an advancing column so intensely that "he could have wept in his longings." He immediately pictures himself as "a blue desperate figure leading lurid charges with one knee forward and a broken blade high-a blue, determined figure standing before a crimson and steel assault, getting calmly killed" (p. 294). These asinine visions, in this context, are evoked by Henry's desire as a psychological thrust to counteract the opposing force of fear. Thus, Henry begins a debate with himself: he wants to go forward, his fear invents excuses, and his reason overcomes these excuses one by one as they are raised. This debate ends in defeat only because Henry believes there is absolutely no way in which he can return to his regiment with self-respect. And this belief, of course, turns out to be the illusion which forms the basis of his final episode in the forest. However, Henry's mental debate itself accomplishes two important results: it enables Henry to transcend by an effort of will his most absurd selfishness -his wish for the defeat of his own army-and it sufficiently calms his mind for him to realize, for the first time since his original flight, that his physical condition-hunger, thirst, extreme fatigue-suggests he is actually "just one little feller," ordinary, weak, and fallible. His inner debate ends when he sees the very men with whom he had lately identified himself come fleeing back through the woods in terror. He leaps into the midst of these panic-stricken men in an attempt to rally them, and receives his red badge of courage when one of them clubs him in the head with a rifle butt. Crane probably seized upon this incident for his title because of the complex ironies woven into it, because of its centrality to a story about courage and 126

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various wounds, and because Henry has to win his manhood by struggle as one wins a badge. He does not receive his wound in flight, but in the performance of an act of courage! Henry is struck down (by a coward) while inarticulately striving "to make a rallying speech, to sing a battle hymn." He is in a position to suffer such a wound because he has originally fled from his regiment, but he is going against the current of retreating infantry, towards the battle, when he gains the red badge. 16 He has already revealed his intent, his desire to return. The wound changes nothing whatsoever within Henry's mind. Chance merely provides the means for which he has already been searching-the means of returning to his regiment secure from outward ridicule. Henry is guided back by the cheeryvoiced soldier-a man who helps others without vanity or even a wish for thanks, exactly as Henry should have helped the tattered man. Henry tells his lie-which ironically proves unnecessary-is nursed by Wilson and, both physically and emotionally exhausted, put to bed in his friend's blankets. In terms of the structural pattern noted earlier, Henry is now back in his original position and again about to confront the unknown, still untried in battle-so far as he believes-still afraid. Nevertheless, the short story has become a novel; and within Henry's mind a major battle has been fought and won. Although he still does not know how he will act when he confronts the unknown, the bitter experience of this fantastic day's journey through the moral forest has brought Henry to a secure knowledge of what he can not do when the time for this confrontation comes, for him, on the morrow. However, his actions next morning are not reassuring. His vanity returns with his sense of security, he complains loudly, and he treats Wilson quite shabbily. This reassertion of the old Henry is demanded by dramatic necessity because if growth of character is contingent upon awareness Crane cannot very well make much of a change in Henry before he experiences actual combat. Moreover, Henry's undesirable traits provide a necessary contrast at this point to emphasize the change which has occurred in Wilson, who has already had his baptism of fire: He seemed no more to be continually regarding the proportions of his personal prowess .... He was no more a loud young soldier. There was about him now a fine reliance. He showed a quiet belief in his purposes and his abilities. . . . And the youth saw that ever after it would be easier to live in his friend's neighborhood. [pp. 314-15] 16Eric Solomon, "The Structure of The Red Badge of Courage," Modern Fiction Studies, V (Autumn, 1959), 230-31.

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Given Crane's parallel-scene technique, this passage has to foreshadow and describe the change which Henry will also undergo once he successfully faces his own commitment; it can have no other function. However, Henry's vain foolishness at this point is primarily important because it contrasts with his yesterday's view of himself-yesterday he had seen himself lower than all other men, and mocked by nature; today he imagines himself "a fine creation . . . the chosen of some gods," and he considers nature "a fine thing moving with a magnificent justice" (pp. 319-20) -and because these absurdities allow Crane to show that Henry is now capable of perceiving the falseness of his position. His "pompous and veteranlike" thoughts are just as absurd, of course, as those he revealed during his flight; and neither passage presents Crane's own view of the universe and man's place in it. 17 But no critic has noted that these silly illusions form a carefully wrought sequence in themselves which begins with Henry's smug sense of power over Wilson because of the packet, rises to a climax of loud complaint, and ends suddenly when this swelling pomposity is "pierced" by a fellow soldier's lazy comment: "Mebbe yeh think yeh fit' th' hull battle yestirday, Fleming." Henry is inwardly "reduced to an abject pulp by these chance words" (p. 325). What has happened here seems fairly obvious: Henry has assumed a vain pose and has been acting out his role as if the external view of himself were all that mattered; the laconic comment pierces this pose-as easily as a little gambler's knife pierces the body of a burly Swede-by abruptly awakening Henry's conscience; and the whole external pose collapses before this inner voice's inflexible command that Henry view himself as he really is. When the next battle comes, Henry turns his reawakened self-loathing and self-hatred upon the enemy, and chooses to stay and fight rather than run again into that terrible forest: "He had taken up a first position behind a little tree, with a direct determination to hold it against the world" (p. 330). After making this willed commitment, Henry slips again into the trance of battle sleep, fights like a regular "war devil," and after the skirmish he emerges from his trance with the praise of his comrades ringing in his ears. He had fought like a pagan who defends his religion. Regarding it, he saw that it was fine, wild, and, in some ways, easy. He had been a tremendous figure, no doubt. By this struggle he had overcome obstacles which he had admitted to be mountains. They had fallen like paper peaks, and he was now what he called a hero. And he had not been aware of the process. He had slept and, awakening, found himself a knight. [p. 331] 17Crane uses exactly this same device in one of his poems; two contrasting views of a morally neutral reality, the sea, are presented, and neither view can legitimately be 128

called Crane's own. See War Is Kind, III, in Wilson 5. Follett, ed., The Work of Stephen Crane (New York, 1925-27), VI, 111.

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Henry, in short, has successfully passed through the unknown, the feared experience, and this time he is aware of the fact, even though-again because of battle sleep-he has not actually experienced the unknown itself. Hence, Henry has a great deal to ponder about. The great irony of this crucial episode is not that Henry has become a hero in his battle sleep-Crane never offers the reader such an absurd definition of heroism-but that during this sleep Henry has successfully passed through the very experience upon which his imagination and fear have been intensely centred since the beginning of the novel: the monumental irony is that Henry has endured all his suffering, all the tortures of his imagination, over an action which is so easily done that one can do it superbly while in a trance. The implications which follow from this ironic deflation should be clear to us, even if Henry is not yet capable of sorting them out: if the feared unknown, the hideous dragon of war, can be successfully encountered while one is in a trance, then Henry's former imaginings, fears, concepts of knightly heroism, all such feverish activity of his weak mental machinery, stand revealed as absurd. Henry, in other words, for the first time since the novel began, is now in a position to learn authentic self-knowledge, to perceive the reality which is actually before his eyes to be seen, and to acquire the humility which Wilson already has attained. Henry's subsequent actions immensely favour this conclusion. He accepts his own insignificance when he overhears his regiment of "mule drivers" ordered into an action from which few are expected to emerge alive. And, even knowing the danger of the coming battle, there is no hesitation in Henry, no thought of flight. Hence, it follows reasonably from this deliberate courage that Henry should finally be able to experience actual combat in full possession of all his faculties. In fact, Crane insists upon Henry's awareness, both of the external and the inner reality, during this charge: "It seemed to the youth that he saw everything. Each blade of the green grass was bold and clear . . . all were comprehended. His mind took a mechanical but firm impression, so that afterward everything was pictured and explained to him, save why he himself was there." (pp. 338-39, my italics) The final phrase simply means that Henry has not forgotten his past failures. The frenzy of this charge, not the blind rage of battle sleep, is described as a "temporary but sublime absence of selfishness. And because it was of this order was the reason, perhaps, why the youth wondered, afterward, what reasons he could have had for being there." (p. 339) Henry, like the other men, still shows anger, pride, wild excitement; but such qualities, which could hardly be omitted from any realistic presentation of men at war, do not make these men less than human, and Henry never again loses his grip on his consciousness. These men reveal anger and pride in this situation precisely because they are men who hold themselves responsible for their own actions and seek the good opinion of their fellow men. Henry 129

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has yet to learn that if a man satisfies his own sense of personal honesty, this is enough; the opinion of others, just one more externality, will vary with the several views which others take of one's actions. Chapter xx1 prepares Henry for this stoic lesson. The elated regiment returns from the charge, only to be taunted by veterans who observe how little ground was covered. Henry soon accepts the view that the extent of the charge was comparatively "trivial," even though he "feels a considerable joy in musing upon his performances during the charge" (a joy which is not unreasonable when we recall that only yesterday Henry had fled in panic from this same situation). When a general states yet another point of view-that the charge was a military failure, and the "mule drivers" now seem to him to be "mud diggers"-the lieutenant's defence of his own men implies that a military failure is in itself no criterion of the performance of the men doing the fighting. And the chapter ends with Wilson and Fleming being told of the praise they have received from the lieutenant and colonel of their own regiment. Wilson and Fleming have every right to feel pleased at this praise; and the fact that they "speedily forgot many things," that for them "the past held no pictures of error or disappointment," does not indicate that they are mere automatons at the mercy of external circumstances: it indicates that in their first flush of pleasure they have not yet assimilated and considered this praise in the total perspective which is specifically demanded by the several points of view presented in this very chapter. There is not time for assimilation of anything at this point because the novel immediately roars on into yet another battle, a final skirmish in which all the men act like veterans by tending strictly to business and Wilson even captures an enemy flag; after the battle, he holds this prize "with vanity" as he and Henry, both still caught up in the excitement of the moment, congratulate each other. The time for reflection and thought comes only with the final chapter when Henry walks away from the battlefield and is again free to probe into his own mind. The endless critical squabbles which have arisen over this final chapter hinge upon a single question: does Fleming achieve any moral growth or development of character? Yet any Crane student should be able to answer this question almost without consulting this chapter at all-without reading Crane's description of Henry's change of soul which requires at least two pages in most editions. To claim that Fleming does not achieve any growth or development is to ignore many quite obvious statements of his gradual moral progress scattered throughout the novel, the entire function of Wilson's role, and the fact that Crane must have had some reason for endowing Henry -unlike the earlier protagonists-with awareness and a conscience. It is also well to remember that Crane is trying to be psychologically realistic: Henry is still a young lad not yet even twenty-four hours removed from the very nadir 130

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of self-abasement, and this is the first time Henry has full opportunity to reflect upon all the experiences which have crowded the past two days of his life. Henry begins by rejoicing that he has come forth, escaped, from "a land of strange, squalling upheavals." The deliberately ambiguous language here should suggest all of Private Fleming's various battles, with the enemy, the "arrayed forces of the universe," and his own weaknesses. Then Henry attempts to consider all that has happened to him from the point of view of the new perspective he has attained by living through these past two days. And here Crane is again explicit, neither ironic nor ambiguous: He began to study his deeds, [both] his failures, and his achievements. Thus, fresh from scenes where many of his usual machines of reflection had been idle . . . he struggled to marshal all his acts. At last they marched before him clearly. From this present view point he was enabled to look at them in spectator fashion and to criticize them with some correctness, for his new condition had already defeated certain sympathies. [pp. 365-66] Henry's "procession of memory" begins with the most recent events, his public deeds which are recalled with delight because they tell him "he was good." This recollection seems reasonable, so far as it goes; these public deeds, after all, have been good. But the next sentence reveals Henry's error moments before he himself corrects it: "He recalled with a thrill of joy the respectful comments of his fellows upon his conduct" (p. 366). Henry, in short, begins with his old error of judging himself by the opinion of others, by his external reputation. The entire remaining portion of his self-analysis consists of the assaults made upon this public image by the shameful recollections of his private deeds until, finally, an equilibrium is attained in which both public and private views of the self take permanent position in a realistic, balanced judgment. Thus, the great image which dominates these final pages as an inexorable "spectre of reproach" is the "dogging memory of the tattered soldier-he who, gored by bullets and faint for blood, had fretted concerning an imagined wound in another; he who had loaned his last of strength and intellect for the tall soldier; he who, blind with weariness and pain, had been deserted in the field" (p. 367). The great care with which Crane makes Henry recall all the ramifications of this incident implies the deep impression it has made upon Henry. The youth cringes when this spectre looms before him: "For an instant a wretched chill of sweat was upon him at the thought that he might be detected in the thing. As he stood persistently before his vision, he gave vent to a cry of sharp irritation and agony." (p. 367) If read correctly this passage does not reveal selfish vanity; it reveals only the continuity of Henry's thought. He is still basking in the warmth of his public deeds when this 131

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private horror suddenly pierces and deflates, for him, his public image of himself. In order to live with this awful ghost Henry has to redress his own judgment of himself: he retains a concern for his external reputation-few men of any age desire to have their shameful deeds made public-but this vision finally forces him to accept the characteristic position of the mature man that his own inner view of himself is vastly more important than the external opinions of others. Henry never entirely banishes this ghost-an attainment which would be as impossible in Crane's world as it would be in Hawthorne's-but he is able to place it in perspective, "to put the sin at a distance." An excised passage which follows reveals that Henry handles this sin as any intelligent man of conscience would handle it-as a means of trampling upon his own ego to prevent his committing such a sin again. "This plan for the utilization of a sin did not give him complete joy but it was the best sentiment he could formulate under the circumstances, and when it was combined with his success, or public deeds, he knew that he was quite contented" (p. 369). Henry is being neither vain nor callous in this decision; he is merely being practical and realistic. No better use of a sin is possible in Crane's world. And if this sin is a real and permanent part of his past, so are his good actions during the day's fighting: if Henry is to see himself as he really is he must consider both "his failures, and his achievements." Once he attains this balanced view of himself, he is able to foresee "some new ways" of life for him in the future. "He found that he could look back upon the brass and bombast of his earlier gospels and see them truly. He was gleeful when he discovered that he now despised them." (p. 369) Henry's weak mental machinery, in short, has undergone considerable readjustment. His eyes have finally opened, and he is now able to begin perceiving correctly the reality which has been before him and largely unchanged since the novel began. Henry's personal honesty can now assert itself in morally significant action, and he is ready to begin the difficult practice of manhood in an amoral universe. With this conviction [my italics] came a store of assurance. He felt a quiet manhood, nonassertive but of sturdy and strong blood. He knew that he would no more quail before his guides wherever they should point. He had been to touch the great death, and found that, after all, it was but the great death. He was a man. [p. 369]

I am unable to find any irony in the closing paragraphs of the novel. Henry is exhausted from his battles and gratefully marching to a rest. Only the most romantically obtuse reader at this point could believe in the actuality of "an existence of soft and eternal peace," but the image aptly describes how inviting the coming rest must seem to a weary young soldier. Certainly Henry is 132

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not fooling himself; his quiet confidence that he will "no more quail before his guides wherever they should point" would be meaningless if he really anticipated an existence of soft and eternal peace. And the final image seems to me merely an emblem of what has just happened to Henry. He has attained authentic self-knowledge and a new sense of manhood after long and fierce battles with his own moral weaknesses : "Over the river a golden ray of sun came through the hosts of leaden rain clouds." Crane's ironic vision perceived with terrible clarity that every man's worst enemy is himself. And thus, in all of his best work, this intense awareness is concentrated upon a reality which eternally remains immune to the erosion of time. The Red Badge is no period piece. The various battles of Private Fleming are all fought over again whenever a lad has to charge across the dangerous terrain which separates boyhood from manhood. So long as man is burdened with moral responsibility in an amoral universe, vulnerable to fear and vanity, endowed with the great powers of the imagination-so long as the human situation exists-Crane's work will endure.

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Daniel Fuchs WALLACE STEVENS AND SANTAYANA

That Stevens was influenced by Santayana has been often enough affirmed. 1 The pages which follow attempt to delineate the extent of this influence. There can be no doubt that Santayana was a benign presence in Stevens' literary career, from early to late. Yet Stevens was too autonomous a self to have been dependent on Santayana. Rather it is a question of cultural accord, the smile-not quite the shock-of recognition. Santayana is not Stevens' progenitor, but he is a memorable and fairly constant source. The connection between them was real enough for Stevens to have diverged from this source, and, of course, in the matter of poetry, to have transcended it. Beginnings are at Harvard in the late 1890's where Stevens was a literary student and Santayana, a literary, somewhat avuncular, assistant professor of philosophy, had already written The Sense of Beauty. Many years later, on the occasion of Santayana's death, Stevens writes of this period to a friend: I grieve to hear of the death of George Santayana in Rome. Fifty years ago, I knew him well, in Cambridge, where often he asked me to come to see him. This was just before he had definitely decided not to be a poet. He had probably written as much poetry as prose at that time. 2 Stevens' letters confirm what he publicly stated: that Santayana's poems did mean a great deal to him. In a letter to Henry Church, to whom "Notes toward a Supreme Fiction" is dedicated, he gives a closer view of their Harvard connection : "I read several poems to him and he expressed his own view of the subject of them in a sonnet which he sent me, and which is in one of his books." 3 Holly Stevens possesses the handwritten copy of lSee Joseph N. Riddel, "The Contours of Stevens Criticism," English Literary History, XXXI (March, 1964), 131 n. Samuel French Morse, in a letter to me, Nov. 12, 1965, confirms that Stevens was familiar with Santayana's poetry and prose, and "owned a good many of Santayana's books." What remains of his library includes Santayana's Sonnets (1896), The Hermit of Carmel and Other Poems (1901), and the three volumes of the autobiography. 2 1n a letter to Barbara Church, Sept. 29, 1952, no. 842 in MS of The Letters of Wallace Stevens. Since this essay was written

The Letters of Wallace Stevens has been published (1966} in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., and in England by Faber and Faber. All quotations from the Letters by permission of Holly Stevens, Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., and Faber and Faber. 3Dated Oct. 15, 1940, no. 413. In this letter Stevens also writes : "I did not take any of his courses and never heard him lecture." Stevens' transcript shows that he took no philosophy courses at all, but did take seven English and comparative literature courses and a few composition courses, in addition to history and government.

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Santayana's sonnet as well as the handwritten copy of the Stevens sonnet to which it is a reply. The poems are Petrarchan sonnets which indicate that the movement and rhythm, the conventional touches of language, the a capella stance, would be characteristic of Santayana though not of the Stevens of Collected Poems. Yet a characteristic note emerges. Stevens' poem is about his preference of the rough, magnificent music of nature to the genteel, pleasing music heard in churches. Cathedrals are not built along the sea; The tender bells would jangle on the hoar And iron winds; the graceful turrets roar With bitter storms the long night angrily; And through the precious organ pipes would be A low and constant murmur of the shore That down those golden shafts would rudely pour A mighty and a lasting melody. And those who knelt within the gilded stalls Would have vast outlook for their weary eyes; There they would see high shadows on the walls From passing vessels in their fall and rise; Through gaudy windows there would come too soon The low and splendid rising of the moon.•

The first line is a witty conception. The supporting octave, focusing on sound, moves toward the "mighty and lasting melody" of the sea. The sestet, focusing on sight, concludes on "the splendid rising of the moon." Despite obvious difficulties, Stevens achieves the rise that the form calls for. Santayana's reply to this sonnet is instructive. It dramatizes the idea that religion, specifically Christianity, finds support in nature just as nature is conceived to be meaningful because of the mythological order religion imposes. For Santayana, all cathedrals are contiguous to the sea of experience. CATHEDRALS BY THE SEA

Reply to a sonnet beginning "Cathedrals are not built along the sea" For aeons had the self-responsive tide Risen to ebb, and tempests blown to clear, And the belated moon refilled her sphere To wane anew-for, aeons since, she diedWhen to the deeps that called her earth replied (Lest year should cancel unavailing year) And took from her dead heart the stones to rear A cross-shaped temple to the crucified. 4 "Cathedrals

are not built along the sea," Haroard Monthly, XXVIII (May, 1899), 95.

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Then the wild winds through organ-pipes descended To utter what they meant eternally, And not in vain the moon devoutly mended Her wasted taper, lighting Calvary, While with a psalmody of angels blended The sullen diapason of the sea.5 The octave is hampered by the rather remote, melodramatic "she" and the crudeness of imagery in the last lines. But the sestet moves without a break rapidly through open vowels and liquid consonants to its fine concluding two lines. The thematic difference in these early poems reflects a difference in temperament which was to remain constant. Despite his naturalism, Santayana was not for long intoxicated with nature. For Stevens, the radiance of nature was often enough her own argument. In Santayana; nature is rather a more formidable mechanism when not made friendly by man's organized consciousness. Like some of his Harvard contemporaries, he expressed the fin de siecle "desperate naturalism"6 which stemmed from the agonies of consciousness in a mechanistic universe, the sense that the natural world they wanted to believe in was a chaos which would paralyse this belief, rather than offering a harmonious, ordered world-view. But the tonal and thematic climate shared by these poems is more conspicuous than the differences they embody. Stevens, like Santayana, was concerned with the question of religion in a naturalistic world. This was the subject of Santayana's first sonnet sequence, as it appears in book form a makeshift narrative illuminating from different points of view Santayana's loss of faith in Roman Catholicism and consequent embracing of naturalism. In his Preface to his selected poems he affirms their autobiographical element. Making somewhat excessive apologies for the conventional, merely "literary," language, the lack of "fresh idiom," the "worn and traditional" prosody, the general "breathlessness and unction," he goes on to say that "their sincerity is absolute, not only in respect to the thought which might be abstracted from them and expressed in prose, but also in respect to the aura of literary and religious associations which envelops them." He admits to its being his "most authentic personal note," to its being the "confession of an actual spiritual experience."7 The main segments of his selected poems are his two sonnet sequences. There is good reason to believe that most of this sincerity is attributed to the first sonnet sequence, not only because it contains the better poetry but because of Santayana's explicit remarks to his biographers Howgate and Cory about the second sequence, the "Platonizing 6Jn The Hermit of Carmel and Other Poems (New York, 1901), p. 122. The sonnet was not included in subsequent collections of Santayana's poems. 6Herbert W. Schneider, A History of Ameri-

can Philosophy (2nd. ed., New York and London, 1963), pp. 352-71. Cf. William Vaughn Moody's "Gloucester Moors." 7George Santayana, Poems (London, 1922), pp. vii-xiv passim.

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sonnets" as he calls them. To Howgate he admits that the sequence is "somewhat of a literary exercise" in which "his mind if not his heart were touched" ;8 to Cory he calls "the sublimated love sonnets ... an evasion of experience." 9 It is the naturalistic sonnets which influenced Stevens. It was not only the young Stevens who admired Santayana as a fellow poet, for in the late essay,"A Collect of Philosophy," Stevens recalls that Santayana "was an exquisite and memorable poet in the days when he was, also, a young philosopher."10 Thematically the first sonnet sequence is close to Stevens' own concerns. The first, like the second and twentieth sonnets in the sequence, was written last-together they form an introduction and conclusion to the loose narrative pattern. The opening sonnet tells of Santayana's conversion from Roman Catholicism to nature. I sought on earth a garden of delight, Or island altar to the Sea and Air, Where gentle music were accounted prayer, And reason, veiled, performed the happy rite. My sad youth worshipped at the piteous height Where God vouchsafed the death of man to share; His love made mortal sorrow light to bear, But his deep wounds put joy to shamed flight. And though his arms, outstretched upon the tree, Were beautiful, and pleaded my embrace, My sins were loth to look upon his face. So came I down from Golgotha to thee, Eternal Mother; let the sun and sea Heal me, and keep me in thy dwelling-place.

One may essentially agree with Santayana's devaluation of his poems and his later estimate: "Mine is not what English-speaking people now call poetry: it is not a dissolution and fresh concretion of language. . . . Where I break through convention . . . is in my themes or sentiments." 11 It is hard not to think that a good part of the hold these poems had on Stevens is attributable to the thematic content, for as Santayana himself acknowledged, the distinction of his poems is in their thought. An entry in Stevens' journal in 1906 bears out this speculation. He says that he has been reading poetry and is struck by "the marvelous poetic language" and "the absence of poetic 8George W. Howgate, George Santayana (Philadelphia, 1938), p. 57. 9Daniel Cory, Santayana: The Later Years (New York, 1963), p. 208. lOWallace Stevens, Opus Posthumous (New York, 1957), p. 187. Hereafter cited as OP. All quotations from Opus Posthumous, copyright © 1957 by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.,

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and from The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens, copyright © 1955 by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. and Faber and Faber. 11 "The Middle Span" (originally published 1945) in Persons and Places (New York,

1963), II, 164.

Daniel Fuchs thought .... We get plenty of moods ... and so we get figures of speech, and impressions, and superb lines, and fantastic music." This is not enough: "But it's the mind we want to fill-with Life. We admit now that Truth is the warrior and Beauty only his tender hide." The poet who exemplifies this insight is Santayana. Stevens concludes that "Santayana's sonnets are far nobler and enduring in our eyes than [Stephen] Phillips' tragedies." 12 The first sonnet, serene, naturalistic, pious and irreligious gives over to a second which introduces a sharp note of vacillation: Slow and reluctant was the long descent, With many farewell pious looks behind, And dumb misgivings where the path might wind, And questionings of nature, as I went. The greener branches that above me bent, The broadening valleys, quieted my mind, To the fair reasons of the Spring inclined And to the Summer's tender argument. But sometimes, as revolving night descended, And in my childish heart the new song ended, I lay down, full of longing, on the steep; And, haunting still the lonely way I wended, Into my dreams the ancient sorrow blended, And with these holy echoes charmed my sleep.

The descent is from "Golgotha," the place of generic religious suffering, the mountain upon which Christ was crucified. The misgivings, mollified by "Summer's tender argument," take over in the final two lines in the form of the "holy echoes" of the "ancient sorrow." One may readily think of the alternating moods of "Sunday Morning" when reading the first sonnet sequence: the poetry of argument, the serene naturalism, the doubts of secularism, the memories of Christianity there called in similar language "the holy hush of ancient sacrifice." The protagonist of Stevens' poem will "find . . . comforts of the sun" as the "I" of Santayana's says "let the sun and sea / Heal me"-though here too Santayana's grasp of nature is somewhat aesthetic and mental rather than direct and primitive. In the fourth sonnet, Santayana can only say, "I would I had been born in nature's day" and his feeling for the primitive is bookish, imitation Keats : "No unsung bacchanal can charm our ears / And lead our dances to the woodland fane." Compare this wistful thought with Stevens' "supple and turbulent . . . ring of men." The most joyful note in Santayana's sonnets is struck in celebration of nature but it is a subjective, psychological one. It is an assertion of imaginative independence, 12Letter no. 117: a journal entry dated May 29, 1906.

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the primacy of secular selfhood in the same "unsponsored" world of "Sunday Morning," the same lovable, post-mythological "old chaos of the sun." There may be chaos still around the world, This little world that in my thinking lies; For mine own bosom is the paradise Where all my life's fair visions are unfurled. This note is also struck in "Sunday Morning" : Divinity must live within herself: Passions of rain, or moods in falling snow; Grievings in loneliness, or unsubdued Elations when the forest blooms. The most desperate doubt of the naturalistic answers, a note more pervasive in Santayana than Stevens, comes, for example, in the often anthologized third sonnet, "O world, thou choosest not the better part," which shows Santayana's youthful disenchantment with the "uncritical common sense and science of the day." A few lines will suffice: Bid, then, the tender light of faith to shine By which alone the mortal heart is led Unto the thinking of the thought divine. A like impulse of doubt is expressed in "Sunday Morning" when the protagonist muses, "But in contentment I still feel / The need of some imperishable bliss." Her doubts are ultimately dispelled, as are the doubts of Santayana's figure. Commenting on the movement of recovery in his sequence, Santayana sums up by saying that though the third sonnet is "solipsistic" and "immature" the poems move toward a "mature solution ... in obedience to matter for the sake of freedom of mind." 13 The twentieth and final sonnet is unlike the first two sonnets in its direct didacticism. Where the first sonnet was a secular prayer and the second a kind of confession, the concluding sonnet draws the moral clearly. The poet asks the "great Mother" to open his eyes to her secrets, for The soul is not on earth an alien thing That hath her life's rich sources otherwhere; She is a parcel of the sacred air. 14 Similarly a didactic, secular note is struck in the concluding stanza of "Sunday Morning": 13"The Background of My Life" (originally published 1944) in Persons and Places, I, 241.

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14The following numbered sonnets of Santayana have been quoted in this order from his Poems: sonnet II, p. 4; IV, p. 6; XIV, p. 16; III, p. 5; XX, p. 22.

Daniel Fuchs She hears, upon that water without sound, A voice that cries, "the tomb in Palestine Is not the porch of spirits lingering. It is the grave of Jesus, where he lay." But if there are similarities in tone, world-view, rhythm and even snatches of diction in "Sunday Morning" and the first sonnet sequence, the differences between the two are equally important. We are, after all, comparing one of the masterpieces of twentieth-century poetry with a thematically original, distinguished but uneven and formally derivative sonnet sequence. It is on the count of "dissolution and fresh concretion of language" that Stevens' poem is of a higher order, for in his naturalistic, American appropriation of romantic blank verse he found the "fresh idiom" Santayana lacked. Stevens juxtaposes in "Sunday Morning" the conventional language he discards with the fresh concretion which is the dominant language in the poem. There is not any haunt of prophecy, Nor any old chimera of the grave, Neither the golden underground, nor isle Melodious, where spirits gat them home, Nor visionary south, nor cloudy palm Remote on heaven's hill, that has endured As April's green endures The dissolution takes place as the verbal equivalent of the logical content of the poem (chimera of the grave, etc., is an irreverent tag). What is wrong with Santayana's poetry, as he himself acknowledged, is that the language lags behind belief, the formal convention is not adequate to the theme. Another illustration of how different levels of language function precisely in "Sunday Morning" is seen in the following: Death is the mother of beauty; hence from her, Alone, shall come fulfilment to our dreams And our desires. Although she strews the leaves Of sure obliteration on our paths, The path sick sorrow took, the many paths Where triumph rang its brassy phrase ..• She makes the willow shiver in the sun For maidens who were wont to sit and gaze Upon the grass ... Once again a fresh version of romantic elevated diction (with its possible recollection of Keats's "Ode on Melancholy," though Stevens is serenely thinking of fulfilment where Keats, thinking of destruction, is left in anguish), is heightened by its juxtaposition with an archaic, here generically neo-classical diction. "Sick sorrow," and "triumph rang its brassy phrase" bring to mind 141

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other ways in which death is mythologized, confronted and made the subject of emotion. As the concessive II although" indicates, death was cause for despair in the older renditions of it, whereas his own naturalistic mythology accentuates its paradoxically benign effect on life. Here again, Stevens' characteristic use of language is made more poignant by the presence of a diction to be dissolved. Masterpieces like "Sunday Morning" and "Peter Quince at the Clavier" spring up almost out of nowhere. These are "early" poems, composed at about the same time he is doing poems which improve on Austin Dobson or poems which are precious versions of Imagism. He did well by these influences too. But it is not until Stevens makes use of some of the themes close to his Harvard friend that he breaks through to the major accent. Unlike Santayana, he finds a style wholly answerable to the moment of these themes. If Santayana's poetry offers a thematic analogy to what Stevens was doing in some of his earlier work, so does his prose of that period add to the argument for influence. The prose works which Santayana wrote as a critic-philosopher at Harvard help to create the cultural ambience for Stevens' first breakthrough into major poetry. Santayana's moving essay on Lucretius, for example, delineates the naturalistic sense of nature as it appears not only in Lucretius and Santayana but, in essential respects, in Stevens as well: Nature remains always young and whole in spite of death at work everywhere; and what takes the place of what continually disappears is often remarkably like it in character.... To perceive universal mutation ... is the condition for any beautiful, measured, or tender philosophy. This is the sort of triumph over death, the sort of serious tenderness "Sunday Morning" gives us. The immediacy compounded with philosophical sweep of Stevens' poem is prefigured by such a sentiment as the following: We seem to be reading not the poetry of a poet about things, but the poetry of things themselves. That things have their poetry, not because of what we make them symbols of, but because of their own movement and life, is what Lucretius proves once for all to mankind. In addition, the satiric dismissal of archaic concepts in "Sunday Morning" is anticipated: "Mythology, that to a childish mind is the only possible poetry, sounds like bad rhetoric in comparison. The naturalistic poet abandons fairy land because he has discovered nature, history, the actual passions of man." Naturalism is "the least poetical of philosophies." 15 Stevens liked to think 15 Three Philosophical Poets (New York, 1953), pp. 28 f., 39 ff., 60. Copyright © 1910 by Harvard University Press. All quo-

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of himself as being anti-mythological in this sense. I do not mean to suggest that Stevens is as Lucretian as Lucretius-his theme is not the vanity of life, and in his nature Venus usually has the last word-but that much of what Santayana says about nature in this essay must have struck a liberating note. Santayana's preference of the naturalistic concept of nature to the romantic one is stated in these terms: "Nature has depth as well as surface, force and necessity as well as sensuous variety. Before the sublimity of this insight all forms of the pathetic fallacy seem cheap and artificial."16 And he takes no less a figure than Wordsworth to task on these grounds: When he talked of nature he was generally moralizing, and altogether subject to the pathetic fallacy; but when he talked of man, or of himself, he was unfolding a part of nature, the upright human heart, and studying it in its truth. 17

Without going into the question of the accuracy of this description, it is worth noting that when Stevens talks about the "romantic" in its pejorative sense he is thinking of this sentimental aspect. "The Snow Man," another poem, is about the superiority of cold, naturalistic perception to the false warmth generated by the pathetic fallacy. Here too, Santayana, an exemplary mind of winter, taught him. Reason in Religion is another of Santayana's early books which bears directly on "Sunday Morning." Pointing to the anthropological origin of magic, sacrifice and prayer, Santayana says that "if all went well and acceptably, we should attribute divinity only to ourselves." The naturalistic narrator of "Sunday Morning" insists that "Divinity must live within herself" so that all may go well and acceptably. Santayana adds to his proposition, however, that there are "ambiguous regions of nature and consciousness which we know not how to face." 18 These are the regions which account for magic, sacrifice and prayer. "Sunday Morning" too accounts for "ambiguous undulations," but is 16/bid., p. 39. Santayana writes elsewhere (Daniel Cory, ed., The Letters of George Santayana [New York, 1955], p. 408): "Naturalism . • . is something to which I am so thoroughly wedded that I like to call it materialism, so as to prevent all confusion with romantic naturalism like Goethe's, for instance, or that of Bergson. Mine is the hard, non-humanistic naturalism of the Ionian philosophers, of Democritus, Lucretius, and Spinoza." 11 Three Philosophical Poets, p. 59. Cf.: M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp (New York, 1958), pp 291 f.; Geoffrey H. Hartman, Wordsworth's Poetry, 1787-1814

(New Haven, 1965). Cf. also an anonymous review of Santayana's Interpretations of Poetry and Religion (New York, 1957) in Harvard Advocate, LXIX, no. 2, 31 f.: to one "drowsy with the warm scent of mystic Ones and transcendent Experiences in which all differences are merged, the eminently sane and rational view of life and its meaning which Mr. Santayana sets forth will come as a breath of clear cold air." Stevens was president of the Harvard Advocate at this time. 18 Reason in Religion (New York, 1962), p. 25.

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content to rest in the ambiguities. Stevens' rather ordinary "casual flocks of pigeons," like most Stevens birds in flight, sink "downward" towards earth, a romantic naturalist counterpart of Shelley's skylark. Although there is a chaste, Dionysian worship there is no necessity for magic, sacrifice or prayer. If this worship is mythology, it is rather like the one Santayana describes the Vedic Indians as having: they "burst into song in the presence of the magnificent panorama .. . day-sky and night-sky, dawn and gloaming, clouds, thunder and rain." 19 "Sunday Morning" does allude retrospectively to a more conventional godhead, particularly in the somewhat puzzling passage which fuses classical and Christian mythology. Jove in the clouds had his inhuman birth. No mother suckled him, no sweet land gave Large-mannered motions to his mythy mind. He moved among us, as a muttering king, Magnificent, would move among his hinds, Until our blood, commingling, virginal, With heaven, brought such requital to desire The very hinds discerned it, in a star. This passage finds its parallel and clarification in Reason in Religion (p. 64) where Santayana points out that "the incarnation of God in man, and the divinisation of man in God are pagan conceptions, expressions of pagan religious sentiment and philosophy." Jove and Christ in this sense come from a common source, the religious imagination. In both classical and Christian myth man is transformed, ennobled, by divine visitation. This is the way gods "move among us." Santayana writes (p. 30): "Men like to think that God has sat at their table and walked among them in disguise." But "Sunday Morning" leaves no doubt that incarnation is not the myth of the present. Finally, "Sunday Morning" even subscribes to the prescriptive remarks Santayana makes about poetry in "The Elements and Function of Poetry," the important concluding essay of Interpretations of Poetry and Religion. In addition to the "visible landscape," which Santayana says "is not a proper object of poetry," it gives us what Santayana calls the "cosmic landscape." And it embodies what Santayana considered a necessity for relevant poetrythe element of prophecy. For Santayana, the poet must either express an existing religion or herald one which he believes possible. Despite the sense of exhaustion of conventional mythology, then, there is no despair. In a later work, Santayana puts it this way: 19Jbid., p. 47.

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The loss of faith, has no tendency to banish ideas ... [it] lends to the whole spectacle of things a certain immediacy, suavity, and humour. All that is sordid or tragic falls away, and everything acquires a lyric purity, as if the die had not yet been cast and the ominous choice of creation had not been made. 20 Another, perhaps the other, great "early" poem (1914) by Stevens, "Peter Quince at the Clavier," shares the Santayana air. Possibly the beginning"Music is feeling, then, not sound"-recalls the typical sort of statement that Santayana makes in The Sense of Beauty to the effect that the aesthetic experience is dependent on emotional consciousness. But it is the meditation on Susanna's fate which clearly owes something to the chapter in Reason in Religion called "Ideal Immortality." Santayana has been discussing the two kinds of immortality. First, the belief in a future life, of which he says, "Such an immortality would follow on transmigration or resurrection, and would be assigned to a supernatural sphere." Second, ideal immortality, where he considers the way in which ideal compensations may console the self for its lost illusions. Santayana begins his discussion by saying that nature has not solved the problem of perpetual motion in the animal body, as nature has approximately solved it in the solar system. Nutrition should have continually repaired all waste, so that the cycle of youth and age might have repeated itself yearly in every individual, like summer and winter on earth. Nor are some hints of such an equilibrium altogether wanting. For example, "a belated love" may bring about "a certain rejuvenescence in man prophetic of what is not ideally impossible-perpetuity and constant reinforcement of his vital powers" (p. 173). Immortality, the life cycle, permanence in flux, love out of season-we move towards the Susanna story, Stevens style. The elders of course are satirically given, yet their sense of "Susanna's music" is itself a poignant reminder of her beauty, the tone of the poem being relaxedly hedonistic rather than morally prescriptive. Susanna is immortal because she was beautiful in her day and lives in myth as a synonym of grace in the collective memory. For Santayana this is the meaning of immortality: "As it is memory that enables us to feel that we are dying and to know that everything actually is in flux, so it is memory that opens to us an ideal immortality. . . . It is an immortality in representation-a representation which envisages things in their truth as they have in their own day possessed themselves in reality." (p. 179) In both Stevens and Santayana, then, that which may take the place of future life or eternal beauty or spiritual immortality is the naturalistic sense of beauty-something 20Scepticism and Animal Faith (New York,

p. 67. Naturalism does not preclude for Santayana, as it does not for Stevens,

1955),

the private enactment of religious rituals. Indeed, both men feel the poignancy a naturalist may feel for them. 145

Stevens & Santayana

existent, something remembered, something eternal in its perfection of a given moment. The representation of this beauty is the human equivalent of the eternal, the "perpetual motion in the animal body [which] nature has approximately solved" in the natural world. Beauty is momentary in the mindThe fitful tracing of a portal; But in the flesh it is immortal. The body dies; the body's beauty lives. So evenings die, in their green going, A wave, interminably flowing. So gardens die, their meek breath scenting The cowl of winter, done repenting. So maidens die, to the auroral Celebration of a maiden's choral. Susanna's music touched the bawdy strings Of those white elders; but, escaping, Left only Death's ironic scraping. Now, in its immortality, it plays On the clear viol of her memory, And makes a constant sacrament of praise.

Susanna's beauty is part of the poet's emotional consciousness, as she was that of the elders', and is in this sense "music," which "is feeling, then, not sound." The praise of such beauty, the perceived beauty of a young woman in the flesh, has therefore a sacred character. The thematic similarities between Stevens and Santayana are easily translated into programmatic ones. There is a quality to some of Santayana's early utterances about the social function of imagination which Stevens echoes early and late in his prose and poetry. In Reason in Art, for example, Santayana speaks, as Stevens would, of the revolutionary quality of art: If what is hoped for is a genuine, native, inevitable art, a great revolution would first have to be worked in society. We should have to abandon our vested illusions, our irrational religions and patriotisms and schools of art, and to discover instead our genuine needs, the forms of our possible happiness. To call for such selfexamination seems revolutionary only because we start from a sophisticated system, a system resting on traditional fashions and superstitions, by which the will of the living generation is misinterpreted and betrayed. To shake off that system would not subvert order but rather institute order for the first time, it would be ..• a setting things again on their feet. 21

One could hardly find a better statement for Stevens' own imaginative imperialism. Stevens too, in "Imagination and Value"-in part, literally, a 2 1Reason

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in Art (New York, 1962), p. 152.

Daniel Fuchs tribute to Santayana-alludes to "the imagination" as "the irrepressible revolutionist." 22 He too wishes to institute order; he too works for our only possible happiness to emerge from disillusion. Both see the imagination as "a principle a priori." 23 Santayana's sense of the imagination, however, is rather more exalted than Stevens', as when he says: it "must furnish to religion and to metaphysics those large ideas tinctured with passion, those supersensible forms shrouded in awe in which alone a mind of great sweep and vitality can find its congenial objects." Stevens' sense of the supersensible is more modest than Santayana's. "To the One of Fictive Music" offers his version of it. After describing how close the imagination is to the particulars of human life, the poet adds: Yet not too like, yet not so like to be Too near, too clear, saving a little to endow Our feigning with the strange unlike . .. Unreal, give back to us what once you gave : The imagination that we spumed and crave. The deliberately archaized language is consonant with Stevens' assumption of the priestly role, his indulgence in the supersensible. It is when he writes explicitly of the imagination that he comes closest to embracing the idealism he so clearly knows the limits of. • One of the advantages of studying Stevens and Santayana side by side is that Stevens' relation of idealization becomes clearly defined. How far does he go? Where does he approach Platonism? Reject it? What sort of impact did Santayana's doctrine of essences have on him? What light does Santayana's development as a philosopher shed on Stevens' development as a poet? And, finally, what in Santayana was alien to Stevens? What did he modify or reject? To answer these questions we must delineate certain aspects of Santayana's philosophy more carefully. II

There is a shift in Santayana from humanism to epistemological scepticism and systematic ontology, a shift from anthropological psychology to Being and the relation of essence to existence. There has been a tendency on the part of pragmatists to regard this shift as a weakening into Platonism, or even worse, mysticism, but Santayana's realm of essences is not Plato's. The distinction is nicely drawn by Irving Singer: 22In The Necessary Angel (New York,

1951), 152. Hereafter cited as NA. Copyright © 1951 by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. All

quotations by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. 23 Santayana, Interpretations of Poetry and Religion, p. 10. 147

Stevens & Santayana In distinguishing essence from existence, Santayana aligns himself with the Platonic doctrine presented in the Timaeus. There the distinction is made between that which is self-identical, immutable, and definable and that which is in flux, unstable, and indefinable. But whereas Plato considered the Forms to be dynamic and causative, Santayana delegates all power and activity not to essence, but to the flux of existence. For him, essences are only "logical characters." As such, they constitute a different ontological realm from the underlying surd which they happen to characterize. 24 For Santayana, "an essence is simply the recognizable character of any object or feeling, all of it that can actually be possessed in sensation or recovered in memory, or transcribed in art, or conveyed to another mind." 25 He states clearly that "what I call essence is not something alleged to exist in some higher sphere: it is the last residuum of scepticism and analysis." 26 If Santayana had the cursed Platonic strain in him, it was injected the wrong way. It seems that what gives the edge to Santayana's definition is its distinction from the Platonic doctrine to which it owes much. Indeed, it is probable that Stevens' sense of Plato-his version of I love Plato but I love truth moreis derived in good part from Santayana, who makes a materialistic critique of Plato. In accents very much like Stevens' he says that Plato "was preaching a crusade against the established church. For naturalistic deities he wishes to substitute moral symbols, for the joys of sense, austerity and abstraction." 27 The criticism moves from the anthropological to the ontological level in The Realm of Essence. Here Santayana says that geometrical figures, types of animal bodies or human institutions are indeed essences, but so also are all the qualities of sensation despised by Platonism and all the types of change or relation neglected by that philosophy.... To discern them only in natural or moral units, and to think of them as perfections towards which things aspire, is not merely to omit noticing them elsewhere but to regard them as natural magnets, as a background of metaphysical powers, more selective than nature itself, and constituting a world of substances behind the flux of appearance. 28 It was in this sense that Santayana denied that he was a metaphysician. His sympathy is with the material flux. What motivated Platonism (and Santayana, like Stevens, does not say Plato was no Platonist) "was not love of nature at all but .. . a political, human good, and . . . so much in nature as might sanction it." 29 In short, Santayana laments the loss by the Platonic ideas of 24Santayana's Aesthetics (Cambridge, 1957), p. 3. Copyright © 1957 by Harvard University Press. Quoted by permission of Harvard University Press. 2 5"Proust on Essences" in Irving Singer, ed., Essays in Literary Criticism (New York, 1956), p. 241.

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26 "On

the Unity of My Earlier and Later Philosophy" in Works of Santayana, Triton Edition (New York, 1937), p. xiii. 21Reason in Art, p. 68. 28New York, 1927, pp. 30-31. 29Platonism and the Spiritual Life (New York, 1957), p. 310.

Daniel Fuchs "the radiance and the music of Phoebus Apollo," concluding that the ideas "in establishing their absurd theocracy over nature, were compelled to bend their backs to that earth-labour, and become merely a celestial zoology, a celestial grammar, and a celestial ethics." 30 When we say that Stevens is antipathetic to a realm of essences or that he rejects ontological priority we mean essences and Being in the Platonic sense which Santayana has characterized. Santayana's realm of "materialistic" essences is a friendlier, more viable conception to Stevens, his ontology more close, more human. In his poem "To an Old Philosopher in Rome," Stevens characterizes this realm as "the celestial possible." The oxymoron here-the idea of heaven and the idea of what can actually exist-points to the difference in conception. The closest Stevens comes to the Platonic road in Santayana's sense is a poem like "The Idea of Order at Key West." In this rhapsody on idealist impulse, to use Santayana's terms, essence is discriminated from sense data : "The water never formed to mind or voice, / Like a body wholly body" for "it was she and not the sea we heard . . . / And when she sang, the sea, / Whatever self it had, became the self / That was her song." The conclusion to this idealist epiphany is a sense of mysterious order. The essential song ends and the lights of Key West Mastered the night and portioned out the sea, Fixing emblazoned zones and fiery poles, Arranging, deepening, enchanting night.

The poem concludes with an apostrophe to the "Blessed rage for order," which will give our experience the heightening of "ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds." There is a passage in The Realm of Essence which is strikingly pertinent to this process : Sometimes sense itself, without any dialectical analysis, distinguishes essences from facts, and recognises them in their ideal sphere .. . this labour of perception may be more or less welcome, pleasant, or life-enhancing, apart from its ulterior uses; and sometimes this incidental emotion is so strong that it overpowers the interest which I may have had originally in the external facts. . . . I am transported, in a certain measure, into a state of trance. I see with extraordinary clearness, yet what I see seems strange and wonderful, because I no longer look in order to understand, but only in order to see. I have lost my preoccupation with fact, and am contemplating an essence. [pp. 6-7]

The most characteristic, and one of the greatest, of his later poems, "Notes toward a Supreme Fiction," indicates more clearly the extent to which Stevens knew Santayana's later work. The shift in Santayana from the philosophy of history to systematic ontology is paralleled in Stevens by a shift from the 30"Ideas" in Soliloquies in England and Later Soliloquies (New York, 1923), p. 232.

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sensuous world to a more mental conception of that world, from hedonist celebration to the mind corralling itself in never-ending meditation, from the tone of naturalistic elegy to ideas of order, from existence to its connection with essences, from primary colours to a general luminous quality, from comedy with a satiric edge to an elevated levity characterized by pathos and expansiveness. "Notes toward a Supreme Fiction" embodies most of these shifts. At the same time it is related to Santayana in other ways. For example, it recalls Santayana's early programmatic statements about poetry. In Interpretations of Poetry and Religion (p. 290), after saying that poetry "must be" euphonious, euphuistic, sensuous and ideal, Santayana hopes for the fruition of "relevant fiction, of idealism become the interpretation of the reality it leaves behind. Poetry raised to its highest power is then identical with religion grasped in its inmost truth." This elevated sense of poetry is also Stevens'. The spiritedness with which Three Philosophical Poets concludes (pp. 189 f.) is also to the point: "Honor the most high poet, honor the highest possible poet. But this supreme poet is in limbo still." I do not mean to suggest that Stevens is the answer to Santayana's limbo, but that the impulse behind Santayana's rhetoric seems to have had a hold on Stevens. The two qualities that this rational art must possess Stevens understands. First, it should buttress-the way science, business, morality buttress our life--"it informs us about our conditions and adjusts us to them; it equips us for life; it lays out the ground for the game we are to play." Santayana adds that "the philosophical or comprehensive poet, like Homer, like Shakespeare, would be a poet of business. He would have a taste for the world in which he lived." Second, it should express "the ideal toward which we would move under improved conditions .... Who shall be the poet of this double insight? He has never existed, but he is needed nevertheless." The tentative, hopeful, not quite literal prophetic note recalls Stevens, as does Santayana's emphasis on the artist as a craftsman whose home should be in the midst of society, "not on its bohemian fringes, nor in some remote empyrean." "Notes toward a Supreme Fiction" as much as any of Stevens' poems and more than most is "philosophical" in the sense in which Santayana wanted poetry to be "philosophical." Santayana admires the poetry which contemplates the order of things or sees the anything in the light of the whole, pointing out that "poetry .. . is not poetical for being short-winded or incidental, but, on the contrary, for being comprehensive and having range" (p. 20). In the interpretation of "Notes toward a Supreme Fiction" Santayana figures in various ways. Knowledge of his ontology is helpful in penetrating the difficult first cantos. "This invented world" implies the sort of historical relativism which both writers display in their sense of the progress of mythology, as when Santayana writes, in Persons and Places (p. 85), of his first awakening 150

Daniel Fuchs to this insight: "I was aware, at first instinctively and soon quite clearly on historical and psychological grounds, that religion and all philosophy of that kind was invented. It was all conceived and worked out inwardly, imaginatively, for moral reasons." The world in Stevens' poem must be invented since the idea of the sun, Being, is inconceivable; the realms of Being-matter, truth, essence-cannot be fully grasped by thought. The idea of the sun is inconceivable in the way Santayana says the realm of matter is: "the intrinsic essence of matter [isl unknown .. . all human notions of matter, even if not positively fabulous, must be wholly inadequate" ;31 or in the way that the absolute truth is: "Possession of the absolute truth is not merely by accident beyond the range of particular minds; it is incompatible with being alive, because it excludes any particular station, organ, interest, or date of survey: the absolute truth is undiscoverable just because it is not a perspective" ;82 or in the way the realm of essence is: it is not conceivable in that the realm of essence is all that Being could ever be or contain. To pursue Santayana's terminology, the spirit-an amalgam of feeling, thought, consciousness, imagination-may, through individual perception, make partial appropriation of essence, matter, and truth. This is what Stevens means when he says that the idea of the sun is inconceivable but that the idea of this invention may be perceived. For Stevens, as for Santayana, there is no first cause, no inventing mind as source of this idea; therefore, there is no necessity for sages of that concept. Though no mind can invent Being, man can "see" or intuit it in the serenity of privileged moments. Then, the comedy of mythological transience gives over to an apparently permanent intuition of Being. How clean the sun when seen in its idea, Washed in the remotest cleanliness of a heaven That has expelled us and our images ... The odd metaphor obscures the meaning but the same metaphor in Santayana, in a strikingly similar context, clarifies it: 31The Realm of Matter (New York, 1930), pp. vii f. 32The Realm of Essence, p. xiii. The Realm of Truth was published in 1938, "copyright 1937, 1938." The central idea is that truth is the sum "of all true propositions, what omniscience would assert, the whole system of qualities and relations which the world has exemplified or will exemplify. . . . If views can be more or less correct, and perhaps complementary to one another, it is because they refer to the same system of nature, the complete description of which, covering the whole past and the whole

future, would be absolute truth." This living truth is no living view, no actual judgment, "but merely that segment of the realm of essence which happens to be illustrated in existence" (The Realm of Truth, pp. vii, viii). It is perhaps interesting to speculate whether Stevens' poems about "The truth," published in the autumn of 1938 and embodying different aspects of this insight, came on the fresh reading of Santayana. See "The Man on the Dump," "On the Road Home," "The Latest Freed Man," "Connoisseur of Chaos."

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In order to reach the intuition of the pure Being, it is requisite to rise altogether above the sense of existence.... In other words, the proper nature of existence is distraction itself . . . so that it cannot be synthesised in intuition without being sublimated into a picture of itself, and washed clean of its contradiction and urgency. 33 But in Stevens sympathy with this purity of intuition is short-lived. The stanza concludes with the denial of the permanence of such intuitions: "Phoebus was / A name for something that never could be named." The canto concludes with an existential dissonance: The sun Must bear no name, gold flourisher, but be In the difficulty of what it is to be. The sun survives the myths. Being cannot be permanently dubbed this or that (though Stevens' sympathy with the attempt betrays itself in "gold flourisher"). Existence is in this sense difficult. Santayana has very much the same idea: "In so far as spirit takes the form of the love of truth ... it must assume the presence of an alien universe and must humbly explore its way, bowing to the strong wind of mutation, the better to endure and profit by that prevailing stress."34 The ephebe is the figure of youth as virile poet (and sometimes not so virile). This conception too might have had its origin in Santayana: "Throw open to the young poet the infinity of nature; let him feel the precariousness of life, the variety of purposes, civilizations, and religions even upon this little planet; let him trace the triumphs and follies of art and philosophy, and their perpetual resurrections." 35 This is clearly a figure of youth as virile poet, as a hero in the kaleidoscope of myth. The ephebe must become an "ignorant man" in that sense of second innocence that Stevens attributes to poets. Santayana too associates "the child of poetic genius" with "the ignorant heart." 36 The second canto points to the inevitable "celestial ennui" which comes from the necessarily approximate rendering of the first idea. The great sun is reduced to an isolated fragment at times, a "hermit." The process, the sense of renewal, goes on. In canto III, the poem as fresh imaginative interpretation, as partial arresting of the first idea, has the sanction of primitive impulse. Santayana tells us that "Memorable nonsense, or sound with a certain hypnotic power, is the really primitive and radical form of poetry." 37 Stevens' stylized Arabian (and once-listened-to wood-dove) and nonsensical ocean embody this original and not yet extinct nexus of poetry. The "damned hoobla" and howling "hoo" will never cease; the integration of imagination 33The Realm of Essence, p. 47 f. 34The Realm of Matter, p. 206. 35Three Philosophical Poets, p. 186.

1S2

36 Interpretations of Poetry and Religion, pp. 259 f. 37Reason in Art, p. 67.

Daniel Fuchs and reality is a constant. Stevens is far from the hieratic tone of "The Idea of Order at Key West." It is characteristic of him to treat comically a theme he elsewhere treats in all seriousness. The fourth canto alludes to Descartes, whose methodological doubt as a scaffolding to prove the existence of God is questioned. Stevens does not reach for a Platonic first cause but is content with a materialistic relativistic sense of "the" first idea. There was a muddy centre before we breathed. There was a myth before the myth began, Venerable and articulate and complete. From this the poem springs : that we live in a place That is not our own and, much more, not ourselves And hard it is in spite of blazoned days. "Descartes," Stevens writes, "is used as a symbol of the reason. But we live in a place that is not our own; we do not live in a land of Descartes; we have imposed reason; Adam imposed it even in Eden." 38 Reason is used here in a special sense, as an equivalent to man's imaginative rendering of reality. The "not ourselves" is an allusion to what Stevens and Santayana conceive to be a romantic appropriation of nature, as in Stevens' "The Snow Man" or Santayana's essay on "The Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy," where he traces the evolution of Transcendentalism from "a conscientious critique of knowledge" to "a sham system of nature." 39 Eve and "her sons and . .. daughters"-an outgrowth of Adam-were the first to subvert reason emphatically by indulging in a sham system of nature. "The first idea was not to shape the clouds / In imitation. The clouds preceded us." For Stevens, as for Santayana, spirit is said to be transcendental but epiphenomenalbeyond the body, of the body, but not causally effective on matter. In Eve's view, nature is a reflection of human wishes: "They found themselves/ In heaven as in a glass." How general does Stevens mean the indictment to be? He adds, in explication of this passage, "It is not the individual alone that indulges himself in the pathetic fallacy. It is the race. God is the centre of the pathetic fallacy." 40 The mirror is didactically replaced in Stevens by a hard, materialist perspective-"bare board." True consolation is the result of an only personal subjectivity, there being no celestial harmony : "Abysmal instruments make sounds like pips / Of the sweeping meanings that we add to them." 38Jn a letter to Hi Simons, Jan. 12, 1943, no. 469. The allusion to Descartes may be an acknowledgment as well, for Stevens knew Descartes and his Meditations supply us with a possible source of imagery in these cantos, e.g., "we must finally reach a first idea, the cause of which is an arche-

type (or source)." See Meditations (Indianapolis, 1960), pp. 38-40. 39Winds of Doctrine (New York, 1957), p. 195.

4 0Jn

a letter to Hi Simons, March 29, 1943, no. 479.

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The fifth canto pursues this vein of self-irony, in the form of the ephebe as precarious, urban, introspective hero. Generally, the rest of "It Must Be Abstract" works towards the mythical possibility the ephebe has to work with. The supreme fiction and the ordinary man are reconciled in a triumph of abstraction. The man In that old coat, those sagging pantaloons, It is of him, ephebe, to make, to confect The final elegance, not to console Nor sanctify, but plainly to propound. The feeling here is comic, genuine, American and on first blush remote from the austere, patrician Santayana. Then one recalls his sympathetic essay on Dickens, or his essay, "Imagination," in which he thinks tenderly of a similar figure: "What dreams occupy that fat man in the street, toddling by under his shabby hat and bedraggled rain-coat?" Love? Religion? Politics? We are all "ruled by imagination."41 Stevens' meditations on the first idea and mythology lead to an affirmation of ordinary life. His indulgence in abstraction only confirms his naturalism. "It Must Change" works many of the familiar Stevens themes: the old seraph juxtaposed with the young girls with jonquils in their hair, the eternal generations of bees, the archaic statue, the harmony of natural opposites in a universe of change, the poignancy of the physical world. The sixth canto bears curiously on Stevens' relation with Santayana. It echoes-perhaps unconsciously-a line in Shelley's "Ode to the West Wind" which Santayana often quotes. "Be thou me, impetuous one," says the poet to the wind. Like Shelley, Stevens is concerned in this canto with the reaction of consciousness to change; but what is cosmic in Shelley is local in Stevens. Stevens' gloss on this passage, though, could almost literally be a gloss on Shelley's poem: "In the face of death life asserts itself. Perhaps it makes an image out of the force with which it struggles to survive. Bethou is intended to be heard; it and ke-ke, which is inimical, are opposing sounds. Bethou is the spirit's own seduction."42 The last flourish takes us far from Shelley's idealistic appropriation of nature, though it has its own necessary, minimal idealism. The poem tells us that "bethou . . . is / A sound like any other. It will end." This seems to be an undercutting of Shelley. For Stevens, the flux clearly transcends any attempt by consciousness to penetrate it. With all his sympathy for the poet, Santayana, in his essay on Shelley, makes a similar point: "he will never be able to make nature the standard of naturalness."43 41Soliloquies in England, p. 122. 42In a letter to Hi Simons, Jan. 28, 1943, no. 472.

43Winds of Doctrine, p. 166. See also: In-

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terpretations of Poetry and Religion, p. 145; Paul Arthur Schilpp, ed., The Philosophy of George Santayana (New York, 1951), p. 282; The Sense of Beauty (New York, 1896),

Daniel Fuchs The final canto of "It Must Change" is a meditation in the manner of Santayana. A bench was his catalepsy, Theatre Of Trope. He sat in the park. The water of The lake was full of artificial things, Like a page of music, like an upper air, Like a momentary color, in which swans Were seraphs, were saints, were changing essences.

The mood is typical of Stevens though some of the language specifically recalls Santayana. The philosopher, who often uses the image of the theatre in his prose, defines trope as "the essence of any event, as distinguished from the event itself."44 The psyche or soul itself is considered a trope in that it is potentiality rooted in a seed. The language of Santayana underscores the depth of the reflection. The poet is transfixed by meditation, marrying the world of sense to an accessible transcendence. The swans, the seraphs, the saints-none here has the ironic connotation that Stevens had earlier in his career given them. The west wind-Stevens' west wind-is not impetuous but animates the local bucolics and calls to mind the principle of constant change, A will to make iris frettings on the blank." The "frettings," a late figure in Stevens, signify the internal intricacies of his later meditations. They are like the "damask" of"An Ordinary Evening in New Haven" (another poem with various flourishes out of Santayana); "the blank" is a version of the realm of essence, as is New Haven's "dominant blank, the unapproachable./ This is the mirror of the high serious." 45 (A pun?) The element of change in 11

p. 244 f.; "My Host the World" in Persons and Places, III, 1 f., originally published posthumously (1953) ten years after "Notes toward a Supreme Fiction." In this last, Santayana contrasts unrepentant "transcendental spirit" with his own limited penitent psyche. 44The Realm of Matter, pp. 101 f. Whitehead's Science and the Modern World is close in idea to The Realm of Essence and The Realm of Matter. In the postscript to The Realm of Essence, Santayana points to the similarity of their respective concepts of essence. Whitehead's concept of "event" is equally close to The Realm of Matter. 45"An Ordinary Evening in New Haven," which is about the integration of mundane fact and essences, shows various intimations of Santayana: "The metaphysical streets of the physical town," "The difficulty of the visible / To the nations of the clear invisible •• . gets at an essential in-

tegrity"-even the unpromising "tink-tonk I Of the rain in the spout . . . is of the essence not yet well perceived." Moreover, the theoretical remarks about the function of poetry recall the Santayana of Interpretations of Poetry and Religion, Reason· in Religion, Three Philosophical Poets: "The poem is the cry of its occasion, / Part of the res itself and not about it." Or, even more emphatically: This endlessly elaborating poem Displays the theory of poetry, As the life of poetry. A more severe, More harassing master would extemporize Subtler more urgent proof that the theory Of poetry is the theory of life, As it is, in the intricate evasions of as, In things seen and unseen, created from nothingness, The heavens, the hells, the worlds, the longed-for lands.

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Stevens & Santayana nature is analogous to the transformations of the introspective self. Essences are revealed, Santayana tells us, only by the movement of matter. "It Must Give Pleasure," after a series of familiar contrasts, leads to climactic utterance: To find the real, To be stripped of every fiction except one, The fiction of an absolute-Angel, Be silent in your luminous cloud and hear The luminous melody of proper sound. Note, an absolute. Even what remains is recognized as fiction. The angel is imagination in its ideal aspect as a reflection of the realm of essence. Because of this it must listen to the actual melody of worldly sound to find expression. A Stevens angel, he "Leaps downward ... Forgets the gold centre, the golden destiny," and thereby "grows warm." The luminous quality, the essential contingent on the existential, the sense of a multiplicity of possible fictions, the necessity to believe in imaginative transcendence and the necessity of imaginative transcendence to be derived from a mundane world-these are qualities central to Santayana as well, as when he writes of "innocent" essence: When actually given in intuition, every essence is luminous and not estranged ... by any doubt or veil. Matter is neither luminous nor innocent; it is therefore no object of contemplation; but nevertheless there lie all his hopes [the hopes of essence]; hence he sprang, on that he feeds, and there he must leave his mark if he would render existence more friendly to the spirit. It is by shifts of matter, in the world or in the brain, that essences are revealed . . . happy the man who, in bringing to light those which to him can be . . . congenial, leaves all the others to loom for ever in the distance, like ancient gods respected but not worshipped. 46 Stevens' angel, not like all the others, is the necessary angel of earth; Stevens' poetry is compounded of the "luminous flittering" and "the concentration of a cloudy day," the "imagination's Latin" and the "lingua franca et jocundissima." As Santayana would have it, his poetry expresses the ideal towards which we would move as it informs us about our conditions and adjusts us to them. "Notes toward a Supreme Fiction" moves towards conclusion as the whistling wren (no "be thous" here) offers natural counterpoint to the euphoristic poet who "can / Do all that angels can." The wren, cock and robin are bound by an only instinctive life to "mere repetitions." Yet the poet, with a comic bow to Coleridge, is left to muse whether the more elaborate activities of imaginative man are not themselves inevitably an analogous sort of repetitious activity, "One of the vast repetitions final in / Themselves and, therefore, 46The Realm of Essence, p. 72.

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Daniel Fuchs good." Man's occupation is expansive rather than forced but he must repeat, must order the flux by naming it. The resultant clairvoyance of consciousness, the coalescence of essence and datum, is man's most characteristic pleasure. As Santayana puts it, Radical flux is indeed characteristic of existence ... but the mind, even if describing only the series of its own illusions, attempts to describe it with truth: and it could not so much as fail in this attempt unless that series of illusions and each of its terms had a precise inexpungible character.... I may long ruminate upon it and impress it upon myself by repetitions, which to a lover never seem vain ... the repetition serves to detach and to render indubitable the essence meant. 47

"Notes toward a Supreme Fiction" concludes with the lover's essential consummation as he rests in an imaginative conception of his world: "flicked by feeling, in a gildered street, / I call you by name, my green, my fluent mundo." Stevens' flicks, glitters, flashes of gold, particles of nether-do are a figurative expression of Santayana's realm of essence. A knowledge of this concept dispels the fuzziness of numerous later poems. When, for example, in "A Primitive Like an Orb," Stevens alludes to "The essential poem at the centre of things," he is thinking of mythology as an essence, the sum of all poems. It stands in comic relation to the present artificers of the poem, "such slight genii in such pale air." This essential poem is not ontologically prior to poems; "it is not a light apart, up-hill." The giant in the poem is the collective poet, an inspiration to slight genii, "a large among the smalls / Of it, a close, parental magnitude." Stevens makes a poet's appropriation of the realm of essence as a worthy mythology in itself. He is more concerned with imagination than cognition and essences are for him not so much a logical necessity as an aesthetic preference. Nor is animal faith a self-conscious doctrine in the poet. The strong tendency in Stevens to think of description as a product of imagination is consonant with Santayana's view, but the equally strong (until the last phase) and logically contradictory tendency (Stevens makes poetry out of this contradiction) to immerse himself with direct cognition, empirically, in the indubitable thingishness of things is not. Much of Stevens' poetry is an example of the "gay empiricism" which Randall Jarrell says is the characteristic quality of American poetry. The philosopher bridled at this confident American quality. Yet Santayana's sense of culture, his naturalism, his idealism, though not his epistemological scepticism nor his air of Olympian resignation, provide an analogy in reflection to Stevens' poetry. In addition, Santayana's philosophy is considered poetic in itself. His categories are valued for the satisfaction and general imaginative coherence they bring rather than for their factual accuracy. Santayana thinks of philosophy as the art of 41 Ibid.,

pp. 5 f.

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Stevens & Santayana

thinking rather than the science of thought, as vision rather than argument; he goes so far as to say that it is only when "philosophy is good literature that it is good for anything." 48 Such a philosophy served Stevens as a theoretical justification of the residual Plato in him. Ill

Though Santayana has influenced Stevens' production in all these ways it is important to point to some essential difference. Stevens found an impetus to his later poetry in Santayana's ontology, but a major strain of his later poems is a clear departure from Santayana's aesthetics. The Sense of Beauty was written in 1896, yet when the subject of Stevens and Santayana is broached the impulse of critics is to show how Stevens-especially in his late masterpieces, "Notes toward a Supreme Fiction," "Esthetique du Mal"-is a poetic embodiment of that early book. Santayana's is a hedonistic aesthetics. And does not Stevens say of the supreme fiction that it must give pleasure? Not sybaritic, but tempered, mellow, naturalistic pleasure. Yet "Esthetique du Mal" seems to question even this accessible bliss. It is possible that Stevens thought of these two extraordinary works as contrapuntal, both dense meditations having the majesty of the summa, but "Notes" being to harmony and pleasure what "Esthetique" is to dissonance and pain. What Santayana has to say about the aesthetic experience bears relation to the earlier Stevens and that considerable aspect of the later Stevens which relates to his viable hedonism. Santayana writes: "The appreciation of beauty and its embodiment in the arts are activities which belong to our holiday life, when we are redeemed for the moment from the shadow of evil and the slavery to fear, and are following the bent of our nature where it chooses to lead us." 49 For Santayana, pleasure is the essence of the aesthetic experience. Beauty is defined as "pleasure objectified" to distinguish it from pleasure derived from ordinary activity, pleasure in the adverbial sense. (In this sense hedonism is conspicuous in the philosophy of Aristotle himself.) In accents which may have made a permanent impression on Stevens, he speaks of the arena of pleasure. "To see it in the physical world, which must continually be about us, is a great progress toward that marriage of the imagination with the reality which is the goal of contemplation."50 The sense of harmonious appropriation of the object by the subject, the gentlemanly tone, the aura of leisure, the refined hedonism-Santayana's aesthetics does take us directly into 48Scepticism and Animal Faith, p. 254. 49The Sense of Beauty, p. 25. 50Jbid., p. 136. For Santayana's critique of his early, empirical "definition" of beauty (from "pleasure objectified" to "a vital har-

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mony felt and fused into an image under the aspect of eternity") see Singer, Santayana's Aesthetics, pp. 42 ff. Pleasure is still the essence of the aesthetic experience.

Daniel Fuchs

Harmonium, a good way into the gay melancholy of "Notes,'' and even into the last poems. But it does not take us very far into the dark italics of "Esthetique du Mal" and the many poems like it. For in these poems the idea that pleasure is not the essence of aesthetic experience is explored. Terror, dissonance, darkness, isolation-but not pleasure. 61 This represents a change in Stevens' thought and a break from Santayana's. In a late essay Stevens writes: "Men in general do not create in light and warmth alone. They create in darkness and coldness. They create when they are hopeless, in the midst of antagonisms, when they are wrong, when their powers are no longer subject to their control. They create as the ministers of evil."52 This statement has none of Santayana's idealizing aesthetic impulse. It is quite the contrary of Santayana's saying that beauty "is never the perception of a positive evil, it is never a negative value," 63 as is much modern literature contrary to his saying that "art does not seek out the pathetic, the tragic, and the absurd." Indeed, Stevens is not original in his meditations on beauty as a positive evil. Much of the serious literature of our time is immersed in the destructive element, just as much criticism has explored the relation between art and neurosis. It is not simply a question of the negative element being "imposed . . . upon our attention." The crucial fallacious distinction here is the one Santayana makes in his discussion of expression, which is the quality acquired by objects through association (from judgment to revery). Expression consists of two terms, the manner (e.g., sound, rhythm, image) and the object itself; it is only by subordination of the second term to the first, Santayana tells us, that evil may be aesthetically represented, may be made "agreeable to contemplation." Santayana says that "we are not pleased by virtue of the suggested evils, but in spite of them."64 While it is true that the gratuitous accumulation of painful stimuli renders a work of art horrible, the fact remains that a beauty whose essence is not pleasure is the inspiration of much modern art. In "Esthetique du Mal" the sun is not majestic or clean, but faltering, imperfect, dressed "in clownish yellow, but not a clown." If it still represents the source of mythology, or the realm of essence, it is the apotheosis of mal. The "big bird [that] pecks at him," preferring spiritual to earthly food, essences to sensations, is Stevens' weirdest bird. He contents himself with lilCf. Marshall Cohen, "Aesthetic Essence" in Max Black, ed., Philosophy in America (Ithaca, 1965), pp. 115-33, for a challenging analysis of different views on aesthetic essence and the difficulty in establishing such a category. 52'Two or Three Ideas" in OP, p. 210. 53The Sense of Beauty, p. 49. In an engaging essay, "The Fate of Pleasure: Word·s -

worth to Dostoevsky," Lionel Trilling assesses the moral consequences of the "negative transcendence" of modem literature, of its attraction to "unpleasure," with late romantic nostalgia for the career of pleasure in literature. In Carroll Camden, ed., Literary Views (Chicago, 1964), pp. 93114.

54The Sense of Beauty, pp. 222 f.

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Stevens & Santayana

the perfections of an imperfect paradise. 55 The moon in "Esthetique du Mal" is seen in its "comic ugliness," the landscape of the mind in its nightmare state. A man of bitter appetite despises A well-made scene in which paratroopers Select adieux; and he despises this: A ship that rolls on a confected ocean, The weather pink, the wind in motion; and this: A steeple that tip-tops the classic sun's Arrangements; and the violets' exhumo. Whatever the protagonist of "Esthetique" experiences, it is not the normative, humanistic pleasure that Santayana writes about (except at the opening where he entertains more or less conventional ideas about tragedy and the sublime). If he is an epicure here, he is tasting "hunger that feeds on its own hungriness." Similarly, in "No Possum, No Sop, No Taters," Stevens exhibits his fascination with the negative second term: "The crow looks rusty as he rises up. I Bright is the malice in his eye...." As the poet says, "Bad is final in this light." The first term, the manner in which this poem is expressed-with its monosyllables, short sentences, choppy tetrameters, abstract words, lack of colour, the very inversion of his standard Harmonium patterns-is remarkable. But the poem does not succeed despite its subject. Though Santayana's aesthetics is rejected by the Stevens of the aesthetic of evil (Santayana himself seems to have set little store by The Sense of Beauty in his later years),56 the tone and verbal ambience of his later writing is not. The very use of the word "comic" or "clownish" in Stevens' later poems to indicate the nothingness of disillusion, the precariousness of man, the confusions of history, the detritus of metaphysics and the relativity of the physical world is something he may well have picked up from Santayana, who frequently enough alludes to "the comedy of change," "the laughing firmament," "this motley world," this "endless comedy of experience."57 Similarly, when, in canto xm of "Esthetique," Stevens writes of "the unalterable necessity/ Of being this unalterable animal," Santayana's materialist psyche comes to mind. When Stevens adds This force of nature in action is the major Tragedy. This is destiny unperplexed, The happiest enemy 55Cf. William Burney, "Wallace Stevens and George Santayana," unpublished Ph.D. dissertation (State University of Iowa, 1962), ch. 4. Burney points to a connection between this canto and Scepticism and Animal Faith, p. 85. 56Cory, Santayana, p. 17.

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51 The

Realm of Essence, pp. 109, 92; Scepticism and Animal Faith, pp. 3, 53. There are some recurrent images in Santayana which Stevens may have found there-the candle, the book, the small bird, nature as mother who has a philosopher as child.

Daniel Fuchs we see that this happy tragedy is close to sad comedy and we may think of an analogous passage in Santayana: The tragic compulsion to honour the facts [determined or fixed natural conditions] is imposed on man by the destiny of his body, to which that of his mind is attached. But his destiny is not the only theme possible to his thought, nor the most congenial. The best part of this destiny is that he may often forget it; and existence would not be worth preserving if it had to be spent exclusively in anxiety about existence.58

The perplexed calm of this insight is like the note on which canto xm concludes, a note of difficult Mediterranean serenity which, as several critics have observed, brings Santayana to mind. The concluding lines of "Esthetique" issue into a whirling recessional, the ontological expression of which is the materialistic philosopher's realm of essence. So many selves, so many sensuous worlds, As if the air, the mid-day air, was swarming With the metaphysical changes that occur, Merely in living as and where we live.

A friend once asked Santayana why he no longer wrote poetry and he answered "that poetry was not congenial to the spirit of the age." 511 No doubt. But what Santayana did not adequately see was that poetry can be made of this very contradiction, poetry at least partially representative of the aggrandizing fiction he had speculated about as a critic. The result is a modernist experimentalism he generally could not or would not fathom, the ideational content of which was sometimes closer to his own interests then he knew. Though Santayana seems not to have remembered Stevens, Stevens seems never to have forgotten Santayana. Speaking of Santayana's "poetic way of writing," he says that "the exquisite and memorable way in which he has always said things has given so much delight that we accept what he says as we accept our own civilization. His pages are part of the douceur de vivre."60 And Stevens does accept his civilization. The impressionism and piety of this remark are rendered more meaningful when we remember that Stevens has just been less complimentary in his estimate of Nietzsche's "poetry" and of Bergson's. It is Santayana whom he considers representative, inclusive, sweet. He pays similar tribute to Santayana in his essay, "Imagination as Value," both directly and indirectly. Indirectly, in that he shows distrust for the 58The Realm of Essence, p. xii. Burney sug-

gests that the protagonist of "Esthetique ciu Mal" is probably Santayana. In "My Host the World," Santayana does visit Naples (Vesuvius is on the bay), does think about sublimity in Sicily and elsewhere, does write a letter home (from the Holy Land). How-

ever, this final volume of Persons and Places was originally published in 1953, ten years after the poem. 59John Herman Randall in Corliss Lamont, ed., A Dialogue on George Santayana (New York, 1959), p. 29. 60"A Collect of Philosophy" in OP, p. 187. 161

Stevens & Santayana

romantic conception of imagination as something having metaphysical value in the everperfecting poem of the universe, but trust in the imagination as metaphysics when considered "something vital" and "capable of abstraction" -or not metaphysical at all but simply a power of the mind over external objects, a force in arts and letters. Directly, when he says, in comparing the life which is thrust upon man to the life which exists by the deliberate choice of the man who lives it, "it may be assumed that the life of Professor Santayana" (he hadn't been a professor since 1912) is a life in which the function of the imagination has had a function similar to its function in any deliberate work of art or letters. We have only to think of this present phase of it, in which, in his old age, he dwells in the head of the world, in the company of devoted women, in their convent, and in the company of familiar saints, whose presence does so much to make any convent an appropriate refuge for a generous and humane philosopher.61 Stevens remembered the man and had read the first two volumes of the autobiography. Taken together this is the life to which he refers, a life selfconscious, austere, detached, harmonious with itself. It seems an instance of normality in an abnormal time and is in this sense analogous to the problem which any recent imaginative effort is likely to encounter. "To an Old Philosopher in Rome" is a tribute to that life. Written before the publication of the third volume of Santayana's autobiography and just before his death, the poem depicts the later "spiritual" Santayana, the spectator of time and eternity. Of course, this had since his youth been a congenial stance for Santayana. But his definitive utterances about the life of the spirit occur in his later work. There he says, with residual Christian emphasis, that the "kingdom [of the spirit] is not of this world" and he eulogizes its power of renunciation in portentous prose rhythms: "understanding too much to be ever imprisoned, loving too much to be in love." He hastens to add, however, that "its distinctive object is not pure Being in its infinity, but finite being in its purity."62 Yet the emotional meanings which attach to spirit are an index of the temperamental difference between Stevens and Santayana. It is the 61NA, pp. 136 ff., 147 f. When Stevens adds

that the imagination is "a miracle of logic and that its exquisite divinations are calculations beyond analysis" and then, quoting anonymously, says, "If so, one understands perfectly the remark that 'in the service of love and imagination nothing can be too lavish, too sublime or too festive' " he is quoting from the second volume of the autobiography ("The Middle Span," pp. 2 f.). Santayana's statement is actually more complex and typical of his later tone:

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"Baroque and rococo cannot be foreign to a Spaniard. They are profoundly congenial and Quixotic, suspended as it were between two contrary insights: that in the service of love and imagination nothing can be too lavish, too sublime, or too festive; yet that all this passion is a caprice, a farce, a contortion, a comedy of illusions." Santayana spent his last years at the Blue Sisters' Nursing Home in Rome. 62P/atonism and the Spiritual Life, pp. 257, 304,293.

Daniel Fuchs difference between Connecticut and Rome. Though both are hermitic, Apollonian, spectatorial, elegant, and wise, though both came to prefer places to persons,63 the element of renunciation, of superiority to merely worldly triumph and sensuous indulgence is what typically distinguishes the exile from the American. But Stevens' later theme of mal bridges this gap considerably. The old Santayana seems often as close to the old Stevens as the young Santayana was to the young Stevens. Both remained to the last "impenitent" as to the eternal and were, in the end, "most penitent" about life itself. "To an Old Philosopher in Rome" reflects Santayana's dualism, his distinction between essence and existence, in a series of threshold parallels: the figures of the street, the figures of heaven; Rome, the more merciful Rome beyond; the inch and the mile; the banners and the wings; the human end and the spirit's greatest reach; the known and the unknown; the newsboy's muttering and another murmuring; the smell of the medicine and a "fragrantness" not to be spoiled; the light on the candle tearing against the wick and a hovering excellence. (Even the "bird-nest arches" and "rain-stained vaults" extend the threshold imagery, both being intermediary, in nature and church, between earth and heaven.) The realm of essence, "your particles of nether-do," arrests the flux. As Being comes near, the senses cling to "men growing small in the distances of space," the "smaller and still smaller sound" of their singing, the candle which evades sight. It is a remarkable rendering, its relentless abstraction a testimony to the interior distance Stevens has covered in his lifetime meditation as a poet. Here is delineated a human apprehension of the "celestial possible," the transcendence which is the qualitative dimension of existence itself. Santayana, in his heroic, philosophical absorption in the tragi-comedy of existence is Stevens' "master and commiserable man." The author of Realms of Being, this "inquisitor of structures," is a capable representative of the existential "poverty," the naturalistic disillusion, Stevens came to write much about. Santayana knows too, "It is poverty's speech that seeks us out the most. / It is older than the oldest speech of Rome." The consolation of Rome is a fictive one; "mercy" is not "a mystery/ Of silence" but the reverberations of the bells. That this "total grandeur at the end," this "total edifice," this scene so adequate to the meaning of life, was chosen by the philosopher "For himself" is characteristic of the way in which Santayana's life was a work of the imagination. The interior landscape is exquisite but it is not quite Stevens'. Rather it is an expression of empathy for a kindred spirit. The very titles of Stevens' stunning 63Cf. "Persons yielded in interest to places" says Santayana of the years 1897-1913 ("The Middle Span," p. 111). In Adagia (OP, p. 158) Stevens writes, "Life is ·an

affair of people not of places. But for me life is an affair of places and that is the trouble."

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Stevens & Santayana

last poems show a deliberate diminution of grandeur: "On the Way to the Bus," "As You Leave the Room," "Farewell without a Guitar." The embodiment of Stevens' desire and apperception in the mystical realm of essence takes typically a less churchly, a more spiritually subdued, more ordinary, more spontaneous, more exclusively naturalistic form. This distinction in heart's desire is rather like the one figured in their early sonnet dialogue. Now, in its essential gold and fire, we envisage Stevens' final bird. The palm at the end of the mind, Beyond the last thought, rises In the bronze distance, A gold-feathered bird Sings in the palm, without human meaning, Without human feeling, a foreign song. You know then that it is not the reason That makes us happy or unhappy. The bird sings. Its feathers shine. The palm stands on the edge of space. The wind moves slowly in the branches. The bird's fire-fangled feathers dangle down.

The exquisiteness of the representation, here and in other last poems, indicates a sense of tempered recovery, the grasp of naturalistic sanity, the possibility that pleasure may really be the last word, the final tribute to the intuitions of aesthetic normality. The poem is called "Of Mere Being," (OP) the irony intending to show that Being is contingent upon existence. For Stevens, even more that Santayana, knows that eternity is in love with the productions of time.

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Lewis A. Lawson

THE GROTESQUE IN RECENT SOUTHERN FICTION

The word grotesque is one of the most frequently used-and flagrantly abused -terms to be found in discussions of modern Southern fiction. As it is generally used, it seems only to be vaguely synonymous with ugly, absurd, and bizarre, to be a convenient synonym for Gothic, and to be applied only to the surface phenomena of unnatural action, setting, and character. Thus, the inclusion in Southern fiction of such violent actions as murders, suicides, rapes, castrations, and self-mutilations, of such weird settings as woods, swamps, and abandoned houses, of such aberrant characters as the insane, the idiotic, the obsessed, the freakish, the incestuous, and the perverted is cited as the unhealthy penchant of Southern writers either for cheap sensationalism or for the monstrous and atypical aspects of reality. Extremely prevalent though this usage of the word is, I find it singularly worthless as a critical concept. I wish in this essay therefore to offer a definition of the grotesque, to amplify my definition, and to apply it to recent Southern fiction. My definition follows : The grotesque is a mode of illusion which employs both photographic realism and absurdity, which occurs most frequently in times of cultural confusion, and which possesses characteristic tropes, motifs, and content. II

The grotesque is not a category determined by form, like a sonnet, or by substance, like sculpture, or by medium, like a painting, or even by method of composition, like a novel, which is characterized at least in part by being in prose. It is an aesthetic category that is determined only in the subjective perception of the viewer-not by the construction of the art object, but by that which the art object expresses. Nothing within the art object proclaims its grotesqueness; the viewer must proclaim that the object is grotesque. The grotesque is not objectively verifiable. The grotesque, then, is what Wellek and Warren would call a "mode of illusion," a conception of reality. 1 All art is an illusion of someone's reality, a representation of reality that is coloured by the individual vision of the artist. lRene Wellek and Austin Warren, Theory of Literature (New York, 1956), p. 203.

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The Grotesque

The grotesque mode of illusion is one that is markedly different from the illusion upon which the majority of people have agreed. We sense the grotesque only when we compare the vision of the artist to what we think is the public vision. Most of us err, however, in thinking, like the neo-classical critic whom Edwin Rosenthal speaks of,2 that our view is not coloured by subjectivity, that there is indeed an objective reality shared by all save the perverse artist. The idea that the grotesque is a mode of illusion is not new, of course, for all the arguments of the early nineteenth century about the grotesque as real or ideal were but to admit that the grotesque results from the unique vision of the artist, from subjective experience rather than from faithful copying of nature. And such discussions of the grotesque were but one aspect of the argument between kinds of fiction throughout the century. In America the conflict was between the romance and the novel; 3 in England it was, as Warren Beck points out, between the phenomenalists, exemplified by Thackeray, and the idealists, exemplified by Dickens. 4 With so many other modes of illusion available-classicism, romanticism, realism, naturalism, expressionism, impressionism, surrealism-one might doubt whether it is necessary to determine a new mode. But much of art, especially modern art, cannot be subsumed under any of those heads, and significant American art has always departed from those modes : The contemporary writer's use of distortion is not a new trend in American writing, however; rather it confirms a major tradition in American letters. Beginning with the Puritan obsession with sin and depravity as manifested in the Salem witchcraft trials and the rhetoric of Jonathan Edwards, the American imagination has always expressed itself metaphorically in terms of violence and grotesquerie. They are the heart of the frontier tradition of the tall tale and at the root of American humor; out of our preoccupation with them have come the Western and the "private eye" detective story-perennial favorites of our popular culture. In our greatest literature they find expression in Hester Prynne's scarlet letter, Ahab's ivory leg, and the decaying House of Usher. One thinks of the novels of violence and grotesquerie to come out of the Twenties and Thirties : of Faulkner and Hemingway, Farrell and Dos Passos, Steinbeck and Nathanael West, 6nally, of Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio, a book specifically about "grotesques."5 Modem art partakes of all previous modes of illusion, and yet it seems to be more than just a bastard composite. It most nearly approaches what Walter Myers, as early as 1927, called the "later realism": 2Edwin Rosenthal, The Changing Concept of Reality in Art (New York, 1962), pp.

4 Man

in Motion (Madison, 1961), pp. 140-

3See Richard Chase, The American Novel and Its Tradition (Garden City, 1957), for a thorough discussion of this conflict.

5 Paul

IX (Dec., 1961), 51. Quoted by permission

Levine, "The Violent Art," Jubilee,

58-59.

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42.

of Jubilee.

Lewis A. Lawson

As always in realism, the moving force seems to be a desire for the final and utter truth about life. In the search for this truth realists have enlarged their view of normality and have gained power in the use of actuality. These developments are manifest in three ways. First, the more advanced realistic characterization shows a disregard of artistic, traditional, or conventional consistency or unity and permits often an effect that may properly be called incongruity. Second, there has been an infusion of something poetic, metaphysical, mystical, which has heretofore in prose fiction been the property of romance and which may for convenience be called extra-realistic. Third, close attention to personality and its externals has produced "a sharper specification of the signs of life."6 But, as Katherine Anne Porter, like Marc Chagall and others, argues, to be faithful to reality is to be unfaithful to it; speaking of Eudora Welty, Miss Porter has pointed out: Her use of this material raises the quite awfully sordid little tale to a level above its natural habitat, and its realism seems almost to have the quality of caricature, as complete realism so often does. Yet, as painters of the grotesque make only detailed reports of actual living types observed more keenly than the average eye is capable of observing, so Miss Welty's little human monsters are not really caricatures at all, but individuals exactly and clearly presented: which is perhaps a case against realism, if we cared to go into it.7 Since realism has a historical meaning in literary criticism that customarily stops short of admitting the type of material Myers discusses, it would be more profitable, I think, to leave realism with its traditional meaning. The grotesque then becomes necessary as a mode of illusion. But this is not to say that modern art is completely divorced from any conception of reality. If one wishes to discuss modern art and reality, though, one would be wise to approach reality as Philip Wheelwright does, in Metaphor and Reality: it is presential and tensive, it is coalescent and interpenetrative, and it is perspectival and hence latent, revealing itself only partially, ambiguously, and through symbolic indirection. 8 Similarly, William Barrett, beginning his discussion of existentialism, has found reality for the modern artist to be "opaque, dense, concrete, and inexplicable."9 It should be noted that bisociation or incongruity is implied everywhere in these criteria. III

In his book Insight and Outlook Arthur Koestler develops a theory which, he believes, explains finally the mystery of comedy. The scope of his study is enormous: 6The Later Realism (Chicago, 1927), p. 4. Copyright © 1927 by the University of Chicago Press. Quoted by permission of the University of Chicago Press. 7"Introduction" to Selected Stories of

Eudora Welty (New York, 1943), p. xxi. Copyright © 1941 by Katherine Anne Porter. Quoted by permission, SBJoomington, 1962. 9 Irrational Man (Garden City, 1958), p. 56.

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The Grotesque Artists treat facts as stimuli for imagination, whereas scientists use the imagination to coordinate facts . The aim of this book is, first, to show that such distinctions are not fundamental, that all the creative activities of man are based on a common pattern, and to present a unifying theory of humour, art and discovery, in which these are shown to differ merely in degree and not in kind. Secondly, the attempt is made to show the possibility of a system of ethics which is neither utilitarian nor dogmatic, but derived from the same integrative tendency in the evolutionary process to which the creative activities of art and discovery are traced.10 Most reviewers of the book were far from convinced that Koestler had fulfilled his aims, and their lack of enthusiasm for his effort is understandable, since a book answering all the questions raised by his aims would be one of the most significant books of the century. Most of the reviews implied that Koestler had undertaken an essay beyond his intellectual competence. That his theory of bisociation is insufficient or too superficial to answer all the questions he asks seems to have been generally agreed; there was, however, little or no objection to its application to the phenomenon of humour, and in that one area, I think, Koestler has made a very significant contribution. The best method of presenting Koestler's theory is, I believe, to quote his summary, in which I have interpolated definitions of his technical terms: The necessary and sufficient conditions which define the nature of the comic stimulus are the sudden bisociation [bringing together] of a junctional idea or event with two independent operative fields [concepts, and the contexts in which they are habitually found, which are usually thought of as incompatible], and the presence of a dominant aggressive component in the compound emotional charge. [Genuine laughter, to Koestler, is reflexoid in nature, relieving the laugher of tensions which have arisen in the mind because of the introduction of two ideas which are not normally thought of at the same time.] The resulting abrupt transfer of thought from one field to the other causes a momentary dissociation of parts of the emotional charge from its thought-context, and the discharge of this redundant energy in the laughter reflex. [p. 110]

If, as Koestler believes, the comic results essentially from incongruity, that is, the clash of contradictory concepts, so too does the grotesque.11 Just what are the two operative fields which precipitate the response from a viewer that an object is in the grotesque mode is another matter. The original meaning of the word grotesque implied a combination of animal and vegetable, and by extension, any kind of incongruity. Such was the meaning of the word as it was used by Montaigne, Dryden, Shaftesbury, Hazlitt, and Scott. Later meanings lONew York, 1949, p. vii. Copyright© 1949 by the Macmillan Company. Quoted by permission of the Macmillan Company, New York and London, and A. D. Peters & Company, London.

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11 For

an opposing theory to my belief in the grotesque as bisociation, see Bernard Berenson, Aesthetics and History in the Visual Arts (New York, 1948), pp. 93-95.

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also stressed the incongruity inherent in the object termed grotesque. For Coleridge, grotesque suggested incongruous words placed in the same context; his use of the word pertained to diction. For others, Burke and Ruskin especially, grotesque suggested the clash of the ludicrous and the fearful. And other clashes have been suggested: the real and the fantastic (Ruskin, Bagehot), creation and imitation (Baudelaire), the tragic and the comic (Mann, Dilrrenmatt), the comic and the elegiac (Ihab Hassan), and the acceptance and rejection of the known world (Kenneth Burke). It can be seen that each of the dichotomies in the preceding paragraph amounts finally to the same thing. In a world in which it was still possible to separate all components of the universe into three rigid classifications, animal, vegetable, and mineral, the bisociation of two of them would be the creation of something unreal and outside the realm of what was conventionally accepted as real by most men. Sir Thomas Browne believed what he wrote: "there is no Grotesca in nature." Similarly, with the other dichotomies, there was the refusal to accept the limitations of the existing scheme of things and a conscious attempt to substitute a scheme which, according to empirical science, was untrue and therefore absurd. What, then, are the two operative fields, the juncture of which creates the grotesque? It would be a mistake, I think, to establish a definition which is highly specific, for many previous definitions seem inadequate for that very reason. John Addington Symonds, for example, proposed the bisociation of caricature and the fantastic, a dichotomy so narrow that the tragic principle, which undoubtedly pervades much modem grotesque, has no place in it. At the risk of appearing to retreat from the problem which I am studying, I would only propose the operative fields of acceptance and rejection of the world as we know it. By these terms I mean to say that there is present in grotesque, whatever the context of the word, a clash between accepting and rejecting the possibility of truth outside our experience. All that we call truth we have utilized as a scheme which we say gives meaning to the universe and consequently to men's actions and to the conception of tragedy. But if it is a higher truth that we live in a totally meaningless world, will not all our actions be absurd? Much of modern art seems to be a yoking together of the tragic and the absurd. In modern literature grotesque has been applied to various elen:ients. Most inclusively it is applied to the entire tone or atmosphere which pervades a work of art, the quality which I have called its mode of illusion. More specifically it has been applied either to the rhetoric or to the characters, actions, or situations of the content. If it can possess a similar meaning in every context, a highly specific definition cannot be demanded. If, however, we agreed that anything we termed grotesque contained both extremely realistic (acceptance of reality) and at the same time unrealistic or surrealistic 169

The Grotesque

(rejection of reality) elements, we could apply the term in all its contexts. For those who find the grotesque mode of illusion rewarding, I would suggest that their aesthetic pleasure results from the tension (the tension that Bosanquet admired) that arises in their mind from the clash of real and unreal, from the bisociation of physical and psychic reality, of the concrete and the symbolically indirect. There is no relaxation of tension in the grotesque mode through catharsis, no restoring of order as there is in old tragedy, I admit; and to some critics this might suggest that the grotesque mode is necessarily inferior to art in older modes. I do not think so, and several excellent criticsamong them Thomas Mann-have believed that only the grotesque mode is a form viable enough to reflect the modern apprehension of the world. IV

Very few critics have considered the grotesque from a historical perspective, and I know of only one who bases his whole interpretation of the grotesque mode upon a consideration of it as a phenomenon recurring at specific times in history, and even he makes allowances for individual practitioners of the mode at any time. Wolfgang Kayser sees "three historical periods in particular" in which the grotesque mode is especially prevalent: the sixteenth century, the age which extends from the Sturm und Drang to Romanticism, and the twentieth century. In these periods the belief of the preceding ages in a perfect and protective natural order ceased to exist. Without being forced to construct a unified world view for the Middle Ages, one must admit that the sixteenth century had experiences unexplained by the W eltanschauung of the preceding centuries. Sturm und Drang and Romanticism were consciously opposed to the rationalistic world view developed during the Enlightenment; they even questioned the legitimacy of the rationale for such a world view. The modern age questions the validity of the anthropological and the relevance of the scientific concepts underlying the syntheses of the nineteenth century. The various forms of the grotesque are the most obvious and pronounced contradictions of any kind of rationalism and any systematic use of thought. 12

And although Kayser is perhaps the only critic to label-perhaps even too specifically-the periods in which the grotesque mode has prevailed, other critics would seem to agree with him, if they went so far in their analyses, for they corroborate his view of what constitutes a period in which the grotesque is abundant. Several other critics have found this mode a characteristic of periods when "the belief in the preceding ages in a perfect and protective natural order ceased to exist." The comments of these critics range from 12The Grotesque in Art and Literature, trans. Ulrich Weisstein (Bloomington, 1963), p. 188. Copyright © 1963 by Indiana Uni-

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lewis A. Lawson

rather incidental statements to well-wrought arguments. Martin Foss has observed that "in times of chaos men return to the magic form of art, using the demoniac aspects of life for their stories and plays: sickness, insanity, death; but they turn them into grotesque means for laughter, in order to regain their inner balance."13 More pertinent, however, is Kenneth Burke's statement, which concludes a very interesting discussion of the grotesque mode as an expression of collective mysticism: "We might say here, in quick summary, that the grotesque comes to the fore when confusion in the forensic pattern [cultural frame of reality] gives more prominence to the subjective elements of imagery than to the objective, or public, elements." 14 And many critics, including David Daiches in The Novel and the Modern World, find the twentieth century a period of subjective imagery. So, too, does Erich Auerbach, who goes further to say that he senses the first "forewarnings of the approaching unification and simplification. 1115 Should such a phenomenon occur, should men once again generally agree upon what reality is, the grotesque mode should theoretically once again lapse into disuse. V

Since the grotesque is a mode of illusion most frequently occurring during periods of cultural upheaval, it follows that the characteristic tropes, content, and motifs of grotesque literature will emphasize ambiguity, complexity, distortion, incongruity, and the demonic. Practitioners of the grotesque mode have characteristically employed such manneristic tropes as the paradox, the oxymoron, synesthesia, mixed and far-fetched metaphors, at the same time as they have employed photographic accuracy of description. Phrase it how they will, most critics seem to see the oxymoron as the distinctive trope of the grotesque mode: it suggests to them the sense of incongruity, incredibility, and surreality that a style laden with such figures represents, especially when the motifs and content which the style bears are similarly incongruous, incredible, and surreal. As Kenneth Burke has said, "The incongruity of the grotesque-mystical comes to a focus in the oxymoron: one hears silence, peoples loneliness, feels distance, and sees in the dark."16 Throughout its history, the grotesque mode has emphasized certain distinctive motifs. These motifs generally express a revolt against the belief that nature is scrutable and an acknowledgment by the artist of the ultimate mystery of life. Since the mysterious-particularly in the past-was sinister and frightening, these motifs employed images that man had created to symbolize the 1asymbol and Metaphor in Human Experience (Princeton, 1949}, p. 121. 14 Attitudes toward History (Los Altos,

1959}, p. 84. 15Mimesis (Garden City, 1953}, p. 489. 16 Attitudes toward History, p. 59.

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seemingly unknowable and unnatural aspects of existence. Some of the traditional motifs of the grotesque mode are gargoyles and demons, the Dance of Death, the Ship of Fools, and the Temptation of Saint Anthony. Some of the more recent motifs are the use of the mask to suggest the inscrutability of personality, the use of automatons to suggest a will-less mankind, the encroachment of things into the province of beings, the use of vermin to suggest evil, and the general use of mythic parallels. There is also a characteristic body of content for the modern grotesque mode. Following the lead of the nineteenth-century romantic artist, the modern artist of the grotesque has taken the ugly as his own particular province. Physical deformity, even to the point of caricature, is the aspect of the ugly which comes immediately to mind, and it is the one characteristic of grotesque content that all critics stress.17 Certainly the literature of recent years which has been called grotesque has also contained many passages of sexual frankness, not merely descriptions of the sexual act but also descriptions of various sexual aberrants, but it should be noted that none of the passages could conceivably be called pornography. Of this Vivian Mercier is positive: "Let me be dogmatic: the grotesque never excites desire and therefore can never be pornographic in the narrow sense of the word." 18 And modern literature in this mode often suggests a pervasive atmosphere of the dream. These modern writers wish their work to occur on a plane where, as Katherine Anne Porter writes of Eudora Welty, "external act and the internal voiceless life of the human imagination almost meet and mingle on the mysterious threshold between dream and waking, one reality refusing to admit or confirm the existence of the other, yet both conspiring toward the same end."19 VI

That the grotesque mode is abundantly present in modern Southern fiction can be confirmed virtually by the reading of one novel or short story. There is no need to know of the two strains of grotesque influence, the European (through Edgar Allan Poe) and the indigenous (through the Old Southwest Humorists), that have contributed to the art of these modern Southern writers. The reader can sense for himself the strangeness, the ugliness, the absurdity of the aspects of life being presented, although he would appreciate fully the technique of the writer only if he were to recognize that the writer was working in the fullness of a tradition. But the grotesque he can recognize, 17Although Kayser correctly warns that isolated physical ugliness does not constitute grotesqueness (The Grotesque in Art and Literature, p. 57).

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18"Samuel Beckett and the Sheela-na-gig," Kenyon Review, XXIII (Spring, 1961), 301. 19"Jntroduction," p. xxi.

Lewis A. Lawson

nevertheless, and if he reads book reviews or criticism, he will have his recognition confirmed by a multitude of reviewers and critics. And such reviewers and critics are well within their rights to use the word grotesque, with the proviso that the word is not used merely as an anathema. With the privilege of its use should come the responsibility of its explanation; with its explanation should come a discussion of two problems attendant upon it. One problem complicating any use of the word grotesque is its relativity of meaning. The lack of a rigidly defined meaning for the word has been mentioned before, but this lack should be stressed again, in fairness to the writers whose work is often damned with this single word. Much of the confusion with the word lies in the fact that it is often applied by members of one cultural group to the work of another group, which is a sub-culture, if not a distinct culture. At least one Southern writer has commented upon this problem of the relativity of the grotesque: Flannery O'Connor has said, "I have written several stories which did not seem to me to have any grotesque characters in them at all, but which have immediately been labeled grotesque by non-Southern readers." 20 The idea is suggested that many of the charges of grotesquerie are the result of a clash between what Kenneth Burke calls "forensic patterns," between two views of reality. For if, as I have tried to demonstrate, the grotesque finally is only a mode of illusion, a stylization of reality which emphasizes exaggeration, does not the grotesque exist only in the response of the individual? The other problem complicating any use of the word grotesque is the confusion of art and morality that lurks in some critics' minds when they approach what they view as grotesque in Southern literature. This problem is, to phrase it another way, the old confusion of content and intent. What makes the confusion so tempting lies deep in the very nature of any aesthetic consideration of the grotesque: if grotesque art consists of representations of the ugly and the evil, is it not, therefore, ugly and evil aesthetically, and consequently without aesthetic value? It would seem to me that the grotesque would really represent "difficult beauty," and thus offer a greater pleasure to the reader by demanding more response from him. Yet critics, apparently still thinking, like William Dean Howells, of American novelists as those who "concern themselves with the more smiling aspects of life, which are the more American," condemn Southern writers on the basis of their content. In a study of Robert Penn Warren, revealingly entitled II Anatomist of Monsters," Oscar Cargill writes: 20"The Fiction Writer and His Country" in Granville Hicks, ed., The Living Novel (New York, 1957), p. 162.

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The preternatural absorption of the modern reader in the disfigured and unflgurable souls of fictive monsters provides one of the puzzles of our times. Physical monstrosity is revolting to us, so revolting that we expect the literary man to match the silence of the embryologist on the subject. And despite his penchant for the horrific and his irritation at restraint in all other matters, the modern writer has accepted the taboo. After all, the cretins of Faulkner and Steinbeck are not much more offensive than Quasimodo and Caliban, who have a quality of poetry about them. Yet the modern reader not merely tolerates but is fascinated by psychical anomalies, by grotesques, by distortions of all that is symmetrical in our supposed conception of man's spirit. Do we so lack the power to visualize the shape of the souls of men that we accept in fiction warped natures whose accretions and deficiencies outmode any malformations of embryonic reproduction? Or is the fault the writer's? Has his want of perception robbed his caricature of the human spirit of all purport? Why is our imagination less affected by the psychical monstrosity than by the physical?21 Such criticism results from the confusion of content and intent. The surface phenomena of fiction, the "externals," as Tennessee Williams calls them in his Introduction to Carson McCullers' Reflections in a Golden Eye, are content; the artist may or may not like them, or he may be Joyceanly indifferent about them. He uses the "externals" only as symbols anyway, as Williams goes on to point out. It just might be, contrary to what many critics think, that Southern writers have a moral intention in using the grotesque. In "The Fiction Writer and His Country" Flannery O'Connor approvingly quotes a statement made by Wyndham Lewis: "If I write about a hill that is rotting, it is because I despise rot" (p. 161). Then she goes on to suggest in her measured way that others write of rot for the same reason. The problems attendant upon the grotesque having been mentioned, the reasons for the widespread and persistent use of that mode by Southern writers may be pursued. A history of the use of the grotesque will not reveal the only reason for its employment by these writers, although, as has been suggested, the tradition is a potent influence, more so than most critics recognize. But the tradition is only the channel, not the force behind the modern Southern use of the grotesque. Its use is but one aspect of the whole Southern literary tradition, which is in turn but one aspect of the Southern philosophy. The Southern literary tradition has always been outside the main stream of American literature, first perhaps because of geographical distance and later perhaps because of philosophical difference. The Southern literary tradition has always been more conservative than the general American tradition; it never espoused Transcendentalism or, later, economic determinism. As Richard M. Weaver has written of American literature: "One school of writing tried to present man as all glory. A later school tried to 21col!ege English, IX (Oct., 1947), 1. Re-

printed by permission of the National Council of Teachers of English.

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present him as all jest-for that is what he must be if he is considered merely the pawn of circumstances. Only the contemporary Southern school has combined the glory and the jest and remained faithful to the riddle of man which may never be answered." 22 It is the larger frame of Southern philosophy, based upon Southern experience, that provides, more than any literary tradition, a milieu in which the grotesque mode is pertinent. The South, more than any other section of the United States, it is generally accepted, has retained a provincial, insular, conservative culture. It is even today more agrarian-minded than the remainder of the country. The setting of its novels is still the country or the small town, whereas most "American" novels have an urban setting, out of which comes naturalism. Man more nearly thinks of himself in conflict with forces when he finds himself in a highly mechanized, highly object-centred environment. Southern fiction is just beginning to reach this point. Faulkner had intimations of such a threat in Sanctuary, but the pressures of mechanized existence have only recently become prominent in Southern literature. Witness the woman in "Good Country People," by Flannery O'Connor, whose facial expressions are becoming so Pavlovian that they can be labelled forward, reverse, or neutral; or witness the mechanized descriptions of Rayber in The Violent Bear It Away, by the same author, who "was in bad need of a haircut and his eyes had a peculiar look-like something human trapped in a switch box." In naturalism there is no possibility of tragedy in the old sense. But, maintains Richard Weaver,23 tragedy is still possible in Southern fiction. For one reason there is still a belief in a dualistic philosophy; man still has a choice of good and evil. He does not yet live in an amoral, mechanistic world. If there is still choice, there is still evil to be warned against; hence comes one of the reasons for the grotesque. The grotesque magnification of evil, as Ihab Hassan notes, is a religious act. 24 Or as Wolfgang Kayser proposes as the raison d'etre for the grotesque mode: "an attempt to invoke and subdue the demonic aspects of the world." 2~ The grotesque mode almost becomes the type of hyperbole found in mystical literature (recall Burke's "grotesque-mystical"), where the "mystic is doing what an artist might do who painted the Parthenon bright purple and pink, not because that had been his intuition of it at Athens, but in order to coerce certain persons unfamiliar with the effects of the sun in that latitude out of a persistent assumption that the Parthenon is grey or brown." 26 In Flannery 22"Contemporary Southern Literature," Texas Quarterly, II (Summer, 1959), 142. 23Jbid., 143. 24Jhab Hassan, "The Victim: Images of Evil in Recent American Fiction," College Eng-

lish, XXI (Dec., 1959), 145. 25The Grotesque in Art and Literature, p. 188.

MacGregor, Aesthetic Experience in Religion (London, 1947), p. 146.

26Geddes

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O'Connor, grotesque magnification and mystical hyperbole are joined: "The novelist with Christian concerns will find in modern life distortions which are repugnant to him," she has said, "and his problem will be to make these appear as distortions to an audience which is used to seeing them as natural."27 The grotesque mode of illusion, then, is basically an exaggeration by which a call to order is made,28 and such exaggerated figures as Hazel Motes, Flem Snopes, or Popeye Vitelli are represented in fiction as rot that is to be despised. The belief in a dualistic philosophy is rooted in a sense of piety that is distinctively Southern. The half-mystical, half-orgiastic manifestations of Southern fundamentalism, snake-handling, speaking the Unknown Tongue, Holy Rolling, all of which are performed at revivals that grew out of the old camp meeting, immediately strike the visitor to the South or the reader of its literature. On a less sensational level, "Southern piety is basically an acceptance of the inscrutability of nature." 29 The acceptance of the inscrutability of nature allows the Southern writer more freedom than his more "realistic" American counterpart; he is freer to mix real and unreal to achieve the grotesque mode. If he does not know the bounds of reality, he explores and, by that action, widens them. The other reason that Weaver gives for the possibility of tragedy in Southern literature is that the South has known so much tragedy in its history. The Civil War, of course, is the great tragedy, the great defeat, the great crisis. The effect of the war was so great that the modern Southern mind has been obsessed with history (witness Gail Hightower, in Faulkner's Light in August) and with what might be called a mystique of defeat. The war as the supreme disintegration habitually comes to the mind of the Southern artist as he portrays personal disintegration in his fiction. The supreme indignity that Mason Flagg can force upon Cass Kinsolving, in Styron's Set This House on Fire, is to call for the rebel yell immediately after Cass has drunkenly exposed his body on his hands and knees as he sang a ribald song. Immediately after the war and for years after, there was a sense of physical defeat; the men came home vanquished, the land was desolated, and the section was occupied, in some areas for fifteen years, by men who were considered to be enemy troops. But these very factors ensured cultural unity, and there was no sense of cultural defeat. The fact that the Southern point of view had not been successfully defended militarily did not indicate to Southerners that it was morally or emotionally indefensible. As a matter of fact, the South may have become a more tightly knit cultural unit as a result 2 7 Quoted in Hassan, ''The Victim,'' p. 145. 28James K. Feibleman, Aesthetics (New York, 1949), p. 84.

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M. Weaver, "Aspects of the Southern Philosophy," Hopkins Review, V (Summer, 1952), 11.

2 9Richard

Lewis A. Lawson

of its defeat. Before the war there had been large areas of opinion that dissented from the majority point of view in the South; but after the war, all of the South was united by poverty, hatred, and myth. There were men like Henry Grady who spoke of a New South, patterned after the North, and slowly there was a very minor voice directed toward the future. But for all intents the South had the same cultural posture in 1929 as in 1861. 30 As Allen Tate has said, it was not the war but the highway that doomed the cultural South, which had no defence against modern communications and modern transportation, hence against new ideas. Consequently, the assimilation of the South into the cultural union began to be perceptible only in the twentieth century. For that reason, the modern Southern school that began with Faulkner has ever been a group writing, no matter what the background or the individual perspective, on the general theme of disintegration. At first the fiction depicted the disintegration of a tradition; Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury or Katherine Anne Porter's "Old Mortality" are examples of this phase. But very recently the novels have begun to depict the disintegration of the individual-the disintegration of the tradition has been accomplished. In this respect, contemporary Southern fiction is perhaps closer to Poe than to its previous generation; as one critic has pointed out, Poe strikes us as modern because of his discovery of the disintegration of personality as a theme for American literature. 31 The difference between the two types of disintegration may be seen, as Louis Rubin and Robert Jacobs dernonstate, by comparing The Sound and the Fury with a novel closely patterned after it, William Styron's Lie Down in Darkness : though Quentin, like Peyton, is living far away from his Southern home when he takes his own life, he is nonetheless a citizen of Yoknapatawpha County, even in Harvard, and his death comes not from his separation but from his inability to escape his impossible Compson heritage in a world in which that heritage and the role it prescribes for him are no longer possible. Peyton, on the other hand, is no longer a citizen of Port Warwick. Her parents' failings may have caused her to be what she is, but they fail as parents, not as degenerate representatives of an outdated dynastic concept of family.32

To be sure, there have been attempts at a defence of the old cultural frame. It is generally accepted that the South has sought to retain its old standards in the face of the outside world, even to the point of establishing a rationale 30Jay Hubbell, "Poe and the Southern Literary Tradition," Te:ras Studies in Language and Literature, II (Summer, 1960), 166. Sl[bid., p. 169. The critic cited is Allen Tate.

32Louis D. Rubin, Jr., and Robert D. Jacobs, eds., South (Garden City, 1961), pp. 22-23. Copyright © 1961 by Doubleday and Company, Inc. Quoted by permission of Doubleday and Company, Inc.

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-witness some statements from a few Agrarians-that smacked of a genteel fascism, or, even further, to the point of defying the law of the land-witness its doctrines of interposition and standing in the schoolhouse door. Defiance of law and order cannot be condoned, and no modern Southern writer would defend such actions. But compliance with the law of the land does not therefore mean that the Southern writer must accept the new cultural frame completely. If he wishes to distort aspects of the new philosophy to show their evil, his distortions should be viewed as attempts to warn his audience. Nor is his distortion confined to the new philosophy; he also distorts the aspects of the old tradition that have gone sour. For every Flem Snopes, there is a Benjy or a Jason Compson. What has not been generally recognized, either by Northern critics or by Southern politicians, is that the old cultural frame of the South is fast cracking. The South is catching up with the rest of the United States economically; but it is paying the price of losing its identity, which is being submerged into the chromium-plated dullness of modern American, Rotary-club materialism. The twentieth century may be a period of transition for all the Western world, as David Daiches, Wolfgang Kayser, and Erich Auerbach, among others, suggest, but if it is, it is doubly so for the South; the South has to catch up with the rest of the United States and then keep up with the changing as well. The use of the grotesque mode in American fiction is general at the present, as William Van O'Connor writes. 33 But its use is more concentrated and more persistent in modern Southern fiction primarily because of the double transition that the South has been forced to make-a transition that perhaps is reaching its completion. I have tried to indicate that the widespread use of the grotesque mode of illusion recurs periodically, in times of cultural crisis. It follows that a period of crisis would have a beginning, a middle, and an end; there would be a time when the old order was cracking, when it was completely demolished, and when the pieces began to reassemble in a new order. Extra-literary evidence suggests that the South in the last fifteen years has rejoined the cultural union. And literary evidence indicates that the period of the grotesque is nearly over. For the modern Southern writer there was a beginning of the mode in the early Faulkner, when the main concern seemed to be the mythologizing of the old order and the caricaturing of its agents of destruction.34 Then there was a period in which the old standards and rules appear to have lost all their validity and vitality. The result in fiction is pure chaos and absurdity, exemplars of which would be the novels of Flannery 33"The Grotesque in Modern American Fiction," College English, XX (April, 1959), 342-46.

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34 Lewis A. Lawson, "The Grotesque-Comic in the Snopes Trilogy," Literature and Psychology, XV (Spring, 1965), 107-19.

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O'Connor. 35 But novels in the past five years or so suggest that the Southern writer hopes to build a new view of reality upon a new set of criteria. If the world is absurd, then one must embrace a philosophy of the absurd; consequently several recent novels (William Styron, Set This House on Fire; 36 Carson McCullers, Clock Without Hands; Walker Percy, The Moviegoer) reveal existential professions of faith. 37 A. Lawson, "Flannery O'Connor and the Grotesque: Wise Blood," Renascence, XVII (Spring, 1965), 137-47, 156. 36 Lewis A. Lawson, "Cass Kinsolving: Kierkegaardian Man of Despair," Wisconsin

3 5 Lewis

Studies in Contemporary Literature, III (Fall, 1962), 54-66.

wish to acknowledge the aid of a grant from the General Research Board of the University of Maryland during the preparation of this essay.

37J

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Michael Millgate WILLIAM FAULKNER: THE PROBLEM OF POINT OF VIEW

Nothing in Faulkner's career is more remarkable than the sheer bulk of his achievement and the extraordinary range of his experimentation, the variety of narrative techniques adopted in successive volumes. Even his earliest novels, Soldiers' Pay and Mosquitoes, incorporated distinctive experimental elements, and by the time he wrote his fourth novel, The Sound and the Fury, he was no longer tinkering with the problems of fictional form but undertaking radical new departures. Three of the four sections of The Sound and the Fury take the form of interior monologues; As I Lay Dying, his next book is entirely made up of a series of interior monologues radiating from the central "story" like the spokes of a wheel. In other books of the 1930's and early 1940's the experiments were of many different kinds: chiefly stylistic in Pylon, chiefly structural in The Wild Palms, both stylistic and structural in Absalom, Absalom!, The Hamlet, and Go Down, Moses. After the war, and particularly in his last three novels, The Town, The Mansion, and The Reivers, Faulkner tended more and more to abandon this experimental exuberance and confine himself to fictional techniques which were less obviously innovatory. It is possible, of course, that the relatively conventional character of the late fiction represents simply a falling-off in energy, but that this may not be the whole answer is suggested by the presence among Faulkner's later work of Requiem for a Nun, a kind of playwithin-a-novel (or, if you prefer it, a play in which the opening stage direction of each act has the length and indeed the structure of a short story), and also of A Fable, an intricately constructed narrative which is, perhaps, not so much a novel as what its title announces it to be-a fable, a moral exemplum, eloquent of general truths. Apparently Faulkner neither rejected experimentation as such nor lost the energy with which to conduct experiments when they seemed to be called for. Is it possible then-and it is to this question that I want to address myself in this paper-that Faulkner may have felt in writing the more conventional of his final novels that he had in fact found not a retreat or a respite from, but actually an answer to, those very problems which had earlier led him into more evidently adventurous paths? These problems all involved in some degree the question of point of view, an area of technique which is not only of fundamental importance to all novelists but which has characteristically been a major preoccupation of 181

Faulkner modern novelists, and particularly of Conrad and Joyce, two of the most powerful and most immediate influences on Faulkner himself. The problem of point of view embraces, after all, some of the most crucial questions of literary technique: from whose angle and in whose voice is the story told? Where does authority lie in the novel, and whom, as readers, should we trust? Where does the author himself stand, and how do we know where he stands? We have to ask such questions, and answer them satisfactorily, before we can speak with any assurance of the moral patterning of a book or even, in some instances, of what it is, in the broadest sense, about. What is immediately striking is the rarity of the first-person narrator in Faulkner's work. In a writer who is so often claimed as a direct descendant of Mark Twain and the tradition of Southwestern humour, it is a little surprising to find only two books-The Unvanquished and The Reiverswhich are told entirely from the point of view of a single first-person narrator. And even in The Reivers the first-person narrator is not the final authority: the whole book is thrust into a frame, set at a distance, by the implications of the two opening words-"Grandfather said"-and of the colon which follows them. 1 The content of the book may be Grandfather's story, but clearly we must suppose that story to have been set down not by Grandfather himself but by one of his audience, presumably a grandson, and the distinction is crucial to a proper apprehension of the tone of the whole book. Henry James, of course, had a horror of "the terrible fluidity of self-revelation," and Faulkner, with his own highly developed sense of form, may conceivably have seen similar dangers in this particular technique. But obviously there is more to it than that, and even as one notes the relative absence of direct first-person narrative in Faulkner's work, one is haunted by the sense that the spoken voice is one of the dominant elements in almost all of his books. What closer inspection reveals is that many of his novels have not a single point of view at all but a multiplicity of points of view and, further, that Faulkner's preference is, in many cases, for a multiplicity of types of point of view-first person, third person, stream of consciousness, centre of consciousness, and so on. Perhaps it would be useful, as a way of clarifying this question, to look in a little more detail at one particular book, The Sound and the Fury, generally thought of as the most "difficult" and technically adventurous of Faulkner's works. A reader who comes unprepared to the opening section of the novel may well be initially at a loss to know into what kind of a fictional world he has strayed: Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see them hitting. They were coming toward where the flag was and I went along the fence. Luster 1 The

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was hunting in the grass by the flower tree. They took the flag out, and they were hitting. Then they put the flag back and they went to the table, and he hit and the other hit. Then they went on, and I went along the fence. Luster came away from the flower tree and we went along the fence and they stopped and we stopped and I looked through the fence while Luster was hunting in the grass. "Here, caddie." He hit. They went away across the pasture. I held to the fence and watched them going away. 2

The reader may well wonder who it is speaking in this curiously formal, elaborately simple way. It may take some time for him to realize that what he is hearing is not properly a speaking voice at all; that he is, in fact, inside the mind of Benjy Compson, a thirty-three-year-old idiot. Benjy cannot talk; nor is he capable, in even the simplest of ways, of distinguishing the relation of cause and effect; and what Faulkner does in this whole section of the novel is establish a convention of pure objectivity. Benjy observes the world around him, but he is incapable of imposing any pattern on that observation, and Faulkner employs him as a kind of camera-eye, recording whatever passes before him. In that opening paragraph, Benjy is in the garden of the Compson house, looking through the fence and the honeysuckle ("the curling flower spaces") at men playing golf ("hitting") on the adjoining course. When one of the golfers calls out "Here, caddie," Benjy howls in anguish ("I held to the fence," he says), and it is not till some time later that we realize he is giving voice to that vague sense of loss he feels at the absence of his sister Caddy, the one member of the family on whom he had depended for comfort. It is only later, too, that we discover that the golf course was formerly Benjy's pasture, one of the few things in the world to which he felt an attachment, and that the land has been sold to pay for a Harvard education for Benjy's brother, Quentin. Later still, we discover that Caddy has left home in disgrace, that Quentin has committed suicide at the end of his first year at Harvard, that Jason, the youngest of the Compson children and the only one left at home with Benjy, is a mean and rapacious small business man. The Compson family had once been a relatively distinguished one in the society of Mississippi, but it is now in the process of rapid disintegration, hastened rather than delayed by the cynicism of a dipsomaniac father, now dead, and the utter selfishness of a neurotic mother, still alive and still complaining. The reader discovers these things as he gets further and further into the book, as he responds to that experience of progressive discovery and imaginative re-creation to which Faulkner's technique invites and, indeed, compels him. Benjy is narrator of the first section, Quentin of the second, Jason of the 2New York, 1929, p. 1. Copyright © 1929 by Random House, Inc. Quoted by permission of Random House, Inc.

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third, while the fourth section is told by the familiar method of third-person narration, in which the author puts himself in a position of omniscience. Each of the first three sections is a tour de force in its own way : in Benjy's section, as we have seen, there is that brilliantly achieved convention of objectivity and an absolute freedom of movement backwards and forwards in time-the creation of what Faulkner once described in a letter as "that unbrokensurfaced confusion of an idiot which is outwardly a dynamic and logical coherence."3 Quentin's section is the interior monologue not of an idiot but of a highly sensitive and extremely tortured mind, and we follow, in a variation of the Joycean stream-of-consciousness method, the various experiences, ideas, images, memories which crowd upon his over-active mind during the last day of his life. Jason's section is an extremely successful capturing of a particular personality in terms of a particular tone of voice : "Like I say if all the businesses in a town are run like country businesses, you're going to have a country town" (p. 310) . When Jason talks like that, the man and his attitudes come frighteningly alive for us; one might add, too, that although this section, like its two predecessors, is generally spoken of as an interior monologue, the voice evoked is specifically a speaking voice, and it is easy to imagine Jason's words as being spoken out loud. This is much less true of Benjy's and Quentin's sections, and it is perhaps a sign that in this third section we are already moving outwards from the extreme internalization of the first two sections to the overtly social world of the fourth section, in which Faulkner writes as the omniscient author and gives us, for the first time, a physical description of the various members of the Compson family and of the Compson estate, and shows us much more clearly than before the ways in which the Compsons and their Negro retainers relate to the larger society of Jefferson, Mississippi. But why-it might be asked, and with some passion-why do it this way at all? Faulkner once said that in The Sound and the Fury he had told the same story four times,4 but that will hardly do as a complete explanation : the four sections may illustrate the same fundamental situation, that of the Compson family in its decay, but there is not in fact a great deal of narrative overlapping from one section to another. Indeed, the powerfully evoked individuality of the three first-person narrators, each locked in his own kind of unreality and remoteness, tends to result in a certain lack of over-all cohesion in the novel, and although one of Faulkner's chief purposes seems to have been the creation of Caddy, the Compson daughter, in terms of the view3Autograph letter signed, Faulkner to Ben Wasson [1929), in Massey Collection, University of Virginia; quoted in Michael Millgate, The Achievement of William Faulkner

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(London, 1966), p. 94. Reprinted by permission of Mrs. Jill Faulkner Summers. 4 Robert A. Jelliffe, ed., Faulkner at Nagano (Tokyo, 1956), p. 105.

Michael Millgate

points of her three brothers, there is a sense in which she remains vague and elusive of definition. It would be extremely interesting to know whether Faulkner had originally intended to write the fourth section in the third person, or whether his decision to do so was in some degree the result of a sense that the book was in danger of falling apart and needed a kind of authorial hoop to hold it together. It is not hard, in fact, to see ample justification for Faulkner's decision to write the closing section as he did-it was the most appropriate way of handling a considerable body of narrative material and it gave the reader release from the claustrophobic intensity of the previous sections. But although The Sound and the Fury was the book of which Faulkner spoke with most affection in later years, he seems at the same time to have thought of it as at least a partial failure,6 and one of the sources of his dissatisfaction may have been an awareness that, given the basic technique of the novel, there were other Compson voices that should perhaps have been allowed to make themselves heard: Caddy's, her daughter's, Mr. Compson's, Mrs. Compson's, Dilsey's. In As I Lay Dying, of course, that is precisely what Faulkner did: everyone is given a voice-not only every member of the Bundren family, but also several neighbours and various other people whom the Bundrens encounter on their way to Jefferson. Unity can be said to have been achieved here simply by virtue of the comprehensiveness of the points of view, but it is more specifically achieved by the way in which each of the narrative fragments makes its own contribution to the central "story"-the anecdote of the journey itself. It is a brilliant tour de force, but one which could only be achieved, perhaps, with basic material of this limited and essentially anecdotal kind. It is hard to see how the four sections of The Sound and the Fury could have been very much shorter than they are, and it seems likely that if Faulkner had attempted to deal in the As I Lay Dying manner with material on the scale of The Sound and the Fury he would have found himself with a book unmanageable in terms simply of size alone. There may well have been other reasons, however, why Faulkner did not repeat the kind of experiments in the use of the first-person narrator which he had undertaken in The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying. He may have recognized a more fundamental limitation in exclusive reliance on firstperson narration, however generously proliferated. Use of the first-person point of view can give vitality and immediacy; it allows the novelist both to tell the story, to recount simple narrative events, and, at the same time, to reveal the character of the narrator himself-in terms of the way the story is told, the order in which events are recounted, what is emphasized and 6Jbid.

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Faulkner dwelt upon, and, certainly not least, the kind of language that is used. But how are we to judge the reliability of what the narrator tells us? How, specifically, does the author dissociate himself from an untrustworthy firstperson narrator? Clearly, a skilful author can make a narrator like Jason Compson betray his unreliability by everything he says; an alternative method of ironic self-revelation is to allow the narrative itself to involve patterns of events-or simply passages of dialogue-which irresistibly call in question the narrator's interpretation of them. By such methods the author can invoke in the novel, in however shadowy a form, an ideal standard of value against which the narrator's aberrations can be assessed. The method has its limitations, however. The measurement of human behaviour against abstract standards, whether aesthetic or moral, is not necessarily a particularly sensitive process, and the attempt to enforce judgment of a first-person narrator in terms of standards both abstract and only tenuously implicit may well become oversimplified and much too absolute. Because Faulkner preferred to judge people in terms not of abstractions but of responses to actual human situations, his view of the world, of human behaviour, and of human values was rather more complex than this, and in writing Light in August, his next major novel after As I Lay Dying, he attempted to give expression to that complexity. In technical terms this involved considerable modification of his use of first-person narration, which now took a subsidiary role instead of the dominant one it had been given in previous books. Light in August, indeed, is the novel in which Faulkner first tried to incorporate within a relatively conventional framework the kind of narrative effects he had sought, and in large measure obtained, in The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying-but perhaps at the cost of drawing disproportionate attention to the techniques themselves. In Light in August Faulkner still avoids simple chronological continuity and still deals, as he was to do throughout his career, in large blocks of material so disposed as to achieve maximum effects of ironic juxtaposition or to bring to bear the fullest possible weight of historical, social, and emotional complexity upon a particular moment in time. The long flashback telling the story of Joe Christmas, the man who does not know whether he is Negro or white, is thus poised, in point of time, on the moment just before the final and fatal confrontation between Joe himself and Joanna Burden, the aging white woman who has become his mistress. The novel contains several substantial passages of first-person narrative-by Miss Burden, by Gavin Stevens, by the mad Doc Hines and his wife, by the anonymous furniture dealer in the final chapter, and by a voice identified simply as "they"-the ordinary people of the town of Jefferson and its surrounding countryside. But while these passages often continue uninterrupted at some length, and thus retain 186

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a degree of independent identity, they are all incorporated into an over-all narrative framework. The most remarkable of these passages, structurally speaking, is the final account by the furniture dealer of his encounter with Lena Grove and the doggedly faithful Byron Bunch. The account is essentially a monologue, an extended passage of first-person narration, but it is interrupted from time to time by comments from the man's wife, and we become quickly aware that the telling of this mildly racy story is considerably affected by the presence of this particular audience and by the fact that the two of them are together in bed. At one level, of course, this is very much in the tradition of American anecdotal humour-the humorous story, according to Mark Twain, is essentially American and its point consist primarily in the way it is told-but as one looks at the other examples of first-person narrative in Light in August it becomes clear that each of them is addressed to a specific audience and that each of them is affected, to a greater or lesser degree, by the speaker's awareness of that audience (Doc Hines, perhaps, is oblivious of his particular audience, but it might well be argued that this was precisely an aspect of his madness). Our own total experience as we read these passages includes-or should include, if we are reading sufficiently closely-simultaneous awareness of the speaker and of his audience, and of the interaction of the two. Faulkner's great innovation in Absalom, Absalom!, published four years after Light in August, was to make this awareness into an organizing principle. He realized that first-person narrative, with all its advantages of immediacy and character revelation, need not be treated in isolation-as separate sections of uninterrupted solo performance-but could be handled in terms of extended dialogue. From this point on, it might almost be said, Faulkner's characteristic way of handling narrative was to present it as a recital to an audience, a monologue with interruptions. The great advantage of interrupted monologue, as Faulkner discovered, was that it permitted interior and exterior views of a character to be much more closely juxtaposed and virtually, indeed, to coexist. Because an audience is present, the characters are quite naturally driven to deal not simply with events but with motivation, to reveal the bases of reason, prejudice, or emotion on which they have acted-or on which they believe themselves to have acted. The listeners, for their part, may abandon silence to protest, argue, cross-examine, or engage in Socratic dialogue-as Gavin Stevens so frequently does, for instance, in the play sections of Requiem for a Nun.

In Absalom, Absalom ! itself, the whole complex structure is built up almost entirely from the interlocking of a succession of interrupted monologues, and Faulkner once described Shreve McCannon, the arch-interrupter, as "the commentator that held the thing to something of reality," adding: "If Quentin 187

Faulkner had been let alone to tell it, it would have become completely unreal. It had to have a solvent to keep it real, keep it believable, creditable, otherwise it would have vanished into smoke and fury." 6 There is perhaps a hint here of the kind of function performed by the interlocutors in other Faulkner novels: the disgusted interjections of the short convict as the tall convict tells his tale in the "Old Man" section of The Wild Palms represent, in one respect, just such an intrusion of the voice of common sense. To put it another way, they are in some degree the kind of interjections which we as readers should be making, and it is almost as though Faulkner had provided the reader with a second self within the very world of the novel. By methods such as these, the first-person narrator can be judged not simply against standards implicit in his own narrative, but in terms of concurrent commentary from a specific audience. Ironic effects proceed now not so much from verbal jugglery within the monologue itself as from the juxtaposition of monologue and context, the relation between what is said and the situation in which it is said: the tall convict's tale of freedom unappreciated is being related, after all, to an audience of convicts still hopelessly immured. It is in The Wild Palms, of course, that Faulkner made the most obviously challenging of his experiments in large-scale ironic juxtaposition, since it seems clear that the story of the tall convict, embarrassed by a freedom he did not seek or desire, was designed by Faulkner as a deliberate counterpoint to the story of Charlotte Rittenmeyer and Harry Wilbourne, who suffered every kind of agony in their search for a freedom they could never attain. 7 Such a juxtaposition relates directly to the question of point of view, for our evaluation of the meaning of either story must be profoundly affected by our having been forced to a parallel reading of its companion piece: the meaning of the novel as a whole is precisely the product of our reaction to this experience, our response to the coexistence, the chapter by chapter alternation, of two stories which may look and be quite separate as simple narrative but which Faulkner insists are related in significant ways. The Wild Palms was published in 1939; The Hamlet, a novel of great beauty and remarkable stylistic virtuosity, appeared in 1940; and in 1942 came Go Down, Moses, perhaps the most widely and persistently misunderstood of all Faulkner's works. In Go Down, Moses, I suggest, Faulkner is demanding still more of us than he did in The Wild Palms, though few critics seem even to have realized that he is demanding anything at all. Misunderstanding of the book began with its first editor, who took it upon himself to call the volume Go Down, Moses and other Stories; that "and other Stories" was a 6 Frederick L. Gwynn and Joseph L. Blotner, eds., Faulkner in the University: Class Conferences at the University of Virginia, 1957-

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1958 (Charlottesville, Va., 1959), p. 75.

7Cf.

Jelliffe, ed., Faulkner at Nagano, pp.

79-80.

Michael Mitigate quite unauthorized addition which Faulkner later had cancelled but which has bedeviled discussion of the book ever since. 8 The so-called stories which make up Go Down, Moses were intended by Faulkner to be read as chapters in a novel;9 each of them makes a quite distinct statement about white-Negro relations or about the destruction of the wilderness, or about both, and our reading of the book as a whole must depend upon our awareness of the interaction of all these separate statements one with another. We tend to look for neater, more clearly formulated resolutions in most of the books we read, but Faulkner's deliberate choice, here as elsewhere, is to offer as resolution the fact of complexity itself, the frank acknowledgment that there may be situations-such as the white-Negro situation-in which no single standard of right and wrong is universally applicable, and in which men of goodwill can only do what seems to them right and necessary and possible in any given set of circumstances. The fourth section of "The Bear" is the one point in the novel where Faulkner attempts to bring all his material into narrower focus, and he does so precisely by means of that technique of interrupted monologue we have already discussed. The basic monologue here is Ike McCaslin's, but because Ike is delivering it to his cousin Cass, a man who has adopted different solutions to the very problems which so agitate Ike himself, the whole section becomes a kind of debate, a dramatized presentation of what are essentially abstract issues. Faced with the problem of living as moral men in an immoral world-specifically here, the world of the American South-Ike has chosen withdrawal into idealism, Cass involvement in the sometimes sordid world of actuality; Faulkner is not necessarily here saying that either is right or wrong, but rather that Ike's position, however dignified, looks a good deal less admirable when put side by side with the practical workaday achievements of Cass, while Cass's position, though sensible and practical, certainly lacks idealism and perhaps contributes to the perpetuation of social evils. 10 Go Down, Moses was the logical culmination of directions which Faulkner's work had been taking for several years previously, and there is no reason to think that he was dissatisfied with it. Nevertheless, its particular solution was not to be his final solution; it is characteristic of Faulkner, indeed, that he regarded no solution as final but tried always to avoid repeating himself in any way, to do something fresh in every book. What he attempted several years later in Requiem for a Nun was to isolate the interrupted monologue Bfor a discussion of this point see Millgate, The Achievement of William Faulkner, pp.

202-3.

Gwynn and Blotner, eds., Faulkner in the University, pp. 4, 273.

9 Cf.

1 °For

a somewhat similar dramatization of an ideological conflict, see the interview between the Corporal and the old General in A Fable (New York, 1954), pp. 342-56.

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Faulkner in the form of a play; his relative failure in this book was perhaps not so much a matter of the basic conception but of the highly artificial dialogue in which he chose to embody it. He did not, at any rate, abandon the idea of disengaging the monologue from the traditional kind of novel structure, even though to attempt to do so was in some sense to retrace the steps he had taken in working towards the integrated structure of novels like Absalom, Absalom! and The Hamlet. When, in the middle 19S0's, Faulkner resumed the writing of the Snopes trilogy, of which the first volume, The Hamlet, had been published many years before, he worked out another solution to the problem of point of view-a solution less dramatic than many of his earlier experiments but precisely calculated to meet the particular demands of his material and themes. In The Town, the second volume of the Snopes trilogy, the narration is divided between three first-person narrators, Gavin Stevens, V. K. Ratliff, and Charles Mallison. Gavin Stevens is the central character, and his sections of narrative give expression to his hopelessly romantic attitudes towards first Eula Varner and then her daughter Linda. Ratliff, a man of very different outlook, operates to some extent as the reader's representative within the novel, and his comments on Stevens' romantic notions, though often brief, are extremely pointed. Charles Mallison, as Stevens' nephew, gives us glimpses of his uncle in domestic situations, but he also speaks specifically as the voice of Jefferson, as a mouthpiece for the local consensus: "So when I say 'we' and 'we thought' what I mean is Jefferson and what Jefferson thought." 11 The novel achieves unity through the continuity of the narrative as it is passed on, relay fashion, from one narrator to another, and through the carefully established sense of Jefferson itself as a place and a society. This unity is also greatly strengthened by the way in which the three narrators, and particularly Ratliff and Charles, seem to engage in a continual conversation. For Ratliff and Charles the conversation is usually about Stevens, and if Stevens, on the other hand, seems often to be talking to himself, that is, perhaps, precisely a sign of his relative isolation from reality. Although The Town is not often thought of as one of Faulkner's major achievements, it perhaps deserves greater recognition as a novel in which Faulkner seems finally to have come to terms with the problem of point of view with which he had wrestled so long. By means of the efficient but quite unobtrusive technique he has here adopted, Faulkner has retained all the normal advantages of first-person narrative; at the same time, he has not sacrificed economy, because he has used only three narrators, each of whom fulfils a major representative role, as well as a purely individual one, in the over-all pattern; he has not sacrificed unity, because the successive narrative 11 New York, 1957, p. (3).

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sections all contribute to a single developing story; he has not sacrificed those advantages of continuing commentary which came with the interrupted monologue, because the placing of many of the sections, particularly those in which Ratliff is the narrator, is designed precisely to fulfil such a function; nor has he sacrificed complexity, since our total response, as in The Wild Palms or Go Down, Moses, depends upon our awareness not only of Gavin Stevens' view of things but also of the very different views of Ratliff and Charles Mallison and the people of Jefferson. Stevens may operate at some distance from what most of us would regard as the world of practical reality, but we are not allowed to view him in such isolation, any more than we are allowed to view him entirely on his own terms. The characters of the novel include Ratliff and Eula Varner as well as Gavin Stevens, and what finally confronts us here, as in all of Faulkner's works, is not man alone, or man judged against an abstract ideal, but man seen in relation to his fellow men and in the context of his society, doing what he can and must within the inescapable limitations of an actual and highly imperfect world-or, in Stevens' case, refusing, grandly but foolishly, to recognize such limitations at all. Because of his treatment of such "lost" characters as Joe Christmas in Light in August and Quentin Compson in both The Sound and the Fury and Absalom, Absalom!, and because of his recourse in The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying to the extreme intimacies of stream-of-consciousness technique, Faulkner has often been thought of as a quintessentially "modern" novelist, dealing primarily with the agonies of contemporary man in his desperate search for identity and expression. Unquestionably this element is present in Faulkner's work, and especially in the novels just mentioned. When Faulkner gave his Nobel Prize address, however, these were not the themes on which he dwelt: he spoke rather of "the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomedlove and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice."12 If one accepts that the Nobel Prize speech was not an idle rhetorical exercise but a precise expression of what Faulkner believed his work to be about, then clearly one has to see Faulkner's major emphasis as falling not so much on the individual in isolation as on the individual in his relation to other human beings. Faulkner, indeed, seems "traditional," rather than "modern," in his insistence on questions of right conduct, and it might well be argued that the major themes in his work, taken as a whole, are essentially social in character. Cleanth Brooks has written very persuasively of the importance of responding, in almost every Faulkner novel, to the omnipresent sense of the community, 12James B. Meriwether, ed., Essays, Speeches, and Public Letters by William Faulkner (New York, 1965), p. 120.

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"the powerful though invisible force that quietly exerts itself in so much of Faulkner's work. It is the circumambient atmosphere, the essential ether of Faulkner's fiction." 13 As Brooks goes on to point out, we become aware of the community in a novel like Light in August in terms of the minor characters and their reactions to the central characters, and, even more explicitly, in terms of that unidentified voice which speaks for the community as a whole and of the furniture dealer's final picture of Lena Grove and Byron Bunch-a picture which, because of its frankness and humour, serves to place not only the affairs of Lena and Byron but the whole action of the novel in a new perspective. The final section of The Sound and the Fury performs a somewhat analogous function, and even in As I Lay Dying the passionate voices of the Bundrens in their intensely introspective monologues are counterpointed against a kind of composite voice of the community, made up of the monologues of the various outsiders who become involved in the story. Even in these most aggressively "modern" of his novels, Faulkner found it necessary to give some direct expression to the social reverberations of individual action, and in subsequent works the presence of society, of the community, becomes even more apparent. The very device of the interrupted monologue, the very presence of an audience for most of the passages of first-person narrative, even the book-length narrative of The Reivers-the use of such techniques implies almost automatically the existence of a specific social situation. Master of technique though he was, Faulkner knew that technique is meaningless if it is pursued simply for its own sake, and in book after book he resisted the temptations of the spectacular and worked towards the perfection of technical devices whose very unobtrusiveness would best subserve his over-all objective of presenting the human condition in all its pain, joy, hope, despair, defeat, and triumph. "Art is simpler than people think," Faulkner wrote to Malcolm Cowley in 1945, "because there is so little to write about. All the moving things are eternal in man's history and have been written before, and if a man writes hard enough, sincerely enough, humbly enough, and with the unalterable determination never never never to be quite satisfied with it he will repeat them, because art like poverty takes care of its own, shares its bread." 14 18William Faulkner: The Yoknapatawpha Country (New Haven and London, 1963), p. 52.

14Typed

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letter signed, Faulkner to Malcolm

Cowley, undated, Yale University Library; quoted in Millgate, The Achievement of William Faulkner, p. 252. Reprinted by permission of Mrs. Jill Faulkner Summers.

Frederick J. Hoffman CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN POETRY

The word contemporary in this case comprehends the twenty-year span from the end of the Second World War to the present. It is a brave, though it may be a foolhardy, enterprise to establish "lines" of development; but for the sake of making my way through a great volume of materials, certain generalizations are necessary. There are facts, too, fortunately, and one of these is that the contemporary poets are young : in their thirties, at the most their forties. Their achievements have appeared within the twenty years I've mentioned; only a few of their books were published during the war itself, or just before it. The first thing one needs to remember, therefore, is that these poets are not dependent upon the classic figures of twentieth-century poetry, though they may want occasionally to acknowledge one or two of them. The time of Eliot's great influence on modern poetry and criticism has all but ceased. New poets have been very selective in their recognition of their elders. For various reasons, these following have been most often cited: William Carlos Williams most frequently, Ezra Pound (the Cantos almost exclusively), E. E. Cummings; and, in another context altogether, Whitman (somewhat uneasily), and Vachel Lindsay (a fellow on-the-road traveller). I do not mean that the preoccupation with "metaphysical poetry" in the 1920's and 1930's (Ransom, Tate, Eliot, others) has simply been discontinued; it does go on, but rather unspectacularly, with the very sensible idea that "metaphysical"-or, for that matter, symbolist-matters are naturally a part of the poetic process. Eliot and his contemporaries had to point to Donne and his fellow poets as "discoveries" who had lessons the poet could learn; this necessity no longer exists. Poets write in tacit acknowledgment of them, or in active rejection of them. To prevent this essay from becoming merely an assortment of random observations, I should like to point to four principal developments in contemporary verse: 1. The quietly intellectual, metaphysical poetry, which follows what has become a "tradition of the new": this poetry is extremely literate, very competently written, sometimes very effective. While it doesn't shout its allegiances, the line of descent from the 1920's is discernible, and the history of modern American poetry might (at some sacrifice) be written in terms of it. 2. The poetry of the native and the local image: the verse is in this case 193

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partly reminiscent of Robert Frost, though without his more or less obvious gleam and glimmer of message, irony, and innuendo. These are, in short, poets of scene; and, though they do vary occasionally and move into social commentary, their long suit is the simple experience. 3. "Projective" verse, which either is written from the force of a theory of expression, or forces the poet to offer one. The important pioneering figures here are Williams, Louis Zukofsky, and Charles Olson. The verse is "free" in the sense that it is used in a fight-more or less serious-against the "tyranny of the iambic pentameter" in English verse; but it is also quite strict, in the sense Pound intended when he said that all good verse must follow the hard line of being as close as it can to what the poet's mind conceived it as being. 4. The free-swinging verse of what is mistakenly referred to as the "San Francisco group" : this poetry did dominate San Francisco for a while, but it is transcontinental. It is the verse that accompanies social outrage, distress over "the bomb," the sexual Apocalypse, the assumption of causes, and is in general rebellion against those who are in power, those who are administrators, those who are older and more established. Any set of generalizations risks being caught in and involved with significant exceptions. Moreover, the categories I have given are by no means so neatly independent of each other as they may seem. But they are a working set of characteristics, which serve well to bring some order into the consideration of a topic that has so far had little serious study. 1 II

One thinks of generations in connection with this subject, perhaps even of decades. Poets who are still active and publishing scarcely deserve to be labelled "old generation." Yet, in the line of the first class, there are many poets who are not "contemporary" so much as near contemporary. These poets have for the most part an intellectual, sometimes even an academic, lPerhaps the best beginning is to be found in the two most important anthologies of contemporary American verse: Donald M. Allen, ed., The New American Poetry, 19451960 (New York, 1960), and Donald Hall, ed., Contemporary American Poetry (Baltimore, 1962). The fact that the two books differ so radically ·as to have very few poems in common is in itself a very interesting commentary on the literary scene. There are other anthologies, but these two will help to present the subject, if they are read intelligently and together. As for formal studies, 194

there are these: Glauco Cambon's pamphlet, Recent American Poetry (Minneapolis, 1962); Stephen Stepanchev, American Poetry since 1945 (New York, 1965); Anthony Ostroff, ed., The Contemporary Poet as Artist and Critic: Eight Symposia (Boston, 1964); and Edward B. Hungerford, ed., Poets in Progress (Evanston, 1962). The third and fourth of these books have many authors and are exploratory; though they contain some very good insights, the discussions are often provisional and inconclusive.

Frederick J. Hoffman background, are obviously educated in areas from which allusions and epigraphs can come, take a fancy to established forms (only occasionally do they attempt vers libre), and manreuvre skilfully within them. Perhaps it is rushing history a bit to think of Theodore Roethke, Robert Lowell, Richard Eberhart, Richard Wilbur, and Randall Jarrell as not contemporary; but the truth is that these poets are already established and are not contemporary in the strict sense of the term. They do carry the tradition to the younger, the more recent poets; and many of them have published volumes of poems in recent years. I should use them as transitional figures in the most substantial tradition we have: the line of development from the metaphysical poets of the 1920's and 1930's to the present. What was "experimental" then has now become established. For example, Roethke's early poems seemed a radical departure from anything that had ever been tried before; nevertheless, his poetry after that, and the poems in the posthumous volume, The Far Field (1964),2 are intellectually far advanced and formally more at ease than the exciting early poems. Perhaps the finest testimony in that last volume to Roethke's enduring value as a poet is the poem "In a Dark Time," which brilliantly sums up the diversified qualities of his career and also subtly defines its value: Dark, dark my light, and darker my desire. My soul, like some heat-maddened summer fly, Keeps buzzing at the sill. Which I is 17 A fallen man, I climb out of my fear. The mind enters itself, and God the mind, And one is One, free in the tearing wind. 3

However tempting it is to settle upon this and its equals as "contemporary poetry," there are more recent and less familiar poets. Louis Simpson is one of these. Born in 1923 in Jamaica, he studied for some years at Columbia University, then fought in Europe in the war (he was naturalized as a citizen of the United States at Berchtesgaden) and is currently a professor of English in Berkeley, California. He shares with several modern poets, most notably with Randall Jarrell, the fact that his interesting early poems were concerned with the war and with the varied phenomena of dying in it. The attitude of the common soldier is communicated in these early poems in the fashion made traditional by Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfrid Owen, Robert Graves, Ernest Hemingway, and many other earlier writers, and continued in the work of Jarrell 2Roethke died in 1963. For a recent exploration of his work, see Arnold Stein, ed., Theodore Roethke: Studies of the Poems (Seattle, 1965). 3 Copyright © 1960 by Beatrice Roethke as administratrix of the estate of Theodore Roethke, from The Collected Poems of

Theodore Roethke (Garden City, 1966), p. 239, final st. Reprinted by permission of Doubleday & Company, Inc. For a good analytic discussion of this poem, see Ostroff, ed., The Contemporary Poet as Artist and Critic, pp. 26-53.

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and others in the recent war. Here Simpson expresses the dread of the gun's authoritative roar and the soldier's uncertainty over the meaning of events: The guns know what is what, but underneath In fearful file We go around burst boots and packs and teeth That seem to smile. 4

Simpson has other comments to make of the War: of "that battle," he says, he remembers the tiredness in eyes, how hands looked thin Around a cigarette, and the bright ember Would pulse with all the life there was within.5

He judges ironically the "heroes" whose war wounds enhanced them, "just enough of their charms shot away/ To make them more handsome." 6 Perhaps more than the war itself, Simpson is able to communicate the postwar attitude, the sense of letdown from a position of high heroism: It was my generation That put the Devil down With great enthusiasm. But now our occupation Is gone. Our education Is wasted on the town. 7

In addition to the war, Simpson is much preoccupied with his adopted country. "American Preludes" is a long poem pointing to his imagination of what the country once was in its blessed beginnings: Maple and berry dogwood, oak, are kings. The axe is lively and your pale palm stings While Echo claps her hands on the bare hill. The scene is clear. The air is chill. 8

Of New Yorkers he says that "They're in a tearing hurry, to enrich/ The of a Lost War" in Selected Poems (New York, 1965), p. 18, st. 1. Copyright © 1965 by Louis Simpson; all quotations from Selected Poems reprinted by permission of Charles Scribner's Sons. This poem originally appeared in Simpson, Good News of Death (New York, 1955). For other war poems, see Randall Jarrell, Little Friend, Little Friend (New York, 1945), and Ben Belitt, Wilderness Stair (New York, 4 "Memories

1955).

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Battle" in Selected Poems, p. 19, last st. 6"The Heroes" in ibid., p. 20, first st. 7 "The Silent Generation" in ibid., p. 84, second st. Copyright © 1957 by Louis Simpson. Reprinted from his A Dream of Governors (Middletown, Conn., 1959) by permission of Wesleyan University Press. 8 "American Preludes" in Selected Poems, p. 25, last st. ; originally in Good News of Death. 5"The

Frederick J. Hoffman undertaker and to spoil a ditch." 9 In his own quiet way, he enunciates a credo that is not without its dignity and rightness: Life if you like is a metaphor of deathThe difference is you, a place for the passing of breath. That is what man is. He is the time between, The palpable glass through which all things are seen. 10 What is noticeable in this verse is the absence of experimental to-do. The language is quiet and sure; there are few major metaphors, but these are telling and not to be denied; most of all, the hand is sure and the sense mature, which guide these lines. There is irony, but it is modified by a sense of responsibility to his subjects (that is, Simpson does not simply exploit them, but rather allows them full scope and control). Perhaps the most interesting strain is that of Simpson's having become a citizen of the United States, fought with his newly acquired compatriots in a great war, then, after a war "we all knew was just," looked coolly (but not without sympathy) at his country; he is never obsequious or merely patriotic, but he is alive to the issues and can even appreciate the enchantment. In these latter cases, his "engagement" with Walt Whitman is an especially interesting encounter. All the realtors, pickpockets, salesmen, and the actors performing / Official scenarios" ignore the great grey poet; but Simpson is relieved to find that he did not, after all, insist upon a Great Society: 11

All that grave weight of America Cancelled! Like Greece and Rome. The future in ruins! The castles, the prisons, the cathedrals Unbuilding, and roses Blossoming from the stones that are not there ... The clouds are lifting from the high Sierras, The Bay mists clearing, And the angel in the gate, the flowering plum, Dances like Italy, imagining red. 11 Louis Simpson may be taken as typical of the post-war poet of the American tradition. Ordinarily working within forms long since agreed upon, he offers generally a quiet though secure development of the poetic line, with wit and 9"Islanders" in Selected Poems, p. 30, Part II, st. 2. 10"Islanders" in ibid., p. 33, Part IV, st. 4. 11 "Walt Whitman at Bear Mountain" in ibid., pp. 119-20. Copyright © 1960 by Louis Simpson. Reprinted from his At the

End of the Open Road (Middletown, Conn.,

1963), by permission of Wesleyan Univer-

sity Press. See also "Pacific Ideas-A Letter to Walt Whitman" in Selected Poems, p.

121.

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irony occasionally in evidence but seldom dominating the poem. Despite their many individual differences, this is also the line taken by Lowell, Roethke, Wilbur, and other poets of the forties and fifties; each has his own special gift to offer, but their contributions are conservative within the context of a post-war country whose intellectuals are both proud of and embarrassed by its sudden pre-eminence. There is also a strong sense of the intimately "small" details of human relations: small only in the sense that explosive events happen about them. Donald Justice treats formally of love and death, senses the continuity of generation and the charming inevitability of love. In his "Sonnet to My Father," he speaks of human situations that eternally recur: But, father, though with you in part I die And glimpse beforehand that eternal place Where we forgot the pain that brought us there, Father, and though you go before me there, Leaving but this poor likeness in your place, Yet while I live, you cannot wholly die.12 Of this group of traditional poets, many are women, which is perhaps not unusual in a country in which women have always been a sizable minority among the poets. Of Adrienne Rich's latest volume, Snapshots of a Daughterin-Law, she says that the poems "are concerned with knowing and being known; with the undertow and backlash of love and self-love; with the physical world as mine for the inward one." 13 Her poetry flashes with brilliant aperi;us, but these escape from it as a genie from a bottle, which is otherwise self-contained. About the concern with "knowing and being known" she is obviously genuine : Time wears us old utopians I now no longer think "truth" is the most beautiful of words. Today, when I see "truthful" written somewhere, it flares like a white orchid in wet woods, rare and grief-delighting, up from the page. 14 The kind of wit one finds in such a poem as "Ghost of a Chance" reminds one of what Marianne Moore and, later, Elizabeth Bishop were able to do 12Copyright © 1959 by Donald Justice. Quoted from his The Summer Anniversaries (Middletown, Conn., 1959), p. 21, last six lines, by permission of Wesleyan University Press. 13New York, 1962. The quotation is from

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the dustjacket. 14"Double Monologue" from Snapshots of a Daughter-in-law (New York, 1963), pp. 35-36, st. 7, and st. 8, II. 1-2. Copyright © 1963 by Adrienne Rich Conrad, and quoted by permission of the author.

Frederick J. Hoffman with the conceits derived from the behaviour of the "lesser species"; a man trying to think, Miss Rich says, is like a fish half-dead from flopping and almost crawling across the shingle, almost breathing the raw agonizing air till a wave pulls it back blind into the triumphant sea.15 There are, of course, variations of intellectuality in the poetry of this kind. I offer a kind of "dead centre" of it. It seems generally to have come from a stable (perhaps, in some cases, a static) situation, to have followed out from special (though not unusual) intellectual interests. It does not have any great emotional drive, and it is not tendentious. The poetry does not bear the weight or exhibit the force of Lowell's, Jarrell's, Eberhart's, or Roethke's; it is therefore not nearly so complex or so intricate as that earlier poetry. It does not have any ideological force, of the kind exhibited in the work of Muriel Rukeyser and Eve Merriam as a consequence of events in the 1930's. Its main virtues are its lucidity, its accesses of wit, its sense of stability (from which the witty or profound commentary can most safely be launched), and its formal solidity. To base all of one's judgments concerning our poetry on it would be to risk ultimate distortion. Ill

Yet, when we look at the second class of poets, we find a curious split in its behaviour. On the one hand, the poetry is almost purely "imagistic," in the sense of not allowing extraneous particles of thought or opinion; but some of it is also "editorial." The two qualities rarely conjoin; they are two separate functions of the poetry. I think mainly of Robert Bly (editor of The Fifties, now The Sixties magazine) and James Wright as the two principal figures in this class. Wright began by promising "much in little." He fancied the short line, the four-line, six-line, or eight-line stanza, but he did prefer end-rhymes. "The Seasonless" is perhaps typical of what his first volume, The Green Wall, has to offer: 15"Ghost of a Chance" from ibid., p. 60, st. 2, 11. 8-17. Copyright © 1963 by Adrienne Rich Conrad, and quoted by permission of the author.

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When snow begins to fill the park, It is not hard to keep the eyes Secure against the flickering dark, Aware of summer ghosts that rise. The blistered trellis seems to move The memory toward root and rose, The empty fountain fills the air With spray that spangled women's hair; And men who walk this park in love May bide the time of falling snows. 16 Meanings are implicit, and they become explicit only in the last stanza, in the image of the lonely old man who walks by: And why should he, the lost and lulled, Pray for the night of vanished lives, The day of girls blown green and gold? 17 The poetry does occasionally "explode" out of its self-contained shell of implications, for example in such a poem as "American Twilights, 1957," which is dedicated to Caryl Chessman, the cause celebre of many poets on the occasion of his campaign against capital punishment. The guilt provoked by Chessman's death attends us, Wright says, as does all violence in the land; Chessman buried is a memory very much alive: Haunted by gallows, peering in dark, I conjure prisons out of wet And strangling pillows where I mark The misery man must not forget, Though I have found no prison yet. 18 But the poems of The Branch Will Not Break (1963) are less urgent, and are content for the most part to allow the "message" to remain implicit within the image. The "purity" of these poems comes close to inhibiting the poet. Only occasionally does the "nature" described by the poet carry a burden of disquieting guilt : for example, in "Fear Is What Quickens Me," the line "They stared about wildly" ("they" referring to the animals destroyed by Americans on their westward push) of Stanza 1 and the last line, "I look about wildly," balance each other.19 There is also a clever commentary on the vulgarity of 16Copyright © 1957 by James Wright. Quoted from his The Green Wall (New Haven, 1957), p. 5, st. 1, by permission of Yale University Press. 17Jbid., p. 6, st. 3, II. 8-10. Quoted by permission of Yale University Press. 18Copyright © 1959 by James Wright. Quoted from his Saint Judas (Middletown,

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Conn., 1959), p. 49, st. 7, by permission of Wesleyan University Press. 19Copyright © 1961 by James Wright. Quoted from his The Branch Will Not Break (Middletown, Conn., 1963), p. 19, I. 3 of st. 1, and the last line, a stanza by itself, by permission of Wesleyan University Press and Longmans, Green and Company, Ltd.

Frederick J. Hoffman Warren Gamaliel Harding, which persists in the embarrassment caused by his graveyard and the monument erected to him; 20 and Wright yields to the easy ironies of "Eisenhower's Visit to Franco, 1959."21 But, for the most part, he settles for much less, for the Minnesota landscape in all seasons, typified in "By a Lake in Minnesota": Upshore from the cloudThe slow whale of country twilightThe spume of light falls into valleys Full of roses.22

This tendency toward bare imagery and statement by implication is carried on in the poetry of Robert Bly, who was born on the western plains of Minnesota, and has made a poetic mine of them. Bly talks about the simple pleasures in a manner like Williams' calling our attention to the importance of a red wheelbarrow. It is a pleasure, also, to be driving Toward Chicago, near dark, And see the lights in the barns. The bare trees more dignified than ever, Like a fierce man on his deathbed, And the ditches along the road half full of a private snow. 23

Occasionally, Bly breaks away from the "pleasure in familiar things" habit. He will play a few variations on a theme by Wallace Stevens ("Thinking of Wallace Stevens on the First Snowy Day in December," p. 16); he will be urgently emotional about simple divisions and adversities ("Poem against the Rich," p. 27); but for the most part he is content to watch the seasons change and to mark each sparrow's fall. This kind of poetry, while it is not always predictable, does settle into a monotony of almanac observations, with a minimum of "drive." Though Bly has been an active critic and editor, and has translated poetry from several languages, from the evidence we have at least, these appear to be separate functions. IV

The final two classes of verse I have suggested are much more engage than are the first two. There is a sense of deep urgency in each of them; they are 20"Two Poems about President Harding" in ibid., pp. 26-28. 211n ibid., pp. 29-30. 22Copyright © 1960 by James Wright. Quoted from his The Branch Will Not Break, p. 38, st. 1, by permission of Wes-

leyan University Press and Longmans, Green and Company, Ltd. 23 From "The Three Kinds of Pleasure," copyright © 1962 by Robert Bly. Quoted from his Silence in the Snowy Fields (Middletown, Conn., 1962), p. 11, st. 3, by permission of the author.

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impressive and portentous, and they are sometimes pretentious. But there is no doubt that they strongly assert instead of just wryly observing or quietly stating. The third group has adopted a label, "Projective," an extension of the "Objectivist" tag of Louis Zukofsky-who, with William Carlos Williams, is godfather to the group. Many of them have in common the experience of teaching at Black Mountain College, and some of them of being published by Jonathan Williams at the Jargon Press, Highlands, North Carolina. As for the theory, Williams announced it some years ago, when he called a poem a small (or large) machine made of words .. .. Its movement is intrinsic, undulant, a physical more than a literary character. .. . When a man makes a poem, makes it, mind you, he takes words as he finds them interrelated about him and composes them-without distortion which would mar their exact significances-into an intense expression of his perceptions and ardors that they may constitute a revelation in the speech that he uses.24

Of course Charles Olson is more precise, or at least more emphatic, in his critical statement. In the "Projective" sense, a poem is more than a machine made of words; it is "energy transferred from where the poet got it (he will have several causations), by way of the poem itself to, all the way over to, the reader." 25 The "dogma" involves a regular, interlinking "happening" of perceptions and a physiological precision: "that verse will only do in which a poet manages to register both the acquisitions of his ear and the pressures of his breath" (p. 388) . The syllable first, "that fine creature," then the line, which "comes from the breathing of the man who writes, at the moment that he writes" (p. 389). The head provides "the dance of the intellect" which manifests itself in the syllable; the heart, by way of the breath, produces the line. Syntax is the conduit of the poetic force, in what Olson calls "composition by field" (p. 392) . The line, the block of the stanza, conform to both breathing and meaning; pauses, blank spaces, are "breath withheld"; line length is a measure of breathing. Ultimately, the details of his theory are elaborated into this kind of generalization: "It comes to this: the use of a man, by himself and thus by others, lies in how he conceives his relation to nature, that force to which he owes his somewhat small existence" (p. 395). This is a revival-as it is in some respects a refinement upon-the theory and practices of Williams, of the Ezra Pound of the Cantos, of Zukofsky. What 24Quoted by Randall Jarrell, "Introduction" to Selected Poems of William Carlos Williams (New York, 1949), p. xvi. Copyright @ 1949 by Randall Jarrell. Quoted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation. 25 In "Statements on Poetics," published as App. to Allen, ed., The New American

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Poetry, p. 387. Other references to this statement wjll be found in the text. Originally published in Poetry New York, no. 3 (1950), Olson's essay is to be reprinted in Human Universe published by Grove Press in 1967. Quotations reprinted by permission of Grove Press and Charles Olson.

Frederick J. Hoffman kind of poetry it realizes can be seen in the Cantos, in Williams' Paterson, in the "collected short poems" of Zukofsky. There is no doubt that all of them had some logistics of breath-sound-meaning in the composition of their effects. The lines cut the meaning short in an effort to "cube" it, to give it geometric sturdiness: Rays sent from glass Sphering with its beamed fall the air Could not surpassDesigned to meet opposed beams thereThe unsealing of the eyes bare. 26 This is not unlike much of Williams' poetry, both early and late. The introductory lines of Paterson once again assert the doctrine as well as anyone has: To make a start, out of particulars and make them general, rolling up the sum, by defective means-27 That the "means" are defective, Williams was willing to admit; it is unlikely that Olson would be willing to admit the possibility. What kind of poetry emerges from this theory, or requires it? I use as first illustration a passage from The Maximus Poems 11-22. The indebtedness to Pound and Williams is quite obvious, though Olson is more concerned about the dynamics of arrangement on the page as well (that is, words must lie on the page in such a way as to resemble the ways in which they were originally "breathed"): Bowditch (later) ran Harvard, made enemies by helping to oust Kirkland. But, it is argued, saved the college financially (as he also founded insurance companies, from his knack for figures, and his years of trading for Mass. merchants as supercargo on Salem voyages. 28 A later volume shows a wide variety of line and stanza lengths, with Olson breathing consistently with the thought apparently. The content shapes the 26from " - - 'her soil's birth'" in All the Collected Short Poems, 1923-1958 (New York, 1965), p. 49, st. 2. Copyright© 1965 by Louis Zukofsky. Reprinted by permission of W. W. Norton and Company, Inc., and Jonathan Cape, Ltd. 27New York, 1948, p. 11. Copyright © 1946 by William Carlos Williams. Reprinted by

permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation and MacGibbon and Kee, Ltd. 28Stuttgart, Germany, 1956, p. 25, "Letter 16." Copyright © 1960 by Charles Olson. Quoted by permission of Jargon Books (Jonathan Williams) in association with Corinth Books, Inc. 203

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form, but there is some question as to why the content in the first place. The poetry is very informally conceived and ordered; there is no doubt that it represents "man thinking" (and breathing) instanter. The variety of production ranges from the rather quiet reaction to the natural image, in dogwood flakes what is green

to the stormy and angry "Letter" to Gerhardt, "There, among Europe's Things of Which He Has Written Us ..." 29 Surprisingly, the poets who are supposedly "Projective" write very different verse from Olson's. Robert Creeley's poetry is a compromise of groups two and three; it is simplistic almost to a fault (that is, it says what occurs to him and doesn't wait for a "poetic envelope" to be delivered), and unimagistic. A Form of Women is precisely that, without adornment, no "let me tell the ways" intervention: Praise god in women Give thanks to love in homes. Without them all men Would starve to the bone.30

The simplicity of observation is pushed to the extreme of "non-poetry": to kiss you is not to love you. Or not so simply. Laughter releases rancor, the quality of mercy is not strained.31

Robert Duncan, also considered one of the group,32 differs strikingly from Creeley. He is scarcely the "poet of cosmic consciousness" that Stephen Stepanchev claims him to be,33 but his poetry comes from an erudite and a far-ranging intellect. Some of his poems (especially the Letters) come close to being a restatement of Olson's theoretics: 29from The Distances (New York, 1960), pp. 86, 35. 30"The Wind" in A Form of Women (New York, 1959), n.p., st. 3. Copyright © 1959 by Robert Creeley. Quoted by permission of Jargon Books (Jonathan Williams) in association with Corinth Books, Inc. 31 "The Crisis" in For Love: Poems, 19501960 (New York, 1962), p. 19, last two st.

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Copyright © 1962 by Robert Creeley. Quoted by permission of Charles Scribner's Sons, and Calder and Boyars, Ltd. 32Among the others are Paul Blackbum and Denise Levertov; a lack of space prevents my discussing them. 33American Poetry Since 1945, p. 145.

Frederick J. Hoffman in

Spired / the aspirate the aspirant almost without breath it is a breath out breathed-an aspiration pictured as the familiar spirit hoverer8• At other times, the poem carries a full weight of intellectual substance, and the poet seems far away from the need to explain what he's doing. The range is wide, and Duncan is perhaps one of the most accomplished of our contemporary poets. This is perhaps one reason why he is difficult to classify, why at one time he seems to be doing double duty for Charles Olson and the next to be standing quite entirely free of him and of every other influence. V

It may be that the poets of the last group have had a "bad press," or too much of a press. Donald Hall, who includes none of them in his anthology, explains that the "Beat Generation" is simply "an invention of weekly news magazines. Insofar as it has made several good lines of poetry, it has belonged to the colloquial tradition." 35 Thus to dismiss an entire group of very live, kicking, vigorous poets expresses some height or other of sophisticated snobbishness. These poets have a tradition, they take a stand, they favour a poetic line as against others, they are a viable part of the post-war scene. It is true that many of them have been exhibitionists, have been known for bad manners, both in and out of their poems, and have seemed a bit in need of soap and water. But these are tactics of what Hall calls "the colloquial tradition." They are, most prominently, Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti. They are, above all, outspoken, impatient over questions of technique, given to direct statement. As for their sources, these are varied enough, though Whitman and Lindsay are drawn on for both technique and attitude; the great pose is self-definition in terms of ego and group, and Whitman has offered that. Beyond these, the poets are indebted to whomever they care to acknowledge : Henry Miller at times, Rimbaud (in Miller's image of him), D. H. Lawrence, Jean Genet, et al. The poets of this group can scarcely be described as an "invention" of anyone but themselves. Nor are 34 Letters (Highlands, N.C., 1958), n.p. Copyright © 1958 by Robert Duncan. Quoted by permission of the author.

35Contemporary American Poetry, p. 23.

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Contemporary Poetry

they confined to San Francisco (where, it is true, the best known frequently settle in, or "shack in"); the mimeographed little magazines with New York addresses testify to a very active contingent in the East. If they may be said to have one theme in common, it is the diminished self confronting "the bomb"; the bomb is a metaphor representing any and all kinds of organizational and institutional pressure and constraint. Gregory Corso's The Happy Birthday of Death contains an insert called "Bomb," which has the shape of a mushroom cloud hovering over the rest of the book. 36 Ferlinghetti's A Coney Island of the Mind contains a number of "Oral Messages," of which the following excerpt may be considered typical: I am waiting for my case to come up and I am waiting for a rebirth of wonder and I am waiting for someone to really discover America ... and I am waiting for the Age of Anxiety to drop dead37 Compensating for the "hate" poems is the assertion that serves as the title of one of Corso's volumes, Long Live Man (1962). However strongly disapproving these poets are of the form of our society, they believe in survival, and are in this sense affirmative. Survival can usually be achieved through one's taking the position of the clown, the hobo, the man patiently sitting out his jail sentence: in short, the "marginal man." As Corso has put it, Man is the victory of life, And Christ be the victory of manKing of the universe is man, creator of gods; He knows no thing other than himself And he knows himself the best he can;38 There is scarcely anything subtle about these lines; this poetry is either openly abusive or openly assertive. It is a direct expression of anger, indignation, or faith. It has a vitality, whose compensating weakness is superficiality. But it is vital. There is no question of its significance as an expression of rebellion, of the willingness to exist outside the accepted centres of government, education, probity, society. In the beginning, the emotions expressed were unadulterated anger and hatred, as in Ginsberg's notorious beginning 36New York, 1960. The "Bomb" insert is between pp. 32 and 33. 37New York, 1958, p. 49, II. 1-5, 14-16. Copyright© 1955 by Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Quoted by permission of New Directions 206

Publishing Corporation. 38New York, 1962, p. 10, st. 4, II. 3-7. Copyright © 1959 by Gregory Corso. Quoted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation.

Frederick J. Hoffman line of Howl: "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked." 39 But the tone has changed considerably since 1956. For one thing, it has become much more varied. What Donald Hall labels "the colloquial" includes jailbirds, hobos, "beats," along with intellectually more sophisticated poets. While the group has survived some ten years, having experienced a number of mutations during that time, it is still vital, has learned subtle variants of poetic (as well as activist) strategy, and continues to demonstrate vitality in its work and in its modus vivendi. The spectrum I have described consists of the widest range of poetic colour, point of view, form, and type of origin. It is essential that all four kinds of poetry be represented and discussed. 40 They testify, even in this foreshortened view, to the immense variety, skill, and vitality of contemporary poetry. The United States is in the middle of a literary renaissance, in both poetry and fiction. Only in the drama is it excelled by European artists; and it shows signs even here of a movement at least toward originality, if not greatness. Certainly, the evidence brought to bear upon this brief consideration of recent poetry is the best kind of proof, both of excellence and of a promise of continuing distinction. 39Howl and Other Poems (San Francisco, 1956), p. 9. This first of Ginsberg's volumes has a brief Foreword by William Carlos Williams, which ends: "Hold back the edges of your gowns, Ladies, we are going through hell" (p. 8). Copyright © 1956,

1959, by Allen Ginsberg. Quoted by permission of City Lights Books. 4 01 am aware of omissions, made necessary by limits of space : W. 5. Merwin, Donald Hall, W. D. Snodgrass, James Dickey, William Jay Smith, and May Swenson, among them.

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NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

GAY WILSON ALLEN, Professor of English at University College of New York University, is well known as a distinguished Whitman scholar. He is the author of the definitive biography, Solitary Singer, and Walt Whitman as Man, Poet, and Legend, Walt Whitman Handbook, and other books and articles. His first book, American Prosody, has become a standard text, and his latest work is again a definitive biography, William James. MUNRO BEATTIE, Professor of English and Chairman of the Department at Carleton University, has long been working on a study of Henry James as an annalist of English and American society. His most recent writings are the four chapters on modern Canadian poetry in the Literary History of Canada.

Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin, is the General Editor of the original American Writers Series. He is the author or editor of Major American Poets, Thomas Paine: Representative Selections, Transitions in American Literary History, and other books and articles. HARRY HAYDEN CLARK,

DANIEL FUCHS, during 1967-68 a Fulbright Lecturer at the University of Nantes, is the author of The Comic Spirit of Wallace Stevens and articles and reviews of Stevens scholarship. WILLIAM H. GILMAN, Professor of English at the University of Rochester, is the author of Melville's Early Life and "Redburn" and several articles and reviews. He is the joint editor, with M. R. Davis, of The Letters of Herman Melville, and one of the editors in charge of the new edition of The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson.

J. HOFFMAN, Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, is well known to students of modern American literature. He is the author of The Twenties: American Writing in the Postwar Decade, Freudianism and the Literary Mind, The Modern Novel in America, Conrad Aiken, and numerous other books and articles. His latest work is The Mortal No: Death and the Modern Imagination. FREDERICK

LEWIS A. LAWSON, Associate Professor of English and Associate Chairman of the Department at the University of Maryland, has published several articles on Southern writers and the Grotesque. He is the joint editor, with M. J. Friedman, of The Added Dimension: The Art and Mind of Flannery O'Connor. MICHAEL MILLGATE, Professor of English at University College of the University of Toronto, is the author of William Faulkner, American Social Fiction: James to Cozzens, and The Achievement of William Faulkner among other writings.

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Contributors ROGER B. SALOMON, Associate Professor of English at Western Reserve University, has published essays on Mark Twain in American journals and is the author of Twain and the Image of History. At present he is editing an edition of Mark Twain's The Prince and the Pauper. MILTON R. STERN, Professor of English at the University of Connecticut, is the author of The Fine Hammered Steel of Herman Melville, among other writings on Melville, and the editor of Discussions of "Moby-Dick."

is Associate Professor of English at Carleton University. He has published articles on Stephen Crane, Longfellow, and Evelyn Waugh, and at present is working on a critical study of Crane.

THE EDITOR

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