Pandora’s Box in American Fiction HARRY HAYDEN CLARK

America, Carlyle wrote Emerson, “is verily the Door of Hope to distracted Europe; which otherwise I should see crumbling down into blackness of darkness.”

The Door of Hope! It is perhaps time now to ask down what corridors this door has led, to scrutinise the precise quality of American hope. Is it a new hope, or a disguised form of the European hope which has led “to blackness of darkness”? What, for example, have our fiction writers, reflecting the American mind, past and present, reported regarding the success of their quest for happiness? If they have reported that certain sorts of hope have led to despair, what evidence is there that other sorts lead to joy? For “the desire for happiness,” says Arnold, “is the root and ground of man’s being. Tell him and show him that he places his happiness wrong, that he seeks for delight where delight will never really be found; then you illumine and further him.” Let us sketch the quality, first, of the hope of a paradise of supernal beauty; second, the hope of an American paradise of nature; and finally, the hope of “A Paradise within thee, happier far.”

I

If we consider the European background of the hope to escape to a paradise of supernal beauty and bliss, we find that in the classical legends of the Golden Age, in such Renaissance writers as Lyly, Sidney, and Spenser, and in such later work as Thomson’s Castle of Indolence, this idyllic Arcadianism was either frankly recreational and non-philosophic or else a cloak for allegory. Not until the middle of the eighteenth century was the idyllic dream taken seriously. Revolting from earlier and contemporary restriction of the imagination, Akenside advocated refusing to “restrain” one’s “soaring fancy,” Joseph Warton glorified the “creative and glowing imagination,” and Edward Young sought to escape “this pestilential earth” by the “creative power” of the imagination to call forth paradisiacal beauties, “shadowy beings and unknown worlds,” in the “vast void beyond real existence.” He exalted a genius which was to “wander wild” in “the fairy land of fancy,” “reign arbitrarily over its own empire of chimeras,” and “sport with its infinite objects uncontrolled.” Thus in Vathek Beckford created a sensuous and erotic paradise with its five palaces which he destined “for the particular gratification of each of the five senses.” “The light that never was, on sea or land,” enthralled the youthful Wordsworth, but he soon questioned it as a “fond illusion.” Keats sought to escape on “the viewless wings of Poesy” from the “weariness” of actuality to the “charmed magic casements.” Shelley, the high priest of this ceaseless and aimless quest for the unattainable, tells us that only his “fearful and monstrous” story of The Cenci is “a sad reality”; otherwise he “dreams of what ought to be, or what may be.” For him the Spirit of Beauty leaves “This dim vast vale of tears, vacant and desolate.” His is a longing indeterminate, a

Alastor and Epipsychidion are matchless records of his fruitless quest for the phantom of desire. DeQuincey’s fantasies are “filled with perishing dreams, and the wrecks of forgotten deliriums.” The Lady of Shalott and The Palace of Art testify to Tennyson’s reluctant renunciation of the life of illusion. Swinburne characterised himself in A Nympholept, while his friend, the author of The Earthly Paradise, strove to

With this background in mind, let us see to what extent the American story-tellers’ hope for a paradise of supernal beauty coincides with the idyllic, indeterminate hope of the English romanticists. In The Author’s Account of Himself, Irving, our first master of the short story, states his Old World longing “to escape, in short, from the common-place realities of the present,” to “the shadowy grandeurs of the past,” the “earthly paradise” of “Bellissima Granada” and the legend-haunted Alhambra. The Legend of Prince Ahmed al Kamel, dealing with the quest for the phantom of desire, illustrates the idyllic quality of his imagination. The Prince, called the “Perfect” on account of his “super-excellence,” receives from a dove tidings of a fair princess—“no flower of the field could compare with her for loveliness.” In the Spanish spring-time the Prince, a “pilgrim of love,” resolves to “seek this unknown princess throughout the world.” Guided by a parrot and an owl, he eventually finds her in the court of her hostile father. The lover produces his “silken carpet of the throne of Solomon,” and after confessing his devotion, “the carpet rose in the air, bearing off the prince and princess ... and then disappeared in the blue vault of heaven.” Irving, however, sought “escape ... from the common-place” not only in the picturesque fantasies of Old Spain but also in the glamorous aspects of the American past, as illustrated in The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. In “a remote period of American history,” among “some of the goodliest scenes of the mighty Hudson,” Ichabod rides on a “fine autumnal day” through the “rich and golden livery” of a natural paradise to win the “peerless,” “ripe and melting and rosy-cheeked Katrina” and her “unimaginable luxury.” Introduced by lines from The Castle of Indolence, The Legend illustrates Irving’s somewhat sentimental and humorous continuation of the merely recreational Arcadianism of earlier days. And the ruse of the Headless Horseman, in connection with the “twilight superstitions” of one who was “a perfect master of Cotton Mather’s History of New England Witchcraft,” suggests the interesting tendency of the native Puritan interest in things unearthly, with the waning of faith, to become a subject for the æsthetic imagination as in the case of Hawthorne and Poe.

Unlike Irving, Poe takes the idyllic dream seriously. He defines the Poetic Principle as “simply the Human Aspiration for Supernal Beauty,” manifested “in an elevating excitement of the Soul.” Of course, as every one knows, his vigorous reason controlled the decadent imagination and emotion of the earlier Gothic school and made him perhaps our greatest master of the short story technique. But let us illustrate and define the content of his “aspiration,” his “elevating excitement of the Soul.” Where does he seek happiness? One thinks of the “delirious bliss” of “the Valley of the Many-Coloured Grass” in Eleanora. We might better, however, turn to The Domain of Arnheim, where Ellison, with “a fortune of four hundred and fifty million dollars,” seeks to satisfy his passion for an exclusively “physical loveliness,” his “four elementary conditions of bliss,” which are “free exercise,” “the love of woman,” “contempt of ambition,” and “an object of unceasing pursuit.” After a four year quest he finds in the “luxuriant nature of the Pacific Islands” “an elevated tableland of wonderful fertility and beauty”; it was the “Paradise of Arnheim,” combining everything rich and voluptuous. Ellison, however, sought to gratify the “one passion of his soul, the thirst for beauty,” “above all ... in the sympathy of a woman, not unwomanly, whose loveliness and love enveloped his existence in the pure atmosphere of Paradise.” Thus the content of Poe’s aspiration, as well as his references here to the “chimera of the perfectionists” “Turgot, Price, Priestley and Condorcet,” to “Fonthill,” the birthplace of Vathek, and to the “rapt day-dreams of De Staël,” suggest that his aspiration is essentially one with that ceaseless and aimless sensuous longing already illustrated in the English romanticists. Or take The Island of the Fay, which deals with the contemplation of “the glory of God” in “natural scenery”—“all within the Spirit Divine”—in a “rivulet and island,” “all one radiant harem of garden beauties.” Shelley-like, he sees approach the “enchanted” island a gentle Fay in a “fragile canoe” with a “phantom of an oar.” This vision of loveliness, however, passed “disconsolately with her boat into the region of the ebony flood,” and “darkness fell over all things and I beheld her magical figure no more.” Thus, as Professor Foerster has so finely said, Poe gives us only “shuddering harmonies of the murky subconscious, and roseate harmonies of sensuous longing posing as spirituality.... His vision oscillated not between the earthly and the supernal, but between the infernal and the Arcadian.” But what did Poe report regarding the success of his aspiration for supernal beauty? “To be thoroughly conversant with Man’s heart,” he concludes, “is to take our final lesson in the iron-clasped volume of Despair.” Thinking of writing a book on his life, he said: “No man will ever dare write it. No man could write it, even if he dared. The paper would shrivel and blaze at every touch of the fiery pen.”

Perhaps the most vigorous and passionate Arcadian in American literature is Herman Melville, mariner and mystic. Descended from Dutch and New England parents proud and conservative, Melville was driven to “the water world,” he tells us, by “sad disappointments ... united with a naturally roving disposition.” He deserted his ship and found in the valley of the Typees “perpetual hilarity. Surrounded by all the luxurious provisions of nature,” the innocent natives enjoy the idyllic bliss “that springs principally from that all-pervading sensation which Rousseau told us he at one time experienced: the mere buoyant sense of healthful, physical existence.” This was before the missionaries and “the worst attendances of civilisation” drove “all peace and happiness from the valley.” In Mardi, frankly idyllic and nympholeptic, devoted to the savages “as they are not,” Melville’s nostalgic idealism and his hatred of reality become intensified. Here he creates a dream-girl, Yillah, “the earthly semblance of that sweet vision, that haunted my earliest thought,” and the book is a record of the allegorical quest for her through all the nations of the earth. It follows Unitarianism and Transcendentalism, with their hope for the infinite perfectibility of men; it is the quest of Alastor and Epipsychidion, the quest of Novalis for the Blue Flower. “But fiery yearnings their own phantom-future make, and deem it present. So, if after all these fearful, fainting trances, the verdict be, the golden haven was not gained;—yet, in bold quest thereof better to sink in boundless deeps than float on vulgar shoals; and give me, ye gods, an utter wreck, if wreck I do.” If Melville fled, however, “not so much bound to any haven ahead as rushing from all havens astern”—such as the “Babylonish brick-kiln of New York,” “Commonness and Conventionalism,” “mines and marts,” and Democracy, “the harlot on horseback”—his first-hand experience with the reality of a sea red in tooth and claw as well as “the mystery of iniquity” tended to clash with his dreams of Utopia. Moby-Dick was born of this clash between the hope of a paradise of supernal beauty and the sight of a malignant reality from the deck of a whaler. We have his own commentary on the final results of nympholeptic longing:

“Explain this darkness, exorcise this devil, ye cannot.... The truest of men was the Man of Sorrows, and the truest of all books is Solomon’s, and the Ecclesiastes is the fine hammered steel of woe. All is vanity. All.... He who ... calls Cowper, Young, Pascal, Rousseau, poor devils all of sick men.... And your only Mardian happiness is but exemption from great woes—no more.... Sadness makes the silence throughout the realms of space; Sadness is universal and eternal.”

Let us skip the realism of the later nineteenth century, most of which is essentially arid, and approach such a figure as Floyd Dell. Born of autobiographical revery, Moon-Calf is the history of a “lonely, unhappy, desperately desiring and bewildered child” in various Middle Western towns as he sought refuge in dreams from “the mysterious and troublesome real world which he feared and disliked.” The avenues of escape are two: the “gorgeous fantasies which were unrolled for him in the pages of books,” and the quest of the dream-girl. Lured by the hope of “freedom, of happiness, of a world altogether new and beautiful,” Felix becomes a Socialist, only to find later that “that garret Utopia had somehow lost its savour.” He becomes a factory worker—in the chaste language of his boss, “the messiest, absent-mindedest, God-damn carelessest person he had ever seen around a factory.” And then he tries newspaper work, and is again discharged. Then “he wanted, with a kind of nostalgia, to write that novel.” Like Shelley, he sought refuge from a world to which he refused to adjust himself by turning “his gaze inward upon a world of ideas and dreams.” As Wheels says, “The world itself is hideous. You can’t do anything with it. But you can dream beautiful dreams.... There is no other beauty.” An “incorrigible Utopian,” a member of the Agnostic Society, Felix escaped to poetry—an “enchanted land”—loving the “drug-like beauty” of “words, which were like a perfumed breeze out of nowhere, or out of some strange life lived before, affecting him with a strange nostalgia.”

And then there is the quest for the dream-girl. First there is Rose, the gardener’s daughter, whom he meets in the attic and to whom he reads Rousseau’s Confessions. One night they stay in the woods, watching the stars, and “awakened chill and stiff, a little before dawn.” In “the innermost caves of fantasy” she was the “Virgin Queen” of Atlantis, and he her Harper.... “She was ... hope that turns to despair.” And then there was Margaret, Helen Raymond, Daisy Fisher, Emily, Mrs. Miller, Lucy, and finally Joyce, with whom he spent the nights in the cabin. He explains to Joyce that he seeks “something better than just ordinary, everyday happiness,” that he doesn’t believe in private property, God, the home, or the support of one’s wife. He wants a companionship “at once light and gracious, irresponsible and sincere, generous and self-respecting!” Finally he felt “a discrepancy between her and a not very distinct ideal of his imagination.” He “clung to the memory of his shadow-land of ideas” in preference to the “world of desperate reality,” and when his beloved Joyce tells him she is to work out her human destiny with another the “world of his dreams fell shattering about him.” Obviously, Moon-Calf is the creation of the sort of hope which robbed Shelley of “peace within.”

Let us turn to Willa Cather, whose main theme is the struggle for æsthetic or emotional self-realisation amid the sordid environment of either the frontier or an industrial society. In O Pioneers! most piteous is the fate of the fair Marie Tovesky, murdered in the arms of her lover. In The Song of the Lark Thea Kronsburg develops her rare voice in spite of a gossipy Colorado town. “There is only one big thing—desire.” In My Ántonia the heroine says, “That is happiness—to be dissolved in something complete and great.” Her lust for richness of experience leads to her becoming an unmarried mother and finally the mother of a large family. In Youth and the Bright Medusa a typical story is that of Paul, whose longing for an æsthetic paradise in a flatly stolid industrial town led him to robbery and to suicide after a week’s fulfilment of his hopes. Most instructive, perhaps, is The Professor’s House, based on the fruitless struggle of the romantic spirit against materialism and convention. The Professor does not “think much of science as a phase of human development”; he resisted the new “commercialism” in education; he preferred his old dingy study to the one in the pretentious house which his worldly wife and daughters had planned; he loathes the petty quarrels of his daughters over fashions; and his wife accuses him of “shutting yourself away from everybody.” In place of materialism and convention, however, he seeks to substitute not a central interest in what is most richly and typically human but rather a refuge in the romantic past: in the pomp of the Middle Ages when man was “a principal in a gorgeous drama with God”; in the bygone glories of the Spanish adventurers; in reliving in revery his youth, “the realest of his lives”; in the loving study of many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore; and in his interest in his former student’s worship of the ancient Cliff-dwellers. The seemingly irrelevant interpolation of Tom Outland’s story of his inability to interest official Washington, “so petty, so slavish,” in his “religious emotion” regarding his discovery of the relics of the Cliff-dwellers is explained by its paralleling and under-scoring the Professor’s own struggle—the romantic spirit struggling in vain against materialism and convention. Finally, when the Professor’s family departed for Europe, he “thought of eternal solitude with gratefulness,” and “wanted to run away from everything he had intensely cared for.” One night while he is resting in his old study a storm blows out his gas stove and slams his window shut: he awakens to find himself “nearly asphyxiated”; he wished to die. “He hadn’t lifted his hand against himself—was he required to lift it for himself?” He cannot bear the thought of his wife’s return and the continuation of their way of life. Finally an old friend revives him, but he found that “he had let something go—and it was gone: something very precious.” He reflects that “his apathy” will not trouble a family “preoccupied with their own affairs.” No, the merely romantic devotion to what is picturesque in the storied past will never avail in the quest for peace in a conventional and materialistic environment.

Like Poe, Joseph Hergesheimer strives to escape “the dreary and impertinent duty of improving the world” in his worship of an unattainable beauty. His friend Mr. Cabell finds “in all the Hergesheimer novels” “men labouring toward the unattainable, and a high questing foiled.” For example, in Linda Condon, based on this theme, Peyton, a sculptor, seeks in vain to win the beautiful Linda, who marries another. The sculptor endeavours to sublimate his passion in the creation of a great statue, which is destroyed by a mob, and he dies in forlorn desolation.

“Love was the supreme force, and its greatest expression a desire beyond the body.... The endless service of beauty. Of course, a woman—but never the animal; the spirit always. Born in the spirit, served in the spirit, ending in the spirit. A direct contradiction, you see, to nature and common sense, frugality and the sacred symbol of the dollar.... The old gesture toward the stars, the bridge of perfection, the escape from the fatality of the flesh. Yet it was a service of the body made incredibly lovely in actuality and still never to be grasped. Never to be won.”

This spiritualised beauty, however, is of course dependent upon sensuousness, and Mr. Hergesheimer asserts that “the whole discharge of my responsibility was contained in the imperative obligation to ... put down the colours and scents and emotions of existence.” And, like Keats, like all who found life on a merely sensuous beauty, he is haunted by the dread of transience, by “that sharp sense of beauty which came from a firm, delicate consciousness of certain high pretensions, valours, maintained in the face of imminent destruction ... in the category none was sharper than the charm of a woman, soon to perish in a vanity of array as momentary and iridescent as a May-fly.” He tells us that he creates ideal beauty as a result of “the assault of a persuasive discontent.” Nothing matters but an unattainable sensuous beauty; and this merely impresses him with its evanescence. This transient beauty can be arrested only by art, and he begins a later essay on art with the words, “I am getting damned tired of art....”

Perhaps the endless and aimless longing for the unattainable has received most elaborate treatment at the hands of Mr. Hergesheimer’s friend, James Branch Cabell. In Beyond Life, a series of essays, he outlines his literary creed, his hostility to realism. Holding that “veracity is the one unpardonable sin,” he “perceives this race ... to be beyond all wording petty and ineffectual,” and he follows the “instinct of any hurt animal to seek revenge ... in the field of imagination” by retreating to Poictesme, “that fair country ... which is bounded by Avalon and Phæacia and Sea-coast Bohemia, and the contiguous forests of Arden and Broceliande, and on the west of course by the Hesperides.” Let us examine the quality and success of Mr. Cabell’s aspiration as embodied in The Cream of the Jest. Felix Kennaston, the hero, is actually a conventional novelist, a conservative property-owner, a Presbyterian, and a good husband. Inwardly, however, he is a dreamer who seeks to escape from the thralldom of actuality in his quest of “Ettarre, who embodied all Kennaston was ever able to conceive of beauty and fearlessness and strange purity, all perfections, all the attributes of divinity, in a word, such as his slender human faculties were competent to understand.” “It is the cream of a vile jest,” he says, “that I am forbidden ever to win quite to you, ever to touch you.” These magic dreams of Ettarre are induced by a sigil—a broken disc which Felix found on one of his walks. Finally, near his death, it is discovered that this magic sigil is only “the metal top of a cold cream jar,” and his dreams become a tale told by an idiot, signifying nothing. This is perhaps the blackest pessimism in American literature—the conviction that reality is a “dragging nightmare,” and the discovery that the illusion which alone makes life bearable is founded on nothing more sacred than the broken “top of a cold cream jar.” And it should be noted that, all Mr. Cabell’s books being parts of a “Biography,” Felix is nothing less than a symbol of “humanity.” “His history was, in essentials, the history of our race thus far. All I advanced for or against him, was true of all men that have ever lived.”

Jurgen may be said to deal mainly with the poignancy of the realisation of the contrast between the veiled loveliness of youthful illusions and a cold and ugly sensuous reality; relief is sought through an escape from this reality in dreaming of these illusions now shattered, or in dreaming of new illusions. In actuality, Jurgen is only a dirty little pot-bellied pawn-broker of the Middle Ages married to a shrewish, cowardly wife. Through magic, however, he is enabled to pack into one year “the follies of a quarter of a century,” to seek through a land of fabulous loveliness the phantom of desire. There he meets Dorothy la Désirée, “in all things perfect,” as he had loved her in the “garden between Dawn and Sunrise”; in reality she was a “horrible lascivious woman.” And there in her robe of flaming silk is the young Guenevere, “the fairest of mortal women”; there is the Queen Sylvia Tereu of pallid charm who vanishes at dawn; there is Anaitis, the personification of a nature myth, with her ecstatic rites and sensual orgies; there is the plump Chloris, loveliest of Hamadryads; there is Queen Helen, for whose fabulous beauty he hungered even in childhood; there is the proud Dolores, “lovely as a hawk is lovely”; there is Florimel who dwelt by the Sea of Blood; and there is Phyllis, Satan’s wife, “the loveliest little slip of devilishness.” Of one and all Jurgen tires. His remark that his “tender heart and tolerably keen eyes” force him “to jeer out of season” to avoid “far more untimely tears” reminds us of the Bohemian Byron who finally confesses with infinite sadness:

And in the end we have Jurgen’s Shelley-like admission of the futility and hopelessness of his aimless longing:

“Oh, nothing can help me, for I do not know what thing it is that I desire!... For I am Jurgen who seeks he knows not what.... I have gone romancing through the world, ... nowhere have I found what I desired.... I am compact of weariness and apprehension, for I no longer discern what thing is I, nor what is my desire, and I fear that I am already dead.”

It is evident, then, that in the hope for a paradise of supernal beauty Americans have been lured as by a Siren to an abyss of despair of which the English romanticists, who experimented with this idyllic hope, warned us over a century ago. The Edward Young who sported in his paradisiacal “empire of chimeras” “cast the total” of his life as “despair.” Keats reported that in the romantic “Temple of Delight”

And Shelley of the iridescent dreams, who would

confessed in the end:

Very beautiful are these rainbow visions—but they are conjured out of night.

II

Let us turn to a second sort of hope—the hope of an American paradise of nature. Although the paradise of nature appears in Vergil, in Renaissance pastorals by Lyly, Sidney, and Spenser, in Perdita’s shepherd home and in the sylvan cave of Cymbeline’s sons, its use was mainly either decorative or allegorical until the eighteenth century. In 1711 Shaftesbury proclaimed the natural man benevolent, compassionate, and altruistic; and as such he appears in Ossian. Pope said, “The state of Nature was the reign of God.” Rousseau broadcast the doctrine that civilisation had tended to corrupt the morals of mankind, while he described the enchanting life of man in a natural paradise. Cowper united literary simplicity, religious emotionalism, and the naturalistic humanitarianism of Rousseau. Burns glorified the simple peasant close to nature. And Coleridge and Southey dreamed fondly of an American Pantisocracy—“A Dell of Peace and Equality”—on the banks of the Susquehanna. In 1771, Philip Freneau, our first man of letters, deriving his radical democracy and his devotion to the indigenous scene from naturalism, envisaged “The Rising Glory of America”:

Indeed, it is interesting to speculate upon the extent to which this English romantic faith in the “native innocence” of mankind, transplanted to the inexhaustible resources of the American frontier, has under these unique conditions furnished philosophic sanction for an unbridled materialism which has become so characteristically national. Frontier isolation tended to breed self-confidence, equality, self-reliance, optimism, contempt for artificial distinctions and a dependence upon the material world. Crèvecœur in 1782 defined “an American” as a “new man who acts upon new principles.”

“We have no princes, for whom we toil, starve, and bleed: we are the most perfect society now existing in the world. Here man is free as he ought to be.”

Our first novelist who sought a paradise of American nature was James Fenimore Cooper. Revolting against both the feudalism of aristocratic Europe and the crude democracy of Jacksonian America, Cooper sought refuge in projecting his ideals in the character of Leatherstocking and also in such a Utopian paradise as in The Crater. Whatever one may think of Cooper’s Indians, his “females,” his woodcraft, or his rhetoric, Leatherstocking remains a great contribution to the fiction of the world, “perhaps,” according to Professor Paine, “the greatest embodiment of native character in American literature.” He is strangely compounded of Cooper’s memories of his old hunter-friend Shipman, of the heroic saga of the early frontiersman as synthesised in Daniel Boone, of the Rousseauistic-Wordsworthian myth of the natural man spiritualised by contact with forest and stream, and of the idealism of American manhood. According to Cooper’s summary,

“... His feelings appeared to possess the freshness and nature of the forest in which he passed so much of his time, and no casuist could have made clearer decisions in matters relating to right and wrong.... In short ... he was a fair example of what a just-minded and pure man might be, while untempted by unruly or ambitious desires, and left to follow the bias of his feelings, amid the solitary grandeur and ennobling influences of a sublime nature.”

In 1828, however, we find Cooper disillusioned: “All attempts to blend history and romance in America have been comparative failures.... The baldness of American life is in deadly hostility to scenic representation.” And in The Crater (1847) we find him creating a Utopia in a fabulous mid-Pacific island in order to furnish a contrast to the wretchedness of contemporary American life. This is a story of how some folk, shipwrecked on a reef which is the crater of a volcano, succeed in causing vegetation to grow, of how they create a “settlement surrounded with a sort of earthly paradise” which is finally “buried beneath the ocean.” The story, as Cooper conceives it, is a parable: “Of such is the world and its much-coveted advantages. For a time our efforts seem to create, and to adorn, and to perfect, until we forget our origin and destination, substituting self for that divine hand ...” Already, in The Monikins (1835), born of bitter disenchantment, Cooper the former idealist had presented the world as a country ruled by a race of monkeys who laughed to scorn the Yahoo race of mankind. The hope of an American paradise of nature ended for Cooper in disillusionment; natural goodness, democracy, human ideals are revealed here as sounding brass and tinkling cymbals. Professor Pattee compares Cooper’s final pessimism with that of Mark Twain: “Both began as border-minded individualists, parochial-minded, intoxicated with American idealism; both by travel and by wide contacts with urban pessimism were educated into blasé cosmopolitanism ... and both went out at last in utter misanthropy.... It is an American evolution!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And we have Anderson’s summary indictment of industrialism:

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

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

III

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

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

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

Here, then, in our own native tradition is a sort of hope which led to happiness. Can such a hope, however, be reconciled with the artist’s devotion to beauty? To Emerson, as to the æsthetes, art is simply “the creation of beauty,” “beauty is its own excuse for being,” and “the Beautiful is the highest.” But, unlike the æsthetes, he proclaims the unity and parity of beauty, truth, and goodness—“different faces of the same All.” Beauty has “its source in perfect goodness”; it is “the mark God sets upon virtue.” In other words, the rarest beauty is a by-product of that perfect harmony by which a man realises his complete humanity, his complete happiness. This ideal of beauty was given the support of a literary creed by James Russell Lowell, who never feared to expose the weakness of a romanticism whose ultimate fruit was a “melancholy liver-complaint.” He urged the study and creation of a literature which should be an ideal representation of life, “stripped of all unessential particulars” by an imagination which found “the true ideal” not by escape but by a purposeful selection of the real. For Lowell as for Emerson the “first duty” of the artist “is to be delightful.” He distinguishes, however, between a merely recreational “literature as holiday” and a literature which, ideally “representing life, ... teaches, like life, by indirection.” Such a literature, ministering to all the higher needs of the mind and spirit, yields the greatest delight and the greatest beauty.

Aspiration and art of this quality, however, are rare in American fiction. We looked for them in vain in the seekers for a paradise of supernal beauty, and in the seekers for an American paradise of nature. Great as is Hawthorne as an artist, in my judgment he falls short of an aspiration of the Emersonian quality on account of his penchant for the eccentric, the fanciful, and the morbid. One seeks it in vain in the realists’ transcripts from life, which lack the selection and focusing that distinguish art from experience. There is evidence, nevertheless, that the novel is no longer hostile to the specifically human destiny of normal humanity, no longer oblivious to that rare beauty which is the by-product of the struggle by which a noble character imposes order on the chaos of natural desire and approaches the imaginative ideal of a life richly varied, finely poised, and of exalted happiness.

I have space for but one example in modern fiction—Dorothy Canfield’s The Brimming Cup. This deals with the “eternal triangle” in a little Vermont town. Marise Chittenden, whose children have gradually taken her interest from Neale, her husband, becomes lonely when her children all go to school and she senses that “the days of her physical flowering are numbered.” She is loved by Marsh, a wealthy man visiting her elderly neighbour Mr. Wells; Marsh tries to convince her that she is sacrificing “a world of impassioned living” for “an outworn ideal” of “the traditional thing to do.” The characters, not always vividly humanised, symbolise man’s universe. Marise, the “brimming cup,” “filled with some emotion ... gushing up in a great flooding rush,” typifies the surge of impulse. Marsh, a “swirly brook,” to whom life is but a moment’s “blind sensual groping and grabbing” before the “big final smash-up,” typifies unbridled lust and greed. The “steady, visible light” of Neale’s life, Neale who had found true freedom by conquering his “great, fierce, unguessed appetite, the longing for wandering, lawless freedom,” typifies centrality. Mr. Wells, who surrenders “the happiness that comes of living as suits his nature” to help make the world more courteous to negroes, typifies humanitarian sympathy. The much-travelled Eugenia typifies “sophisticated cosmopolitanism,” æsthetic escape: to her “everything’s so common-place”; she cultivates her fading beauty by “breathing in and out through one nostril, and thinking of the Infinite!” Cousin Hetty symbolises tradition; the Indian Touclé, mysticism. Marise sees her conflict as one not between “routine, traditional, narrow domestic life and the mightiness and richness of mature passion,” but as a conflict between the lure of sensuousness and “what is deepest and most living in you.” It is a psychological novel, a novel of introspection: it is based on the quest, not for what is conventionally moral, but for what in the end gives the richest human satisfaction. It presents a struggle based on self-reliance and self-conquest. Neale “wanted her to be herself, to be all that Marise could ever grow to be, he wanted her to attain her full stature.” “Nothing is your own, if you haven’t made it so.” Marise wonders if her mother-love is what Marsh calls “inverted sensuality”; Neale says, “Look into your own heart and see for yourself.” He “longed for her sake to have her strike out into the deep,” he knew that peace could only come from “Marise’s acting with her own strength on her own decision.” He urges not outer but inner control—“as few umpires as possible.” In her conflict Marise sought “what was deepest and most living in her ...; that was what the voices were trying to cry her down from finding.” She longed to be “one with the great current”—Emerson’s “stream of power.” She discovers that she is being lured by “the conventional pose of revolt,” that separation from her children would not be true “growth and freedom, and generous expansion of the soul.” Like Milton and Emerson, she finally becomes free by discovering and obeying what is deepest within:

“She was a free woman, free from something in her heart that was afraid. For the moment she could think of nothing else beyond the richness of that freedom. Why, here was the total fulfilment she had longed for. Here was the life more abundant, within, within her own heart, waiting for her!”

Joyous in her centrality, poise and freedom, she sees Marsh as an “undeveloped and tyrannical soul, the cramped mind without experience or conception of breadth and freedom.” “How narrow and cramped,” and “blinded to the bigness and variety of life” seemed people who thought that “a woman of beauty and intelligence” was wasting her life “unless she was engaged in ... stimulating ... sexual desire.” Marise had the serene joy of her home, her beloved children and her understanding husband; she had the marvel of her music; and she had the surpassing wisdom to seek her happiness not in the miraculous but in the common—in the symbolic neighbourly gathering on the night of the blooming of the Cereus, that rite of beauty; in the calm strength of simple folk whom experience has made wise. And this woman, living out her “heritage, alive and rooted deep,” with her “vivid charm like an aureole of golden mist,” “felt slowly coming into her, like a tide of a great ocean,” the ineffable peace which comes from self-mastery, from the quest of what is most universally and nobly human. Calm and free, she was lifted “high, high above the smallness of life, up to a rich realm of security in joy.”

IV

What are we to conclude from this cursory sketch of the quality of three different sorts of American hope represented in our fiction? To the hope for a paradise of supernal beauty we owe much delicate artistry of a high order; one may maintain, however, as Emerson and Lowell did, that other things being equal, the truthful representation of typical humanity alone produces that harmony which yields the highest beauty. To this hope we owe much which, when read for recreation, can give delight; one takes issue only with those, like Poe and Cabell, who take Arcadianism seriously as a universal way of life and would substitute it for a literary ideal which resolutely confronts life and seeks to solve its meaning. To the hope for a paradise of American nature, a physical paradise, we owe the imposing of order upon the natural chaos of the wilderness; we owe the physical “improvements,” the miracles of the machinery and science of a great nation. Of what ultimate avail, however, are material resources, physical comfort, time-saving machinery, and science unless the time and energy conserved are used for higher intellectual or spiritual ends, for the attainment of happiness? To those who have recorded this hope in fiction we owe the faithful preservation of an important aspect of the social history of America; but literature is greater than social history: it aspires to embody the meaning of life in terms at once timeless and universal and beautiful. Our frontier lands are exhausted, and those who have sought the physical paradise of a standardized industrialism have found nothing but boredom and despair. In place of this dead level of repression and standardisation let us develop a new respect for personality—for personality richly varied and healthily individual. Let us re-direct the joy-giving passion for creation through the matchless resources of the realm of the spirit. If both the rarest happiness and the rarest beauty are the fruit only of the hope of a paradise within, it would appear that American fiction would in the future be wise in dealing not with escape or with externalities but with the infinite variety and eternal mystery of the human soul’s conflict between appetite and aspiration on its quest for an exalted inward happiness. Before we can expect American fiction to do this, however, the way must be prepared by the development of an adequate social imagination. For great art has always been organic with and supported by the life and vision of a whole people. Shakespeare was the “Soul of the Age,” Dante the “voice of ten silent centuries.” A hope must have throbbed in the breasts of a whole age before a writer can body it forth with the concentration, the brooding intensity, and the unerring congruency to human nature demanded of great art. Such a hope, such a social imagination, such an agreement in aspiration, can be developed best, perhaps, through education—through our interpreters of literature in college and university. Mindful of the heritage of heroic pioneers, we must embark upon our intellectual pioneering with the same resolute courage, the same loyal devotion, the same consecration to a high cause. Although our scholars are still being lured aside either to the camp of the æsthetes or the camp of the philologists, America must hereafter strive to develop the “middle-of-the-road” scholar who shall be, as Emerson said, Man Thinking, the delegated mind of society, whose major aim shall be the purposeful and discriminating interpretation of the record man has left, in terms of beauty, regarding “the conduct of life” and the path to peace. When such scholar-critics have developed such a social imagination, such a popular unanimity of hope, we shall be ready to receive the artist of genius who is to write for us the great American novel.

Note—For copyrighted evidence used in the foregoing essay I am indebted as follows: Sherwood Anderson, Poor White (Modern Library, N. Y., 1925); Dorothy Canfield Fisher, The Brimming Cup (Grosset and Dunlap, N. Y., 1921); James Branch Cabell, The Cream of the Jest (Modern Library, N. Y., 1922); Jurgen (Grosset and Dunlap, N. Y., 1927); Beyond Life (Modern Library, N. Y., 1919); Straws and Prayerbooks (Robert M. McBride and Co., N. Y., 1925); Willa Cather, The Professor’s House (Alfred A. Knopf, N. Y., 1925); Floyd Dell, Moon-Calf (Alfred A. Knopf, N. Y., 1921); R. W. Emerson, Complete Works (Houghton Mifflin Co., Boston, 1903); Journals (Houghton Mifflin Co., Boston, 1909–14); The Correspondence of Emerson and Carlyle (Houghton Mifflin Co., Boston, 1888); Norman Foerster, American Criticism (Houghton Mifflin Co., Boston, 1928); Hamlin Garland, A Son of the Middle Border (Grosset and Dunlap, N. Y., 1927); Joseph Hergesheimer, Linda Condon (Alfred A. Knopf, N. Y., 1919); Mark Twain, Complete Works (American Publishing Co., Hartford, 1903); A. B. Paine, Mark Twain, A Biography (Harper and Brothers, N. Y., 1912); F. L. Pattee, “James Fenimore Cooper” (American Mercury, Alfred A. Knopf, N. Y.); Gregory Paine, Introduction to The Deerslayer (Harcourt, Brace and Co., N. Y., 1927); O. E. Rolvaag, Giants in the Earth (Harper and Brothers, N. Y., 1929).