TWO: PORTRAITS

I. MEN

II. AMERICAN TRAITS

III. IDEAS

59

I. MEN

1. RANDOLPH BOURNE

A girl friend of his mother snatched him away from the wise arms, to hug and coddle him; let him slip and dropped him from the balcony where they were standing. This is the origin of the sad mutilations with which Randolph Bourne went through life. The tale has the true depth of a legend. The affection of a young woman, clumsy with unskilled love; the desire to share, to help, perhaps—and as aftermath, the lifetime of agony and visible disgrace. This is the sort of irony that Randolph relished, and bore with him through the world. Beholding him, one felt that his deformity somehow was not the profane traditional one: it was rather the stigmata of some miscarried loveliness.

He was very deformed. Not alone was he dwarfed and hunchbacked: his face was twisted, he had a tortured ear, his color was sallow and his breathing was audible and hard. He walked in a cape that hid him. He took a chair for the first time in your presence, let fall the black shroud about him, and revealed a form so mangled that you despaired ever to find sufficient ease for the sort of conversation his immediately brilliant mind demanded.

But the magic of Randolph Bourne was not separate from his poor body, and at once you knew this. This is why, in writing of his splendid spirit, it is meet to dwell upon his misery. Within half an hour, your discomfort was gone—so miraculously gone that your mind was prone to look about for it. But whenever, in the future, awareness did return of 60the grotesque shape in which this spirit was imprisoned and was doomed to walk, it was intellectual altogether: the mind needed to stir the senses with the thought of it, while the senses moved in full ease within his presence.

It was Randolph’s eyes and hands that brought about the wonder. The hands were exquisite, gentle, quiet. They seemed made for such clear profundities as the playing of Bach: they bespoke his style—the caress of his ruthless understanding. And they flowered from his body with the inevitable irony of all his being. The eyes were penetrant, studious. There was a reticence in them, after the adventure, not before it. You knew from them that Randolph Bourne was wise, and that he had withdrawn some subtle spirit of himself forever from gross contacts: that he had learned to see and to experience without the ill-focused turmoil of too close contacts. So surely consonant were his hands and eyes with what he said, that the body became a sort of Christian Lest Ye Forget—a sign to thrust you back into the humiliating coil of life, from the high freedom of his discourse.

All of him had this counterpoint. His spirituality was shrewd; his warmth was ironical and measured; his gaiety was leashed; above all, his direct caustic wit was barbed with a general indulgence. The body had forced on him this complex economy of emotion. And there ensued from it a splendor of free energy for every challenge of liberty, for every accolade of the creative life. This little man, indeed, so celled in a crushed body that even breath was hard, became a rounded athlete of the spirit, as none, perhaps, of us who have survived him. The loss of Randolph Bourne is a shadow that lengthens....

1925

61

2. CHARLES CHAPLIN

a.

Chaplin’s eyes are a blue so darkly shadowed that they are almost purple. They are sad eyes; from them pity and bitterness look out upon the world. They are veiled: while the man moves forward with irresistible charm, his eyes hold back in a solitude fiercely forbidding. No one who sees the eyes of Chaplin can feel like laughing. They are the one part of the man which does not show in his pictures.

For fifteen years these eyes have looked out on Hollywood. Much nonsense has been written about this suburb of Los Angeles, which is itself a suburb of the country. America reviles it as an indecent stranger somehow lodged in its midst, or romanticizes it into a scene from the “Arabian Nights.” But, of course, Hollywood is no worse a place than any provincial city of our land; nor better. Hollywood’s producers are typical money men; its directors are typical professional men; its actresses and actors are typical girls and boys. Its army of mechanics, craftsmen, engineers, are the usual American sort: grime them up a bit, lower their wages, and they would fit in to your town garage. Hollywood’s swarm of aspirants buzzing about the lots are typical floating seed of the American jungle: the wastrel seed that finds no soil to root in, whether it rots near home or blows away. Only in one respect is Hollywood unusual: its girls are really as fair as all girls would like to be.

Hollywood is the perfect mirror of banal American success. Ordinary souls dream extraordinary dreams—in the way of ordinary souls. And in Hollywood the dreams come true. Here is uncounted money, here is glamour, here is the exact mechanical production of that ideal to which success means a show. And Chaplin, with those frightening eyes of his, 62which almost no one ever sees, looks out upon this world, his home since he was twenty-four. There is another world which he looks in upon: the grey, grinding London of his childhood. He loves the London slums; for these slums were his and they are in his heart. But on his mother’s side the blood of Chaplin is half gypsy. Through her, whom he brought from England to live near him on the Coast, yet another world lives in him: a world of meadows and irresponsible laughter.

In the city of success he carries with him the taste of the London slums. But even there he was not at home: even for that sad past which formed his body and his mind he has a grim, ironical refusal—since there, too, the gypsy in him was a stranger.

This counterpoint of sympathy and denial is our first clew to the man. The drawing room of his house is packed with bibelots, pictures, bric-a-brac, sent him by the admiring splendor of the world. Here are tributes from Chinese mandarins and from the royalty of Europe. And here, too, on the wall, hang a few colored lithographs of Whitechapel and Wapping. Chaplin loves to take these from the wall. They depict streets that are like some cold inferno, in which the people stir slowly like souls stripped of all save the capacity to suffer. Watch his eyes as he looks at this picture of his childhood world. They are at once too soft and too hard. The emotions of understanding and of refusal are separate in them. In this room I once sat with Chaplin while the Comte de Chasseloup exhibited to us what are perhaps the most terrible photographs in the world: close-ups in progressive detail of tortures and executions which he had collected in China. We looked on the deliberate process of men being carved alive—as a butcher quarters a calf. We saw faces black with the horror of their pain, and then white with the relief of death. And in Chaplin there was the same counterpoint of 63feeling. His eyes took in the tremendous pity of these portrayals of man’s way with man. Suddenly his eyes hardened; he jumped up, and his mouth was cruel. “There’s humanity for you! By God, they deserve it. Give it to them! That’s man. Cut ’em up. Torture ’em! The bastards!”... The pity he had felt was intolerable to him. He summoned hardness to wipe it out: to save himself from this danger of being overwhelmed. Chaplin does not wish to give himself to any emotion, to any situation, to any life. Life draws him too terribly for that. Whatever he feels must immediately arouse its opposite; so that Chaplin may remain untouched—immaculate and impervious in himself.

With this same reserve he moves through Hollywood. He is no recluse. His secret apartness is far subtler than that. He frequents the Coconut Grove at the Ambassador, where the slightly decayed youth of the Coast ferments in dance. He sits for hours in the smoke of his friend Henry Bergman’s restaurant on the crowded boulevard. He goes to parties—to those of his friend Marion Davies at her Beach House, to those of William Randolph Hearst at his ranch. And wherever he goes he is the life of the crowd. He acts, he mimics, he plays, he insists on amusing and on being seen. But always there is the same immediate wavering away from the life about him and from the effect he produces. He does not give himself nor does he really take. Above all, he does not aggressively refuse any advance or emotion. He is noncommittal.

Intactness—this is the principle that best explains the balance of opposites in feeling, conduct, thought, which he sets up. He is like an atom that must journey alone through the world. The atom moves an intricate course, swerving here and there, myriadly attracted, myriadly repelled, seeming to give, seeming to respond—always remaining free and alone. A direct refusal of the world about him would mean a definite 64relation with it. This is not Chaplin’s game. If the world draws him, he responds—passive. His course has been swerved, but he is uncommitted. He resolves every force with its opposite. Emotionally this means that he frustrates in himself every impulse of utter giving or of utter taking. He remains unpossessed and ultimately unpossessing. But this deep frustration is the key to his profound success. Do not pity him for it. He is no pitiable creature.

With sure instinct Chaplin has guided his personal life through channels where he would be always alone. He loves the world he lives in, and despises it. He does not want to change it: no man is farther from the fervor of the prophet, and yet few men have done so much to show it up as ridiculous and worthless. He does not want another world. He uses this one, just as it is, in order to ensure his aloneness. But, were he really alone, he would meet in the silence of himself some acceptance which would prove his unity with the world. So he courts the world, and dwells in it, in order to frustrate such a possible self-encounter.

There was a time when Chaplin seemed to me a kind of fallen angel: an angel cursed by God with all human feelings and with the inability to fulfill them: cursed with the gift of evoking laughter and love and with no power to take laughter and love to himself. But this was a sentimental error. The inordinate tenderness of the man, his gentility and grace, are checked by his native rejection of the self-bestowal to which such qualities must lead. Hardness and ruthless egoism are as primal in him as the generous emotions. He refuses to be lost in any synthesis of love. He must remain the atom of himself. And in his perfect poise between the forces of the world—the poise of opposites—this is what he remains. And this is what he wants.

What he wants, Chaplin has infinite resources for getting. The shrewd technique of his art is but a phase of the same 65art in his life. This is the man who, when he was first approached with an invitation to enter pictures—untried and unknown—jacked up the initial offer of seventy-five dollars a week to twelve times that figure. “I saw they were anxious,” he explained to me. “When I said to them, ‘I think I’ll study philosophy; I don’t care for acting,’ I saw them go white. That’s how I knew what I was worth.” And this is the man who, three years later, when Mary Pickford, Fairbanks, Griffith, Hart and himself were in danger of being shamefully exploited by the business end of the game, gathered them all together into “United Artists” and preserved a fair portion of the treasure to the men and women who were doing the work. Chaplin is endowed with consummate powers for connecting with the world. “I’d make a great banker,” he once told me. He is intelligent, so intelligent that he intuitively grasps the abstruse currents of modern thought, esthetic, political, even philosophic. He is sensitive, so exquisitely that the gamut of human joy and pain plays endless responses within him. And he is passionate and earthy, a lover of good food and of women and of racy words. All these gifts naturally conspire to make him one with the world. Yet there is in him this dominant need to be one only with himself, to submit to no marriage, to let himself be lost in no union, to which his mind and sense impel him. What, in this diathesis, can he do? He can keep on moving. He can make his life a constant journey through the inconstancy of impressions which, if he dwelt with them, would bind him. He can make of his life an escape.

b.

The life, then, of this first master of the motion picture, is motion. His art is the treasured essence of his life. The theme of the Chaplin picture is Chaplin himself, in relation (opposition) to the world. He journeys through it, immeasurably 66roused, solicited, moved—yet aloof, yet intactly alone. The form of the Chaplin film is his own body, set off by the world: his body made into a mask behind which the man, all intact, goes slyly and painfully on his impervious journey. And the plot of the Chaplin film is merely some sequence of episodes in this constant opposition of himself journeying through life and never fused within it.

Of course, it is not as easy as it sounds. Precisely because his work is the incarnation of his life mood, of his life journey, its birth is a delicate issue. In the beginning there is the atomic Chaplin, cast in some role that will motivate his passage through the required number of reels. But that passage—as pawnbroker’s assistant, circus fool, convict pilgrim, fireman, seeker of gold, tramp, janitor, country bumpkin, etc.—that passage must be blocked out with events. Each foot of the film is an event, an encounter between Chaplin and the world. Since the art is to be the essence of his life, it, too, like his life, must be completely fleshed; and must breathe! From each encounter, either with another person or with some inanimate object like a brickbat, there must rise visible and palpable the personality of the entire journey. So each event of the film must be a work of art in itself. And there must be sequence, breathing, flowing, mounting. Each event must rise into the next until the mass of events becomes a plastic music where each episode is a note. The whole tale is a motion of events to represent the journey of the man—his escape, intact, through the myriad mass of life.

The mood of the tale, being intimately Chaplin’s own, is carried within him. What he must wait for is the precise scale of episodes that will form the mood. Even when the events have come to him (the particular stunts of the film), they must be weighed and measured. Where do they fit in? Do they fit in at all?

This period of gestation is painful and long. Chaplin lies 67abed an entire morning. He broods, measuring the tentative “body” of his tale by the inner sense of what he wants. This sense is infallible, but it is inarticulate save as the completed picture will be its articulation. Chaplin does not know, he has no words for saying, the exact timbre and gamut of physical actions that will express this particular body of his life journey. The picture will be his knowing.... Meantime, several miles away, his studio awaits him. It is a charming lot, several acres in size. Here lives Kono, the remarkable Japanese factotum who manages Chaplin’s personal journey through life, who serves as a kind of intelligent oil against the inevitable frictions of the inevitable encounters with stranger and friend. Here wait his general staff: Alf Reeves (who has been with him since music-hall days), Harry Crocker, Carl Robinson, Henry Bergman, Henry Clive, Roland Totheroh—possibly the director Harry d’Arrast, who once worked with him in Crocker’s present place and who remains his chum. All these men are distinguishably sweet, sensitized, intelligent, aloof in the crass Hollywood world. (That world is full of workers who carry on after they have left him, bearing the stamp he gave them—Menjou is a celebrated instance.)

The staff all feel the tension of their chief. The strain, indeed, is so great that there are men in the “industry” who could not stand it. At last, possibly around noon, Chaplin arrives. The instant has come when he is ready. He has dropped into his clothes, stepped into the limousine which waits all morning at the door, with the engine throbbing. He is hatless, tieless, and his vest is open. But the clothes are the most dapper product of the London tailor. He wears them, at work, like a gypsy. Even in this detail there is the meeting of the Chaplin opposites. Gypsy and exquisitely groomed young gentleman delete each other: leaving, as ever, merely Chaplin.

68He joins his crowd in the little bungalow on the lot, where lunch is served and where he has his dressing rooms. Tentative moments of the film are brought up, altered, discarded, readjusted. Chaplin paces, his face hard, his mouth half open, his eyes far off in himself. Infinitesimal details are studied, rehearsed, discussed; gags, postures, meanings, properties, business. Walking up and down, the little man holds in his head the film’s inexorable rhythm, the inner logic of its growth. As the ideas fly back and forth, in words and mimicry, Chaplin brings them to the measure in himself: rejects or accepts.

There may be months of this. Nothing seems to be going. The corps of workers champ and chafe. Chaplin moves with his preoccupation through his habitual life: parties, dinners, wanderings about town, swift flights with friends, long hours alone. At last certain scenes, having withstood the critical pause, seem certain. Carpenters and plasterers get busy. Sets rise on the lot. Chaplin wanders about among the hammers, alone or with his group: judging, silent, suddenly exasperated, lost in a new angle of vision—giving sharp orders that destroy the work of weeks. A shot that cost a long journey to location (and $50,000) will be ruthlessly scrapped. Later a scene will be repeated a literal hundred times; and, if the fifty-ninth time was right, each detail of it will be so clear in Chaplin’s eye that he will reproduce it for the camera. Finally, a thousand feet of photography will be collapsed into a yard so pregnant with the essence of the event that it will move, intact like the man himself, through all the world.

This perfect consciousness of Chaplin as craftsman would, of course, be less conspicuous in any other place. (In Paris, for instance, where men work with words and with pigment as Chaplin does with human masses, his métier is understood as merely the highest form of a common practice.) But Hollywood is a usual American town—not a capital of 69artists. And the studios of Hollywood confine their precision and consciousness to problems of mechanics and finance. They are monuments of esthetic vagueness, intellectual nullity, artistic hit-or-miss. The usual story, to begin with, is an externalized contraption put together by the combined shrewdness of half a dozen wholesalers parading as writers, scenarists, directors and producers. The actors have no accurate technique. The directors have no conscious control. In such a combination the chance artist is helpless and lost. When a scene is “pretty good,” it is shot. And the result is the kind of flat approximation that feeds the dreams of the millions. But by the time Chaplin gets ready to rehearse a scene its precise place in the architectonic of his tale has been measured, even as the theme itself has been measured in his life. And as he rehearses, he knows what happens. I mean that he knows the interplay of muscle, mass, space, and their focal value as the camera lens will catch it. He is no expert in photography. In his especial choreography he is supreme.

All organic life has a commanding, individual rhythm: the beat of a heart, the slant of a mind, the indecipherable stir of cells must go with that rhythm. Such an organic rhythm besets the consciousness of Chaplin, incarnating his subjective mood into a story. At the beginning, he knows the rhythm only. He has to grope for the episodes to flesh it. But when he finds his episodes he knows what he wants. And at the moment of shooting a scene he knows how to recall what he wants. And he can do this because, from the twist of a leg to the flicker of an eye, he knows how everything is done.

c.

All this, however, has not explained what it is that Chaplin is doing. His work may be the incarnation of his personal escape from those trammels of life to which his sensitivity and capacity for love expose him; his way of escape may 70be shrewd with all the shrewdness of his cockney-gypsy genius; and the esthetic expression of that journey of his soul may be done with consummate craft. Yet the inward value of the entire adventure is not yet clear.

We can best approach the significance of Chaplin’s art by considering another constant presence (besides himself) in his meditations on the story, in his conferences with Crocker and d’Arrast, in his rehearsals, in his final prunings, acceptances and rejections. That other presence he always alludes to by a simple name. He calls it “they.” “They” is the public. “They” collaborates unceasingly with Chaplin. “They” has the final veto over even Chaplin himself.

Of course, a similar “they” seems to preside over all the lots of filmland. But in the usual studio there are a number of men pawing over the platitudes of the human race in the deliberate effort to concoct from them a pattern which the public will pay for. Chaplin, too, is a child of the theatre. And there is no theatre without a “box” in front. But in the studio of Chaplin there is, most really of all, a man of the people—a cockney, a gypsy, a music-hall fellow—who looks into the eyes of the world as into a mirror, in order to see himself more objectively and sharply. So it is that, coming to Chaplin’s public, we return to the man. By means of this reflection we can see at last, in clarity, how he manages his escape and what it is which, behind the mask of “funny-legs,” goes its immortal journey into the heart of the world.

Chaplin looks upon the world of today. He sees failure: poverty, agony, disease, chaos, fear, pitiful passion, pitiful love. He sees success: deceit, garishness, tinsel, boast, disillusion. He sees his own past in London—his mother in the drab uniform of the poorhouse. He sees his own victorious present. He sees and feels too much. He is afraid of being lost in this world. There is a kernel of him that is neither this success nor this failure: a core in the man that can dance its own life 71if only it may remain alone. That is why he must escape; why he must look on all the invading world as an enemy and must hate it. Chaplin is a hard and princely fellow: his brow is strong, and his jaw and his mouth. But the modeling about his temples is girlishly tender, and the deepest spirit in his eyes is a retreating terror. He is afraid for that core in him of grace and loveliness and youthful dance. To protect it, he will fight—he will employ all his skill, all his hardness.

Now consider Chaplin’s public, which is the modern world. In each breast live grace and loveliness and wistful dream. But in the common man that personal treasure of each heart cannot remain intact. Family, business, law and war invade it. All civilization becomes a foe, trampling on this secret heart, dispersing its dream, bruising and breaking its love.

Chaplin, who has striven to keep it whole for himself, has made his fight for the world. Here, in his films, the grace and beauty of the human “atom” are visible once more. Behind the mask of Chaplin—behind the swinging cane, the ambling, painful feet, the tight drawn coat, the cocky derby hat—marches the common loveliness of man—marches and journeys as it must through a hated modern world—dissociate from social forms, shabby, despised, pitiful, poor; yet miraculously intact and miraculously triumphant.

Rousseau, I suppose, perfected this tragicomedy of the modern world, with its dualistic conflict between beauty and civilization, between love and man’s habitual life. Marvelously gifted, he gave to the world its rationale for the impulse to creep back into a mythic childhood, to worship the self at the expense of the towering forms about it. As Mr. Lardner might say: “Jean Jacques started something.” Charles Chaplin has finished it. (Even the cut of his comic coat recalls the romantic century—the age of Alfred de Musset.) The cult of loveliness at war with the sobrieties of life could beget no 72greater art than this journey of Chaplin carrying beauty untouched through an atmosphere of heavy institutions, of brickbats and policemen. French intellectual, London clerk, Chinese coolie, Mexican peon, Park Avenue child, in the common distress of their submission to a world too full of money to leave room for singing and for dancing, can gaze together at this secret triumph which Chaplin has enacted for them. His song explodes their oppressive world. His primitive refusal to “grow up” in the “respectable way” becomes the modern spirit of revolution.^[1]

d.

In the old days Charles Chaplin worked not less meticulously, but a good deal faster. His theme has always been the exact transcription of the mood of his life. But when his life was simpler, the bridge to his work was more immediate. It was easier for the man to remain impervious, intact, virginally himself. The instinctive operation of his will had found no invasion too bruising or too tiring for him to repel. But he has had to pay the toll of his way; and that toll has grown great. It is hard to sustain one’s solitude when one is so full of eagerness as Chaplin; and when, precisely because the world loved his aloneness, the world has done everything to destroy it. His recent struggles, not so much against the clamor of the public as against his own human need for that peace and love which can be gained only by some union with another, have made him conscious of himself. Consciousness and weariness have stood between him and his journey—slowing him and 73slowing his work, which is the expression of that journey. His hair has turned grey, and his beautiful face is lined.

“The Circus” marks the crisis. The terrible year^[2] that separated its first-made scenes from the last brought a new somberness into his art. The picture on which he is at work at present is the most meditative, the most complex, the darkest story he has ever imagined. A progress like that which distinguishes the end of “Don Quixote” from its rollicking outset is manifest in his work. Chaplin is still alone; still intact. But the fight he has had to wage in order to remain so has worn him. It is the natural destiny of so passionate a man to lose himself. Thus far Chaplin has refused this death. It would mean, indeed, the death of his old gay art. It might mean the birth of a new tragic artist.

Meantime the circumstances of his career in Hollywood have conspired to perfect his solitude. Here was an artist whose theme was an essential motion: the pantomimic medium of the motion picture was there to express him. But now the motion-picture industry of Hollywood decides to talk. Chaplin, whose excellence made him solitary enough, finds himself almost literally alone.

A little more entirely than he may have dreamed, he is having his way. He is alone in his great house, alone with his few friends, who love him but who cannot really reach him. He is alone among his professional comrades, who, unlike him, have abandoned the silent picture. Chaplin has reached a goal. A goal is an end. An end can be also a beginning.

1929.

74

3. D. H. LAWRENCE

Lawrence lived his entire life in a transition. Hence his painful and irascible temper: hence also his illuminations, exquisite and unbearable as direct contact with a nerve.

One world he had left: the world of plural “facts.” He was no dupe of the parade of detailed separatenesses that clutter mortal eye. He knew that this world of things, this matter-of-fact and practical world of commonplace, was false; for he had left it for a truer. But that other world he never quite attained: the world of unity and wholeness, whereof all things are momentary foci. He was close enough to this world to be pulling away from the other: but he was not of it sufficiently to accept the world of “things” in the transfigured sense that makes things real. He was close enough to the true to win from it vision and power to illumine the “things” he fought; close enough to create a vision of them as an artist. Yet he was not of the true world of organic oneness so deeply as to incorporate himself within it and thereby to be at peace with the many.

He was always striving to organize himself in wholeness: and always failing, and always furious and exacerbated by his failures. These failures are his life, and are his books. The characters of his stories are never wholly persons in the sense of either world: the passion of the writer of his books is never wholly either illumination of his characters as organic bodies or life within the characters themselves.

Lawrence was exiled from the moderate pace of things that enact their part in the Whole unconsciously. This blessed naturalization he had left forever. He could never share the peace of the clod which knows not its share in the Life it enacts. Nor could he accept the clod, from within the realm 75of the conscious Life itself. The ecstasy of knowing himself part of the Whole was never quite natural for him; he never assimilated it into the processes of living. To possess that ecstasy, he had to deny the lineaments of life: he had to seek extraordinary moments. The true ecstasy of knowing the many common things of the world as the common features of life’s oneness was never his.

He was imprisoned in transition. And he frantically strove to incorporate himself entirely in the world of truth by lopping off his attachments to the separatistic world that dragged him. Thus his denial of “mind,” of tenderness and pity, of the feminine as contradistinguished from the female. These were qualities that seemed to hold him back near the world of “many-ness” which he hated as false. He was neither strong enough nor clear enough to know that it was his failure to fuse these qualities into wholeness, rather than the intrinsic qualities themselves, that thwarted him and kept him divided.

1930

4. HERBERT CROLY

Most men are set and long past growing before they are forty. This is true of the conspicuous and successful, no less than of the common. They have contrived, from their first impacts with the world, some attitude, trick or gesture; it works; they stick to it until they are repetitive as machines. Herbert Croly was a growing man until he was stricken; and the rate of his growth kept on accelerating with the years. This rare capacity, which toward the end transfigured him, was his true genius.

If we analyze the nature of his growth, we come close to the man, and understand what made him so sound and beautiful 76a being. And the first trait upon which we come is his humility. Herbert Croly was authentically humble. Not humble with the inverted pride of a Franciscan or of a character of Dostoevski’s—because of raging lusts intolerable to himself which he had to flay into their opposite lest they drive him mad. Herbert Croly’s humility came from a true sense of himself in the world—a sense of true proportion. In the years when I knew him, at least, he never seemed to be looking upon himself alone: always, he felt and saw and thought himself within a texture that was the world. From this proportion came sobriety and humility; and from this organic contact with life’s sources, a springlike energy that kept him growing.

There was nothing, I suppose, superficially brilliant or arresting about him. He was in cool fact what Whitman romantically sang: a “divine average.” By which I mean that he was a man whose pre-eminence came from the purification and exaltation of those traits that made him most like others. With the shining talents of the market place he was not lavishly gifted. The talent he had is rare in any mart: the passion for growth, the moral, intellectual powers needed for growth, and a courage in devotion to the life of growth that served him in his long fight as sudden illumination serves the romantic hero.

How differently shrewd he was from the shrewd men with whom he deliberately consorted, and whom he ruthlessly noted while, for the most part, they took scant note of him. This world of atomic egos, bursting with pride and will, and disappearing into the darkness of the mass, after their brief explosion. And Herbert Croly, beginning in the mass, groping his obscure way through a sense of brotherhood and life, into true personality, into wisdom. His first impulse was to accept. And this alone marked him off from his intellectual generation, and made his discoveries far more potential. He had a sympathy for the commonplace. His humility, deriving from 77his sense of proportion, made him instinctively, even intellectually, share. Here, his “averageness” ceased. For what he accepted and shared he weighed with the same quiet ruthlessness that he brought to bear upon himself. That is why, at the end, he had won a deeper vision of his world than had any of his fellows. He had begun by letting himself be part of it, refusing nothing. From within, he had scrutinized, purified—inexorably judged.

Yet, if in this spirit, temper, method, he was different from the New York in which he worked, it was because he carried on so purely an American tradition. It is true, of course, that he did not come of old American stock, both his parents having been born in Europe. But it is also true that in the making of Americans lineage is the least factor. The immigrant is potentially American: that is why he came: he is brother in spirit, if not in blood, of Roger Williams or of Franklin. Moreover, the land itself stamps the child more deeply than do his fathers. Thus, despite the European background of Herbert Croly, there was much of the Puritan about him, a great deal of the pioneer. He trekked our continent of the modern spirit “on foot,” slowly and laboriously blazing his way through the American chaos. He understood creatively and creatively served it, because he had given himself to it; and this he had done because—like Emerson, like Whitman, like Thoreau, like all its deepest critics—he had faith in it.

These homespun traits, almost exactly transposed from the plane of the American forefathers, reveal the nature of his ideological growth. The man who, twenty years ago, wrote “The Promise of American Life” had been essentially one who accepted the intellectual pattern of the hour. Herbert Croly was thinking in terms, then, of government commissions with ideals of knight-errantry, of moral agencies somehow working out through legislative bodies. His way of 78facing the problem of the good life at that beginning would have been familiar enough to Gladstone or to Burke. But, having accepted the pattern, he applied to it a sincerity of penetration rare in any hour. His book, instead of following, became the test—and the destroyer—of its own pattern. He was feeling his way; and all of his career may similarly be termed a feeling of his way.

This trait gives the quality of his style; it lacked charm and ease because it was a process rather than a conclusion. It never flowered; it burrowed and made roots: whatever energy it evolved from its growth turned downward into deeper roots instead of blooming upward. From the standpoint of English, this is a grave defect. A written style should be a fruit, not an embryology for some future fruitage. But from the standpoint of the promise of American life, the style, like the man himself, was the very substance. His words portrayed the passage of the author slowly, circuitously through the jungle of half-decayed surmise which is the heritage of our generation. The ultimate light of what he wrote was the consequence of that passage. His words might be said to have ended with light, in contrast to most modern words which begin with glitter and end in darkness.

This book of 1910 began with a certain premise: America has the political technique and the human equipment to fulfill itself. The book studies the equipment—institutional, personal—turns back on its premise, and rejects it. The book does not conclude; it institutes. While the author writes, he grows: instead of ending, he changes. At the finale, he is free of the pattern of his hour, truly free since he has first accepted it and lived it through.

More than once, he espoused causes that seemed contradictory to the essence of the man as I later came to know him. Thus his acceptance of the War, his sponsorship of the Progressivism of Roosevelt, his apparent dedication to the Pragmatism 79of John Dewey. But to condemn him for this was to misjudge him by standards that did not apply. Herbert Croly was not a prophet; he was an experimental and emergent force within the body politic—the force that energizes prophecy and must precede it: he personified the gradual principle of detachment within the process of his time. He was not espousing these causes that were, indeed, denials of his essence, so much as living through them, and as growing through them. By his acceptance of the War, of the noisy and supine Progressivism of Theodore Roosevelt, of the spiritually prostrate Pragmatism of John Dewey, he was—in his own way—getting beyond them. And his humble method is, to me, the only possible promise of our nation, which, too, having accepted these false positions, with a self-knowledge and a humility like Herbert Croly’s may also get beyond them.

His ultimate refusal was significant because he had lived through what he rejected. Herbert Croly went through a gamut of faiths in political reform; that is why his final doubts about the political method and his convictions on psychological and religious re-education were important. He was well versed in the instrumentalisms and technological credos of his day; that is why his recognition of the nuclear spiritual force within the person and beyond the reaches of pragmatic methods was important. He knew the principles and methodologies of modern engineering; that is why his transposition and application of them to the problem of the person were important, and why his ultimate religious interest—emergent from a practical participation in the affairs of our day—was so convincing and potential.

These later phases of his growth were clear only to those who personally knew him. He spoke of two books that he was going to write: a sequel to “The Promise of American Life” and an intimate record of his own evolution. I do not know if any part of these works was ever set down. But I 80feel that the quality of the man and the form of his spirit were best revealed to his friends. At night, within the shadows of his bookshelves, a release came to Herbert Croly. He was morbidly sensitive. He spoke so low that when one ate with him in a restaurant it was difficult to hear what he said. Yet to have raised his voice in a public place, one felt, would have been an outrage to the nature of this man who was, without doubt, the deepest publicist of his generation. In his own occult way, Herbert Croly had embraced the world. A kind of dogged heroism through the years had driven him to accept the crass contacts of politics and journalism. For that was the method of his philosophy: his knowing was action. But now, in the stillness of his room, his knowing became words. What he said had a luminous strength, like wine kept long. For these were words aged in the cellar of himself. The exquisite perceptions had grown strong in secret. His eyes glowed, at such times, with his words. He was relaxed. A flame burned from the hard wood of his reticence.

Like an old wine, this strength of Herbert Croly’s was not aggressive. It did not come to you; you had to find the means of taking it. He had none of the prophet’s and mystic’s need of self-assertion or of liberation from the trammels of his time. His method was always the same humble one: to work in the substances of the day, to live his day, and slowly to go on emerging without separation from the day’s humble matters.

Some men synthesize the actuality of their time. Such a one was Theodore Roosevelt, once Croly’s friend. Another kind, more rare and more precious, synthesize not the day’s actuality, but its promise. Such was Herbert Croly. But even within this group, he was unique. These men are likely to be at odds with their hour, and quite aloof. Their method of revelation is often the prophetic attitude which refuses all participation with the actuality which they transcend. But 81Herbert Croly synthesized American promise by his acceptance of the American fact. He did not intuit his promise, he distilled it from the facts themselves. He was very far from the conventional prophet or mystic. His exquisite nerves grappled with the iron and blood of the twentieth century. What could come of this embrace of an almost feminine spirit with a body in which plunged a billion horsepower? The spirit of the man remained undriven, clear; it became the record of a slow revelation.

If we translate his career into terms of our national destiny, how does it read? America runs the gamut of political credos. America sets up its external technologies and worships in them its own infantile power. America swears by the machine, and patterns from it arts and folkways. Under high-sounding slogans of pragmatism and instrumentalism, America submits to the hour—to all the miseries and tyrannies of a caste clad in the immediacy of the hour. But America will, from its experience, return unto itself; learn that there is no substitute for the strength and value that reside secretly in man, and that there is no conduit to mastery of the world other than mastery of self. America will again hear the voices of the fathers who came to create a dwelling place, not for gilded slaves of the machine, but for man—a world made new, not by mechanical proliferation, but by the growth of the spirit of man and woman.

Such was the progress of Herbert Croly, who moved through the American jungle to find himself, and in himself projected what must be the destiny of his country, if that destiny be salvation. The promise of American life has had no truer form than this life.

1930

82

5. SIGMUND FREUD

a.

The nineteenth century in Northern Europe was a time of Titans struggling to create worlds of their own. The medieval Catholic world had crumbled: simple or timid souls still lived in it, but for several hundred years the strongest spirits had been engaged in tearing it to pieces. This destruction was, of course, creative; was, indeed, largely the cultural work of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in astronomy, geography, physics, economics, mysticism and esthetics. But it was work of pioneering or analysis, rather than of synthesis. And it bequeathed to the eighteenth century, not a new world for the whole man to live in, but a miscellany of abstract, mutually discordant principles with which to begin to build it. These principles were known as laws: there were the laws of mathematics, of mechanics, of biology, of the natural and the economic man. They were all based upon the law of reason, and this was religiously believed in. The destructive centuries had not invented the faith in reason; that faith was a legacy of the Catholic world which reason, by shifting its premise, undermined. Reason, to be hypostasized, requires an unchallenged premise; in Catholic theology this premise was the revelation of the Bible; now it was to be the revelation of the human senses or of the original rightness and divinity of man. With such instruments, abstract and confused, the forerunners of the nineteenth century (Kant, Rousseau, Blake, etc.) strove to create a cosmos of their own to replace the glorious fertile world of St. Francis, Aquinas, Dante.

The period of great romantic art was ushered in; and it had many forms. In philosophy, there were Schopenhauer, Hegel, Spencer, Comte; in the novel, there were Balzac and Dostoevski; in music, there were Beethoven, Moussorgsky, 83Wagner; in painting, there were Delacroix, Ingres, Cézanne; in the sciences, there were Marx and Darwin. All these men, despite immense distinctions, were of one family. They were in touch with objective reality, masters of inquiry, often discoverers in the fields from which they mined their materials. But their constructions, unlike the worlds of the great Catholic creators right down to Bach, Descartes, Racine, were the embodiments of the personal will of their creators. There is, here, no contradiction; nor were these nineteenth-century worlds less “real,” because personal, or of less social use. Man is not an isolated atom. The genius who erects a world in the image of himself—if his self-search be deep and his self-mastery strong—will produce a work of universal nature. The more profound the subjective impulse, the more complete the command over objective nature in order to fulfill it. That is why the scientific realism of a Cézanne qualitatively equals that of a Darwin; why a poet like Wagner portrays the reality of Middle Europe; why an economist like Marx may write as emotionally as Isaiah; and why we find in the solipsistic verse of a Rimbaud prophecies, which science has fulfilled, of the nature and behavior of the atom.

I have needed to speak of these nineteenth-century Titans, because Sigmund Freud, whose work dates from the 1890’s, is the last of their line. To understand him, we must know his family. It was a family of men moved to replace, by their own work, the broken synthesis of Catholic Europe. They were all absolutists, seeking in some genetic principle of unitary vision the pattern that God supplied in the old order. The law may have been progress and reason or (as in Dostoevski and Rimbaud) their denial; may have been will or (as in Schopenhauer) its overcoming; it may have been some genetic rule like the survival of the fittest, sexual selection, Aryan-Lutheran supremacy, class struggle, etc. Always there was implicit in the texture of these men’s constructions an absolute 84rationalism, or the nullification of reason; a faith in the sufficiency of the senses as a report of truth, or total rejection. These worlds, risen from an abstract and absolute law, were built of materials preponderantly personal—more idiosyncratic, indeed (although the work were a book on economics), than the love lyric of any medieval poet who accepted his immersion in a common cosmic pattern.

The twentieth century will be different: its creative work will be to reconcile and integrate apparently contradictory laws by the aid of supersensory dimensions. It will be the relativistic age, in which the discoveries of the absolutists of the nineteenth century—Nietzsche and Marx, Dostoevski and Darwin, Rimbaud and Spencer—will be worked together for the making not of worlds, but of the world, and not less personal because socially pragmatic. To this new era, barely ushered in by men like Bergson, Whitehead, S. Alexander, André Gide, Franz Kafka, etc., Freud does not belong. But in the perspective of cultural history, he will be seen as a contemporary of Darwin, Schopenhauer, Dostoevski, Marx; and he may be known, by the fecundity of his work, as their equal.

b.

Freud began as a physician; as one seeking to heal human ills. But he found, in the dark places of the human heart, a world as personal, tragic and universal as the world of Dostoevski. The psychological system of Freud is, first of all, a great human drama. Here, in the arcana of the soul, are complex organisms: the superego, dwelling place of the fathers—conscience and tradition; the id, hinterland of the immense accumulations of instinct, habit, appetite; and between them the ego, where lives the individual will. These organisms are interacting units, from whose clash rise devious characters with strange names: cathex, complex, sex-urge, death-urge, 85neurosis, fixation or repression or sublimation of libido. They are all filled with the life of action; they make lyric and epic conquests of the objective world; they also interlock in secret combat or in more terrible alliance, giving forth the gamut of emotions from horror to ecstasy, and producing the many mansions of human deed from pastoral beginnings when the infant offers its prized excrement as a gift to its mother, to heights where men make philosophies and religions.

This world of Freud has complex unity. Among the welter of symptom, dream, and cultural act move the “heroes”: the radical urge for life (sex and self-preservation) and the masochist-sadist hunger, born of life, for the return to death. And like all the esthetic constructions of the nineteenth-century Titans, this world has a personal savor. “The Interpretation of Dreams,” Freud’s pivotal work, in its revelation of a passionate individual nature may be compared with the “Confessions” of Rousseau (the father of the century), with Dostoevski’s “Notes from Underground,” with Volume I of “Capital,” with Schopenhauer’s “The World as Will and Idea,” and with “Thus Spake Zarathustra.” A man is speaking. He is building a system from his discoveries and observations by the use of a legitimate instrument of science. But first and last, a man is revealing himself. And only less intensely is this true of all Freud’s books. Whether he writes of the genetic sources of Da Vinci’s art (in “Leonardo da Vinci”) or of a savage totem (in “Totem and Taboo”) or of a slip of the tongue (in “Psychopathology of Everyday Life”), he brings himself to the construction. While with healing hand he touches the lesions of a soul, he is really carrying to these dark places a flame from his own Promethean nature.

Most men solve their inner conflicts by forgetting about them (with the magic of ready-made solutions or of drugs, sexual, mechanical, alcoholic, patriotic); some men need to create a world of their own to solve them. Marx, suffering 86within himself the lesion of social injustice, created a world that mankind will use as a rationale of cure for its social diseases. The humbly religious Darwin, agonized by an age of “Enlightenment” that had dissevered him from God only to marry him with chaos, forecast a biological order where the human species could begin again to find the peace of integration between its lowest and its highest parts. Freud also makes answer to a personal conflict.

He is a man who accepts the dogma of nineteenth-century science. “There is no other source of knowledge,” he says, “but the intellectual manipulation of carefully verified observations, in fact, what is called research ... and no knowledge can be obtained from revelation, intuition or inspiration.” This is pure eighteenth-century rationalism. Thus armed, he goes down into the irrational depths of the soul, a chaos to be conquered. His highway is the dream; and the Freudian technique of dream interpretation by word and thought associations and by the use of symbols is one of the mightiest acts of the imagination. The domain where the dream has led him, which he calls the id, is a jungle of the lusts of human organs aprowl like wild beasts among the tropical trees and swamps of primeval habit. But Freud will not surrender to this phantasmagoric and miasmic world; he will draw forth from its flux, by means of reason, energy for the three-dimensional world of reasonable practice, and this limited world he will insist to be the one reality. It is a struggle between uneven forces, and the consequence is a psychological design (called “real”) that is drenched with the passionate and heroic will of its author.

It is illuminating to compare this Freudian world with the world of Dostoevski. The novelist explores the same Amazonian jungles of the unconscious, made manifest in their most morbid extremes. He, too, has gone down, through the need of an integrating principle that shall transfigure this chaos 87into truth. His method is the precise opposite of Freud’s. Dostoevski follows the unconscious impulse of men to its irrational source, and he accepts this source as the sole reality, finding in it his God and his values. He rejects as unreal the contradictory world of reason and all the social-moral constructs of reason. This rejected “conscious” world is dream for Dostoevski; the nineteenth-century culture built from it in Europe is false for him; and in the obscurantist ecstasy of what Freud calls the “lowest levels of the id,” the Russian finds his salvation of “waking.” Freud moves toward the irrational source only to reject of it what reason cannot bind; and only such energies of the unconscious as reason can draw back into a world of social conformity will he call “real.” The materials of Dostoevski’s art, made plastic in the great organisms of his novels, are identical with the materials of Freud’s world made into the looser esthetic form of a psychological system.

Dostoevski does not succeed in his absolutist attempt to deny reality to all experience of reason: if the irrational ecstasy is man’s sole waking, there is much sleep in his books, and hence their substance. The same holds with Freud. He would be the first to disclaim victory in his attempt to naturalize all the energy of the id within the domain of reason. There is much “sleep” and much darkness in his system: hence its livingness.

Time and again, Freud is led to limits where he is face to face with Dostoevski’s “real”—the mystic and the occult. “It can easily be imagined,” he says, “that certain practices of the mystics may succeed in upsetting the normal relations between the different regions of the mind, so that, for example, the perceptual system becomes able to grasp relations in the deeper layers of the ego and in the id which would otherwise be inaccessible to it. Whether such a procedure can put one in possession of ultimate truths [there speaks the absolutist devotee of reason] may be safely doubted. All the same, 88we must admit that the therapeutic efforts of psychoanalysis have chosen much the same method of approach. For their object is to strengthen the ego, to make it more independent of the superego, ... to take over new portions of the id. Where id was, there ego shall be.”

Freud does not admit the premise of the mystic method, which is, of course, that the cosmic lives within the individual unconscious (the id) so that the following of percepts to their source rounds man’s circle to God. But Dostoevski, typical mystic in revolt against the world of reason, would not see the implication in Freud’s rationalist method: if the findings of reason are universal, reason must be cosmic. This rationalist premise is also mystic, and also irrationally rounds the circle between man and God. Freud, like all the nineteenth-century rationalists, is an unconscious follower of the older, ethical Kant. Dostoevski was a conscious, and hence a more reasonable, mystic. But both groups of absolutists, in their attempt to exclude a part of man’s equipment for finding truth—the one group reason, the other group organic intuition—are doomed to failure. And in Freud, no less than in Dostoevski, this awareness of limitations gives the poignant note of the Titans who are helpless to create a world against the indefeasible God who is the Whole. In all the great nineteenth-century creations, there is this discord between the will and the work. It gives to the pages of Freud a personal vibration that is not the least of their value.

c.

What of the scientific values of Freud’s work? Psychoanalysis is, first of all, a therapy in the treatment of nervous and psychic disorders. Thousands of physicians, for the most part in the Central European and Anglo-Saxon countries, practice it, and seemingly with success. But therapy is the least important aspect of Freud’s work. Most of the ills of 89personal maladjustment which the Freudian analysis may cure are symptoms of the disorder, economic, social, cultural, of the contemporary world. The right way to overcome them is to attack the disease, not its individual symbols. In this task, the light thrown by Freud on the human psyche is of great importance; the actual relief given to a few persons is immaterial. The time required by an analysis, and the expense, make the method (under our present system) available chiefly to the type of idle woman and parasitic man who are not worth saving at the price of the lengthy effort which the analyst must devote to readjusting them into a morbid world. It would really be better for the whole leisured class, who have supported so many analysts in luxury, to be converted en masse to the Catholic Church. They could all go to Lourdes, whose record of cures is vastly more varied. There is this difference, however. When a patient finds relief at a Catholic shrine, no one is the wiser: the cure has been worked in an invulnerable darkness. But when even the most useless society woman is analyzed by a Freudian, although she may not be cured, the analyst and science know something more about the human soul. Psychoanalysis as a therapy is justified, in so far as the physician is more important than the patient.

Freud, therefore, is within the tradition of his Jewish fathers, to whom Wisdom was never (as it was with the Hindus) an end to be independently attained, but the common fruit of the tree of humane living. Freud, the physician, is moved to heal the suffering of his fellows; and from this humble, socially immaterial ministration has issued a deep knowledge.

I am not qualified to judge the precise final values, as objective science, of the Freudian system. But, of course, objective science has no final values. Despite its assumption of definitive laws, the light of generations makes of the science of any epoch a mere trend or method toward knowledge. That 90scientific work whose path is followed farther, is good work; and here is its ultimate value. Thus the mathematical science of a Pascal or a Leibnitz is good; and in this sense, it is already clear that the Freudian technology is good. His dicta on any specific problem, such as the origin of neurosis or the setup of the psyche, may be amended. Indeed, Freud has himself refuted several of his early propositions. For instance, he used to hold that in the anxiety neurosis, the repression caused the anxiety, and his analytic experience has now taught him, as indicated in “A New Series of Introductory Lectures to Psycho-Analysis,” that the anxiety comes first, and that its source is a (disguised) actual trauma. In the technique of analysis, this reversal is important. But it reveals at what deeper level than any fact or system lies the scientific value of Freud’s work. Freud’s vision of the soul as an organism in dynamic integration with the physical body, with the social body, and with the historic body of mankind, has given us a method. And by this method we have come more close than we had come before to the sources of behavior, to an anatomy of ideas and emotions. Already, the uses of the method have proliferated widely. It has shed light on the social origins of man, anthropological and cultural; and on the problems of character formation without which there can be no science of education and no science of ethics. By its fecundity, the method of Freud’s psychology will perhaps prove to be as good science as the method of Darwin’s biology or of the Marxian historical critique.

I have said that the least value of Freud’s work is its therapy; I may amend this by saying that in therapy lie its greatest evils. Persons who go to psychoanalysis to be cured of neurosis or of a functional maladjustment, inevitably look for guiding values which anciently were given by religion. They seek a way of life; and the analyst is placed in the position of spiritual leader. This is not Freud’s claim. He scouts all Weltanschauung 91beyond the scientific acceptance and ordering of the report of the senses. These rationalists are all naïve in their failure to recognize the limiting dogmatism of their creed. A measuring rod that negates what lies beyond its scope is the sternest of dogmatists. The man who disclaims any individual norm of values, and yet deals with the subtlest problems of human adjustment, implicitly accepts the values that are current and actively rejects what lies outside his measure. The patient is sick because he does not fit into the world as he finds it; the analyst who cures him helps him into this world, which means that he has set up, as the desired norm, the values of the world. If the analyst is not aware of this, his acceptance is merely the more blind and his work upon the soul of the patient the more irresponsible. This is a serious criticism to be made against psychoanalysis from the viewpoint of a world sorely in need of revolution in the domain of values. And it may well be that the maladjusted neurotic of today is closer to the norm of healthy social transformation than the neurotic whom Freudian analysis has made “fit and content” within a society of false individualism and cultural decay.

A more serious, because more philosophical, indictment is that the Freudian system (not the method) makes of mental life a region without polarity with either cosmos or individual person. The explorer Knud Rasmussen once asked an Eskimo, who lived within the ice of the Arctic Circle and whose food was the raw flesh of caribou, “What do you understand by the soul?” And Ikinilik, the savage, answered: “It is something beyond understanding, that makes me a human being.” Freud, the man, would probably agree; Freud, the nineteenth century rationalist, cannot admit of this “something beyond understanding.” He must draw his charts of human behavior, his maps of the mind, without allowance for this “x.” But what if the “x” is needed to produce, from Freud’s hypothetic 92id and ego, the human being? What if all Freud’s analytic counters, lacking this “x,” do not add up into the synthesis—the actual person? “The id,” says Freud, “is the whole personality and the ego is within it.” But Freud’s id is a chaos of instinct and desire, timeless and spaceless, from which by definition all cosmic connection is excised. How does it manage, out of its anarchic tidings, to throw up the ego and the superego with their cultural cosmic sublimations? Where is the forming factor? Dostoevski, who finds God at the irrational and subnormal source, has a more logical explanation. Jung, the Swiss psychologist, although he lacks Freud’s intellectual genius and although his work is not, like Freud’s, a great esthetic body, is more logical, calling the id the “collective unconscious” and finding there the cosmic seed that can explain the human fruit. You can insert no new element, says Whitehead, in an evolving organism. It must be there at the beginning. Freud, in his rationalist refusal to allow within the id, at least hypothetically, the mystic “x” which can alone explain the flowering from the muck of the intellectual and esthetic capacities of man, meets the tragic fate of all rationalists whose ultimate syllogism proves the irrationality of the rationalist dogma.

But whatever the reader judges to be the validity of the Freudian system or the virtues of his own use of his method, he must know, as he reads the books of Sigmund Freud, that he stands within the presence of true human greatness. Freud, indeed, is one of the supreme intellectual heroes of our time: one of those men who make life more livable for us all through the fact of their existence. In his writings, we sense the heroism of his effort, armed alone by faith in reason, to conquer cosmic continents. We think of the first Spaniards, exploring with the blunderbuss and a Cross, yet giving the Americas to man. Freud, also, with a faith and weapons 93equally foredoomed, has discovered a new world which, by outliving him, will make him immortal.

1934

6. SHERWOOD ANDERSON

One must approach the stories of this storyteller in the spirit of reverence, in the spirit of mystery—as one approaches the child. Let the critical come after. If one begins by analyzing Sherwood Anderson, one will not receive him; and all one’s analysis will go for naught. Let him lodge in us ungrudgingly; not till then let our intellectual questionings have play.

For his tales are a testimony; and they testify to the still infantile revelation of Our America. What would have happened in Europe, if the naïve confessionals of convert Gaul and Frank and Goth had been analyzed before they were accepted? Anderson’s books are a relation of the search for fresh religious values; a groping toward an Apocalypse in our own inchoate terms. Woe to us if we do not nurture this act in the childlike simplicity of the man who gives it!

We shall create a Scripture in our land. And of the stuff of Scripture are the glowing songs of “Winesburg, Ohio,” “A Story Teller’s Story,” the subsequent volumes. Scripture they are not. They are not hard, clear, strong enough for that. They are to our new Scripture that shall be, possibly, as were the lost Songs of Miriam to the subsequent Books of Moses; as the pre-Vedic psalms to the Rig-Veda; as the stammering testimonies before St. Isidore of Christians from the Rhine to the Guadalquivir, to that medieval Scripture of Abélard, Anselm, Aquinas. They are source, a living inchoate source. We must let them speak in us and for us, in order to grow beyond them.

94If we fail to accept them, America will turn against them. There are already signs of this revulsion—weakness turned into bravado—in the shrill gestures of young-old men like Ernest Hemingway. We shall have to spew out this false maturity; we shall have to go back and live through Anderson in order to grow beyond our childhood.

From the molder heap of nineteenth-century America rise flames of longing and dance a moment in the air. Then they fall back into the smoke, lost, fetidly lost. There is still too much damp muck for the divine bonfire which America shall be. We cannot yet burn. We can get ready to burn.

Such is the burden of Sherwood Anderson’s books; they are a playing of wistful flames over the muck heap. There have been other flames, hardier, greater. Either they came before our modern muck heap, or they played on its edge. The flames of Thoreau, Melville, Poe, the fire of Whitman, stood clear enough away to cast light to Europe. Anderson’s flame is more modest. But it is at the heart, not at the edge of the molder. It does not light Paris and London; it helps warm us. It helps prepare the muck heap for the great bonfire. Its value lies in its inwardness, in its humble staying.

All the tales of this storyteller are little inward-creeping tongues of fire. Anderson himself is a fragment flame flickering through America’s chaos: licking, curling, dancing, smoking, fainting. He is not organic, he has no body and no eyes. He ignites nothing. He warms, he lessens the dank, he cleanses the stench of the muck heap. After, the bonfire.

When we have accepted him, we can place him; and by this means place America. Looking upon this man’s nature, listening to his words, above all to the dull beat of his feet, we realize what a task this is: to make America into a holy land. Elijah and Amos wrestling with their idolaters, the Judges and Prophets swearing to force their pack of stubborn shepherds into the Word of God, had a task no harder than ours who 95would make America into a luminous land. If you have doubts, here are books to strengthen despair; if you hesitate in your need to transcend despair, here are books to hearten you by their songs of man’s mysterious emergence.

Whence came Sherwood Anderson? and what had he? If this be not God in his blundering step, in his blinded eye, then God is not immanent on earth. Not intelligence, not shrewdness, not cultural purpose, moved this man. To the end he will be deaf, dumb, blind. The Midwest lives in his stories but not in his knowledge of himself. He comes to New York, a man past forty years. Can you say that he saw even one skyscraper, even one person? High men, low men, bitter men and sweet, dance in equal delirium before him. He goes to Europe, a pilgrimage through the detritus of his own youthful readings about Europe. So he has gone through life: so, in a true esthetic form of faint emergence out of chaos, he has created his tales. Creeping flames searching in muck and drench for the dry brand, striving so wistfully hard to catch on, to ignite!

I spoke with a sharp critic from England about “A Story Teller’s Story.” He disposed of it with ease: it lacked form, it lacked clarity of image and thought, it gave nothing of Ohio, nothing of New York; it was vague in picturing the associates of childhood, the transition years; it had no incisive word on the artists encountered in the East. The European mind could not touch the flavor of this revelation. What it saw as muddle is search; what it saw as evasion is honest effort.

Sherwood Anderson used to sing of the gods, the new-old gods coming out of the corn into the streets of Chicago. Primitive gods they were, almost phallic. Mere trunks of power, moving; mere conveyancers of life greyly luminous into the builded blackness of our cities. Sherwood Anderson 96is such a god, himself. There must be many, ere the new Elohim grow into the new Jehovah.

1926

7. HART CRANE

I dwell in Possibility

A fairer house than Prose,

More numerous of windows

Superior of doors.

Emily Dickinson

a.

Agrarian America had a common culture, which was both the fruit and the carrier of what I have called elsewhere “the great tradition.”^[3] This tradition rose in the Mediterranean world with the will of Egypt, Israel and Greece, to re-create the individual and the group in the image of values called divine. The same will established Catholic Europe, and when it failed (producing nonetheless what came to be the national European cultures), the great tradition survived. It survived in the Europe of Renaissance, Reformation, Revolution. With the Puritans, it was formally transplanted to the North American seaboard. Roger Williams, Thomas Hooker, Jonathan Edwards; later, Jefferson, Madison, Adams, carried on the great tradition with the same tools, on the same intellectual and economic terms, that had been brought from Europe and that had failed in Europe. It was transplanted, it was not transfigured. But before the final defeat of the Puritan avatar—a defeat ensured by the disappearance of our agrarian economy—the great tradition had borne fruit in two general forms. The first was the ideological art of what Lewis Mumford calls 97the Golden Day: a prophetic art of poets so diverse as Emerson, Thoreau, Poe, whose vision was one of Possibility and whose doom, since its premise was a disappearing world, was to remain suspended in the thin air of aspiration. The second was within the lives of the common people. Acceptance of the great tradition had its effect upon their character; and this humbler achievement is recorded, perhaps finally, in the poems of Robert Frost.

Frost’s record (“North of Boston,” 1914; “Mountain Interval,” 1916) was already made when the United States entered the War; and the War brought final ruin to the American culture of “free” individuals living for the most part on farms, whose beauty Frost recorded. The tradition which had tempered the persons in Frost’s poems had already, before the Civil War, sung its last high word in the old terms that were valid from Plato to Fichte. And this, too, was fitting, for the Civil War prepared the doom, which the World War completed, of the agrarian class culture. But the great tradition, unbroken from Hermes Trismegistus and Moses, does not die. In a society transfigured by new scientific and economic forces, it must be transfigured. The literature and philosophy of the past hundred years reveal many efforts at this transfiguration: in this common purpose, Nietzsche and Marx are brothers. The poetry of Whitman was still founded on the substances of the old order. The poetry of Hart Crane is a deliberate continuance of the great tradition in terms of our industrialized world.

If we bear in mind this purpose of Crane’s work, we shall be better prepared to understand his methods, his content, his obscurity. We shall, of course, not seek the clear forms of a poet of Probability, like Frost. But we shall also not too widely trust Crane’s kinship with the poets of the Emersonian era, whose tradition he immediately continues. They were all, like Crane, bards of possibility rather than scribes of realization. 98Yet they relied upon inherited forms—forms emotional, ethical, social, intellectual and religious, transplanted from Europe and not too deliquescent for their uses. Whitman’s apocalypse rested on the politics of Jefferson and on the economics of the physiocrats of France. Emerson was content with the ideology of Plato and Buddha, his own world not too radically differing from theirs. Even Emily Dickinson based her explosive doubts upon the permanent premise of a sheltered private garden, to which such as she could always meditatively retire. These traditional assumptions gave to the poets of the Golden Day an accessible, communicable form; for we, too, have been nurtured on the words of that old order. But in Crane, none of the ideal landmarks, none of the formal securities, survive; therefore his language problem—the poet’s need to find words at once to create and to communicate his vision—is acute. Crane, who began to write while Frost was perfecting his record, lived, instinctively at first, then with poignant awareness, in a world whose inherited outlines of person, class, creed, value—still clear, however weak, in Emerson’s Boston, Whitman’s New York, Poe’s Richmond—had dissolved. His vision was the timeless One of all the seers, and it binds him to the great tradition; but because of the time that fleshed him and that he needed to substance his vision, he could not employ conventional concretions. In his lack of valid terms to express his relationship with life, Crane was a true culture-child; more completely than either Dickinson or Blake, he was a child of modern man.

b.

Harold Hart Crane was born in Garrettsville, Ohio, July 21, 1899. His parents, Clarence Arthur Crane and Grace Hart, were of the pioneer stock that trekked in covered wagons from New England to the Western Reserve. But his grandparents, on both sides, had already shifted from the farm to 99small-town business, and Clarence Crane, who had inherited his father’s general store in Garrettsville, became a wealthy candy manufacturer in Cleveland. Here the poet, an only child, lived from his tenth year. At thirteen, he was composing verse; at sixteen, in the words of Gorham Munson, “he was writing on a level that Amy Lowell never rose from.” In the winter of 1916, he went with his mother, who was separated from her husband, to the Isle of Pines, south of Cuba, where his grandfather Hart had a fruit ranch; and this journey, which gave him his first experience of the sea, was cardinal in his growth. The following year, he was in New York, in contact with Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap, editors of “The Little Review”; tutoring for college; writing; already passionately and rather wildly living.

At this time, two almost mutually exclusive tendencies divided the American literary scene. One was centered in Ezra Pound, Alfred Kreymborg, the imagists, Harriet Monroe’s “Poetry” and “The Little Review”: the other was grouped about “The Seven Arts.” Young Crane was in vital touch with both. He was reading Marlowe, Donne, Laforgue, Rimbaud; but he was also finding inspiration in Whitman, Sherwood Anderson and Melville. His action, when the United States lurched into the war, reveals the complexity of his interests. He decided not to go to college and by his own choice returned to Cleveland, to work as a common laborer in a munition plant and a shipyard on the lake. He loved machines, the earth tang of the workers. He was no poet in an ivory tower. But also he loved music; he wanted time to write, to meditate, to read. The conflict of desires led him, perhaps, to accept what seemed a comfortable compromise: a job in the candy business of his father.

The elder Crane seems to have been a man of turbulent and twisted power, wholly loyal to the gods of Commerce. He was sincerely outraged by the jest of fortune which had 100given him a poet for a son. Doubtless, he was bitter at his one child’s siding with the mother in the family conflict. But under all, there was a secret emotional bond between the two, making for the ricochet of antagonism and attraction that lasted between them until the father’s death, a year before the son’s. The candy magnate set laboriously to work to drive the “poetry nonsense” out of his boy. Hart became a candy salesman behind a counter, a soda-jerker, a shipping clerk. He received a minimum wage. Trusted employees were detailed to spy on him, lest he read “poetry books” during work hours. Hart Crane escaped several times from the paternal yoke, usually to advertising jobs near home or in New York. And at last, in 1920, he decided to break with both Cleveland and his father.

His exquisite balance of nerves was already permanently impaired. The youthful poet, who had left a comfortable household to live with machines and rough men, who had shouldered “the curse of sundered parentage,” who had tasted the strong drink of literature and war, carried within him a burden intricate and heavy—a burden hard to hold in equilibrium. Doubtless the chaos of his personal life led him to rationalize the accessible tangent ease from the strain of balance which excess use of alcohol invited. Yet there was a deeper cause for the disequilibrium which, when Crane was thirty-two, was finally to break him from his love of life and to destroy him. Hart Crane was a mystic. The mystic is a man who knows, by immediate experience, the organic continuity of his self with the cosmos. This experience, which is the natural fruit of sensitivity, becomes intense in one whose native energy is great; and lest it turn into an overwhelming, shattering burden, it must be disciplined and ordered. A stable nucleus within the self must be achieved, to bear and finally transfigure the world’s impinging chaos. Personally, Crane did not win this synthesis.

101But the poet was clearer and shrewder than the man. His mind sought a poetic principle to integrate the exuberant flood of his impressions. The early poems, collected in “White Buildings” (1926), reveal the quest, not the finding. Allen Tate, in his Introduction to this volume, writes: “The poems ... are facets of a single vision; they refer to a central imagination, a single evaluating power, which is at once the motive of the poetry and the form of its realization.” But the central imagination, wanting a unitary principle, wavers and breaks; turns back upon itself instead of mastering the envisaged substance of the poem. That is why, often, a fragmentary part of a poem is greater than the whole: and why it is, at times, impossible to transpose the series of images into the sense-and-thought sequence that originally moved the poet, and that must be perceived in order to move the reader. The mediate principle, coterminous with the image logic of the poem and the feeling logic of the poet, is imperfect. The first lines of the volume:

As silent as a mirror is believed

Realities plunge in silence by....

are a superb expression of chaos and of the poet’s need to integrate this chaos in the active mirror of self. Page after page, “realities plunge by,” only ephemerally framed in a mirroring mood which alas! melts, itself, into the turbulent procession. Objective reality exists in these poems only as an oblique moving-inward to the poet’s mood. But the mood is never, as in imagist or romantic verse, given for and as itself. It is given only as an organic moving-outward toward the objective world. Each lyric is a diapason between two integers of a continuous whole. But the integers (subjective and objective) are almost never clear. This makes of the poem an abstract, wavering, esthetic body. There is not yet, as in the later work, a conscious substantiated theme or principle of 102vision to stratify the interacting parts of the poems into an immobile whole.

But in the final six lyrics of this volume (“Voyages”) there is the beginning of a synthesis. Its symbolic theme is the Sea. The turbulent experience of Crane’s childhood and youth is fused in a litany to the Sea.

... Sleep, death, desire,

Close round one instant in one floating flower.

The sea, first source of life, first Mother, is death to man. To woo it is to return to death’s simple singleness. This solution from the burden of chaos is like the erotic mysticism of D. H. Lawrence. Immersion—hence loss—of the burdened mystic self in perfect sexual union is a romantic myth, old as the myth of the Sea. It satisfied Lawrence. But Crane was intellectually too strong, and too robust an artist, to abide it. “White Buildings” closes on the unitary theme of surrender. But the poet is ready to begin his quest again.

In 1924, the poems of “White Buildings” written but not yet published, Crane was living in Brooklyn, in range of the harbor, the Bridge, the sea-sounds....

Gongs in white surplices, beshrouded wails,

Far strum of fog horns....

And now, the integrating theme came to him.

The will of Crane in “The Bridge” is deliberately mythmaking. But this will, as we have seen, is born of a desperate, personal need: the mystic must create order from the chaos with which his associative genius overwhelms him. The poem retains this personal origin. The revelation of “The Bridge,” as principle and myth, comes to an individual in the course of his day’s journey; and that individual is the poet. In this sense. “The Bridge” is allied to the “Commedia” of Dante, 103who also, in response to desperate need, takes a journey in the course of which his need finds consummation.

Lest the analogy be misleading, I immediately amend it. Dante’s cosmos, imaged in an age of cultural maturity, when the life of man was coterminous with his vision, contains time and persons: only in the ecstatic last scenes of the “Paradiso” are they momently merged and lost. Therefore, the line of Dante’s poem is clear, being forth and back in time: and the focus of the action is cogent, being the person of the Poet with whom the reader can readily graph points of reference. Crane’s cosmos has no time and his person-sense is vacillant and evanescent. Crane’s journey is that of an individual unsure of his own form and lost to time. This difference at once clarifies the disadvantageous esthetic of “The Bridge” as compared with that of broadly analogous poems of spiritual search, like the “Commedia” or “Don Quixote.” It exemplifies the role played by the cultural epoch in the creation of even the most personal work of genius.

In “Proem,” the poet exhorts the object of his choice—the Bridge. It shall synthesize the world of chaos. It joined city, river and sea; man made it with his new hand, the machine. Parabola-wise, it shall now vault the continent, and, transmuted, reach that inward heaven which is the fulfillment of man’s need of order. Part One, “Ave Maria,” is the vision of Columbus, mystic navigator who mapped his voyage in Isaiah, seeking to weld the world’s riven halves into one. But this Columbus is scarcely a person; he is suffused in his history and his ocean; his will is more substantial than his eye. Nor does he live in time. Part Two, “Powhatan’s Daughter” (the Indian princess is the flesh of America, the American earth, and Mother of our dream), begins the recital of the poet’s journey which traces in extension (as Columbus gives in essence) the myth’s trajectory. The poet awakes in his room above the harbor, beside his lover. Risen (taking the harbor 104and the sea-sounds with him), he walks through the lowly Brooklyn streets: but walks with his cultural past: Pizarro, Cortés, Priscilla, and now Rip Van Winkle whose eyes, fresh from sleep, will abide the poet’s as they approach the transfigured world of today. The poet descends the subway that tunnels the East River (the Bridge is above); and now the subway is a river “leaping” from Far Rockaway to Golden Gate. A river of steel rails at first, bearing westward America’s urban, civilization (“Stick your patent name on a signboard”) and waking as it runs the burdened trudge of pioneers and all their worlds of factory and song. The patterning march of the American settlers traces the body, gradually, of Pocahontas; the flow of continent and man becomes the Great River; the huge travail of continental life, after the white man and before him, is borne southward, “meeting the Gulf.” Powhatan’s daughter, America’s flesh, dances and the flesh becomes spirit. Dances the poet’s boyhood memories of star and lake, of “sleek boat nibbling margin grass”; dances at last into the life of an Indiana mother, home from a frustrate trek to California for gold, who is bidding her son farewell; he is going east again to follow the sea. (“Write me from Rio.”)

There are no achieved persons in the universe, barely emergent from chaos, of Hart Crane; and this first crystallization—the prairie mother—is the first weak block in the poem’s structure. Now, with Part Three, “Cutty Sark,” the physical course of the poet (the subway ride has exploded into the cosmic implication of the River) returns to view, but blurred. The poet is in South Street, Manhattan, near midnight: he is carousing with a sailor who brings him in snatches of song Leviathan, Plato, Stamboul—and a dim harbinger of Atlantis. “I started walking home across the Bridge”: there, in the hallucinatory parade of clippers that once winked round the Horn “bright skysails ticketing the Line,” the poet is out again, now seaward.

105Part Four, “Cape Hatteras,” is the turning point of the poem. Thus far, we have seen the individual forms of the poet’s crowded day melt into widening, deepening cycles of association. Columbus into the destiny and will of the Atlantic: two lovers into the harbor, the harbor into the sea: subway into a transcontinental railroad, into a continent, into a River; the River into the Gulf; the Indian princess into the Earth Mother, and her dance into the tumult and traffic of the nation; ribald South Street into a vision—while the Bridge brings the clippers that bring China—of Atlantis. Now, the movement turns back toward crystallization. “Cape Hatteras” at first invokes the geologic age that lifted the Appalachians above the sea; the cosmic struggle sharpens into the birth of the airplane—industrial America; the “red, eternal flesh of Pocahontas” gives us, finally, Walt Whitman. “Years of the Modern! Propulsions toward what capes?” The Saunterer on the Open Road takes the hand of the poet. Parts Five and Six are interludes. Part Seven, “The Tunnel,” carries the poem to its climax. The poet, in mid-air and at midnight, leaves the Bridge; he “comes down to earth” and returns home as he had left, by subway. This unreal collapse of bridge into subway has meaning. The subway is the tunnel. The tunnel is America, and is a kind of hell. But it has dynamic direction. In this plunging subway darkness, appears Poe:

And why do I often meet your visage here,

Your eyes like agate lanterns...?

If the reader understand Poe, he will understand the apparition. Of all the classic poets of the great tradition in America, Poe—perhaps the least an artist—was the most advanced, the most prophetic, as thinker. All, as we have noted, were content more or less with the merely transplanted terms of an agrarian culture. Only Poe guessed the transfiguring effect of the Machine upon the forms of human life, upon the very 106concept of the person. The Tunnel gives us man in his industrial hell which the machine—his hand and heart—has made; now let the machine be his godlike hand to raise him! The plunging subway shall merge with the vaulting bridge. Whitman gives the vision, Poe—however vaguely—the method. The final part, “Atlantis,” is a transposed return to the beginning. The Bridge, in time, has linked Atlantis with Cathay. Now it becomes an absolute experience. Like any human event, fully known, it links man instantaneously, “beyond time,” with the Truth.

The principle that Crane sought, to make him master of his sense of immediate continuity with a world overwhelmingly chaotic, gave him “The Bridge”; but in actual life it did not sustain him. The later poems, despite their technical perfection (and with the exception of “The Broken Tower”), mark a retreat to the mood of the last pages of “White Buildings.” The Sea, symbol of the return to a unity of personal abolition, had ebbed while the poet stood upon his mythic bridge; now again it was rising. The periodicity of his excesses grew swifter; the lucid intervening times when he could write were crowded out. Crane went to Mexico, where individual extinction has for a thousand years inspired a cult and a culture. On his return to New York, heart of the chaos in his life, there was the Sea; and he could not resist it. As his boat was bearing him from the warm waters which fifteen years before had given him a symbol, he took off his coat, quietly, and joined the Sea forever.

c.

The beauty of most of Crane’s lyrics, and of many passages of “The Bridge,” seems to me to be inviolable. If I analyze this conviction, I am brought first to the poetic texture. Its traditional base is complex. Here is a music plainly related 107to the Elizabethan poets. And here, also, is a sturdy lilt like the march of those equal children of the Elizabethans—the pioneers. Although Crane describes a modern cabaret ...

Brazen hypnotics glitter here;

Glee shifts from foot to foot ...

always, there is the homely metronomic, linking him to his fathers. Hence the organic soundness of his verse. Its livingness it owes to the dimension of variant emergence from the traditional music, like the emergence of our industrial world from the base of old America. The entire intellectual and spiritual content of Crane’s verse could be derived from a study of his typical texture. And this is earnest of its importance.

The structural pattern of “The Bridge” is superb: a man moves of a morning from Brooklyn to Manhattan, returns at midnight, each stage of his course adumbrating by the mystic law of continuity into American figures with cosmic overtones, and all caught up in a mythic Bridge whose functional span is a parabola, and an immediate act, of vision. The poem’s flaw lies in the weakness of the personal crystallization upon which the vision rests, as the Bridge is spanned upon its piers. This flaw gets into the idiom and texture. Sometimes the image blurs, the sequence breaks, the plethora of words is blinding. There is even, in the development of certain figures, a tendency toward inflation which one is tempted to connect with the febrile, false ebullience of the American epoch (1924–1929) in which the poem was written. Yet the concept is sound; the poet’s genius has on the whole equaled his ambition. Even the failings in execution help to express the epoch, for it is in the understanding and creating of persons that our rapidly collectivizing age is weakest.

Crane’s myth must, of course, not be confused with the myth as we find it in Homer or the Bible or the Nibelungen. The Bridge is not a particularized being to be popularly sung; 108it is a conceptual symbol to be used. And the fact that this symbol begins as a man-constructed thing is of the essence of its truth for our instrumental age. From a machine-made entity, the poem makes the Bridge into a machine. But it has beauty. This means that through the men who builded it, the life of America has flowed into it—the life of our past and our future. A cosmic content has given beauty to the Bridge, and must give it a poetic function. From being a machine of matter, it becomes an instrument of spirit. The Bridge is matter made into human action.

We may confidently say that this message of “The Bridge” will be more comprehensible in the future (not in the immediate future), when the functionally limited materialism of our collectivist era has, through success, grown inadequate to the deepened needs of a mankind released from economic insecurity and prepared, by leisure, for regeneration. For even as necessity, today and tomorrow, drives most men to think collectively in order that they may survive; necessity, day after tomorrow, will drive men to think personally (poetically, cosmically) in order that their survival may have meaning. When the collectivist era has done its work—the abolition of economic classes and of animal want—men will turn, as only the privileged of the past could ever turn, toward the discovery of Man. But when that time comes, the message of “The Bridge” will be taken for granted; it will be too obvious, even as today it is too obscure, for general interest. The revelation, in Crane’s poems, however, of a man who through the immediate conduit of his senses realized the organic unity between his self, the objective world and the cosmos, will be accepted as a great human value. And the poems whose very texture reveals and sings this man will be remembered.^[4]