Dorothy Canfield Fisher

Dorothy Canfield Fisher was born at Lawrence, Kansas; but in my mind she belongs firmly with her ancestors in the hills of Vermont. Perhaps the addition of middle-western practicality to New England imagination is one secret of her really great power as a novelist and her determination as a student. In her house at Arlington, Vermont, not so far from Robert Frost at South Shaftsbury, she is an eager mother and wife, a swift, active, almost bird-like little woman. When I last saw her she was busy on the proofs of her translation of Papini’s “Life of Christ”. It is a rare thing for an author of such scope and imagination to be also a student of language, of French, of Italian, even of Old English, an earnest interpreter of Madame Montessori. Her understanding of American life and of French character has made her novels unique in contemporary fiction. They have a quality of wholesome regard for social standards as well as a brave facing of fact. This creed she gives us in the “Nietzschean Pilgrim Fathers”. She travels much in Europe; but her keen interest in the people of Vermont and their community affairs brings her back often to the Green Mountains.

NIETZSCHEAN PILGRIM FATHERS

When I first spelled my way through my history primer’s account of the Pilgrim Fathers, the threadbare, too familiar story was all new to me and came fresh-coined from the mint of glory. Swinging my feet and chewing my tongue as I read, I glowed with sympathy for their intrepid resistance to a tyranny which tried hideously to lay hands on the sacred freedom of thought. I was hurrahing inwardly for them as they fought their way across the hostile Atlantic, as they endured the heartbreaking difficulties of their first winter, and I nearly shed tears of admiration when they gloriously refused to go back on the ship that would have set them back where men had the monstrous pretension to dictate to other men what they should or should not believe. Swimming in a golden haze of hero worship I rolled under my tongue the quotation from Mrs. Hemans which ended the chapter:

And all unsuspecting, I turned over the page for the next lesson.

Roger Williams and the Quakers were in the next lesson.

I strained my poor nine year old eyes hotly over the unbelievable story. Two hundred and sixty years divided me from the actors of those times, but that afternoon I went off into the woods and shouted excitedly at the top of my voice back across the centuries, to my forefathers, “But looky-here, looky-here! You’re doing just what you left England so people wouldn’t do it to you. Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! Oh, please don’t!”

My forefathers returning no answer to my heartbroken appeal, I tried the generation immediately before mine, and shyly put a brief question to my father on the subject. My father’s carelessly cynical answer brought a club down on what was left of my cracked and tottering ideal. “Oh, shucks, the Pilgrim Fathers wanted the same sort of ‘freedom of thought’ that everybody wants ... freedom to bully everybody else into thinking as they do.”

Of course the elasticity of childhood and youth being invincible, I did not keep this disillusion in the centre of my consciousness. I poked it down into the darkest corner of my mind and thought I had forgotten it. I grew up to be nineteen and twenty, and as automatically as I put up my hair and learned how to dance, I plunged into the other natural accompaniment of being nineteen and twenty, and became a radical. “Down with the tyranny of the past” resounds recurrently with healthy vigor as each generation advances toward its later teens, and I sallied forth with others of my age, a red flag in one hand and a bomb in the other. I cannot now remember just what we attacked but I suppose, from the dates, that we waged war on such moth-eaten old formulæ as, “Woman’s sphere is the home”: “My father’s God is good enough for me”: “Impressionism is all poppycock, paint pots thrown in the face of the public”: “Organized Labor is flying in the face of the immutable law of supply and demand”, etc., etc. I do remember that any adverse criticism of Ibsen made us froth at the mouth, and that we were prepared to shed our heart’s blood for the right of women to wear rainy day skirts as high as their shoe tops. “Liberty, sacred liberty!” we shouted as we charged.

When did I begin to notice a certain deadly likeness to our Puritan forebears? When did the recollection of Roger Williams and the Quakers begin to seep coldly into my mind? I don’t know when. With advancing years, I suppose, and with that recognition of the vast, incalculable diversity of human nature which can only come after a considerable first-hand contact with all kinds of people.

Perhaps it was the too great vogue of our campaign for emancipating women from domestic slavery that made me first wonder whether it was such an uphill battle for liberty we were fighting, and whether it was really liberty we were getting. We had repudiated at the tops of our voices the ridiculously sweeping generalization that every woman is happier bringing up children than in any other occupation. Things began to go our way; the writers on our side began to be in fashion, to be considered the knowing and sophisticated ones. The other side hung its sentimental head in defeated silence.

And then—oh, bother, take it! It seemed to me I began to see Roger Williams and the Quakers approaching. The sound, much needed axiom “Every woman is not a natural mother” seemed insensibly to have become “No woman is a natural mother”. After all there are women, just as there are men, who prefer children and home life to anything else. In the generation of our grandmothers no girl “in our set” had ventured to say she wanted anything in life but to marry and bring up children. After we had said our say, no girl “in our set” ventured to say that she did want to marry and bring up children.

All that we had done, apparently, was to vary the kind of intimidation, from the kind that had not suited our tastes to the kind that did. We had summoned people to free themselves from the tyrannical dicta of preachers in the pulpits, and had clapped upon them the other tyranny of the radical magazines. Were they getting any more chance to be themselves? Weren’t they being bullied into believing what radical thinkers told them to believe, rather than what they really did believe? Were people with a mystical, poetic, religious turn of mind getting any fairer show now than people with a logical, clean cut turn of mind had when we were twenty? When we said “self-expression” did we mean the expression of Bernard Shaw’s self? Did we not yell “sentimental hypocrite” at people who ventured to express other personalities than the brisk, clear eyed, level headed, disillusioned type which happened to suit our fancy?

My early fierce outraged scorn for the Puritan Fathers began to be tempered with humility. It wasn’t such an easy trick to turn ... to leave people free to believe what you knew was all nonsense.

And yet, with every year that revolved before my eyes the kaleidoscope of the infinitely various differences between human beings, there was forced upon me the intolerable conviction that perhaps what we knew was all nonsense might not be all nonsense for everybody.

One’s first conception of that idea is a terrible moment in life. I suppose it is the beginning of old age—certainly of middle age. It is as devastating as an earthquake to the exhilarating cocksureness which has hitherto been the solid ground under one’s feet. Forever afterward one advances with craven caution, one tries to modify sweeping generalizations by those qualifying clauses which normal human beings instinctively detest. It is unpopular enough business to temper any sweeping generalization whatever—people are uneasy when historians try to qualify to greater truthfulness even such dead issues as opinions on the causes of the Civil War, or what sort of man George Washington really was. But when anyone tries to limit with qualifying phrases the generalizations actually in fashion, then indeed do people cast him out of the righteous ranks of orthodox Plymouth and drive him off to live with the Indians.

Somewhat aloofly then—my natural inheritance of human intolerance inhibited by the certainty that there is much to be said on both sides—and considerably ashamed of my aloofness, I look on at the old struggle being fought as fiercely today as it was twenty years ago.

One of the sweeping generalizations in fashion now is that the late war was caused solely by capitalists and fought either by men naturally brutes, or by finer specimens forced against their will into the ranks by brutalized public opinion. Everybody knows in his heart that this is not a complete statement of the truth, but no one in the ranks of the sophisticated may be permitted to qualify the statement. The tyranny of what is “the thing” to think is as absolute in one direction now as it was during the war when no one was permitted to qualify the equally outrageous statement that the war was caused solely by sympathy for ravaged Belgium and was fought by snowy souled Crusaders.

Another sweeping generalization just now settling itself in the saddle is that middle western American life starves and cramps all souls submitting to it—starves and cramps, that is, more than any other organized human society puts the screws on originality and personality anywhere else. Nobody must qualify that statement under pain of a sentence of exile, passed by the new Pilgrim Fathers, battling gloriously for universal freedom to think as they do.

Another more intimate and personal conviction is that self-control is synonymous with self-mutilation, that self-abnegation is always perverse morbidity.

Another one states that ethics based on enlightened self-interest should and will take the place of religion in human life and that any form of “religion” which involves a mystical sense of communion with a power greater than ourselves, is as out of date in the human mind as the appendix in the human body.

These, since they happen to arouse no personal passion of mine, I can consider calmly. But the Old Adam is not dead in me. Let anyone maintain that the principle of authority qua authority is needed in human life, and every atom of me rises up aflame in denial. I cannot conceive it calmly, cannot put my mind on it impartially as I do on other matters. Any mention of it in my presence is like dropping a lighted match into a keg of gunpowder. I go off with a shattering bang. It is my flaming conviction that nobody should pretend to tell anybody how to run his life. This conviction seems so axiomatic to me that it was like turning all my brain cells inside out, to get a faint, distant glimpse of the possibility that perhaps, occasionally in some cases, once in a while, the principle of authority might be necessary for the stiffening into shape of certain especially jelly-like temperaments. I don’t believe it! Heavens, no! I can never believe it! But as from time to time I encounter, among the maddeningly diverse specimens of human nature which surround me, a specimen especially inchoate, born without the necessary structure of moral bones, I almost perceive the possibility that even my own pet sweeping generalization may need occasional qualification.

This perception, faint and passing as it is, makes me so dizzy and sick that I am sure I could never act on it. I am not even sure that I could refrain from attacking someone else trying to act on it. I try to be flexible minded and tolerant but I stiffen and flame when that conviction is touched. This makes me understand how other people feel about their special generalizations, how the woman who has fought her way out of a hideous, hide bound, joy killing creed, stiffens and flames at any suggestion that some people need a mystical religion: how a man who has lived with an exasperatingly “devoted mother” flares up ragingly at the idea that self-sacrifice may be commendable. I understand that there is no help for us, that we are none of us battling for freedom of thought. We are battling to set up our dogmatic convictions just as our fathers did, and as we despised them for doing. Our convictions are different from theirs. That is all. We are ready to fight to force on others what Samuel Butler has told us to believe, instead of what Tennyson told our fathers to believe. We don’t intend to allow any variation from our standards if we can help it, any more than they did.

For a time I was greatly cast down over the discovery of this invincible intolerance in all our hearts. Apparently we were no better than anyone else. Had any good come at all of our fine ideas of liberalism and freedom? Had we helped the younger generation in the least?

I began to look around me at the younger generation, the really younger ones, those under adolescence, the ones who have been brought up in the best modern manner, unrepressed by stale old restrictions, unhampered by stale old beliefs. And I began to think that I saw two things: first, that the beliefs from which we revolted are not stale and old to them at all, but gleaming bright with novelty; and second, as to these beliefs of ours which we have tried to force on them, they are preparing a revolt from us, as they advance toward their later teens. One of my modern acquaintances told me the other day, “What do you think? My Jeannette is just crazy about babies. She’ll leave a bunch of her twelve year old playmates any day to fool around the whole afternoon with our neighbor’s eight months old little girl. And she says when she grows up and marries, she wants to have seven children, and not belong to a single club! Where does she get such ideas? It’s nothing I’ve taught her; nothing she’s picked up at home!”

It occurs to me that the great saints and heroes of mysticism never come from religious families, but out of a free thinking, materialistic milieu. There comes to me with a clap, what every old woman knows, that rigidly neat housekeepers always have careless, slack daughters and that the daughters of careless, slack housekeepers always react violently into violent tidiness.

I begin to wonder, just wonder speculatively, how Christian ideals will seem to young people who have the intimate excitement and triumph of discovering them under protest, rather than having them crammed down their throats. It occurs to me that perhaps all we have been doing, as we impetuously emptied the baby out of the bath, was to enhance the value of babies. Will not the youngest generation have a perfectly fresh, spontaneous joy in rushing to rescue what we have thrown away? Isn’t it possible that in a generation brought up to ruthless logic à la Shaw, there may be individuals with spiritual and mystical minds, who will revolt against ruthless logic as hotly as we against dogmas, and who, reveling in all the inimitable joys of martyrdom, will fight, bleed, and die for the right to believe in what they believe—even if it is in a religion of faith? Among children brought up to believe that self-development is the highest duty of man, may there not even now be growing up here and there some whose brain cells are different from those of the majority, who will stumble some day by accident into a self-abnegating deed, recognize in the sweetness of the pleasure it gives them their own rightful inheritance, and fleeing the intolerance of the latter day Nietzschean Pilgrim Fathers, betake themselves off to live the life they were meant for? We will persecute them I dare say, and call them reactionary, and hold them up as horrible examples of sentimental self-deception. And all that we will really accomplish, as far as they are concerned, will be to tear from the pure gold of their ideals the disfiguring rags of outgrown dogma, which we mistook for the thing itself.

On the whole, as I think it over, it seems to me that if we do that, we will have done about all that can be expected of any generation. Human progress is slow and spiral. Perhaps, although it is certainly not in the least what we meant to do, that will be counted as our sufficient contribution.