Chapter III

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

“Only add
Deeds to thy knowledge answerable; add faith;
Add virtue, patience, temperance; add love
By name to come called Charity, the soul
Of all the rest: then wilt thou not be loth
To leave this Paradise, but shalt possess
A Paradise within thee, happier far.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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