Chapter IV

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

Note--For copyrighted evidence used in the foregoing essay I am
indebted as follows: Sherwood Anderson, _Poor White_ (Modern
Library, N. Y., 1925); Dorothy Canfield Fisher, _The Brimming
Cup_ (Grosset and Dunlap, N. Y., 1921); James Branch Cabell,
_The Cream of the Jest_ (Modern Library, N. Y., 1922); _Jurgen_
(Grosset and Dunlap, N. Y., 1927); _Beyond Life_ (Modern Library,
N. Y., 1919); _Straws and Prayerbooks_ (Robert M. McBride and
Co., N. Y., 1925); Willa Cather, _The Professor’s House_ (Alfred
A. Knopf, N. Y., 1925); Floyd Dell, _Moon-Calf_ (Alfred A. Knopf,
N. Y., 1921); R. W. Emerson, _Complete Works_ (Houghton Mifflin
Co., Boston, 1903); _Journals_ (Houghton Mifflin Co., Boston,
1909-14); _The Correspondence of Emerson and Carlyle_ (Houghton
Mifflin Co., Boston, 1888); Norman Foerster, _American Criticism_
(Houghton Mifflin Co., Boston, 1928); Hamlin Garland, _A Son of
the Middle Border_ (Grosset and Dunlap, N. Y., 1927); Joseph
Hergesheimer, _Linda Condon_ (Alfred A. Knopf, N. Y., 1919); Mark
Twain, _Complete Works_ (American Publishing Co., Hartford, 1903);
A. B. Paine, _Mark Twain, A Biography_ (Harper and Brothers, N. Y.,
1912); F. L. Pattee, “James Fenimore Cooper” (_American Mercury_,
Alfred A. Knopf, N. Y.); Gregory Paine, Introduction to _The
Deerslayer_ (Harcourt, Brace and Co., N. Y., 1927); O. E. Rolvaag,
_Giants in the Earth_ (Harper and Brothers, N. Y., 1929).

_Dionysus in Dismay_

STANLEY P. CHASE

Twenty-five years ago, when my generation were beginning to find their way around in the world of print and paint, a group of us used to meet occasionally to share each other’s discoveries in contemporary thought and literature. You may smile at the association of the date 1904 and contemporary literature, and confessedly some of the objects of our attention were fantastic enough--Elbert Hubbard, Edward Howard Griggs, and even “I, Mary MacLane.” The more daring among us were delving in Haeckel and Henry George; our conservatives, according to their bents, delighted in Kipling and Barrie, or a group of alluring Celts, or became expert in discriminations between the earlier and the later manner of Henry James. We all read, of course, William James and Bernard Shaw and H. G. Wells and Chesterton. In poetry, to be sure, we had no such variegated menu as the contemporary road-house affords; I should say that our diet was easily digestible and a little saccharine. For the most part, as I recall, we followed along the vagabondia trail after Richard Hovey and Bliss Carman. In that old college town near the coast, we could still thrill to such verses as

Three of us without a care
In the red September
Tramping down the roads of Maine,
Making merry with the rain,
With the fellow winds a-fare
Where the winds remember.

Frost and Sandburg, Lindsay and Masefield, had not come into our world--much less Walter de la Mare or Aldous Huxley or Robinson Jeffers. But we were not so entirely neglected by the contemporary muse as you may suppose. We knew the early work of Yeats, and “The Hound of Heaven” of Francis Thompson; we had discovered the sonnets of Santayana; we could repeat a large part of _A Shropshire Lad_; and of course for our more cosmic moods we had Walt Whitman. Hundreds of other such groups must have existed, like ours callow, inexperienced, bumptious, but very inquisitive, very receptive. Not against us did the “new poetry” (no longer such) have to hurl its bolts.

And even in that distant, unreal decade of the nineteen-hundreds, before President Roosevelt, by a few kindly pages in the _Outlook_, put Edwin Arlington Robinson’s name into every one’s mouth, we knew the poet of “Tilbury Town” (only thirty miles from our own). There was one poem of his whose meaning used to be a great subject of dispute,--for we were than naïve enough to think that a poem must be susceptible of some rational explanation. It was entitled “Cortège,” and had appeared in the _Captain Craig_ volume of 1902.[45]

Four o’clock this afternoon,
Fifteen hundred miles away:
So it goes, the crazy tune,
So it pounds and hums all day.

Four o’clock this afternoon,
Earth will hide them far away:
Best they go to go so soon,
Best for them the grave to-day.

Had she gone but half so soon,
Half the world had passed away.
Four o’clock this afternoon,
Best for them they go to-day.

Four o’clock this afternoon
Love will hide them deep, they say;
Love that made the grave so soon,
Fifteen hundred miles away.

Four o’clock this afternoon--
Ah, but they go slow to-day:
Slow to suit my crazy tune,
Past the need of all we say.

Best it came to come so soon,
Best for them they go to-day:
Four o’clock this afternoon,
Fifteen hundred miles away.

The half-benumbing, half-intensifying effect of the “crazy tune,” the curious way in which a mere pattern of words can usurp the mind, now stealing its attention from the very grief they point to, and now flashing upon it a new aspect of that grief--something like that, I suppose, accounts for the fascination the poem had for us. But a number of us were dissatisfied with an explanation so simple. No, we wanted to know, first, who and how many persons were being buried at four o’clock to-day, and their relationship to the poet (was it, for instance, a former sweetheart and her husband?), and whether “she” in the third stanza was one of the deceased, and in what sense it could be said that Love “made the grave so soon,” and what “half so soon” meant--was it any different from “twice as soon”? We even calculated that the burial must be taking place some fifteen hundred miles to the _west_, since otherwise, all (Protestant) funerals being held commonly at two o’clock, the poet’s time would be twelve noon instead of four afternoon. All, of course, very silly and irrelevant questions.

Only a few years ago, in a poetry course, I was recalling these old agitations of ours, as a warning, I feel sure, against such literalness of interpretation. But, as will happen with class-room instruction, my admonitions produced quite the opposite effect from that intended, for one member of the class was so intrigued by the problem, even as we had been twenty years before, that he evolved the staggering theory that the poem was not about a funeral at all, but about a marriage. This ingenious view having been communicated, in a circuitous way, to Mr. Robinson, he settled the matter quite simply with the following note to the inquirer:

“I have long given up attempting to interpret my own poetry, but
in this instance, would go so far as to suggest a funeral rather
than a marriage. I remember this poem chiefly as a more or less
reprehensible experiment in sound and feeling--a performance more
pardonable thirty years ago--perhaps--than it would be to-day.”

Of course, it was not Mr. Robinson’s performance, but ours, which was reprehensible. We were treating an “experiment in sound and feeling” as we might have treated a deposition in court or an application for the payment of life-insurance; we were bringing to a poem an attitude of mind alien to its character _as a poem_. It was as if one should read Mr. Frost’s “The Thatch” and demand to know _why_ he “would not go in till the light went out.” For “Cortège” in essential matters is not cryptic in the least; it is only irrelevant, external details that are left unexplained. And ultimately, I suppose, what we call a taste for poetry, of any except a very elementary sort, depends upon the possession of tact or intelligence to perceive just such a distinction.

I have used this personal recollection because much more frequently to-day and to a greater degree a somewhat similar feeling of puzzlement assails the reader of contemporary poetry. This simple instance of an obscurity gratuitously created by readers may lead to the consideration of a problem of poetic form more comprehensive than any question of mere technique (though technical elements of poetry are involved in it too), I mean the question of those necessities which are laid on poetry from its being a form of communication between mind and mind. For, I believe, from misapprehension and confusion in this matter, on the part now of poets and now of their readers, springs, to some extent, the unsatisfactory state of poetry at the present time. On the one side, there is reported a feeling of exasperation, by readers competent enough in other kinds of literature or in the older poetry, who “can make nothing of this modernist stuff,” and on the other side the modernists’ rejoinder that such readers are precisely in the position of my group of twenty-five years ago--lacking the intelligence to grasp what is essential and to disregard non-essentials. Surely a consideration of the nature and limits of that community of mind which must be assumed to subsist between the poet and his readers is not foreign to the subject of this book.