Chapter I: Poe at Last (1)

Perhaps the classic figures of American literature should be regarded chiefly as actors in the epos of the American birth. With one or two exceptions, they did not produce great books. Yet all of them were heroes; were characters who in their defeats as in their victories fleshed and fixed features of our nascent world. Their lives—like the careers of the patriarchs of Genesis—may prove more current in our future mind than any of their works.

This certainly will be the case with Poe. Despite his influence abroad, despite the range of his activity, he wrote neither verse nor prose intrinsically great. His significance is not to be extracted from his situation. And the construction of the creative Poe—the _true_ Poe—has lagged, precisely because this situation was misunderstood. Poe paid bitterly for his youthful Byronism. From his neighbors and the Bostonians, it shrouded him in sentimental horror; from us, it has quarantined the man in an equally blinding sentimental glamour. His first biographer, Griswold, was incompetent. And Professor Woodberry inherited this incompetence for all his scholarly good will since crucial features of Poe’s life were hidden and since without them Poe’s work, unlike organic great art, lacked an entire dimension.

There has now been published a sheaf of letters[7] which will mark the true birth of Poe as an authentic, working figure in our cultural world. For the most part, they are notes written by Poe to his foster father, with brief notations or replies by Mr. Allan. They give us at last the young Poe, the crucial Poe, and the world which he went forth to live in and to conquer. The first of them dates from the University of Virginia which the poet entered at seventeen; the last reveals him, seven years later, abandoned for the final time by Mr. Allan who has remarried and is soon to die. The years—from seventeen to twenty-four—are the years of Poe’s confrontation with America. Prior to them, he was a child—what manner of child, nurtured and spoiled in the Richmond mansion of the Allans, his words reveal. And after them, there come the open pages of his books, of his trafficking with editors, of his relations with Mrs. Clemm and with his wife, Virginia. These letters form the link that makes the whole. Their appearance is a major event in American letters.

The career of Poe becomes a scene in a symbolic drama. He is creative will, nakedly let loose upon the American world. Who shall say America did not summon him? He rises like an impulse from this land which cannot act him out. Between America and Poe, as between Poe and his foster father, are the chains of a need unrecognized. Without his adopted son whom he bred to hyperesthesia and left to starve, whom he set high and then cast down, John Allan would be a clod. And without John Allan, Poe would have been altogether disembodied. In the tortuous recriminations of these letters, there is the plea for love as well as bread. Transpose the family quarrel into general terms, and you have the full years of Poe: Poe, the most highly potential intellect of a land whose hour of realization had not struck.

In this failure there is no object lesson, no call for a morality. It is too inevitable and too right. It is true that, with the intellectual range of a Goethe, Poe gave forth but a few shriveled and glittering pages. And yet, in his hour and for his hour, he gave the ultimate, since he gave a Symbol. An imagined Poe, petted to old age in the rich library of an adoring foster father, would have been less—far less—than the frail, fierce, frustrate Poe we have.

Unarmed, unguided, he went forth to create in the American desert. His masterful will found no immediate object upon which to work. He had absorbed haphazard the philosophers, the metaphysical poets, the occultists and seers of the Kabala, the chroniclers of exotic journeys. But he did not stay in _their_ world. His constant effort was to refocus and apply this chaos of ideas to some absolute experience of life. Witness his treatment of the values of poetry and music: his making metaphysics out of the relation of facts or out of the forecast of facts: his use of the machine, or airships, of mesmerism, of physiology and mechanical contrivance, to express the widening consciousness of the human soul. Even the wanderings of Arthur Gordon Pym end in a revelation. Of course, Poe failed. Grub Street in Baltimore and New York—this remained the stage for his apocalypse. And the hazard crumbs from the intellectual banquets of Asia and of Europe were but manna, in no wise transfiguring the Wilderness which for forty years he wandered.

Yet the lofty impulse of his work is lodged, forever. Poe’s theory of pure poetry holds the intuition of a great esthetic. His “Eureka” gives the glimpse of a vision deep as that which is imagined in the Kalpa and the Brahma of the Hindus. A half dozen of his tales, “Eleonora,” “Ligeia,” “Morella,” “The Fall of the House of Usher,” etc., are variants of a single theme which envisions the mystery of the Person as close as any prophecy of Blake. Hard, shut, shrunken work it is: and yet it holds a vaster sense of life than do the amplitudes of Whitman or of Emerson. Holds it, however, as a seed the tree. In Whitman and Melville there is life’s blossoming. Poe belongs less with the creators of art than with its prophets.

His creative impulse, first to last, was metaphysical and religious. Behind these horrid trips to Ulalume and Usher, these dogmatic repetitions of telltale hearts and reincarnate lovers, is the man’s will for a world timeless and absolute. That his materials were the shoddy “seconds” of the romantic Gothic, we may leave to the pedants to assure us. Poe’s impulse was no more romantic than was Goethe’s. He had a flair for the Real: he lacked the power to establish this reality from the world about him. Hence his defeated flights to other realms. But in his Poetics and in “Eureka,” it stands proved that the glancings-off which constitute his “works” were but his trial flights: that Poe was resolved to found his revelation within the visible, audible, beating world. Unlike the Bostonians, Poe was no transcendentalist by choice or reason. The confrontation of experience and then the act of alchemy upon it, by virtue of his vision, was beyond his powers. And was beyond him not, as seemed manifest, because of his harried and brief life: was beyond him symbolically, inevitably, since it was beyond the America of which he was so high, so near, so unachieved an impulse.

Let us make _this_ Poe ours. Let us not twang semi-sentimental plaints about his failures. Let us not fool ourselves as to his triumphs. Let us not blame the symbolical Mr. Allan for acting so well his ungrateful role in a Scene so vastly without his canny ken. Let us, above all, not split Poe—as is the fashion of the day—into pseudo-scientific fragments of psychologic and sociologic terms. Let us take him whole—the man and his work: Poe the embodied impulse of an Organism which holds not only him, but us; Poe the impulse of America to transfigure the worlds within it into a world more real. And let us proceed to the Adventure.

_1925_

2. FRANCE AND THOREAU

Since Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, French literature has come variously to America for materials and forms wherewith to re-create itself. The greatest instance is still perhaps that of Chateaubriand whose impossible Indians may outlast the too-possible Frenchmen of Flaubert. The sustenance which Stendhal won from contemplation of our scene for the esthetic of his novel of the modern will is less widely recognized. We are aware, however, of how the symbolists transfigured Poe; and more recently of the enthusiastic creation by the Dadaists of a romantic America of cowboys, skyscrapers and jazz. Romantic movements in classicist France are ever forages for nurture rather than voyages of discovery. Like Greece, France is omnivorous and egocentric. In every period of influences her writers are like a family consuming beefsteak. That beefsteak will become, let us say, part of a lanky father, a fat mother, a bad pagan boy, and a noble Christian sister. At this moment, we may behold America turn into Louis Aragon, Valéry Larbaud, and Bazalgette....

Bazalgette’s translation and biography of Whitman had a dynamic share in the slow stirring of French letters, away from the Narcissus mood which led to the masterworks of Claudel, Valéry, Proust, toward a new gesture of spiritual excursion whence a good range of fresh romantic stuffs will accrue for the young classicists to work on. His Whitman was a biography that held fairly close to the narrative form, save that a lyrism illumined it and made it speak with emphasis and fervor to the imagination of the French. In “Henry Thoreau,” however, Bazalgette stands revealed more clearly: a poet himself, and a prophet, he employs a certain spiritual experience made manifest in America because less assimilated here than the experience of Rousseau and of Tolstoi in their lands; and he makes of it his own spiritual Word for France. This technical analogy between Bazalgette in sophisticated Paris writing of Thoreau, and Chateaubriand in rationalist Paris dreaming of our virgin forests must not be strained too far. Bazalgette is less a poet than Napoleon’s noble hater, but he is more historian and critic. His book has the lilt and passage and effect of a packed personal paean; and yet it is perhaps the best of all pictures of our great New England. There is no phenomenal relation between Chateaubriand’s America—or that of the Dadaists—and ourselves. Their work is, therefore, not negotiable beyond their immediate needs. But clad in the fine English of Van Wyck Brooks, Bazalgette’s “Thoreau” responds to our experience. It becomes an American classic as surely as it is a French one.

The method is not narrative: it is a composite of allusiveness, colloquy, lyrical projection and dramatic scening. A hard method to follow unflagging through three hundred pages; and at first the frail figure of Thoreau seems insufficient for it. The author has sustained his tone with ruthless logic that at times may pall. One would occasionally welcome passages in a more direct, conventional prose. But the consequence of the author’s lack of mercy is an esthetic form the more remarkable when one considers the, after all, comparative slightness of Thoreau’s stuff and the frustrate colors of his milieu. At the end, one realizes that this unsparing method was the inevitable right one for the subject. Thoreau’s greatness did not loom like Whitman’s. It was the consequence of impacts on a small living nucleus, of the organic yet reactive growth of that nucleus within an inchoate social envelope. When he created his Whitman, Bazalgette had but to follow Whitman. Hence his use of narrative was correct. Even the Civil War fell into place as a sort of objective scene for the hero’s progress. Creating Thoreau, Bazalgette creates primarily the New England town, and the woods and the rivers and the birds, creates the astringent air of Emerson and Alcott, creates Mr. Greeley and his _Tribune_, John Brown and his raiders, lyceum audiences and village ne’er-do-wells. A superb massivity of America bounding Thoreau gives him his dimensions by indirection and by the dynamism of the man’s responses. It was a subtle task, and Bazalgette has done it. It required a complete mastery of the American scene; and the extent to which this Frenchman who has never visited our land knows it—its past, its present, _and_ its future—is uncanny. Where did he learn what a New England village feels like, what winter is in a Canadian wood? How did he catch this scent of the Emersonian family, this shuttling rhythm of Broadway, this dark deluvial stain in the Judge’s house in Staten Island? No mere thorough scholarship can explain it. Chateaubriand’s Indians, Baudelaire’s Poe, are alien and exotic. Bazalgette possesses a true intuition of America. Strange as it may seem, he loves us—loves our promise, our struggle to evolve it. But his love is clairvoyant: his mind has stratified his vision of us with analytic understanding. He knows the heartbreaking husk of social and psychic life in which our promise stifles. Bazalgette is a Roussinean romanticist in that he chooses to bring to Paris our Thoreau as a reality _for it_, from the New England town. But he is no romanticizer of the town. Nor of Thoreau who emerges from the book as a true hero almost by a process of survival. Thoreau is a hero of his age, we gather, because his age was otherwise unheroic.

The book is a new type of novel, if you please, rather than biography in the strict French sense. There is a new novel form—the Proustian—in which the hero is literally “I.” An example of it in our language is Sherwood Anderson’s “Story Teller’s Story.” Here is another kind of novel—a sort of Crocean history—in which a real personage is drawn ruthlessly as regards the facts and yet with Dionysian freedom in spiritual emphasis and in esthetic.

A work like this dares to contain anything: and there is to be found here a bit of literary criticism so original in form that it must be mentioned. Thoreau and Whitman meet. Their talk is a failure. Walt is distrustful of this highbrow Yankee who has so consciously turned away from Harvard. Bazalgette records the futile dialogue and adds to it, by way of antistrophe, an imagined dialogue consisting of responses gleaned from the two men’s work. The effect is powerful and convincing: a contrapuntal fugue that does more to prove the nuclear energy of the American mind and its unity, in variety, of direction, than a score of essays.

Mr. Brooks’s translation has a tendency toward “toning down.” The original title, as an instance, reads “Henry Thoreau, Sauvage.” This might be faithfully Englished as Henry Thoreau, the Untamed. Mr. Brooks has preferred to substitute Emerson’s “bachelor of Nature.” Perhaps he shares somewhat Emerson’s Apollonian attitude toward this nature-drunk, nature-sweet, neoprimitive neighbor. But the translation is very far, indeed, from a betrayal. It is the process whereby Bazalgette’s book becomes indigenous and takes its place in our American literature between the old and the new. Thoreau stands with Whitman and with Melville for the creative transitional gesture between that new America, inheritor of Old World forms, and our old America, creator of a new world. Of this hazardous long birth-hour in whose travail we persist, there is no lovelier expression than the prose of Van Wyck Brooks.

_1927_

3. FAIRY TALES FOR THE OLD

Our country was not young from the beginning. It had to achieve youth. From the Old World came old shoots: the transplantation as often as not aggravated their antiquity. Ere we could be young, our elements had to rot and to be remingled. This took time. And it may broadly be said that only with the opening of the West and the demise, in civil war, of our old sectional cultures, did America become at last a single sprawling infant.

Even then, the sectional elderships persisted. They took many forms. None more pleasant than the glowing second childhood of New England which stands expressed in the stories of Sarah Orne Jewett. These are tales mostly of Maine in the later decades of the nineteenth century. And rightly enough the best of them are about old women. The occasional story of a child is sicklied over with an aged cast: for instance, Sylvia of “A White Heron” is an old woman’s child, and lives with an old woman. And when there is a wooing in “The Country of the Pointed Firs” the maid has grown grey in service of her mother; the man—son of the almost centenarian Mrs. Blackett—is a simpleton past fifty. But whether the scene be the Poor Farm or a spruce island home or the tiny palace of Queen Victoria’s Twin, there is ever a single glamorous illusion making the substance and life of these sweet tales. And it is the manner of illusion that dwells in the hearts of folks who have grown sweetly childish, rather than sour, in their senility.

It is not necessary to insist that the farms painted by Miss Jewett are about as “realistic” as the England of “Alice in Wonderland” or of Tennyson’s “Idylls.” Yet these uniformly charming people, so pure of thought, so innocuous in action, so redolent of lavender and lace, are true, although the theatre of their verity is the poetic fancy of Miss Jewett. We may all snatch from our coming decrepit days the nodding wish to turn from the rot of our world into a sweet-scented realm of senile wishes, in order to enjoy Miss Jewett.

The Maine of a mature mind, contemporary with these stories, must have revealed men and women more like the persons of Robert Frost, more like those one feels, rather by reaction than by direct creation, in the works of Thoreau, Hawthorne, Margaret Fuller, Melville. And yet these kind and well-groomed vagaries of Miss Jewett’s are no less a result of the crass facts—no less respectable. The spirit of them is a sort of iridescent mist rising from the shut pools of that life.

Of course, stories with substance so wistful and so misty cannot rank high as art: and we must not permit the present mood of American reminiscence to which are due so many biographies, so many re-editions, so many reconstructions, to blind us to their frail value. The fairy tales of youth have greater destiny, because they have harder substance. The child transcends his world: his ebullient vaulting energy despises a mere unmastered round of fact and with parabolic power brings Mystery to earth. But with second childhood, reality is too much and is avoided by a sharp reduction. Energy, exhausted, draws back in catatonic gesture; re-creates smallnesses to dwell in as a comfortable offset to the no longer challengeable world.

Willa Cather, a feeble daughter of Miss Jewett, has had the fondness to compare her tales with “Huckleberry Finn” (a fairy tale of youth) and “The Scarlet Letter”—one of the maturest dreams of American romance. But these perfumed pictures of the land of pointed firs are a gross reduction of the truth. All the primary lines, colors, forms, are missing. Indeed, all life-welling passion, all organic substance, have been mulcted out by the desire for Peace: and what remains is a predigested brew of natural descriptions and carefully balanced converse—a true diet, indeed, for old and toothless gums.

Yet, although their stuff be small, these tales have loveliness. And one rereads them, after all these years, marveling at the grace with which their frailties have aged. The scenes of nature are good lyrics. Although Miss Jewett’s sea has become strangely gentle, like a parlor pet, it is still living: it is captured somewhat as life is captured in certain two-dimensional prints from old Japan. The dialect has the mark of absolute perfection; and yet is musically mannered so that none of the conscious stress on veracity is there to irk one. But above all—those women, those adorable, impossible old ladies, brewing tea, gossiping, sewing! They are there, not like our grandmothers, but like our childish vision of them—like what our grandmothers would have liked to be, to our rapt young love. Even this sentimental splendor is reduced to a kind of loophole glimpse. And yet the lens is never blurred and the effect has all the negotiability of art.

There was a strength in old New England which passed maturity without losing all its power. There are wild flowers still in these rock-bound fields that go to seed hardily: they do not scatter or fall with the first turning away of the summer sun; but wraithlike they stand aloft upon their stems and let the autumn air run through them. Something of this prowess is in Miss Jewett’s stories. For all their simplification, for all their romantic refusal of the true stuff of tragedy—finally, hence, for all their subtle denigration of New England which deserves greater and more athletic art, these tales bear well. They may be tales of senescence—of a soul’s twilight: but this is a soul not impotent even in decay.

Most of them appeared in magazines well over forty years ago. As one measures them with what has followed, one is dismayed. For hidden in their glamour is a sinister seed. True enough are tales which spring from a felt illusion. But it is only the lie which has brought forth progeny. The hallucination of Miss Jewett, making her see such paragons of peace and sweetness in the New England farms, causing her in all solemnity to compare the “Bowdoin reunion” with “a company of Greeks going to celebrate a victory, or to worship the god of harvest”—this peculiar magic of old age could not be copied and has not been transmitted. Only the trick of reduction, only the simplification, only the falsehood. And the consequence, patented and standard, swarms within our fiction magazines and in our novels.

The fairy tale turned formula—the fairy tale without the motive of youth or of old age—becomes the harsh, cold, mechanical, nugatory art which makes up most of our current “competence” in fiction. It marks the extension into literature of the processes of mass production which belong to an industrial age. It is responsible for the factories and sweatshops whence reading matter is turned out for the million. How it came to be born you can trace in the soft, warm, gradually shallowing and self-repeating art of Sarah Orne Jewett.

_1925_

4. DUSK AND DAWN

The basis for any criticism of a book by Lewis Mumford must be respect for the author and thankfulness that he is at work in our country. Rare, indeed, are American critics who, like him, venture into the realm of general ideas; and rarer are the men who, with his good will, possess his rounded equipment. For Mr. Mumford tries to be no specialist save in the task of seeing and interpreting life whole. No less than all the works of men shall be his laboratory; no less than the search of values for “the good life” his aim. He can write of archaic Utopias and future city plannings, of modern books and ancient pictures and medieval guilds; he is at home in all subjects since he has gained awareness that all of them are one.

Mr. Mumford’s “The Golden Day” sustains this sense of him. It is in many ways a beautiful book. It flows easy, brilliant, poetical, from the store of its maker. It has style, it has form. There is no reason to doubt that it will take its place in the sparse critical literature of our uncertain era.

Mr. Mumford has written an essay in interpretation of the American past. With this purpose, he has utilized an analysis of our customs, of our ideals, principally through the medium of our writers. But the standpoint of his study is the present. He has not written history; he has established, as his focus, not alone our day, but as well our need. His retrospect receives its dynamic rhythm, one might almost say its _life_, from the author’s mastering interest in “What next?”

The general theme, viewed as a series of facts, is plain enough and has been proposed in similar terms, before. Europe’s state since the Middle Ages is regarded as a disintegration. Of this profound breakup America is a conspicuous symptom and expression. America was colonized by forces of Europe’s decomposition; and America itself, determining such states of mind as pioneering, hastened the deliquescence of that spiritual world which man raised up in Europe and whose tearing down had no deeper symbol than the emigrations. Howsoever, before the final breakup of Europe in the American West, new shoots of the transplanted European culture rose on our Eastern seaboard. In the Golden Day of Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, they reached a splendor fresh and unparalleled in the contemporary hour of a Europe less swiftly, but as essentially decadent. Thereafter, the American West, in which the disintegrated force of the Old World and the barbarizing condition of the New came to a climax, gradually prevailed. Already, with Hawthorne, Melville, Poe, the Golden Day was waning: the good elements of old Europe were rotted by unconscious “new” American factors. The “pragmatic acquiescence” marks America’s rationalized slump into the barbaric mood of the industrial pioneer. William James, John Dewey, are good men ennobling the sterile cause. The descent, now, is swift. The muckrakers are social critics themselves submerged in the muck, failing of any principle to catapult them free. Novelists socially and spiritually submerged are Mark Twain, Jack London, Theodore Dreiser—scavengers whose true function is to pick to pieces what still remains of a once noble structure. And not deeply otherwise are the wistful “pillagers of the past” of whom the finest are Henry James and George Santayana; their retreat into Europe or to “philosophy” is motived by as forceless an acceptance of the barbaric day as the rationalization of the pragmatists. Finally, Mr. Mumford brings us to ourselves. After this ebb, we are sunk so low that naught could remain but a new rising. Mr. Mumford is hopeful, one feels, for sheerly tidal reasons.

Of course, to state in a paragraph what the author himself has athletically stripped to but three hundred pages is to leave out much and to denature more. This book, it seems to me, is chiefly a personal essay—a confession by a significant man. You will find, here, excellent pages on the “romanticism” of the pioneer, on the genius of Emerson, on the limitations of Dewey and Santayana. You will find other pages less adequate: as the discussions of Whitman, Melville, Poe and Dreiser. What interests me most in “The Golden Day” is not its assemblage of interpretations, but its focus.

This focus is external. Mr. Mumford is outside his own book. He depicts superbly the Platonic, pagan and mystical glories which in America’s Golden Day were called Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman. But they are experientially remote from Mr. Mumford: as remote as Dante and Aquinas. Ideally, of course, we share all greatness and find its recognition in our souls. Yet those medieval worlds were not actually ours: their source, their form and their behavior differ. Mr. Mumford depicts, also, and with no less eloquence, the horrors of the American scene: the barbaric frontier, the Protestant decadence, the tyranny of the machine and of the job, the fallacies of materialism, utilitarianism, experimentalism, pragmatism. But he is outside the experience of these also. When he praises the age of Emerson, there is an aloofness of elegy. When he exhorts the young men, his contemporaries: “Allons. The road is before us!” there is an aloofness of rhetoric. What is the matter with Mr. Mumford?

The matter is that he has considered us, rather than experienced us. He has gone deep to behold our past greatness, our present miseries; but not deep enough to establish the vital connection between them, and between them and himself. America is an organic subject. Mr. Mumford, for all his studies in causation, treats as a series of isolate manifestations, “good” or “bad,” “tasteful” or “disgusting,” what are really acts of a single spiritual Organism, yet immature, yet basally “in the making.” The Golden Day whereof the author so wistfully sings was not a day at all: it was not even a dawn: it was, if you insist on solar terms, _a_ dusk of Europe. But only in its ideologies and cultural forms! More accurately, it was a moment in the American childhood when the spirit spoke lyrically, before the whelming demands of body—of nutrition and of growth—plunged America more fully into chaos. The fact that this age was not a Day is plain in its shimmering, surface passage over the American mind: and in the sequence when America transformed the idealism of its transcendentalists and poets into immediate adolescent matters of expansion and of self-indulgence. Mr. Mumford makes Emerson the hero of this “day.” Yet if ever a man was a congeries of lovely echoes, of wistful longings, of fleeting and unfleshed intuitions, Emerson was he! His intimations of immortality were almost literally those which the great Wordsworth beheld on the visage of a babe! Emerson _was_ such an intimation on America’s huge child face. He was our first, unfleshed, undifferentiate glimpse of manhood—of a manhood still very far ahead.

In Whitman this intimation is no longer the tremorous glimpse so well symbolized in Emerson’s frail and evanescent prose. It is a roar of adolescence: a true hunger call: no more. Now, note Mr. Mumford’s basic misunderstanding of Poe and Melville. These men were the first to try to _flesh_ what we might style the Emersonian intuition in American life. Mr. Mumford calls them figures of the twilight. And yet, from the standpoint of a study of the American Organism, they are more advanced than such more successful artists as Whitman and Thoreau. Poe’s mystical attitude toward the mechanism and applied science, his marvelous attempt to add a dimensional sense to the inherited experience of life; and Melville’s tragic effort to wed God and whaling—these are the first organic _acts_ after the childhood intimations of the men whom Mr. Mumford esteems as makers of our Noon.[8] And the author fails to recognize them, because he has no organic experience in America to guide him. He is in love with the gesture, the dream, the childhood faëry of our past: yet he rejects the _body_—our present interim of the Machine and of the romanticisms of the Machine—whereby alone this promise from our past may be organized into a living future.

Therefore, finally, his book brings the flavor of a plaint: his envoi is wistful and vague, his call to future action has no ring. For American future spiritual action must rise organically from the facts of our hideous present, since these facts are an insuperable sequence from our past ideals. Mr. Mumford, in this book, is a man sincerely, prophetically in love with the sweet spirit of childhood; yet turning from the physical, often bestial process whereby alone the child can grow in order to express that spirit. When the child America lisps purities half understood, Mr. Mumford blesses. But when the child America gulps food, wallows in mud, slugs and robs comrades, adventures, bullies, cheats—Mr. Mumford merely scolds.

_1926_

5. ELEGY FOR ANARCHISM

a.

I hoped to glean from the autobiography of Emma Goldman four experiences, each of them worth while: the intimate life story of a remarkable woman, the history of her ideals and thoughts as an anarchist, a portrait of toiling America during the past four decades, and an account of the years of military communism in the U.S.S.R. I got what I wanted, although in each case the net gain in light is different from what I had supposed it would be—different, I feel certain, from what Emma Goldman herself believes her book has given.

The most enlightening point, for me, in the first volume where the author describes her girlhood, her marriage, her entrance into the anarchist ranks after the Chicago executions, her love affairs, her friendships with Johann Most and Alexander Berkman, is that her narrative is almost bare of experience and ideas. The pages fly with gusto, Emma Goldman holds back nothing. But she has, rather amazingly, almost nothing inward to give! Intimately, for all her good will, she appears to remember little of her own sensations; and if there was a period of doubt and inquiry before she accepted Kropotkin and Bakunin, she takes her own thoughts for granted, giving us the bare conclusion. I had a sense of Emma Goldman writing these pages of her youth; but it was a sense of the mature woman the author, not of the young woman the subject. And this very fact: that Emma Goldman describing her loves, her factories and sweatshops, her cities, her encounters with magnates and policemen, gives no direct experience of her feelings and thoughts, helps to reveal the nature of the woman. One must make one’s own deductions, as one might if one were actually speaking with the author. For Emma Goldman is a presence in her book—a deep, hearty presence. She is never the analyst or integrator of her story.

Her chief traits are goodness and energy. There is something abstract in her élan vital, since she is unaware of causes. The Freudians would doubtless call her career a flight from a cruel father (who became symbolized as authority and the state). More obviously, her life was a simple escape from the intolerable pain of inhibitions (personal and social) and a blind rush toward that freedom which the word “anarchism” convincingly evoked. In a life so purely dynamic, there is no pause for thought, hence her book’s total lack of ideology; there is no room for emotional contemplation, hence its author’s want of vivid memory. Emma Goldman cannot be said to remember her girlhood, and its record, pictorial or sensory, is absent from her pages. Which is to say, that her first thirty or forty years were lived not on an intellectual, not even on an emotional, plane; but were instinctive. Instinctive action (if I may use this obsolete term) is automatic, and leaves no memory.

But Miss Goldman’s instinctivism must not be confused with that of others. It is paradoxical, being extremely good and brave. Most women who live on this level are self-indulgent, cowardly, shallow. Miss Goldman, although she seems never to have thought, has a nature both good and profound. At any moment of her youth, it is clear that she was ready to give herself to her Cause. Even her sex life, one feels, was the response of a motherly heart rather than of a lusting body. And if she followed the dictates of her body, the wonder is that even selfish impulse moved her to constant sacrifice and the acceptance of suffering.

This paradox convinces me that there are really persons in the world like the “free souls” on whose actual existence Rousseau, Proudhon and the other romantic anarchists based their theories. No wonder Emma Goldman was an anarchist—and without having to think about it. Her innocent nature predicates and incarnates the anarchist creed. Even in her appetites, she is a woman instinctively good and pure: a woman whose blithe spirit only the alien contacts of official law could poison.

The pages are, of course, full of references to anarchist comrades. Directly, she analyzes them no more than herself; but her own vitality imbues with life her portraits of men like Berkman, Reitman, Brady and Most. Like the author, these figures belong to the romantic movement. They are an issue of the same social forces which gave the Atalas, Renés, Adolphes and Werthers. The key to these characters is a deliberate return to “self”—a return which is a reaction from a system, social and intellectual, that was losing its vitality: so that the romantic return to “self” was literally the escape of “life” from the old Western order. In the profounder romantics (Rousseau, Blake, Beethoven, Stendhal, Balzac, Whitman, Nietzsche, etc.), this return to “self” was sufficiently thorough to reveal the self’s cosmic implications and therewith the nucleus of a whole new social fabric. Intellectually weaker romantics did not go so far. They discovered their own yearning ego, and loved it, and regarded the world as a mere bar to its divine trajectory. Their ideas of social justice were rationalizations of their lyric need of freedom. They were the anarchists. They knew nothing of the objective world, save that it got in their way. They knew nothing even of each other, since in the last analysis they knew nothing of themselves. They were “pure being,” and since “pure being” is a rationalized fantasy, their own lives have an abstract air, a lack of body and of reason.

This _unreality_ of the anarchists is perfectly revealed by Emma Goldman. It is epitomized in the _attentat_ on Frick by her lifelong comrade Berkman. Young Berkman (a very different man from the mature Berkman of later years) is as good as his girl friend. He _knows_ nothing, either: not how to make a bomb, not how to speak English, not the crucial differences between an American magnate and the lords of Tsarist Russia; not (at the end) how to aim a pistol. His act is a “pure act” in a cruel, complex world that has thrown him off, so that he wills to destroy it. The anarchist is a tangential force from the social center, but in his naïve egoism he conceives himself as the center. Thus, by immediate logic, the legalized social world becomes the centrifugal tangent—and he erects a philosophy or builds a bomb, to wipe it out.

Volume One of Emma Goldman’s story might, then, be called the premise of anarchism: there are really born in the world persons instinctively good, whom the complex tissue of laws tortures and maims. Volume Two is the conclusion of anarchism: the fate of such persons in the real world that persists. In her record of the past ten or fifteen years, the author is closer to the subject. We no longer have a woman of sixty trying to re-create a girl. We know what the young Miss Goldman was, by what she failed to record: we have the contemporary in a more positive record. For this other woman has been forced, by her frustrations, from the instinctive rush of her élan vital to the emotional plane. The natural mother blindly fighting for her children becomes the contemplative mother who can no longer wield arms, who can only suffer. The bud of the young woman’s goodness blooms into a dark flower of pain. Now Emma Goldman has memory. Her last pages, in which she gives us a War America and a Russia of her own, are suffused with tragic light.

b.

I do not wish to appear to minimize the intellectual contribution of the great anarchist writers. They established a theory of the state which Marx accepted. Indeed, the bitter war between anarchism and communism is one of methods toward a common goal—the classless and stateless society. As anarchism evolved, however, it became an unrealistic fixation on the end, whereas the Marxists assumed the task of establishing the ideological and technical means that might bring the end into existence. The anarchists (in the contemporary jargon) became a dissociation from the context of life: they represented that extreme of social suffering which touches madness in so far as madness is a dislocation from the whole. And against them, Marx brought his organic rationale to the cause of revolution. He counteracted the instinctive anarchist flight from an unjust world by making reasonable the relation between the rebellious impulse and the capitalist system, and by integrating social revolution as an organic (dialectic) issue of our social order. In this effort, it is natural that all the leading Marxists—Engels, Plekhanov, Lenin, etc.—should have made conscious war against the anarchists. But it is a beautiful stroke of fortune which led a leading anarchist, like Emma Goldman, into articulate contact with the first Marxist nation.

Her bitter rejection of bolshevism is well known. She went to Russia in 1920, ready to defend and to collaborate. A year and a half later, she and Berkman left, heartbroken by what she names the betrayal of the Cause for which she has given her life. Her record is full, and is—for reasons unknown to herself—the most significant part of her book. It is the final revelation of the utter unreality of her own kind of revolution. Emma Goldman found in Russia a ruthless state employing repression of all kinds—censorship, imprisonment, execution—in the effort to survive both the inherited chaos of the Tsarist regime and the seventeen White armies that were attacking it. This was enough for Miss Goldman: the old hated state at its old methods. She had never stopped, in her assaults on bourgeois society, to understand it; why, now, should she stop to understand the real problems of the proletarian dictatorship in Russia? Contexts are beyond Emma Goldman, whether they be White or Red. The whole activity of relations is beyond her.

Her book, in its finality, becomes the tragedy of good will and a good heart unguided by a sense of the Whole. The impulse that had made her a rebel was generous; her methods of rebellion were brave and pure. But rebellion became the automatic habit of her life; her one positive response to the objective world of men and of values. If she had _understood_ the evils of bourgeois society, she would have understood the inevitability of their survival in the transition period which she witnessed in Russia. Her descriptions of what she saw are factual enough: Emma Goldman is incapable of deliberate falsehood. But she is also incapable of truth, which is the placing of facts in their vital context.

Her failure to understand Russia is the anarchist failure to understand and hence to work upon the world. Her story of a great anarchist (there is something about this woman that is great) becomes the most eloquent defense of communism. If the revolutionary impulse can go so far astray through blind emotion, become so hysterical, so impotent, so unjust, and finally so destructive, the Marxian method is imperative.

But if the lesson of this book went no further, it would scarcely deserve the space that I have given it. Anarchism as a system and method of revolution is dead: communism has killed it. What remains in the revolutionary world is the menace of a fixation, different but as deadly as that which in a hundred years turned the fertile beginnings of Godwin and Proudhon into so pitiful an end. Anarchism has died of intellectual dry rot induced by its eccentric emotionalism. There are signs that orthodox communism is threatened by a dogmatic rationalistic creed (by no means discoverable in Marx) whose inadequate depth and breadth would ultimately exclude the creative energies of mankind.

The intelligent communist will not gloat over the tragic story of Emma Goldman. He will bear in mind that a revolutionary cause must be constantly Creative, and that to this end it must be vigilant against mental or emotional habits that exclude the right of fresh discoveries. To bring a new mankind into the world is a long act of birth menaced at every instant by the nearness of death.

_1931_

6. THE BOOK OF LEO STEIN

The man whose conversations about art have gone into the nurture of most of the important artists of our day in Paris has written a book. For one who knows the author, it will be hard to dissociate these printed pages from the voice of the man who wrote them. To have had acquaintance with this tireless seeker, watched the beautiful curves of his mind moving for hours of uninterrupted discourse upon a mental action, and to have relished his piquant admixture of spiritual humbleness, intellectual passion and ascetic distrust of all passions, is not the sort of experience to be overlooked, just because one of the best talkers of our day has turned to writing. Mr. Stein’s work is, moreover, in the best sense, conversation. From beginning to end, his curt and quiet tone is a manner of speaking. The color of the man stands in his most abstracted thought. He has written a volume in which all thinking and all topics are so securely focused to a personal rhythm, that—whatever else—his essay is a work of art.

Mr. Stein has a poor opinion of philosophy, and of what esthetics, at its hand, has suffered. Mr. Stein, moreover, has loved art. He has, in consequence, attempted what might be called a “rescue.” The sentimental mists of philosophic thought must be cut away from his beloved; the basis of the esthetic act must be presented in simple, matter-of-fact, assumptionless terms. This is the program. Actually, what Mr. Stein has achieved is a statement as subjective as Amiel’s journal: a self-portrayal which is both beautiful and significant, since its hero is so archetypical of his time.

With the purely technical part of his examination of esthetics, there can be no quarrel. It is superb. Mr. Stein has studied the _picture_ with a combined sensitivity and intelligence of which I, at least, can name no even approximate equal. To read his discussion of focus, interval, the physiology and analogies of rhythm, distortion, tension, composition, is to be aware of mastery and to know what sentimental perfume most literary art appreciation—from Goethe to Elie Faure—consists of. Mr. Stein’s technique for the practical taste of art seems to me to be perfect. His chapter, for example, on “Pictorial Seeing,” in which he makes clear how the eyes can turn a dish into a picture, how this ideal act is the basis of esthetics and must inevitably determine the distorting, flattening and focalizing, is a masterpiece; and the man who understands it is ready to see pictures. Moreover, the book is filled with apophthegmatic observations on life, the ego, civilization (which, to Mr. Stein, is yet far from dawning), that should make his volume precious to all lovers of delicious talk. Indeed, the work is so complete in its foreground—the physiology of the esthetic object—that its utter lack of background—the matrix, causality and dynamics of art—becomes the clearer. Mr. Stein makes plain how in a picture it is upon the depth dimension that esthetic success hinges: how, indeed, much European art has failed because of the failure to throw the focus organically back and to make alive the planes which support and enact the forward action. And in this criticism he has given the measure of himself.

If, having so amply learned from Leo Stein how to transform the dish before our eyes into a picture, one were to ask him: (a) why one should do this; (b) why anyone has ever done this; (c) why and how this act is universally linked with the entire history of man’s spirit; (d) why feeling and value accrue from this act, and (e) what is the nature of this process whereby the self is enhanced, one would receive no answer. As I have said, Mr. Stein is “against” all philosophy and metaphysics. He takes furious pride in telling us that he has never been able to understand the writers on these subjects: and he makes clear that, if you think you have understood them, you are suffering from a delusion. “Philosophy,” he tells us, “is a pseudo-knowledge which attempts to add a dimension to human capacity.” “Mysticism,” he adds, “is sentimentality taken seriously.” The entire effort to establish truth from facts, or the real from our complex of thought and sense and act, being “philosophical” or “mystic,” is inadequate and acrimoniously barred from his discussion of esthetics. “Esthetics gives us fact, not truth,” he tells us. The work of art is a cognitive object, an object by means of which men may know but which they must “stay outside of.”

Mr. Stein sticks about as heroically to his backgroundless thesis as he could, without becoming inarticulate altogether. What value exists in that rhythmic synthesis of ingredients intercepted by self, and called art, unless the unity achieved conveys an experience beyond the matters abstracted? Why should we care to know a Cezanne landscape, if this especial focusing of hills and houses is a mere unification of themselves? Mr. Stein, in refusing to ask such questions or to place his facts in a context that inherently transcends them, dislocates every fact, every question he discusses; as assuredly as he would dislocate a dish (in a picture) if he essayed to represent its planes without the planes that intersect them.

To render art intelligible by isolating it from those causes and associations which invade the philosophic realm is just about as wise as it would be to employ a language after abstracting the meaning of the words. (This, by the way, is not far from the method of Mr. Stein’s illustrious and ridiculous sister, Gertrude.) In his fear of unproved assumptions, Leo Stein has made a two-dimensional picture of esthetics. For the expert, his study of the traits of art in analytical cross section is instructive. But for the reader who is really seeking an alphabet of esthetics, the result is arid.

Leo Stein represents, in his attitude, the philosophical defeatism of our day. Because so many little boys have burned their fingers, he will eschew fire and live cold. There is something positively heroic in this spectacle of a man aborting the creative process of his mind, because so many births in the past (as he sees it) have been abortions. Even worse, Leo Stein, having no sympathy with the birth pangs of the world, decides there shall be no more birth at all. To this end, the work of art is reduced to a mere rationally cognitive object, with self as a static co-ordinate of the cognition; and that entire process of dynamic osmosis between self and not-self, _which is the history of culture_, is put away as sentimental nonsense.

His subject has its revenge upon him. You cannot trace more than a diagram of the means of esthetics, unless you know that the configuration of facts in any work of art establishes for both artist and observer an experienced entity called truth, which as radically differs from these facts as water does from H_{2} and O, or as a human body differs from the sum of inorganic chemicals within it. And—unfortunately for Mr. Stein—you cannot talk about anything with perseverance, without having to choose between a philosophy of your own (which is at least alive and yours) and a philosophy that is unconscious and not yours and uncontrolled.

This is the fate of the antiphilosophic Leo Stein. He says, for instance: “Some believe there are quite a lot of emotions. Some believe there are only three. I doubt very much that there is more than one, which is just emotion.” This sounds like a brave refusal to “assume.” It is really an assumption based on an atomistic philosophy whose tenet was that you must split up psychic states just as physicists split up matter into atoms. I might respond that there are no emotions—only organic contexts from which the mind may abstract analytic elements which partake solely of the mind process and which it has called emotions. I don’t say my organic philosophy would be truer. The point is that Mr. Stein, in disagreeing with me, is as philosophical as I am.

Throughout his book, such unconscious philosophical assumptions are present: and they are inadmissible because _he_ does not admit them. He says, for instance:

Esthetics gives us fact, not truth. But fact to be interesting to
adults in the long run must be true. Only science and practice can
judge validity beyond the mere aspect. The world as it is
scientifically known is not a whole world, but the nature of that
world is such that it can find in science a partial reflection that is
true enough to work. Our esthetic perception of the world must not
contradict this knowledge.

If this is not philosophy—philosophy of a very classic mold—then Aristotle was a landscape painter.

I have here no space to isolate the assumptions which color the esthetic of Leo Stein; nor to work out the inadequacy of his definition of art as a cognitive object. The task would be the more difficult, in that he forbears from the method of statement of his first principles—a method which makes it so easy to attack the systematic thinkers. I detect, under Mr. Stein’s abnegation of first principles about the “real” and the “true” and the “good,” the cowardice of our epoch. Every man who lives should know that his _life_ is an assumed, rationally unproved first principle. The real and the true are categories of our existence and enter as functions into all our acts. Our sole choice is between a creative and a passive attitude toward the first principles thus _given_. So far as I know, the one honest, if vain, effort to reject first principles is suicide. Much of the brilliant intellectual activity of our day is a comfortable surrogate for self-destruction.

_1927_

7. REFLECTIONS ON SPENGLER

Oswald Spengler’s “The Decline of the West,” from 1918 to 1926, sold in Germany almost a hundred thousand copies. It would be inspiriting to believe that a profound historical and philosophical work could have so large a sale in any modern land. But the originality of Spengler does not reside in his erudition; it is poetic. The book’s metaphysics is eclectic rather than sound; its historical research is vast rather than uniformly deep. “Der Untergang des Abendlandes” is an epos, a myth. So, if Germany has not bought a hundred thousand copies of a great philosophic work, it has at least welcomed a personal mythos of deep interest: one whose elements are philosophy, history, esthetics: one whose comprehension requires of the reader a great familiarity with comparative history and comparative religion.