CUR pelho- bj- DP 200K
American Literature
A Journal of Literary History, Criticism, and Bibliography
Volume 21 1949-1950 L
BOARD OF EDITORS AE a
7 E “a N ;
i f Jay B. HusseLL, Chairman ec CENTR “ wersi d\ OC LIBRAR ’ Duke University ; \ ioe
STANLEY T. Witiiams (1949) Warrer Bram (1951)* NS De Be Jf
Yale University University.of Chicago So aa AAA
Harry H. Cark (1950) Georce F. WuicHER (1952) University of Wisconsin Amherst College
Crarence Gounes, Managing Editor Duke University
* James D. Hart served in place of Mr. Blair in the fall of 1949.
Published in November, January, March, and May by the DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Durnam, Nortu CAROLINA
with the Co-operation of the American Literature Group of the Modern Language Association of America
Reprinted with permission of the original publishers by
KRAUS REPRINT CORPORATION New York, 1961 -
I. AUTHORS
Book reviews as well as articles are included under this heading.
Aaron, Daniel. Reviews: Johnson (ed.), Foundations of Democracy, 127-129; Maclver (ed.), Unity and Difference in American Life, 127-129.
Aldridge, Alfred Owen, “Franklin’s ‘Shaftesburian’ Dialogues Not Franklin's: A Revision of the Franklin Canon,” 151-159; “Timothy Dwight’s Posthumous Gift to British Theology,” 479-481.
Allen, Gay Wilson. Review: Johnson, Hungry Gulliver: An English Critical Appraisal of Thomas Wolfe, 253-254.
Amacher, Richard E. Reviews: Kouwenhoven, Made in America: The Arts in Modern Civilization, 131-1323 Flexner, John Singleton Copley, 133.
Anderson, Charles. Review: Metcalf (ed.), Journal of a Visit to London and the Conti- nent by Herman Melville, 1849-1850, 250-251.
Asselineau, Roger. Review: Zardoya (tr.), Whitman, Obras Escogidas, 511-512.
Blodgett, Harold. Review: Brogan, American Themes, 499-500.
Bloom, Edward A., and Lillian D. Bloom. “Willa Cather’s Novels of the Frontier: A Study in Thematic Symbolism,” 71-93.
Bode, Carl. “A New College Manuscript of Thoreau’s,” 311-320.
Booth, Bradford A. “Mark Twain’s Comments on Holmes’s Autocrat,” 456-463.
Cardwell, Guy A. Reviews: Goodman, Curriculum Implications of Armed Services Edu- cation Programs; Houle et al., The Armed Services and Adult Education; Matthew, Language and Area Studies in the Armed Services; Dunkel, General Education in the Humanities, 241-246. :
Clough, Wilson O. Review: Bernard, Le Roman Régionaliste aux États-Unis, 512.
Cowie, Alexander. Review: Gloster, Negro Voices in American Fiction, 134-135.
Day, A. Grove. Review: Joughin and Morgan, The Legacy of Sacco and Vanzetti, 372-
373- Dauner, Louise. “The ‘Case’ of Tobias Pearson: Hawthorne and the Ambiguities,” 464-
472. .
Davidson, Edward H. Review: Van Doren, Nathaniel. Hawthorne, 359-360.
Draper, John W. Review: Dayton, Pioneers and Their Homes on the Upper Kanawha, 140-141.
Duffey, Bernard I. Review: Elias, Theodore Dreiser: Apostle of Nature, 365-366.
Edel, Leon. Review: Andreas, Henry James and the Expanding Horizon, 362-364.
Eidson, John Olin. “Two Unpublished Letters of Emerson,” 335-338.
Eisinger, Chester E. “Land and Loyalty: Literary Expressions of Agrarian Nationalism in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” 160-178.
Feidelson, Charles N., Jr. Review: Basler, Sex, Symbolism, and Psychology in Literature, 370-372.
Ferguson, Alfred R. “Some Bibliographical Notes on the Short Stories of Henry James,” 292-297.
Foerster, Norman. Reviews: Rusk, The Life of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 494-496; Drew, T. S. Eliot: The Design of His Poetry, 496-497.
French, Warren G. “A ‘Lost’? American Novel,” 477-478.
Frenz, Horst. Review: Clark, Eugene O'Neill: The Man and His Plays, 122-124.
Friederich, W. P. Review: Capasso, Dizionario Lettarario Bompiani delle Opere e dei Personaggi di tutti i Tempi e di tutte le Letterature, 139-140.
Gohdes, Clarence. Some reviews under “Brief Mention” are by Mr. Gohdes.
Grant, Rena V. Review: Shippey, It’s an Old California Custom, 129-130.
Greet, Cabell. Review: Gannett, American Names, 375-377.
Halline, Allan G. Review: Mayorga (ed.), The Best One-Act Plays, 1947-1948, 258.
=— ee ee
—
iv Index—Volume XXI
Hart, James D. Reviews: Jones, The Theory of American Literature, 364-365; McDowell, American Studies, 497-499. |
Heindel, Richard H. Review: Koht, The American Spirit in Europe, 505-506.
Hillway, Tyrus. “Melville’s Geological Knowledge,” 232-237; “Pierre, the Fool of Virtue,” 201-211.
Hinz, John P. “The Real Alexander’s Bridge,” 473-477; “Willa Cather, Undergraduate— Two Poems,” III-II6. i
Hoffman, Frederick J. “The Technological Fallacy in Contemporary Poetry: Hart Crane and MacKnight Black,” 94-107. Review: Hyman, The Armed Vision: A Study in the Methods of Modern Literary Criticism, 255-257.
Holloway, Emory. Review: Gohdes and Silver, Faint Clews and Indirections, 502-505.
Hubbell, Jay B. “Announcements,” 117, 238, 346, 486. The reviews under “Brief Mention” signed J. B. H. are by Mr. Hubbell.
Laverty, Carroll D. Review: Ostrom (ed), The Letters of Edgar Allan Poe, 246-248.
Leary, Lewis. “Articles on American Literature Appearing in Current Periodicals,” 143- 149, 265-278, 381-395. “Joel Barlow and William Hayley: A Correspondence,” 325- 334. Reviews: Farrand (ed.), Benjamin Franklin's Memoirs, and. Farrand (ed.), The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, 492-494. Some reviews under “Brief Mention” are by Mr. Leary. ‘Research in Progress,” 118, 239-240, 346-353, 487-488.
LeClair, Robert C. “Henry James and Minny Temple,” 35-48.
Leisy, Ernest E. Review: Frear, Mark Twain and Hawaii, 251-252.
Levenson, J. C. “Christopher Pearse Cranch: The Case History of a Minor Artist in America,” 415-426.
Lillard, Richard G. Review: Farquhar, Yosemite, the Big Trees, and the High Sierra, 140.
Mabbott, Thomas O. ‘“Poe’s “The Sleeper’ Again,” 339-340.
McElderry, B. R., Jr. “The Uncollected Stories of Henry James,” 279-291.
Marckwardt, Albert H. Review: Herman and Herman, Manual of American Dialects for Radio, Stage, and Screen, 130-131. i
Marsh, Philip. “A Reply to Lewis Leary,” 344-346.
Marston, F. C., Jr. Review: Lundblad, Nażhaniel Hawthorne and European Literary Tra- dition, 248-250. ,
Mathews, J. Chesley. Review: La Piana, Dante’s American Pilgrimage, 373-375.
Miller, Perry. Review: Pochmann, New England Transcendentalism and St. Louts Hege- liantsm, 368-370.
Miller, Ralph N. “Nationalism in Bryant’s “The Prairies, ” 227-232.
Mills, Barriss.’ Review: Chittick, Northwest Harvest: A Regional Stock-Taking, 135-136.
Mott, Frank Luther. Review: Dickinson, The Best Books of the Decade, 1936-1945, 138-139.
Muszynska-Wallace, E. Soteris. “The Sources of The Prairie,” 191-200.
Nevius, Blake. ‘The Idealistic Novels of Robert Herrick,” 56-70.
Nichol, John W. ‘“Melville’s ‘ “Soiled” Fish of the Sea,’” 338-339.
` Patrick, Walton R. Review: Brickell, Prize Stories of 1947: The O. Henry Awards, 136-
137. Paul, Sherman. “Melville's ‘The Town-Ho’s Story, ” 212-221. Peden, William. Review: Malone, Jefferson the Virginian, 120-121. Pritchard, John Paul. “A Glance at Lowell’s Classical Reading,” 442-455. Quinn, Patrick F. “Emerson and Mysticism,” 397-414.
_ Rein, D. M. “Howells and the Cosmopolitan,” 49-55.
Reinsberg, Mark. “A Footnote to Four Quartets,” 342-344.
Richardson, Lyon N. Review: Parrington, American Dreams: A Study of American Utopias, 500-502.
Roberts, J. Russell. “Emerson’s Debt to the Seventeenth Century,” 298-310.
Rouse, Blair. Review: Geismar, The Last of the Provinctals, 126-127.
Rusk, Ralph L. Review: Spiller et al., Literary History of the United States, 489-492.
Index—Volume XXI Vv
Schappes, Morris U. Review: Jacob, The World of Emma Lazarus, 506-508.
Scudder, Harold H. ‘Poe's ‘Balloon Hoax,’” 179-190.
Shockley, Martin Staples. “Shapiro’s ‘World,’” 485.
Silver, Rollo G. Review: Tryon and Charvat (eds.), The Cost Books of Ticknor and Fields and Their Predecessors, 1832-1858, 509-510.
Slater, Joseph. “Music at Col. Grangerford's: A Footnote to Huckleberry Finn,” 108-111.
Small, Miriam Rossiter. Review: Tilton, Amiable Autocrat: A Biography of Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, 121-122.
Spiller, Robert E. Review: Oliver (ed.), Melville, Piazza Tales, 138.
Stone, Edward. “Articles on American Literature Appearing in Current Periodicals,” 519- 539.
Thomas, J. Wesley. “John Sullivan Dwight: A Translator of German Romanticism,” 427-441.
Thorp, Willard. Review: Murray (ed.), Melville, Pierre, or, the Ambiguities, 508-509.
Tindall, W. Y. Review: Unger (ed.), T. S. Eliot: A Selected Critique, 254-255.
Turner, Arlin. Reviews: Cantwell, Nathaniel Hawthorne: The American Years, 357-359; Davidson, Hawthorne's Last Phase, 360-362.
Voss, Arthur W. M. “The Biglow Papers in England,” 340-342.
Ward, Anne. “Speculations on Eliot's Time-World: An Analysis of The Family Reunion in Relation to Hulme and Bergson,” 18-34.
Warren, Austin. Review: Matthiessen, The James Family, 119-120.
Wells, Henry W. Review: O'Connor, Sense and Sensibility in Modern Poetry, 124-125.
Whicher, Stephen E. Review: Stewart, Nathaniel Hawthorne, 354-357.
Williams, Cecil B. “R. M. Bird’s Plans for Novels of the Frontier,” 320-324. .
Williams, Mentor L. “Paulding’s Contributions to the Columbian Magazine,” 222-227.
Williams, Stanley T. Review: Freeman, Melville’s Billy Budd, 367-368.
Wimsatt, W. K., Jr. “Mary Rogers, John Anderson, and Others,” '482-484.
Worthington, Jane. “The Epigraphs to the Poetry of T. S. Eliot,” 1-17.
Il, ARTICLES
Under this heading is included everything except reviews. For “Articles on American Literature Appearing in Current Periodicals,” see pp. 143-149, 265-278, 381-395, 519-539. For “Research in Progress,” see pp. 118, 239-240, 346-353, 487-488, For “Announce- ments,” see pp. 117, 238, 346, 486.
Barlow, Joel. “Joel Barlow and William Hayley: A Correspondence,” by Lewis Leary, 325-334.
Bird, Robert Montgomery. “R. M. Bird’s Plans for Novels of the Frontier,” by Cecil B. Williams, 320-324.
Black, MacKnight. “The Technological Fallacy in Contemporary Poetry: Hart Crane and MacKnight Black,” by Frederick J. Hoffman, 94-107.
Bryant, William Cullen. “Nationalism in Bryant's ‘The Prairies’ " by Ralph N. Miller, 227-232.
Cather, Willa. “The Real Alexander's Bridge,” by John P. Hinz, 473-477; “Willa Cather, Undergraduate—Two Poems,” by John P. Hinz, 111-116; “Willa Cather's Novels of the Frontier: A Study in Thematic Symbolism,” by Edward A. Bloom and Lillian D, Bloom, 71-93.
Clemens, Samuel. “Mark Twain's Comments on Holmes’s Autocrat,” by Bradford Booth, 456-463; “Music at Col. Grangerford’s: A Footnote to Huckleberry Finn,” by Joseph Slater, 108-111.
Cooper, James Fenimore. “The Sources of The Prairie,” by E. Soteris Muszynska-Wallace, IQI-200.
Cranch, Christopher Pearse. “Christopher Pearse Cranch: The Case History of a Minor
_ Artist in America,” by J. C. Levenson, 415-426.
Crane, Hart. “The Technological Fallacy in Contemporary Poetry: Hart Crane and Mac- Knight Black,” by Frederick J. Hoffman, 94-107.
vi Index—Volume XXI
Dwight, John Sullivan. “John Sullivan Dwight: A Translator of German Romanticism,” by J. Wesley Thomas, 427-441. Dwight, Timothy. “Timothy Dwight's Posthumous Gift to British Theology,” by Alfred Owen Aldridge, 479-481. Eliot, T. S. “A Footnote to Four Quartets,” by Mark Reinsberg, 342-344; “Speculations on: Eliot’s Time-World: An Analysis of The Family Reunion in Relation to Hulme and Bergson," by Anne Ward, 18-34; “The Epigraphs to the Poetry of T. S. Eliot,” by Jane Worthington, 1-17.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo. “Emerson and Mysticism,” by Patfick Quinn, 397-414; “Emer- son’s Debt to the Seventeenth Century,” by J. Russell Roberts, 298-310; “Two Un- published Letters of Emerson,” by John Olin Eidson, -335-338.
Franklin, Benjamin. ‘“Franklin’s ‘Shaftesburian’ Dialogues Not Franklin’s: A Revision of the Franklin Canon,” by Alfred Owen Aldridge, 151-159.
Hawthorne, Nathaniel. ‘The ‘Case’ of Tobias Pearson: Hawthorne and the Ambiguities,” by Louise Dauner, 464-472.
Herrick, Robert. “The Idealistic Novels of Robert Herrick,” by Blake Nevius, 56-70.
Holmes, Oliver Wendell. “Mark Twain’s Comments on Holmes’s Autocrat,” by Bradford Booth, 456-463.
Howells, William Dean. “Howells and the Cosmopolitan,” by D. M. Rein, 45-55.
Ingraham, Joseph Holt. “A ‘Lost’ American Novel,” by Warren G. French, 477-478.
James, Henry. “Henry James and Minny Temple,” by Robert C. LeClair, 35-48; “Some Bibliographical Notes on the Short Stories of Henry James,” by Alfred R. Ferguson, 292-297; “The Uncollected Stories of Henry James,” by B. R. McElderry, Jr., 279-291.
Lowell, James Russell. “A Glance at Lowell's Classical Reading,” by John Paul Pritchard, 442-455; “The Biglow Papers in England,” by Arthur W. M. Voss, 340-342.
Melville, Herman. “Melville's Geological Knowledge,” by Tyrus Hillway, 232-237; “Melville's “Soiled” Fish of the Sea,’” by John W. Nichol, 338-339; “Melville's “The Town-Ho's Story, ” by Sherman Paul, 212-221; “Pierre, the Fool of Virtue,” by Tyrus Hillway, 201-211.
Paulding, James Kirke. “Paulding’s Contributions to the Columbian Magazine,’ by Mentor L. Williams, 222-227,
Poe, Edgar Allan. “Mary Rogers, John Anderson, and Others,” by W. K. Wimsatt, Jr., 482-484; “Poe's ‘Balloon Hoax,’” by Harold H. Scudder, 179-190; “Poe’s “The Sleeper’ Again,” by Thomas O. Mabbott, 339-340.
Shapiro, Karl. “Shapiro’s ‘World, ” by Martin Staples Shockley, 485.
Thoreau, Henry D. “A New College Manuscript. of Thoreau’s,” by Carl Bode, 311-320.
H. BOOKS REVIEWED
The names of reviewers are given in parentheses. Most of the books noticed under “Brief Mention” are not included. Andreas, Osborn, Henry James and the Expanding Horizon (Leon Edel), 362-363. Basler, Roy P., Sex, Symbolism, and Psychology in Literature (Charles N. Feidelson, Jr.), | 370-372. Bernard, Harry, Le Roman Régionaliste aux Etats-Unis (Wilson O. Clough), 512.- Brickell, Herschel, Prize Stories of 1947: The O. Henry Awards (Walton R. Patrick), 136-137. Brogan, D. W., American Themes (Harold Blodgett), 499-500. Cantwell, Robert, Nathaniel Hawthorne: The American Years (Arlin Turner), 357-359. Capasso, Celestino, Dizionario. Lettarario Bompiani delle Opere e dei Personaggi di tutti i Tempi e di tutte le Letterature (W. P. Friederich), 139-140. Chittick, V. L. O., Northwest Harvest: A Regional Stock-Taking (Barriss Mills), 135-136. Clark, Barrett H., Eugene O'Neill: The Man and His Plays (Horst Frenz), 122-124. Davidson, Edward H., Hawthorne's Last Phase (Arlin Turner), 360-362. Dayton, Ruth Woods, Pioneers and Their Homes on the Upper Kanawha (John W. Draper), 140-141.
Index—Volume XXI Vii
Drew, Elizabeth, T. S. Eliot: The Design of His Poetry (Norman Foerster), 496-497.
Dunkel, Harold Baker, General Education in the Humanities (Guy A. Cardwell), 241-246.
Elias, Robert' H., Theodore Dreiser: Apostle of Nature (Bernard 1. Duffey), 365-366.
Farquhar, Francis P., Yosemite, the Big Trees, and the High Sterra (Richard G. Lillard), 140.
Farrand, Max (ed.), Benjamin Franklin's Memoirs (Lewis Leary), 492-494; The Auto- biography of Benjamin Franklin (Lewis Leary), 492-494.
Flexner, James Thomas, John Singleton Copley (Richard E. Amacher), 133.
Frear, Walter Francis, Mark Twain and Hawaii (Ernest E. Leisy), 251-252.
Freeman, F. Barron, Melville’s Billy Budd (Stanley T. Williams), 367-368.
Gannett, Henry, American Names (Cabell Greet), 375-377.
Geismar, Maxwell, The Last of the Provincials (Blair Rouse), 126-127.
Gloster, Hugh Morris, Negro Votces in American Fiction (Alexander Cowie), 134-135.
Gohdes, Clarence, and Rollo G. Silver, Faint Clews and Indirections (Emory Holloway), 502-505.
Goodman, Samuel M., Curriculum Implications of Armed Services Education Programs (Guy A. Cardwell), 241-246.
Herman, Lewis Helmar, and Marguerite Shalett Herman, Manual of American Dialects for Radio, Stage, and Screen (Albert H. Marckwardt), 130-131.
Houle, Cyril O., Elbert W. Burr, Thomas H. Hamilton, and John R. Yale, The Armed Services and Adult Education (Guy A. Cardwell), 241-246.
Hyman, Stanley Edgar, The Armed Vision: A Study in the Methods of Modern Literary Criticism (Frederick J. Hoffman), 255-257.
Jacob, H. E., The World of Emma Lazarus (Morris U. Schappes), 506-508.
Johnson, F. Ernest (ed.), Foundations of Democracy (Daniel Aaron), 127-129.
Johnson, Pamela Hansford, Hungry Gulliver: An English Critical Appraisal of Thomas Wolfe (Gay Wilson Allen), 253-254.
Jones, Howard Mumford, The Theory of American Literature (James D. Hart), 364-365.
Joughin, G. Louis, and Edmund M. Morgan, The Legacy of Sacco and Vanzetti (A. Grove Day), 372-373.
Koht, Halvdan, The American Spirit in Europe (Richard H. Heindel), 505-506.
Kouwenhoven, John A., Made in America: The Arts in Modern Civilization (Richard E. Amacher), 131-132.
La Piana, Angelina, Dante’s American Pilgrimage (J. Chesley Mathews), 373*375.
Lundblad, Jane, Nathaniel Hawthorne and European Literary Tradition (F. C. Marston, Jr.), 248-250.
McDowell, Tremaine, American Studies (James D. Hart), 497-499.
MacIver, R. M. (ed.), Unity and Difference in American Life (Daniel Aaron), 127-129.
Malone, Dumas, Jefferson the Virginian (William Peden), 120-121.
Matthew, Robert John, Language and Area Studies in the Armed Services (Guy A. Card- well), 241-246. .
Matthiessen, F. O., The James Family (Austin Warren), 119-120.
Mayorga, Margaret (ed.), The Best One-Act Plays, 1947-1948 (Allan G. Halline), 258.
Metcalf, Eleanor Melville (ed.), Journal of a Visit to London and the Continent by Her- man Melville, 1849-1850 (Charles Anderson), 250-251.
Murray, Henry A. (ed.), Melville, Pierre, or, the Ambiguities (Willard Thorp), 508-509.
O'Connor, William Van, Sense and Sensibility in Modern Poetry (Henry W. Wells), 124- 125.
Oliver, Egbert S. (ed.), Melville, Piazza Tales (Robert E. Spiller), 138.
Ostrom, John Ward (ed.), The Letters of Edgar Allan Poe (Carroll D. Laverty), 246-248.
Parrington, Vernon L., Jr, American Dreams: A Study of American Utopias (Lyon N. Richardson), 500-502.
Pochmann, Henry A., New England Transcendentalism and St. Louis Hegelianism (Perry Miller), 368-370.
viii Index—Volume XXI
Rusk, Ralph L., The Life of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Norman Foerster), 494-496.
Shippey, Lee, It’s an Old California Custom (Rena V. Grant), 129-130.
Spiller, Robert E. et al., Literary History of the United States (Ralph L. Rusk), 489-492.
Stewart, Randall, Nathantel Hawthorne (Stephen E. Whicher), 354-357.
Tilton, Eleanor M., Amiable Autocrat: A Biography of Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes (Miriam Rossiter Small), 121-122. i
Tryon, Warren S., and William Charvat (eds.), The Cost Books of Ticknor and Fields and Their Predecessors, 1832-1858 (Rollo G. Silver), 509-510. l
Unger, Leonard (ed.), T. S. Elot: A Selected Critique (W. Y. Tindall), 254-255.
Van Doren, Mark, Nathaniel Hawthorne (Edward H. Davidson), 359-360.
Zardoya, Concha (tr.), Whitman, Obras Escogidas (Roger Asselineau), 511-512.
THE EPIGRAPHS TO THE POETRY OF T. S. ELIOT
JANE WORTHINGTON Connecticut College
HEN THE TITLE of one of Eliot’s poems is mentioned in
conversation, it often elicits a quotation, not from the poem, but from the epigraph to the poem. “Mistah Kurtz—he dead,” or “but that was in another country ...” are two quotations frequently offered in token of the genuine article. Apparently readers of Eliot’s poetry sense a peculiar fitness in the quotations which head his poems; they recognize that the quotation, no less than the title, belongs inherently to the text which it serves. Even when the . aptness of the quotation is not perfectly understood, its authority is clearly felt.
Because Eliot’s epigraphs are occasionally obscure, it is not always easy for a reader to grasp the relationship between the epi- graph and the poem. Yet, as Mr. Matthiessen remarks in The Achievement of T. S. Eliot, an epigraph may illuminate a whole poem, and is itself “designed to form an integral part of the effect of the poem.” In this study my primary aim is to indicate by simple, yet specific, references the sources for Eliot’s epigraphs. Wherever the original context of the epigraph seems to bear closely upon the whole poem, I shall summarize that context. Always I shall attempt to show what connection the epigraph has with the poem, and hence what part it plays in an interpretation, or criticism, of the whole poem.. I shall take up the poems in the order in which they are arranged in the Collected Poems, 1909-1935.
THE LOVE SONG OF J. ALFRED PRUFROCK
S'io credesse che mia risposta fosse A persona che mai tornasse al mondo, Questa fiamma staria senza piu scosse. Ma perciocche giammai di questo fondo Non torno vivo alcun, s’i’odo il vero, Senza tema d'infamia ti rispondo? (Dante, Inferno, Canto XXVII, Il. 61-66)
+F, O. Matthiessen, The Achievement of T. S. Eliot (London, 1935), p. $2. * Translated by J. S. Carlyle, The Inferno, Temple Classics, p. 303: “If I thought my
2 American Literature
In the twenty-seventh canto of the Inferno Dante describes one of the flames that appeared to him in the eighth circle of hell. He saw the point of the flame shake, and he heard a voice issuing forth and asking for news of Romagna. In reply Dante described briefly the unhappy condition of that land, and in turn asked the flame to tell his name and why he was thus being punished. The spirit, later identified as Count Guido da Montefeltro, prefaced his reply with the words which Eliot has used as the epigraph to “Pru- frock.” In effect his reply was: “If I thought you were alive, I would not speak; but since you are dead and cannot repeat my story to the living, I have no fear and I shall answer you.” Thus did fear of the world’s judgment and utter disregard for the judg-
ment of the dead condition the response of Guido da Montefeltro.
Prufrock too was afraid to speak; he was afraid of comments, of snickers, of not being understood. The irony, of course, lies in the fact that Prufrock fears the comments, not of the living, but of the dead. The women who come and go, talking of Michelan- gelo, the women whom he sits beside after tea and cakes and ices —they are the ones who would comment upon his words, and they are all dead. We sympathize with, and yet smile at, his predicament. Irony and pathos are both intensified by Prufrock’s own realization that the women to whom he would speak of love, of the differences between life and death, are themselves all dead. By placing Guido’s - fear of infamy among the living against Prufrock’s fear of a snicker from among the dead, Eliot has underscored the irony of the poem.®
PORTRAIT. OF A LADY
Thou has committed— Fornication: but that was in another country,
answer were to one who ever could return to the world, this flame should shake no more;
but since none ever did return alive from this depth, if what I hear be true, without fear of infamy I answer- thee.”
°” My reading of “Prufrock” has been influenced by the analysis which Cleanth Brooks, Jr. and Robert Penn Warren have made of the poem in Understanding Poetry (New York, 1938), pp. 589-596. Roberta Morgan and Albert Wohlstetter in “Observations on ‘Pru- frock, |“ Harvard Advocate, CXXV, 27-40 (Dec., 1938) present a slightly different interpre- tation, putting more emphasis upon. the confessional nature of “The Love Song.” Accord- ing to their interpretation, the epigraph increases the irony of the poem because it prefaces a poem wherein the speaker confesses “to himself as someone who will never return to the world and therefore in confidence.” Mr. Matthiessen (op. cit, p. 52) likewise em- phasizes the confessional nature of the poem, and sees the epigraph as underlining “the closed circle of Prufrock’s frightened isolation.”
The Epigraphs to the Poetry of T. S. Eliot 3
And besides, the wench is dead.* (Marlowe, The Jew of Malta, Act IV, scene i, Il. 41-43)
Here is one of Eliot’s simplest and most brilliant epigraphs. The striking contrast between the tone of the epigraph and that of the poem produces a fine irony and makes possible a clearer perception of the whole poem.
In the scene from which the epigraph is drawn, Barabas comically defeats the friars who are vainly trying to denounce his crimes. Whenever either of the friars approaches anything like a direct accusation, Barabas interrupts and supplies one for them. Lightly he assumes a multitude of crimes. He is a Jew, a usurer; he has committed fornication—but what of that? “That was in another country, and besides, the wench is dead.”
At the end of “Portrait of a Lady” the hero wonders what would be his attitude if the lady were to die while he is in another country. To her restless, yet timid, advances he had dared no re- sponse. His sins have all been sins of omission, and yet he feels that if she should die, he could not take her death lightly. Confused, worried, tangled in his own timidity, the hero concerns himself over a situation that has not even arisen. If she should: die, would he “have the right to smile?” Inevitably one contrasts this sickly and pale cast of thought with the rough language and callous atti- tude of ‘Barabas; one is left with an obvious irony and a sharper perception of two extremes.
MR. APOLLINAX Q ris xawéryros, Hpdxdas, rijs tapadofodcyias, eouýxavos dvOpwrros. 5 (Lucian, Zeuxts or Antiochus, 1)
In Zeuxis or Antiochus Lucian delivered a gentle, yet telling, reproof to the art critics of his day. He recorded the praise that people awarded him, and thus, with apparent fortuity, revealed the shallowness of their understanding. They had praised him for the novelty of his work; wherever they found anything new or
* The first half line is spoken by Friar Barnardine; the rest by Barabas, the Jew.
* Lucian, Opera, ed. Carolus Jacobitz (Leipzig, 1864), I, 395. The line may be trans- lated: “O the novelty! Hercules, what a tale of wonder! for, what use of paradox?] An ingenious man!" The Lucian text has been rearranged, and this essay has not yet appeared in either the Loeb Library or the new Teubner: edition.
mee a eet
4 American Literature
unusual, there they applauded loudest. His own experience re- minded him of a story about Zeuxis and the admirable contempt which Zeuxis had shown to people who dealt. him foolish compli- ments on his picture of the centaurs. Zeuxis, like Lucian, was praised for the novelty of his work, whereas his cechnique—tradi- tional, full of grace and skill—his imagination, and his harmony of colors went unobserved.
The quotation which Eliot chose for the epigraph to “Mr. Apol- linax” is a remark made by one of Lucian’s admirers. It was as pertinent to Lucian as were the remarks made of Mr. Apollinax. “He is a charming man’—‘But after all what did he mean?’” Actually, Mr. Apollinax was’ as old as the satyrs and centaurs of Zeuxis, but his novel behavior at tea was all that attracted attention. Mrs. Phlaccus, Professor Cheetah, and their friends ignored the variety -of expression, the imaginative life of Mr. Apollinax, and instead fixed their regard upon his pointed ears.
It is quite likely that Charles Whibley, whom Eliot so much admired, was to a large degree responsible for the quotation from Lucian. In one of his essays Whibley criticized at length the Zeuxis of Lucian. It is worth noting that in his essay the only Greek quotation from Lucian is the one that later served as epi- graph to “Mr. Apollinax.” Whibley introduced the quotation by remarking that “The shouts of the people were as fatuous then as to-day.” There, indeed, is the theme of “Mr. Apollinax.”
LA FIGLIA CHE PIANGE
O quam te memorem virgo .. .
(Virgil, Aeneid, Book I, 1. 327)
The loveliness of “La Figlia che Piange” is made more lovely by the quotation which prefaces the poem. The question was origi- nally asked of Venus, loveliest of all goddesses. She was met by Aeneas for a few moments on the Libyan shore; she spoke briefly to him, and he asked her her name, even though he at once believed her to be a goddess. Like Aeneas’s meeting with Venus, the mo- mentary vision of the girl who mourns was beautiful, disturbing, and
* “1 ucian-—~II,” Studies in Frankness (London, 1898), p. 217. "Translated by H. R. Fairclough, Virgil, Loeb Classical Library, I, 265: “by what name should I call thee, O maiden?”
The Epigraphs to the Poetry of T. S. Eliot 5
long remembered. The epigraph, therefore, enhances the already lovely vision.
The epigraph may also suggest, though obliquely, the passionate parting of Aeneas and Dido. Such a suggestion would make even more pitiable the speaker’s way of parting, a way “incomparably light and deft . . . Simple and faithless as a smile and shake of the hand.” The poem mocks the overcultured, the palely aesthetic, those who know the passions in art but turn from them in life. Similar poems, “Prufrock” and “Portrait of a Lady,” Eliot prefaces with ironic, mocking epigraphs.
GERONTION Thou hast nor youth nor age But as it were an after dinner sleep Dreaming of both. (Shakespeare, Measure for Measure, Act II, scene i, Il. 32-34)
The theme of “Gerontion” is given in the first half line of the epigraph, whereas the tone and atmosphere of the poem are suggested in the following line and a half. Such completeness is rare in Eliot’s epigraphs. Usually they gain in value when they summon up in one’s memory their whole context.
The quotation comes from the Duke’s long speech to Claudio in which he urges Claudio to “Reason thus with life.” To get the theme into the epigraph Eliot might have chosen other lines from the same speech:
Happy thou art not; For what thou hast not, still thou strivest to get, And what thou hast, forget’st.
“Gerontion” makes specific that truth: we would see a sign, and when it is given, we neither see nor understand. But nowhere could Eliot have found in so brief a space both the theme and tone of his poem. The mind of Gerontion moves over history with just that broken, sudden kind of movement that the mind follows in a half-waking dream. Sustained passages of reasoning’ are
8 As opposed to a scene which the speaker can only imagine, a scene wherein the lover would leave, “As the soul leaves the body torn and bruised.”
6. American Literature
broken by peculiar, fragmentary glimpses of personal history. The dream state, suggested by the epigraph, directs the movement of the poem, and is, I think, consciously emphasized in the conclusion. Consider the epigraph as a part of the poem, and then observe the symmetry achieved by the poem’s last one and a half lines.
‘Tenants of ‘thé house, Thoughts of a dry brain in a dry season.
BURBANK WITH A BAEDEKER: BLEISTEIN’ WITH A CIGAR Tra-la-la-la-la-la-laire (Théophile Gautier, “Sur Les Lagunes,” Variations sur Le Carna- val de Venise, i in Emaux et Camées.) —nil nisi divinum stabile est; caetera fumus (An inscription on a late painting of St. Sebastian by Mantegna which is in a house on the Grand Canal. An illustration of the painting may be seen in Paul Kristener, Andrea Mantegna; Lon- don, 1901, p. 329. The inscription—“Only the divine is permanent; the rest is smoke”—appears on the flag of an emblematic candle at the lower right hand corner of the picture.) —the gondola stopped, the old palace was there, how charming its grey. and pink (Henry James, The Aspern Papers, in The Novels and Tales of Henry James, New York Edition, XII, ọ. Mr. Eliot has slightly altered the quotation.) —goats and monkeys- (Shakespeare, Othello, Act IV, scene i, 1. ee —with such hair too! (Robert Browning, “A Toccata of Galuppi’s”) —so the countess passed on until she came through the little park, where Niobe presented her with a cabinet, and so departed. (John: Marston, “Entertainment of Alice, Dowager-Countess of Derby,” in The Works of Marston, ed. A. H. Bullen, London, 1888, III, 383-404. The lines are the concluding directions of the masque.)
The epigraph to “Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar” is a patchwork of quotations, all but one being connected with Venice in one way or another. Three of these quotations were identified and commented upon by Mr. Matthiessen in The
The Epigraphs to the Poetry of T. S. Eliot 7
Achievement of T. S. Eliot? Mr. Eliot kindly identified for me the sources of the three remaining. |
Taken together, the quotations remind one of the glorious past of Venice. Individually they remind one of the particular glories of an older Venice: its music and dances, its religious faith reflected in its religious art, the color and design of its handsome buildings, the poetry and passion of its dramatic past. Finally, they remind one of a way of life not limited to Venice, but common to all Renais- sance societies—as they are now ideally imagined—societies where all was gracious, ceremonious, elegant, where countesses were enter- tained by poets célebrating their worth and beauty in songs and masques. A. far remove from the Venice where Princess a prepared to entertain Sir Ferdinand Klein!
The epigraph adds to the many contrasts between past and present upon which the whole poem turns. Since the poem makes explicit enough the death that has overtaken Venice, and since the epigraph adds nothing new, merely increasing the number of con- trasts,, I am inclined to believe with Mr. Matthiessen that it is less successful than most of Eliot’s epigraphs.
SWEENEY ERECT And the trees about me, Let them be dry and leafless; let the rocks Groan with continual surges; and behind me Make all a desolation. Look, look, wenches! (Beaumont and Fletcher, The Maid’s Tragedy, Act II, scene ii, ll. 74-77) .
The scene in The Maid’s Tragedy from which Eliot chose the epigraph for “Sweeney Erect” is a scene.of lamentation. Aspatia, forsaken by her lover, calls her women about her and bids them “be sad.” With an almost voluptuous delight in grief, she lingers over the sorrows of the lovelorn. She examines a tapestry of Ariadne which one of her ladies has worked, and finding the colors “not dull and pale enough,” she offers herself as a model.
Suppose I stand upon the sea-beach now, Mine arms thus, and mine hair blown with the wind,
*P. 53.
8 American Literature
Wild as that desert; and let all about me
Tell that I am forsaken. Do my face
(If thou had’st ever feeling of a sorrow)
Thus, thus, Antiphilia: strive to make me look Like Sorrow’s monument: and the trees about me, Let them be dry and leafless; let the rocks
Groan with continual surges; and behind me Make all a desolation. Look, look, wenches!
When this scene from The Maid’s Tragedy is set against “Sweeney Erect,” the effect is at first shocking. In the opening lines Eliot forces an immediate connection. He orders a scene of wild desolation where the winds shall “tangle Ariadne’s hair/And swell with haste the perjured sails.’ Suddenly the poem shifts to the sordid bedroom scene—Sweeney standing erect in the morning sun, the epileptic, stretched out upon the bed, “clawing at the pillow slip.” The epigraph and the introductory lines of the poem have recalled to the reader the familiar, poetic laments of the forsaken; now he hears the forsaken one cry out in epileptic screams. The effect of such violent juxtaposition is shocking, but at the same time it suggests a new criticism of both past and present societies.
The central problem in The Maid’s Tragedy lies in the con- flict between love and honor. The drama ought to be a noble and exalted one, dealing as it does with such high matters of ethics. Actually, the play has a kind of mustiness; for all its splendid pas- sages of poetry, it leaves a bad taste. The moral tone of The Maid’s Tragedy is debased because the poets consider the conflict not in terms of the individual (his character and action), but in the terms of an artificial society. The same criticism can be made of “Sweeney Erect”—with one important reservation. It is not the poet who regards the affairs of Sweeney from the point of view of society; instead, the “ladies of the corridor” speak for society.
The ladies of the corridor
Find themselves involved, disgraced, Call witness to their principles
And deprecate the lack of taste. Observing that hysteria
Might easily be misunderstood; Mrs. Turner intimates
It does the house no sort of good.
The Epigraphs to the Poetry of T. S. Eliot 9
In the end, Eliot’s clear criticism of such values paradoxically raises his poem to a higher moral level than that reached by The Maid’s Tragedy. Surely his brilliant, yet indirect, attack upon the evaluation of honor made by a large section of modern society is superior to the easy acceptance given by Beaumont and Fletcher to the standards of a degraded court society.
A COOKING EGG En Fan trentiesme de mon aage Que toutes mes hontes j’ay beues ... (Francois Villon, “Le Grand Testament,” II. 1-2: “In the thirtieth year of my age, having drunk deep of my shames. . .”)
Villon’s confession, at the beginning of his “Testament,” was sincerely made, for truly he had, at the age of thirty, drunk deep of his shames. His whole poem, being in the nature of a last testa- ment, is a review of his sins and a preparation for their remission in heaven. Villon had lived with abandon; he had known many forms of sin—pilfering, whoring, drinking—and, most important, he had enjoyed every one. Even as he prepares himself for heaven, he looks back with regret upon the days of his brave wantonness. To the reader of the “Testament” it seems sometimes that the rewards of heaven pale before those which Villon has already enjoyed from innumerable wenches.
As soon as the source of Eliot’s quotation is recognized and recalled in some detail, the wit and irony of the poem become immediately clear. In the poem it is a thirty-year-old man who speaks, and like Villon he recalls his youth and anticipates his death.™? But there all similarity stops. The hero of “A Cooking Egg” has confined his social life to mild afternoons with Pipit, to whom he gives what attention he can. Sitting upright in her chair, she is, at least, a pleasant relief from the multitudes drooping in a hundred A.B.C.’s. But she offers a pallid kind of entertainment, and the hero is understandably distracted with thoughts of a better and more exciting world. Since the time of Villon, life for the gentleman and scholar has ironically turned into a tepid and dull
7° Matthiessen (op. cit, p. 53) identifies the epigraph and explains the connection between the title and the epigraph.
2 Vol, 21
10 American Literature
thing. Life must, therefore, be different in heaven; there the pleasures denied the modern gentleman will be enjoyed—honors, heroism, wealth, sensuous delights carried to an extreme.
THE HIPPOPOTAMUS Similiter et omnes revereantur Diaconos, ut mandatum Jesu Christi; et Episcopum, ut Jesum Christum, existentem filium Patris; Presbyteros autem, ut concilium Dei et conjunctionem Apostolorum. Sine his Ecclesia non vocatur; de quibus suadeo vos sic habeo.!! (S. Ignatsi epistolae interpolatae, “Ad Traillianos,” 3) And when this epistle is read among you, cause that it be read also in the church of the Laodiceans. (St. Paul, Colossians IV :16)
“The Hippopotamus” opens with two quotations drawn from times so remote in the history of the church as to be almost out of mind. They come from that period, historically known as the Apostolic Age, when the foundations of the church were still to be laid. At first glance it is apparent that the poet intended to remind us in some striking way of the labor which was done by the earliest churchmen.
In his epistle to the Colossians St. Paul spoke of the “great conflict” he felt not only for the church at Colossae, then being beset by vain philosophies and Judaic heresies, but also for its neighbor church, the church at Laodicea. At the conclusion of his epistle Paul turned again to the Laodiceans, a people notoriously unstable in their practice of Christianity; te ordered that his epistle be read also to them. Similarly, the threat of heresy, this time Docetian, inspired the epistle of St. Ignatius to the Trallians. Igna- tius urged the Trallians to observe a strict obedience to the authority of the organized church that they might become a united body and thus enjoy a sure protection against the inroads made by heretical doctrines. When the two quotations are put side by side, as they are at the beginning of “The Hippopotamus,” they witness the in- security of the early church and the need for a fortress to be built
11 For Eliot’s version, see Migne’s Patrologia Graeca, V (1857), 779, nn. 28-29: “And likewise let all the deacons be reverenced, as commanded by Jesus Christ; and let the bishop be reverenced, as Jesus Christ, the living son of the Father; also let the presbyters be reverenced,.as the council of God and the assembly of the apostles. Without these there can be no church; of these things I persuade you as I can.”
The Epigraphs to the Poetry of T. S. Eliot II
against the threats then facing the church. Both ideas are relevant to the poem that follows.
Together the quotations have the effect of undercutting the complacent remarks made about the church. The words of the poem read: The hippopotamus “Although he seems so firm to us ...is weak and frail,/Susceptible to nervous shock.” They suggest something else: the church, which “seems so firm to us,” was once a body “weak and frail,/Susceptible to nervous shock.”
The quotations are relevant to the poem in other ways. The apostles organized the church into an ecclesiastical hierarchy, or, as they preferred to call it, into one body with Christ its head. St. Ignatius particularly liked to stress the organic nature of the church. In the poem the physical life of the church is contrasted with the natural history of the hippopotamus, another large body, and thus subjected to an outrageous travesty. At the end of the poem the criticism becomes direct, even harsh, although still conveyed with wit. The organization of the church, formed about the bishops, the deacons, the presbyters, and originally conceived as a means of protection, has resulted in making the church a dead weight, more inert, and more substantial than the hippopotamus. By the grace: of God the hippopotamus is born aloft and “quired” by heavenly angels, while the body of the True Church “remains below/Wrapt in the old miasmal mist.”
MR, ELIOT'S SUNDAY MORNING SERVICE
Look, look, master, here comes two religious caterpillars. (Marlowe, The Jew of Malta, Act IV, scene i, 1. 21)
Eliot’s volume of Poems (1920) contains three poems on the paradoxical nature of the flesh: “The Hippopotamus,” “Whispers of Immortality,” and “Mr. Eliot’s Sunday Morning Service.” In “The Hippopotamus” the church, no longer flesh and blood, is left behind as the fleshly hippopotamus takes wings and soars to heaven. In “Whispers of Immortality” the modern metaphysician, profiting nothing from the teaching of Webster and Donne, fails to grasp the Abstract Entities—end of all metaphysics—~because he denies, as Webster and Donne did not, experience of the flesh. In “Mr. Eliot’s
12 American Literature
Sunday Morning Service” the sable presbyters do penance for the flesh, even as they prepare to take for their salvation the body and blood of Christ. Eliot contemns the fleshly of past and present as vigorously as he contemns the fleshless. The epigraph to “Mr. Eliot’s Sunday Morning Service” should help to make this point clear.
In The Jew of Malta, from which the epigraph is taken, the Church of the Renaissance is attacked for its fleshly indulgences, especially for its polyphiloprogenitive ways. In the scene from which the quotation comes, the Jew and his servant are found jest- ing at the falsely celibate life of the nuns and friars. The Jew remarks that for a while he was half-afraid the poison they had fed the nuns had failed to do its work, “Or, though it wrought, it would have done no good,/For every year they swell, and yet they live.” But at last assured the nuns have this time swelled with poison and so died, he rejoices with his servant. The latter, de- lighted. with this exciting new occupation, suddenly spies a mon- astery and eagerly asks permission to “poison all the monks.” Barabas, always economical, denies him the pleasure; there is no need, he says, “for now the nuns are dead,/They’ll die with grief.” At that moment two friars approach, and the servant calls out, “Look, look, master, here come two religious caterpillars.”
The paradox of the flesh, emphasized by the poet’s injecting this line from Marlowe into “Mr. Eliot’s Sunday Morning Service” is a cunning one: Christ incarnate—the Word, or Intellect made Flesh —brought salvation (in an Umbrian painting “Still shine the un- offending feet”), but since then the saving harmony of flesh and intellect has rarely been achieved. Almost always there have been two extremes, and both exist today: Sweeney in his bath—descended probably from a long line of religious caterpillars, and related to the flesnly presbyters of today, who “red and pustular” bear to the altar their “piaculative pence”; and, on the other hand, the modern metaphysician, controversial master of the subtle schools—descended from enervate Origen. The division once repaired by Webster and Donne, who experienced the flesh in a way that brought knowledge of death to the flesh and hence whispers of immortality, remains to plague Mr. Eliot at his Sunday Morning Service.
The Epigraphs to the Poetry of T: S. Eliot 13
SWEENEY AMONG THE NIGHTINGALES Oyo, TéerAnypat Katpiay TAYY Erw, 12 (Aeschylus, Agamemnon, |. 1343)
Eliot has said of this poem that he intended to convey merely “a sense of foreboding,” The epigraph, a single line from Aeschylus’s Agamemnon, immediately establishes the sense of foreboding, for it is the cry of Agamemnon as he is struck the mortal blow. The action and atmosphere of Eliot’s poem portend a similarly treach- erous attack upon Sweeney, and in view of the poem’s last lines, the epigraph is correct and striking.
I suspect that other parallels may exist between the poem and the drama. Thus a case may be made out for Aegisthus, who with- drew from the action because he felt it was “The woman’s part” (Agamemnon, 1l. 1636 ff.), and the man in mocha brown, who “Leaves the room and reappears/Outside the window leaning in.” Also in the drama could be found parallels for the trampled cloth (Agamemnon, ll. 944 ff.), the Dog star veiled (Agamemnon, Il. 958 ff.), and the foreign woman—Rachel née Rabinovitch—who, tear'ng at the grapes with murderous paws, prophesies the coming doom, as did Cassandra with her “barbarian hand” (Agamemnon, lI. 1050 ff.). The parallels do not stand in perfect order, but they are sufh- cient to increase the tragic overtones.
THE WASTE LAND
“NAM Sibyllam quidem Cumis ego ipse oculis meis vidi in ampulla pendere, et cum illi pueri dicerent: %é@vAAa ré O€Aas; respondebat illa: dmrobavety GéAw,’’14
(Petronius, Satyricon, sec. 48)
At the famous dinner party described near the beginning of Petronius’s Satyricon, the host asks in his brash, ignorant wav for
7? Translated ‘by H. W. Smyth, Aeschylus, Loeb Classical Library, II, 119: “Ay me! I am smitten deep with a mortal blow!”
*8 Matthiessen, op. cif., p. 129.
** Translated by Michael Heseltine, Petronius, Loeb Classical Library, pp. 85-87: “Yes, and 1 myself with my own eyes saw the Sibyl hanging in a cage; and when the boys cried at her: ‘Sibyl, Sibyl, what do you want? ‘I would that I were dead,’ she used to answer.” The epigraph has been identified by W. Thomas and S. G. Brown, Reading Poems (New York, 1941), p. 720
14 | American Literature
a story out of Homer. He would: be entertained with a tale such as he read when he was a boy—something about Hercules or Ulysses, perhaps. Mention of these fabulous people reminds him that. he himself once saw a remarkable person: he boasts that with his own eyes he saw the Cumaean Sibyl hanging in a cage and heard the boys calling to her, “Sibyl, what do you want?” She replied, “I want to die.” Further discussion of such monstrosities is cut short by the arrival of an enormous pig, which in almost no time at all the chef had killed, cooked, and stuffed with sausages and puddings.
The aptness of Eliot’s epigraph is easily discernible. The societies of the Satyricon and The Waste Land are similarly characterized by vulgarity, lust,)and-greed. In such societies knowledge of good and evil is lost, and the words of the gods are no longer understood. Seers and prophets speak a gibberish. ‘They waste away, and,
` finally, are regarded as fit only to be hung in cages, and jibed at by
boys. Between the Cumaean Sibyl and Tiresias of The Waste Land there exists an understandable affinity. Both have been granted - immortality without youth, and both have “foresuffered all.” The Sibyl expresses their natural desire: “I would that I were dead.”
THE HOLLOW MEN Mistah Kurtz—he dead.’® (Joseph Conrad, “Heart of Darkness,” Youth and Two Other Stories, New York, 1925, p- 150) A penny for the Old Guy.” (Guy Fawkes Day chant)
Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness” is a story within a story. Marlow, an English sailor, tells his friends in London the story of Kurtz, an ivory hunter in the jungles of Africa. Kurtz is described as a lost, violent.soul, one who had given himself to the immense powers of darkness that lie deep in humanity—to pride, lust, power, terror, despair. His soul utterly blackened, he made himself adored as a
*5 Identified by Matthiessen, op. cit., p. 52. 10 Commented upon by Elizabeth Drew in Directions in Modern Poetry (New York,
1940), P. 134.
The Epigraphs to the Poetry of T. S. Eliot 15
god by the dark natives of the jungle. His death was as prodigious as his life, for unlike most of us he crossed with direct eyes to death’s other kingdom. At that crossing Mr. Kurtz pronounced his dread- ful judgment—* “The horror! The horror!’ ”
In telling the story of Kurtz’s death, Marlow emphasizes the contrast between Kurtz’s approach to death and that made by other men. Marlow had himself approached death; he had “peeped over the edge” and seen only a “vision of greyness without form.” But the stare that Kurtz gave at the moment of death was heroic; it was “wide enough to embrace the whole universe, piercing enough - to penetrate all the hearts that beat in the darkness.” He had.summed up—he had judged. “The horror!” Here, according to Marlow, was “the expression of some sort of belief; it had candour, it had conviction, it had a vibrating note of revolt in its’ whisper, it had the appalling face of glimpsed truth—the strong commingling of desire and hate .... he had made that last stride, he had apes over the edge.” :
For the motto to “The Hollow Men” Eliot quite justly ‘chose the ignorant and contemptuous words of the cabin boy who- an- nounced Kurtz’s death. “Mistah Kurtz—he dead.” The moral of Eliots poem is that in this day there are no. lost, violent men. Even the deaths of such men are longer understood, for now men _ - avoid “that final meeting/In the twilight kingdom.”
This moral is reinforced by the short epigraph—“A penny for the Old Guy.” On Guy Fawkes Day children carrying ‘straw effigies of Guy Fawkes about the ‘streets cry out—“A penny for the Old Guy.” With the pennies thus collected, they buy firecrackers, carry their effigies to a large bonfire, and there “with a bang” clear the world of Guy Fawkes for at least another year. When the epigraph is understood, the tone of Eliot’s first lines becomes clear. With deadly seriousness the lines refute the children’s chant: the old Guy, a lost and violent soul, is not at all the straw man. No— We are the hollow men, we are the stuffed men. `
MARINA Quis hic locus, quae regio, quae ‘mundi plaga??” (Seneca, Hercules Furens, 1. 1138)
17 Translated by F. J. Miller in Seneca’s Tragedies, Loeb Classical Library, I, 99: “What place is this? What region, what quarter of the world?”
16 American Literature
Although the title, the manner, and the content of Eliot’s poem evidence the direct inspiration of Shakespeare’s Pericles,” the epi- graph comes from a play far removed from Pericles in spirit and in content. “Quis hic locus, quae regio, quae mundi plaga?” These words are from Seneca’s Hercules Furens; they are spoken by the hero as his sanity haltingly returns. He looks about him, bewildered and afraid; suddenly he discovers the monstrous deed which he himself has committed. In a fit of madness he has slain his wife and children.
The awful grief of Hercules is in striking antithesis to the wonderful joy of Shakespeare’s Pericles. Pericles awakens from a trance to find before him the daughter whom he thought dead. The only similarity between the two dramatic scenes is a similarity of style, but it is nonetheless powerful and moving. Pathetic ejacu- Jations, half-formed questions, and broken phrases form the lan- guage of the two heroes. Shakespeare’s late style is, of course, admirably suited to such expression, and in this vein Seneca too occasionally achieved great pathos and charm. Eliot has elsewhere commented upon the speech of Hercules and noted how phrases of it “haunt us more than we should expect.””’ It is, then, similarity of style that connects the Senecan passage with Shakespeare’s Pert- cles, and hence with “Marina,” a further development of that style. But the epigraph also serves to point up a curious fact in human behavior: the bewilderment and confused emotions attendant upon an awakening to reality may, at first, form themselves into expres- sions essentially alike—no matter whether the reality be cause for grief or for joy.
BURNT NORTON Tov Adyou È edvros uvod Ldovery ot modo ós lav Exovres Ppdvyncry.2° (Heracleitus, Fragment 2) 686s dvw xdrw pia xal duTy, 2! (Heracleitus, Fragment 60)
38 See Pericles, Act V, scene i, J], 81-265.
1° Selected Essays, 1917-1932 (New York, 1932), p. 59.
20 Eliot refers to Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, ed. Hermann Diels. Translated by W. H. S. Jones, Heracleitus, Loeb Classical Library, Fragment 92: “But though the Word is common, the many live as though they have a wisdom of their own.”
71 Translated by W. H. S. Jones, Heracleitus, Loeb Classical Library, Fragment 69: “The road up and down is one and the same.”
The Epigraphs to the Poetry of T. S. Eliot 17
There is nothing oblique or peripheral in the epigraphs attached to Burnt Norton, and later used by Eliot to preface the whole of Four Quarrets. Because the philosophy of Heracleitus is central to the Quartets, critics of Eliot’s poetry have not failed to comment upon the intimate connection existing between the pre-Socratic philosopher and the modern poet. Further comment by me on the connection between Heracleitus and Eliot would be repetitious and out of place.”
By way of summary it may here be remarked that the central doctrine of Heracleitus is also the central theme of Four Quartets, although interestingly modified by Eliot’s own experience and thought. Both writers observe in all things a continuous flux and movement, and both are concerned with finding a reconciliation of the opposites existing in the physical and nonphysical orders. Heracleitus writes of the road up and down as being one and the same, for all things live in the death of their opposites—as fire lives in the death of air, and air in the death of fire. For both writers everything constantly moving may be perceived under the aspect of the wheel. “At the still point of the turning world” is reconcili- ation.
*? See J. J. Sweeney, “East Coker: A Reading,” Southern Review, VI, 771 ff. (Spring, 1941); Helen Gardner, “Four Quartets,” New Writing and Daylight, Summer, 1942, pp. 84-96; Philip Wheelwright, “The Burnt Norton Trilogy,” Chimera, I, 7-18 (Autumn, 1942); F. O. Matthiessen, “Eliot's Quartets,” Kenyon Review, V, 161-178 (Spring, 1943); Louis L. Martz, “The Wheel and the Point,” Sewanee Review, LV, 126-147 (Winter, 1947); Raymond Preston, “Four Quartets” Rehearsed (New York, 1947).
SPECULATIONS ON ELIOT’S TIME-WORLD:
AN ANALYSIS OF THE FAMILY REUNION IN RELATION: TO HULME AND BERGSON
ANNE WARD | New Jersey College for Women
I
LTHOUGH T. S. ELIOT has on several occasions warmly praised the poetry and the general point of view of T. E. - Hulme, he has not, so far as I know, commented on the fact that Hulme was a disciple of Bergson and that a large portion of Specu- lations’ is devoted to-an exposition of Bergson’s metaphysic of art, which is dependent upon Bergson’s time-philosophy. Mr. Eliot has made known more than once his dislike of the time-philosophy and its progeny of ideas and assumptions. Although he has never fol- lowed the example of Wyndham Lewis in undertaking an all-out campaign to demolish the “einsteinian, bergsonian, or alexandrian world of Time and ‘restless’ interpenetration,” Eliot has frequently indicated, in cogent asides, his lack of sympathy with those who find change, in itself, exhilarating. Eliot, although directly exposed to the time-virus when he attended Bergson’s lectures at the Sor- bonne in 1911, has insisted that he was not infected by the “epi- demic of Bergsonism.”* Indeed, one sometimes feels that he protests too much his immunity and that his immunization has consisted simply in pointing to the time-organism and calling it a naughty disease germ. Or one may even suspect that he did actually (though perhaps unconsciously) suffer from the time-sickness and that what immunity he possesses is due to antibodies which his system de- veloped to fight the destructive effects of the disease. With char- acteristic irony, Eliot has maintained: “Words like emergent... [and] organism ... simply do not rouse the right ‘response’ in my
. YT. E. Hulme, Speculations: Essays on Humanism and the Philosophy of Art, ed. Herbert Read (New York, 1924). * Wyndham Lewis, Time and Western Man (New York, 1928), p. 437. 8 F, O. Matthiessen has noted that Eliot attended these lectures and that his comment on them was that “ ‘durée réelle is not final’; see “Eliots Quartets,” Kenyon Review; V, 167 (Spring, 1943). l * Eliot, “A Commentary,” Criterion, XU, 74 (Oct, 1932).
Speculations on. Eliot's Time-World : 19 .
breast.” In one of his “London Letters” written. for.the Dial in 1921, Eliot predicted a total eclipse for the phrase “creative evolu- tion”; he declared that it had “lost both its stimulant and sedative virtues” for our time. In disposing of “creative evolution,” as pro- pounded. by Bergson and Shaw, Eliot ventured the following proph- ecy: l l
It is possible that an exasperated generation may. find.comfort in admiring, -even if without understanding, mathematics, may suspect that precision and profundity are not incompatible, may find maturity as interesting as adolescence, and permanence more interesting than ‘change. It must at all events be either much more demoralized intellectually than the last ' age,.or very much more disciplined.®
Three years later, commenting on Hulme’s S peculations, Eliot, with- out analyzing Hulme’s relation to Bergson, proclaimed Hulme as. the “forerunner of a new attitude of mind, which should be the twentieth century mind, if the twentieth century is to have a mind of i its own.”
Not only was Eliot attracted by Hulme’s general point of view, jarcculady as found in the essay entitled “Humanism and the Re- ‘ligious Attitude,” but also he was strongly attracted by Hulme’s
®“God” (Review of God: Being an Introduction to the Science of Metabiology, by John Middleton Murry), Criterion, IX, 335 (Jan., 1930). .
° LXXI, 455 (Oct, 1921). .
7 Criterion, Il, 231 (April, 1924). Hulme died in 1917. Speculations was fot pub- lished until 1924, but Eliot mentions the influence on poetry of the “philosophical theories of ... Hulme as expressed in his conversation” during the period beginning about .1910 (italics mine) (“A Commentary,” Criterion, XVI, 668, July, 1937). F. O. Matthiessen
‘records that Eliot did. not know Hulme “personally, though he had heard much abot him | from Pound” (The Achievement of T. S. Eliot: An Essay'on the Nature of Poetry, New. York, 1947, P. 71).
2 The argument of the essay (Speculations, pp. 3 3-71) is the confusion, i in ‘the modern world, between religion and other concerns—~a confusion which arises from the inability of the modern mind, permeated with relativism, to grasp the nature of the absolute. This.
- obscuring of the boundaries between various activities has been one of Eliot’s chief topics in his religious and literary. criticism. In at least one place (“Experiment in Criticism,” Bookman, LXX, 229, Nov., 1929), Eliot specifically ascribes the malady to an overacute ' awareness of the process of time. An overwhelming sense of the reality of the flux, not balanced by a conviction’ of the reality of the permanence of-certain absolute values main- tained’ by religion, leads, according to Eliot, to an indiscriminate melting together of all human activities. . The result is a mélange, in which art, science, and religion lose their | specific character. and are often. indistinguishable from each other. A. very interesting paradox (upon which Eliot has played in his critical writings of the last- twenty years or more) arises from granting reality only to relativism and its dynamic god,- the Zeitgeist: on the one hand, the special permanent significance and function of each human pursuit is destroyed by the scasc thar the meanings attained by each of these pursuits are no more
20 American Literature
theory of poetic diction, which aimed at a “revival” of “fancy,” with its hard, dry image, to replace the debilitated romantic “imagina- tion,” with its vague metaphor. Indeed, there is a striking coinci- dence between Eliot’s view, expressed in some of his earliest criti- cism, and Hulme’s views, set forth in his essay on “Romanticism and Classicism.” Hulme’s argument was that the romantic imagery, crystallizing around “metaphors of flight” into the “infinite,”’® had become conventionalized or “abstract.” In the “increasing pro- portion of people who simply can’t stand Swinburne,” Hulme saw evidence of a renewed interest in definiteness and concreteness of expression. In the freshly and vividly conceived image, rather than in the “counter” word which had lost its physical associations, Hulme found the stuff of poetry. Eliot, writing in 1917, expressed a similar point of view when he praised “definite and concrete” imagery, imagery that is “sharp in outline,” in preference to the “slightly veiled and resonant abstractions . . . of Swinburne.”
It is the purpose of this paper to analyze the time-world created by Eliot in The Family Reunion, with reference (1) to the Bergson- ian metaphysic of time, particularly as explained by Hulme, and
than manifestations of the Zettgeist; on the other*hand, deprived of their claims to their
legitimate attributes, art, science, and religion begin to infringe upon each other’s preroga- tives. Art and science begin a mad race to outdistance religion in its business of saving the world, and religion seeks to become more “vital” by making itself more “artistic” and “scientific.” The dependence of Eliot’s elaboration of this paradox upon Hulme’s analysis of “bastard phenomena” (the offspring of illegitimate cross-fertilization between the relative and the absolute) is an interesting subject for conjecture. (See Speculations, pp. 0-11.)
Paul Elmer More, another critic whom Eliot much admired, analyzes romanticism as a hybrid got by the flux upon the absolute (although More does not use this metaphor, so far as I know). In the marriage arranged by Wordsworth between nature (the flux of vital phenomena) and the idea of God (the absolute), More finds the origin of the nineteenth century’s deification of change. This deification represents to More, as to Eliot, a false resolution of the dualism of the flux and the absolute. (See More, “Victorian Literature: The Philosophy of Change,” Shelburne Essays, Boston, 1910, VII, 257-258). In “Definitions of Dualism” (Shelburne Essays, Boston, 1913, VIII, 270-271), More, criti-
‘cizing romanticism for its “radical confusion of the unlimited desires and the infinite inner
check,” specifically mentions the “affiliation” of the “élan vital” with this aspect of romanti- cism.
? Speculations, p. 113.
10 Thid., p. 120.
11 Ibid., p. 125.
12 Hulme, “Notes on Language and Style,” Criterion, III, 485-497 (July, 1925). Note
«especially p. 487.
13 Ezra Pound: His Metric and Poetry (New York, 1917), pp. 15, 13.
Speculations on Eliot's Time-World 21
(2) to Hulme’s insistence upon concreteness in poetic diction.“ The Family Reunion is chosen as the principal material for this analysis because it sums up admirably, in dramatic form, the kinds of time-experience communicated in Eliot’s earlier poetry and be- cause it suggests certain problems of poetic communication inherent in the explicitly religious treatment of time in Four Quartets. A recent study of time-imagery in Eliot’s later poems disposes of The Family Reunion by simply setting it down as an “utter failure.” I believe that the very imperfections of the play (and I do not, con- sider it an “utter” failure) are significant and that an analysis of the play provides a useful key to the greatness and the weakness of Eliot’s accomplishment in clothing his time-values in sensuous imagery. In fact, if one does not push the correspondences too far, Harry’s pilgrimage, in The Family Reunion, may be employed as an allegory of Eliot’s own spiritual and artistic journey through three planes of time. II
In his analysis of the metaphysical basis of Bergson’s theory
of art, Hulme points out that the idea of “real duration, or real time,” which Bergson posits, is essentially opposed to two other conceptions of time—the mechanistic conception and the finalistic
**It is a significant fact that Hulme relates his own observations on effective poetic language to Bergson’s metaphysic of art. The Bergsonian theory of art, it seems to me, is embedded in Bergson’s assumption of the ultimate reality of organic time. Language, says Bergson, reflects the tendency of the superficial intellect to deal with experience as if it could be spread out in space in distinct segments. Since “the tendency of the intellect is to fabricate [i.e., to reconstruct experience from the separate parts into which it has arbitrarily divided that experience], we may expect to find that whatever is fluid in the real will escape it in part, and whatever is life in the living will escape it altogether” (Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, New York, 1911, p. 153). That part of experience which lies beneath the “clear and precise, but impersonal,” aspects of everyday life is “confused, ever changing, and inexpressible because language cannot get hold of it without arresting its mobility or fit it into its common-place forms without making it into public property” (Bergson, Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, London, 1910, p. 129). The most that the artist can do is to suggest ‘ the concrete duration, the flux of interpenetrated elements, beneath the surface of life.
Hulme’s sympathetic exposition of Bergson’s metaphysic of art (Speculations, pp. 143-214) overlooks, apparently, the possibility that such a theory may lead (as it does in some of the poetry of the imagist movement) to a tyranny of the metaphor of change. The metaphor of flowing certainly affords no more “dryness” or “hardness” than does the “metaphor of flight," which Hulme criticizes so severely in his “Classicism and Romant- cism.”
%5 Louis L. Martz, “The Wheel and the Point: Aspects of Imagery and Theme in Eliot’s Later Poetry,” Sewanee Review, LV, 145 (Winter, 1947).
19 Speculations, p. 195.
22 American Literature.
conception.” In Bergson’s world of organic time,.says Hulme, there is real change because there is “continuous growth in creation [,a] becoming never the same, never repeating itself, but always pro- ducing novelty, continually ripening and creating.”"* According to Hulme, Bergson’s critique of
mechanism and finalism, is that they both leave out duration altogether.
Whether the complexity of life comes as the result of the working out of
certain mechanical Jaws, or whether it is following a plan laid down for it, in both cases the future is fixed and could be known to an infinite intelligence. That is, they don’t exist in real time at all—everything is
given, there is no real creation.”
In Hulme’s summary of Bergson’s threefold division of kinds ` of time-perception may be found a key to the structure of Eliot’s time-world, as well as a source for Hulme’s own analysis, in “Hu- manism and the Religious Attitude,” of three planes of experience. Hulme retains the three possible worlds of Bergsonian. metaphysic: (x) the world of dead matter, ir: which time is a homogeneous. medi- um within which mathematics, by studying the similarity and repe- tition of phenomena, is able to predict simultaneities in space; (2) the world of vital phenomena, in which time is a heterogeneous flux of interpenetrated elements which cannot be formulated quantitatively by the intellect and can be felt only qualitatively;
‘(3) the world of absolute religious and éthical values, in which
time, understood either as quantitative or qualitative change, is of no account. Although Hulme accepts the Bergsonian analysis, he does not follow Bergson’s assumption that the world of organic time is the best of all possible worlds. In fact, Hulme is particularly concerned, in the essay on humanism, to defend the fixity and order of the religious realm against the intrusion of concepts of “progress” or “dynamic advance,”—concepts belonging properly to the realm of organic. phenomena.” As we shall note in our examination of
37 Yhid., p. 203.
18 Thid., p. 197.
*° Ibid., p. 203. See also Bergson, Creative Evolution, p. 39.
20 Hulme does not indict Bergson for interpreting religious and ethical values in terms belonging to biology; yet Bergson’s Time and Free Will and The Two Sources of. Morality and Religion (New York, 1935) unquestionably place the élan vital at the very center of ylti- mate reality. Bergson, allowing a kind of endosmosss to take place between his interpreta- tion of vital ‘phenomena and his interpretation of religious experience, produced metabiology
Speculations on Eliot's Time-World 23
The Family Reunion, the emotional values attached by Eliot to the three different levels of time-awareness differ from those attached by Bergson and strongly resemble those attached by Hulme.
The first level of awareness of time, which might be called a mechanical awareness, appears strikingly in The Family Reunton, in Amy’s attempts to ignore the fact of real change in the relations of Harry and-the other members of the household during the years of his absence. Amy’s actions can be analyzed as an objective cor- relative for Bergson’s theory that the superficial patterns of social behavior disguise the element of continuing: and unpredictable modification in human personality. Amy is determined to force events into a design which will realize her ambition to have Harry become the master of Wishwood. -Resolutely turning away from any suggestion that her attempts to arrest time with a formal pattern are doomed to frustration by the complex changes in the people who fall within her scheme, she seeks to manipulate these people as if they were fixed counters. To Agatha’s remark that Harry may find his return to Wishwood painful
Because the past is irremediable, Because the future can only be built Upon the real past
and because “He will find a new Wishwood,” roe replies im- patiently: Nothing is changed, Agatha, at Wishwood.
. Ihave seen to that?!
The kind of time upon which Amy endeavors to build. her life resembles the abstract time of the mathematician or astronomer. According to Bergson, science is able to deal with the material uni- verse by assuming that time does not create anything absolutely new; time, to the physicist, is no more than an inactive medium in. which reciprocally external spatial counters are rearranged and juxtaposed. The intellect, geared to the needs of action, tends, when it turns from dealing with dead matter to dealing with its own
long before Mr. John Middleton Murry wrote his introduction to that science. (The term endosmosis is borrowed from Hulme, who does not, however, apply it to Bergson, so far as I know.)
^ The Family Reunion (New York, 1939), pp. 17-18.
-e æ- ewe wee =
24 American Literature
“conscious states,” to keep up the “illusion” through which it makes these conscious states “share in the reciprocal externality of outer things. ... [This distinctness, and at the same time this so- lidification, enables us,” says Bergson, to give our states of conscious- ness “fixed names in spite of their instability, and distinct ones in spite of their interpenetration. It enables us to objectify them, to throw them out into the current of social life.” Amy’s limited per- ception of people may be precisely stated in Bergsonian terms: she is concerned only with the “external projection,” or the “spatial ... and social representation,” of the self; “inner states, . . . constantly be- coming,” do not interest her because they evade her control.
The image of actors, playing unfamiliar roles, is used to convey the reactions of the members of the family to Amy’s attempts to manufacture a sham situation.” Only Agatha and Mary stand aloof from the roles assigned to them. Agatha perceives that Amy’s request that the family ignore the past, that they “behave only/As if nothing has happened in the last eight years,” is an impossible request. Agatha understands that Amy, with all her
precise attention To detail, interfering preparation Of that which is already prepared,”
will fail in her object of confining events within a superficially ordered scheme. The other assembled members of the family— Ivy, Violet, Gerald and Charles—assent to “Amy’s command, to play an unread part in some monstrous farce, ridiculous in some nightmare pantomime.” In assenting, they exhibit an emotional. ambivalence which betrays, on the one hand, a desire to escape the painfulness of the real past, and, on the other hand, an em-
33 Time and Free Will, p. 231.
33 Thid,
“The New York Times reviewer (November 29, 1947) criticizes the puppet-like behavior of the actors playing. the roles of Ivy, Charles, Violet, and Gerald in the recent Cherry Lane production of The Family Reunion. Surely this comment demonstrates a lack of perceptiveness in the reviewer, not the actors: the outstanding trait of these four characters is supposed to be the artificiality of their comments, the superficiality of their attitude toward the tragedy of which they are a part. After seeing the Cherry Lane production, I should say that one of its chief virtues is the success of these four actors in behaving like marionettes who only dimly and occasionally’ recognize that they are marionettes, not people.
*° The Family Reunion, p. 21.
3% Ibid., p. 22.
Speculations on Eliot's Time-World 25
barrassment at the unreality of the roles which they are assuming. Occasionally, in their choruses, they demonstrate a partial con- sciousness of their own automaticity and of the real chaos beneath their preoccupation with the “keeping up of appearances””’ and with attending to “a limited number/Of strictly practical purposes.””* One might almost transfer to one of these choruses the following commentary, from Time and Free Will, on superficial social rela- tions: “our life unfolds in space rather than in time; we live for the external world rather than for ourselves; we speak rather than think; we ‘are acted’ rather than act ourselves.” Like Amy, the characters who form the chorus seek to find some sort of stability by insisting “that the world is what we have always taken it to be.””° They are, however, less absorbed in the illusion that life can be actually confined to a strict pattern, that they can successfully “measure... out... life with coffee spoons.”
The completeness of Amy’s illusion is suggested by the fact that her very existence is associated with the continued functioning of the household clock, an instrument which registers the passage of time no more mechanically than Amy’s routine activities measure out her life. Her fear that the clock will stop in the dark symbolizes her anxiety lest the future should not work itself out in the sequence of events which she anticipiates. Nervously Amy declares:
I do not want the clock to stop in the dark.
If you want to know why I never leave Wishwood That is the reason. I keep Wishwood alive
To keep the family alive, to keep them together, To keep me alive, and I live to keep them.*?
Amy is desperately determined that her rigidly planned tife shall not be disturbed by some new and deeper rhythm. Her death, as she has divined, is accompanied by the stopping of the clock in the dark; death comes to Amy when Harry’s failure to conform to her “mere sequence” of domestic and social duties forces her to
27 Thid., p. 94.
238 Thid., p. 128.
** Time and Free Will, p. 231.
The Family Reunion, p. 43.
31 Eliot, “The Love Song of }. Alfred Prufrock,” Collected Poems, 1909-1935 (New York, 1936), p. 13.
32 The Family Reunion, pp. 15-16.
3 Vol.21
26 American Literature
realize the collapse of her attempt to control artificially the develop- ment of time.
The mechanical conception of time is clearly illustrated in Murder in the Cathedral, as well as in The Family Reunion. The . awareness of time as no more than the recurrence of separate events appears in the comments of the chorus of the common people on their life during the seven years of the Archbishop’s exile. Although they realize the monotony and superficiality of their lives during Thomas’s absence, they fear the rupture of the simple pattern of their existence by the impending doom; to continue in a routine of “living and partly living” is, they feel, less painful than to be drawn into the current which is carrying Thomas toward disaster.
Eliot’s second world of time-awareness is convincingly por- trayed in The Family Reunion, in the attitudes of Harry and the characters who are drawn into his experience. Agatha, Mary, and Downing participate, in varying degrees, in Harry’s removal’ from Amy’s time-world. Harry has been irrevocably exiled from a life of comfortable routine by his realization that his sin against his wife, although committed in the past, is “eternally present.”** Speaking out of a deeper level of consciousness, he passes judgment upon the “normal” existence of Ivy, Violet, Gerald, and Charles:
You go on trying to think of each thing separately, Making small things important, so that everything May be unimportant, a slight deviation
From some imaginary course that life ought to take, That you call normal.
Exposing the shallowness of the organization which they impose upon experience, Harry continues:
What you call the normal
Is merely the unreal and the unimportant.
I was like that in a way, so long as I could think
Even of my own life as an isolated ruin,
A casual bit of waste in an orderly universe.
But it begins to seem just part of some huge disaster, Some monstrous mistake and aberration
Of all men, of the world, which I cannot put in order.”
88 Eliot, “Burnt Norton,” Four Quartets (New York, 1943), p. 3. “The Family Reunion, p..88.
Speculations on Eliots Time-World 27
Time, in Harry’s world, is no longer a negligible, ‘quite colorless channel within which one constructs or observes an orderly sequence of clearly distinguished events. Time has become an active force, destroying the divisions and distinctions with which the intellect punctuates life and sweeping away the bridges with which the self attempts to span the flux of experience.
Harry’s time-world, like Bergson’s world of real duration, Wears. the aspect of a stream or an organism, rather than of a machine. The progress of events is swallowed up in a current of interpene- trating experiences which evade control, which defy reduction to any rational scheme. Time is a “river,”
sullen, untamed and intractable,
almost forgotten By the dwellers in cities—ever, however, implacable, Keeping his seasons and rages, destroyer, reminder Of what men choose to forget. Unhonored, unpropitiated By worshippers of the machine, but wanne cue and waiting.”
One moves from the boredom of a world where the same “defi- nite . . . shapes” are always “crystallised . . . on the surface,”** where activities can be isolated from the stream of experience and repeated mechanically; one encounters, instead, the horror of a world where time is an unmanagcable flood or an all-enveloping process of growth and decay. In orthodox Bergsonian style, time becomes creative; its creations, however, although “new” and ‘ “unpredictable,”
fail to live up to Bergson’s promises that novelty is necessarily desirable. More often than not, these unscheduled time-creations —things “not in the scheme of generation”*’—are abortive. and altogether loathsome. Furthermore, Eliot continually stresses the fact that time the creator is also time the destroyer. Processes of dissolution and decay are always disintegrating Harry’s world. Foul disease, incarnated in the Eumenides, devours the body of time. Harry is overcome by the recognition that the corruption within his soul is reflected in the external universe. In words which remind
38 “The Dry Salvages,” Four Quartets, p. 21. 38 Speculations, p. 149. 87 “7 ittle Gidding,” Four Quartets, p. 31.
28 American Literature
one of the atmosphere of Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, Harry cries: “It is not my conscience,/Not my mind, that is diseased, but the world I have to live in.”**
Eliot’s preoccupation with time and the word, which is the compelling theme of Four Quartets, is embodied, in The Family Reunion, in Harry’s struggle to translate into words the quality of his consciousness of pure duration. The fact that Harry finds his experiences “unspeakable,/Untranslzcable,” may be analyzed in terms of the Bergsonian metaphysic of art. According to Bergson, language, reflecting the orientation of the intellect toward practical ends, stereotypes experience into generalized, spatial symbols. Ordi- nary language is fitted only to express the time-awareness of persons whose perceptions, like Amy’s, are bounded by the conventionalized appearance of things. Real movement or real change, according to Bergson, escapes formulation by the intellect or by language, its tool. The artist, in his attempt to suggest the personal and particu- Jar quality of experience, must struggle constantly with the stability and fixity imposed by words. Harry, like Bergson’s artist, finds himself forced to: speak “in general terms/Because the particular has no language.” Harry’s sense of the absolute fluidity of ex- perience, a sense which, he says, is like “a vapour dissolving/All other worlds, and me into it,’”** eludes statement in terms which are manufactured for the world of mechanistic time.
Eliot has taken the material of the conception of time as growth and has incorporated it into his aesthetic world in such a way that he has completely reversed any connotation of “creative evolution,” or progress, which might have been associated with the conception. Eliot once remarked that Bergson “invented new sensations from metaphysics” ;** it might be said, with equal justice, that Eliot has, in turn, elicited new sensations from the Bergsonian world of “reai time.” Bergson seemed to find pure excitement in the idea that time makes a difference, that “[r]eal duration .. . gnaws on things, and leaves on them the mark of its tooth.” Eliot, on the other
38 The Family Reunion, pp. 30-31.
°° Thid., p. 29.
*° Thid,
4 Tbid., p. 59.
*? “London Letter,” Dial, LXXI, 216 (Aug., 1921). * Creative Evolution, p. 46.
Speculations on Eliot's Time-World 29
hand, frequently finds the omnivorous habits of “biting Time”* distinctly unpleasant. Eliot simply does not share Bergson’s cheer- fulness at the prospect of enlivening existence by importing vital impulses from the animal kingdom into the realm of metaphysics. Often Eliot uses the idea of organic unity in association with feelings of profund disgust; for instance, in Murder in the Cathedral the growing awareness of the chorus that they are implicated in the social and political fabric of their age, that they are responsible for Thomas’s death, is expressed in their involuntary identification of themselves with revolting forms of animal life.*° It should be noted that Hulme, outside his essays explaining Bergson’s theory of art, reveals none of the shallow and dishonest optimism of which Wyndham Lewis accused the devotees of the ““emergent’ Time- god.” Hulme, like Eliot, finds, not progress, but something re- sembling a cycle of birth and degeneration in the organic time- world. There is an interesting parallel between the opening lines of “East Coker” and a passage from Hulme’s notes for his “Welt- anschauung,” which reads as follows: “The eyes, the beauty of the world, have been organized out of faeces. Man returns to dust. So does the face of the world to primeval cinders.”** Traces of a cyclical theory of the growth of time are found both in the passage from Hulme and in the following lines from “East Coker”:
Houses rise and fall, crumble, are extended,
Old stone to new building, old timber to new fires, Old fires to ashes, and ashes to the earth Which is already flesh, fur and faeces.*®
** Eliot, Murder in the Cathedral (New York, 1935), p. 23.
‘č Thid., pp. 63-65.
* Time and Western Man, p. 438. Eliot, like Lewis, has harped on the dishonesty implicit in Bergson’s optimism. In a review written in 1916, he goes so far as to say he prefers Nietzsche's “policy in regard to the cosmic flux” to that of Bergson. Nietzsche’s “world-will is creative like Bergson’s,” Eliot points out, “but, more sincerely than Bergson’s, is without sense or promise” (review of A. Wolf's The Philosophy of Nietzsche in the International Journal of Ethics, XXVI, 427, April, 1916). For another development of this idea, see Paul Elmer More’s disparagement of modern heretics who make an “idol” of Mutability. More emphasizes that poets in times past have not even trusted, much less worshiped, Change (“Victorian Literature: The Philosophy of Change,” Shelburne Fssays, VII, 263).
*? Speculations, p. 227.
*8 Four Quartets, p. 11.
x (CENTRAL y (LIBRARY 7
30 American Literature
Out of the notion that time is a stream or an organism, in which past, present, and future meet and intermingle, a stream in which “All time is eternally present,” Eliot has constructed -a terrible world in which “All time is unredeemable.”" While acknowledg- ing that, from one point of view, time is a “development” bringing forth unprecedented creations, Eliot has utterly demolished, within his poetic universe, the “fallacy/Encouraged by superficial notions of evolution,” that one may therefore cheerfully disown the past; Eliot has‘rather made both the past and the future oppressively inescapable: Harry’s world of concrete duration is intensified until its meaninglessness becomes unendurable. > An intellectual and emotional ‘resolution is demanded.’ There. is no possibility of his returning to the superficial stability of Amy’s world, in which social relations assume a basis of mathemiatical time; Harry must cross the frontier into a ‘deeper awareness of time. Eliot’s final world, which might also be termed a.finalistic world, is rendered necessary by the constitution of his first two worlds. Ín Harry’s assumption of the burden of the guilt of his own past and that of his family, he finds the solution which is “at once the hardest thing, and the only thing possible.” Released for a moment from the
endless drift Of shrieking forms in a circular desert Weaving with contagion of putrescent embraces On dissolving bone,*?
Harry stands “under the judicial sun/Of the final eye.”™ In that moment, he acknowledges the existence of an absolute realm, be- yond time; accepting ‘his election to explore the further intensity of that final realm, he enters willingly upon his “pilgrimage/Of expia- tion”™ to “[r]edeem/The time.” Like Archbishop Thomas’s espousal of martyrdom, Harry’s decision to seek an absolute judg- ment and, an absolute mercy is a decision made “out of time.””
49 “Burnt Norton,” Four Quartets, p: 3. ;
so The Dry Salvages,” Four Quartets, p. 23.
S1 The Family Reunion, p. 110.
5a Thid., p.. 104.
58 bid., p. 105.
t Thid., p. 131.
55 “Ash-Wednesday,” Collected Poems, 1909-1935, p. 116. 5° Murder in the Cathedral, p. 71.
Speculations on Eliots Time-World 31
mx
Both Eliot and Hulme, it has been pointed out, make use of a Bergsonian division of kinds of time. Both show a profound aware- ness of the world of organic time, which underlies and breaks through the constructions of everyday routine. Both afirm, however, that the principle of organic change should not be allowed to dis- integrate the stillness and permanence of the world of absolute _ religious and ethical valuzs. In Bergson’s universe, mechanism and finalism are “illusions to which, as soon as it speculates on reality in general, the human understanding is exposed”; real duration is the difficult, but supremely true, explanation of that universe.” In Eliot’s universe, mechanism and real duration provide only a limited account of reality; finalism is the arduous, but imperative, completion of the meaning of the universe. Knowledge of “still- ness,” Eliot affirms,. requires a more rigorous discipline than does ‘knowledge of motion.” Bergson finds uniqueness and. freedom in the “shade” or “quality” of those moments in which one manages to get back into pure duration; Eliot maintains that a sense of liberation belongs only to those moments in which one manages
to apprehend » The point of intersection of the timeless With time.”
For Eliot the center of the mystical experience is a glimpse of trans- cendent permanence; for Bergson the essence of the mystical experi- ence is an identification with the dlan vital. Eliot finds an “infinite intelligence,” to whom all is known, a more attractive object of worship than the infinite instinct which Bergson seems to find so intriguing.
Eliot has rearranged the Bergsonian hierarchy of kinds of time; he has insisted that permanence is both more real and more interést-
5” Creative Evolution, pp, xiv-xv.
8° “Choruses from ‘The Rock; ” Collected Poems, 1909- 1935, D. 179..
5° ‘Time and Free Will, p. 182.
“The Dry Salvages,” Four Quartets, p. 27,
"t The mystic love of humanity, . -[cJoinciding with God's love, for his handiwork, is “the vital impetus . . . itself, communicated in its entirety to exceptional men who in their turn would fain impart it to all humanity. . .” (The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, p. 223). A
33 Speculations, p. 203.
32 American Literature
ing than change. An appraisal of the effectiveness of Eliot’s artistic embodiment of his time-world brings us back to the question of concreteness of poetic language, a question upon which, as we have pointed out, Eliot and Hulme share similar views. In seeking to give “esthetic sanction” to his final world of time-awareness, Eliot has, apparently, been particularly preoccupied with the problem of finding imagery to communicate the completeness and fixity of that world. To the poet who, like Eliot, has glimpsed beyond the frontier of real duration, language—which had previously seemed too stable to convey the ceaseless movement of organic time—seems - too involved in temporal processes to communicate the aspect of eternity. Attempting to convey real stillness, Eliot finds that words
slip, slide, perish Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place, Will not stay still.®
Not only has Eliot reversed the terms of the Bergsonian metaphysic of time, but he also must reverse the terms of the Bergsonian theory of art. Art, Eliot would say, aspires to suggest an even deeper reality than the flux. In the case of Eliot, the poet’s perception of the impossibility, because of the limitations imposed by language, of a complete expression of the absolute is,fused with the man’s sense of the impossibility, because of the limitations imposed by original sin, of a complete understanding of the absolute. But the fact that only “hints and guesses” of the timeless are possible does not mean that such experience is hazy or ill-defined or that the poetic expression given to that experience should be vague. In point of fact, Eliot’s effort, in The Family Reunion and the Four Quartets, to give “esthetic . . . justification”® to his final world. is successful in proportion to the degree to which he carries out his own (and Hulme’s) preference for the image that is “sharp in outline.”** There is every reason, from an aesthetic or from a hu- man standpoint, that the tension between the world of dynamic un- satisfied impulses and the world of static fulfilment should give
°° Eliot, “Poetry and Propaganda,” Bookman, LXX, 601 (Feb., 1930). °4 “Burnt Norton,” Four Quartets, pp. 7-8.
6 “The Dry Salvages,” Four Quartets, p. 27.
°° Eliot, “Poetry and Propaganda,” p. 6or.
°? Ezra Pound: His Metric and Poetry, p. 15.
Speculations on Eliot's Time-World 33
birth to a redemptive vision of rare clarity and beauty." This vision takes two forms in Eliot’s poetry. The first of these methods of rendering visually the “impossible union/Of spheres of existence”™ is the use of myth, or “incarnation.” The transfiguration of the Eumenides (representing the flux) into “bright angels” (repre- senting the resolution beyond time, of Harry’s experience in time) illustrates admirably Eliot’s use of the resources of myth to make perceptible the religious synthesis of time. The “lady” of “Ash Wednesday” and the “wounded surgeon” of Four Quartets are other statements, in terms of incarnation or myth, of the substantial meaning of Eliot’s timeless dominion. The second method of making concrete the religious apprehension of time is, of course, symbolism. Eliot’s symbolic representations of the all-inclusiveness of eternity are particularly effective when he uses for his symbol an image drawn from the flux, but transfixed and sharpened in outline. For example, the ever-fixed rose of paradise includes and completes, beyond time, the “partial ecstasy” of the “moment in the rose- garden”; similarly, the purgatorial flame includes and gives a meaning to the “partial horror” of suffering” in the fire of the Heraclitan flux.
Although he has undoubtedly made great triumphs in mar- shaling sensuous imagery, in the form of myth or symbol, to em- body his final world, Eliot has also shown a marked tendency to- ward abstract formulation, rather than concrete realization, of that world. Straining toward a precise statement of the timeless, he has sometimes relied too heavily upon intellectual gymnastics, par- ticularly his favorite trick, the paradox. Even the idea of the “still point,” discussed by Martz, is so close to the realm of abstract formu- lation that it does not in every instance of its use evoke a fully real- ized image. A fundamental question raised by The Family Reunion and, in less exaggerated terms, by the whole body of Eliot’s poetry is the question of whether, having used the world of flux as the medi- um for the presentation of experiences of suffering or horror and, to
88 Tt will be recognized that I have borrowed here from Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy. See The Birth of Tragedy in The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche (New York, 1924), I, 86-128, for the analysis of Greek tragedy from the point of view of the tension between musical movement and visual stillness.
8° “The Dry Salvages,” Four Quartets, p. 27.
7 “Burnt Norton,” Four Quartets, p. 5. Professor Theodore Spencer called attention to this in his class in modern poetry at Harvard University.
34 l American Literature
a lesser extent, of vital joy, Eliot is able to create a finalistic world which is, in its own way, as concrete as his world of flux. Redemp- tion from the shifting and dissolving imagery of durée réelle de- mands, not protests that stillness is more fundamental than change, but visual evidence that stillness can be vividly conceived. . It is to be hoped that Eliots further development in poetic diction will be in the direction of concreteness, lest, while endeavoring poetically to make “precision” seem “compatible with profundity,”™ he should lead his readers into a wilderness of “counter” words and leave them-abstracted from abstraction by abstraction.
"1 Dial, LXXI, 455 (Oct, 1921).
HENRY JAMES AND MINNY TEMPLE
ROBERT C. LeCLAIR Principia College
HE FACT that Henry James never married has caused a num-
ber of speculations concerning the reasons for his bachelor status and the character of his relationships with the women he knew.’ Even during his lifetime, the possibility of his marrying created many rumors, some of which he referred to in a letter to his mother, addressed from London, October 31, 1880, when he had achieved a prominent position in the literary and social world:
Your letter tells me of Alice’s conservatory (a delightful idea), of the future postponement of William’s, the news of my engagement to the young lady in Bangor, etc. This last report I need scarcely tell you, is a slight mistake. I am not just now making any matrimonial arrange- ments, though I constantly hear that I have been (commonbabilically, I am afraid) ‘very attentive’ to numerous spinsters and widows, and also that many of my well-wishers think that I should be ‘so much happier’ if I would only marry. The last source I heard this opinion quoted from was my friend Mrs. Brookfield, a delightful person who lost her husband many years ago. As she is, however, about 60 years of age and was at one time, I believe, in peril of marrying Lord Houghton, I suppose Mr.
was purely disinterested. P expect soon to hear that I am en- gaged to Mrs. Proctor aet. 82. I have indeed proposed to- her several times, but she seems to think she can do better?
*The more extreme theories are considered by Stephen Spender in The Destructive Element (Boston, 1936); the more usual attitude is expressed by Gamaliel, Bradford in American Portraits (Boston and New York, 1922), p. 187: “How I should like to get some glimpse of Henry James in love! But this side of his life is completely hidden from us. He makes no allusion to it in the autobiography, and there is no hint of it in his letters, Yet his novels are saturated with love, contain, in fact, little or nothing else, though it is love quintessenced and alembicated till it hardly knows itself. One would suppose that there was plenty ‘of it in his life. And his love letters would have been one of the curiosities of literature. Fancy the subtleties, the spiritual doublings, the harassing doubts ‘and questions and qualifications! Yet. this may be all wrong, and actual, absorbing love might have simplified and clarified his soul beyond anything else on earth. Who can say? Unless some woman still living who has some of those letters. All that comes to us is the lovely, search- ing, pathetic suggestion in six words, ‘the starved romance of my life’ (Letters, 1, 348).
AMS letter, Henry James, Jr, to Mrs. Henry James, Sr, Houghton Library, Harvard University. In the summer of 1869 his mother, in a letter from Pomfret on July 25, wrote: “You know Father used to say to you, that if you would only fall in love it would be the making of you” (MS letter, Mrs. Henry James, Sr., to Henry James, Jr., Houghton Library).
36 American Literature
In 1880 Henry James was thirty-seven years old and conspicuously eligible for marriage, especially in the eyes of “numerous spinsters and widows.” But ten years earlier, when he was an obscure, struggling writer, the possibilities of a serious affair were limited almost exclusively to the small circle of friends and relations in Cambridge and Newport. Within this group was Mary Temple, a young lady of unusual charm and character, who played a very important part in his youth. In the light of some new material concerning her, a consideration of the question of Henry James and Mary Temple seems justified.
In the last chapter of Notes of a Son and Brother, as well as on pages 76-79, Henry James pays tribute to Mary (Minny) Temple, the cousin of early Albany and Newport days, whose relationship to him has long been a confused issue in the minds of scholars. In his characteristically complicated later style, James does not make clear his relationship to this charming but sickly girl who listed among her admirers, in addition to himself, such promising young men as his brother William, Thomas Sergeant Perry, John Chipman Gray, and Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. In fact, a careful study of certain unpublished documents shows clearly that James consciously excluded any material which might have revealed his actual con- nections with the girl. For example, the letters from Minny Temple which he included in the chapter devoted to her are not to himself but to a mutual friend who made them available to James, years later, when he was gathering data for the reminiscences? In them she alludes very casually to Henry Janes, never intimately or affec- tionately, and gives no evidence that he was anything more to her than merely one of many cousins; yet, as will be shown, he had preserved for over forty years letters which he had received from her during the last few months of her life and which are full of intimate and affectionate feeling toward him. By excluding such letters and by including several in which Minny alludes frequently and in- terestedly to William James, Henry James has given the general impression that it was his brother and not himself to whom Minny Temple was more attracted. The fact that she was the prototype for Isabel Archer in The Portrait of a Lady and for Milly Theale in
3 Notes of a Son and Brother (New York, t914), p. 453.
Henry James and Minny Temple 37
The Wings oy the Dove* and that he devoted nearly seventy pages to her in his autobiographical writings, critics have explained on the grounds that Minny became a legend to him during the long years between the time of her death in 1870° and the closing years of his own life. It has been implied that he was in love with the fantasy she became to him and not with the actual Minny Temple of New- port days.
Professor Matthiessen has published Henry James’s letter to his brother William, written from Malvern, England, on March 20, 1870, upon his learning of the death of their cousin. The general tenor of this letter is one of profound grief, feeling far deeper and more significant than a merely casual friendship would call forth. Furthermore, certain passages reveal important aspects of his feel- ings toward the girl:
My own personal relations with her were always of the happiest. Every one was supposed, I believe, to be more or less in love with her: others may answer for themselves: I never was, and yet I had the great satis- faction that I enjoyed pleasing her almost as much as if I had been. I cared more to please her perhaps than she ever cared to be pleased. Looking back upon the past half-dozen years, it seems as if she repre- sented, in a manner, in my life several of the elements or phases of life at large—her own sex, to begin with, but even more Youth, with which owing to my invalidism, I always felt in rather indirect relation.’
.... Among the sad reflections that her death provokes for ‘ne, there is none sadder than this view of the gradual change and reversal of our rela- tions: I slowly crawling from weakness and inaction and suffering into
strength and health and hope: she sinking out of brightness and youth
“The Letters of Henry James, ed. Percy Lubbock (New York, 1920), I, 36.
5 Mary Temple died on March 8, 1870, at New Rochelle, N. Y., and was buried in the Albany Rural Cemetery, Albany, N. Y. She was born in Albany on December 7, 1845, and baptized there, at St. Peter’s Church, on December 20, 1847. She was the daughter of Col. Robert Emmet Temple, U. S. Army, of the Class of 1828 of the United States Military „Academy, West Point, N. Y., who resigned from the Army in 1839 and entered civil Jife as a lawyer in Albany, 1839-1847; he was Adjutant-General of the State of New York, 1846-1847. Mary Temple’s mother was Catharine: Margaret James, daughter of William James (1771-1832) of Albany and his third wife, Catharine Barber; thus Catharine Margaret James was the sister of Henry James, Sr. There were nine Temple children, of whom Robert, William James, Katharine, Mary (Minny), Ellen James, and Henrietta played important roles in the early lives of the James children. See Katharine Hastings, William James of Albany, N. Y., and His Descendants (reprinted from the New York Genealogical and Biographical Record, April, June, Oct., 1924), pp. 16, 17.
°F, O. Matthiessen, The James Family (New York, 1947), pp. 259-263.
T Ibid., p. 260.
28 American Literature
into decline and death. It’s almost as if she had passed away—as far as I am concerned—from having served her purpose, that of standing well within the world, inviting and inviting me onward by all the bright intensity of her example. She never knew how sick and disordered a creature I was and I always felt that she knew me at my worst. I
always looked forward with a certain eagerness to the day when I should have regained my natural lead, and one [sic]® friendship on my part, at least, might become more active and masculine. This I have especially felt during the powerful experience of the past year. In a measure I had worked away from the old ground of my relations with her, without having quite taken possession of the new: but I had it con- stantly in my eyes?
Earlier on the same day, March 29, 1870, he had written a letter to his mother, from whom he had just learned of Minny’s death. It is a more intimate and spontaneous display of his feelings and shows by contrast that the letter to.his brother was carefully designed, even restrained in places, and written with a consciousness that both he and William had given serious thought to their own and to each other’s feelings for Minny Temple. In the letter to his mother, which is here given, his thoughts are written under the immediate impact of the news, expressing freely his stirred emotions and, in all probability, coming closer to his unguarded thoughts:
Matvern, March 29, 1870. Dearest Moruer,
I rec’d this morning your letter with father’s note, telling me of Minny’s death—-news more strong and painful that I can find words to express. Your last mention of her condition had been very far from preparing me for this. The event suggests such a host of thought[s] that it seems vain to attempt to utter them. You can imagine all I feel. Minny seemed such a breathing immortal reality that the mere statement of her death conveys little meaning; really to comprehend it I must wait— we must all wait—till time brings with it the poignant sense of loss and . irremediable absence. I have been spending the morning letting the awakened swarm of old recollections and associations flow into my mind -~almost enjoying the exquisite pain they provoke. Wherever I turn in all the recent years of my life I find Minny somehow present directly or
8 ‘The original letter, in the Houghton Library Collection of the James Papers, reads: “I always looked forward with a certain eagerness to the day when I should have regained
my natural lead and our [my italics] friendship on my part, at least... .” ? Matthiessen, op. cit, pp. 260-261.
Henry James and Minny Temple . 39
indirectly—and with all that wonderful ethereal brightness of presence which was so peculiarly her own. And now to sit down to the idea of her death! As much as a human creature may, I fancy, she will survive in the unspeakably tender memory of her friends. No attitude of the heart seems tender and generous enough not to do her some unwilling hurt—now that she has melted away into such a divine image of sweetness and weakness! Oh dearest Mother! Oh poor struggling suffering dying creature! But who complains that she’s gone or would have her back to die more painfully? She certainly never seemed to have come into this world for her own happiness—as that of others—or as _ anything but as a sort of divine reminder and quickness—a transcendent protest against our acquiescence in its grossness. To have known her is certainly an immense gain, but who would have wished her to live — longer on such a footing—unless he had felt within him (what I felt little enough!) some irresistible mission to reconcile her to a world to which she was essentially hostile. There is absolute balm in the thought of poor Minny and rest—rest and immortal absence! |
But viewed in a simple human light, by the eager spirit that insists upon its own—her death is full of overflowing sadness. It comes home to me with irresistible power, the sense of how much I knew her and how much I loved her. As I look back upon the past, from the time I was old enough to feel and perceive, her friendship seems literally to fill it— with proportions magnified doubtless by the mist of tears. I am very glad to have seen so little of her suffering and decline—but nevertheless every word in which you allude to the pleasantness of that Jast visit has a kind of heart-breaking force. “Dear bright little Minny” as you most ` happily say: what an impulse one feels to sum up her rich little life in some simple compound of tenderness and awe. ‘Time for you at home will have begun to melt away the hardness of the thought of her being in future a simple memory of the mind—a mere pulsation of the heart: to me as yet it seems perfectly inadmissible. I wish I were at home to hear . and talk about her: I feel immensely curious for all the small facts ‘and details of her last week. Write me any gossip that comes to your head. By the time it reaches me it will be very cheerful reading. Try and remember anything she may have said and done. I have been raking up all my recent memories of her and her rare personality seems to shine out with absolute defiant reality. Immortal peace to her memory! I _ think of her gladly as unchained from suffering and embalmed forever in all our hearts and lives. Twenty years hence what a pure elegant vision she will be.
40 American Literature
But I revert in spite of myself to the hard truth that she is dead— silent—absent forever—she the very heroine of our common scene. If you ... remember any talk of hers about me—any kind of reference or message—pray let me know of it. I wish very much father were able to write me a little more in detail concerning the funeral and anything he heard there. I feel absolutely vulgarly eager for any fact whatever. Dear bright little Minny—God bless you dear Mother, for the words. What a pregnant reference in future years—what a secret from those who never knew her! In her last letter to me she spoke of having had a very good photograph taken, which she would send. It has never come. Can you get one—or if you have only the house copy can you have it repeated or copied? I should very much like to have it—for the day when to think of her will be nothing but pure blessedness. Pray, as far as possible, attend to this. Farewell. I am melted down to such an ocean of love that you may be sure you all come in for your share.
Evening. I have had a long walk this afternoon and feel already strangely familiar with the idea of Minny’s death. But I can’t help wishing that I had been in closer relation with her during her last hours— and find a sweet comfort at all events in thinking of that long never-to- be-answered letter I wrote to her from Florence. If ever my good genius prompted me, it was then. It is no surprise to me to find that I felt for her an affection as deep as the foundations of my being, for I always knew it; but I now become sensible how her image, softened and sweetened by suffering and sitting patient and yet expectant, so far away from the great world with which so many of her old dreams and impulses were associated, has operated in my mind as a gentle incentive to action and enterprise. There have been so many things I have thought of telling her, so many stories by which I had a fancy to make up her lack to her, —as if she were going to linger on as a graceful invalid to listen to my stories! It was only the other day, however, that I dreamed of meeting her somewhere this summer with Mrs. Post. Poor Minny! how much she was not to see! It’s hard to believe that she is not seeing greater things now. On the dramatic fitness—as one may call it—of her early death it seems almost idle to dwell. No one who ever knew her can have failed to look at her future as a really insoluble problem—and we almost all had imagination enough to say, to murmur at least, that life -—poor narrow life—contained no place for her. How all her conduct and character seem to have pointed to this conclusion—how profoundly inconsequential, in her history, continued life would have been! Every happy pleasant hour in all the long course of our friendship seems to return to me, vivid and eloquent with the light of the present. I think
Henry James and Minny Temple 4I
of Newport as with its air vocal with her accents, alive with her move- ments. But I have written quite enough—more than I expected. I couldn’t help thinking this afternoon how strange it is for me to be pondering her death in the midst of this vast indifferent England which she fancied she would have liked. Perhaps! There was no answering in the cold bright landscape for the loss of her liking. Let me think that her eyes are resting on greener pastures than even England’s. But how much—how long—we have got to live without her! It’s no more than a just penalty to pay, though, for the privilege of having been young with her. It will count in old age, when we live more than now, in reflection, to have had such a figure in our youth.
But I must say farewell. Let me beg you once more to send any possible talk or reminiscences—no matter how commonplace. I only want to make up for not having seen her—I resent their having buried her in N. Rochelle. She ought to be among her own people? Good night. My letter doesn’t read over-wise, but I have written off my un- reason. You promise me soon a letter from Alice—the sooner the better. Willy I trust will also be writing. Good night, dearest Mother,
Your loving son, H. James Write me who was at the funeral and I shall write next from here—then possibly from London.”
It is interesting to note the seemingly contradictory statements in these two letters. In the one to William he wrote: “Every one was supposed, I believe, to be more or less in love with her: others may answer for themselves: I never was, and yet I...” whereas on the same day he had written to his mother: “It comes home to me with irresistible power, the sense of how much I knew her and how much I loved her” and “It is no surprise to me to find that I felt for her an affection as deep as the foundations of my being, for I always knew it....” The contradiction is resolved in the fact that, because of his illness and semi-invalidism since the injury to his back at Newport in 1861, he had not been physically able to offer what he speaks of to William as a “more active and masculine” friend- ship, regardless of his feelings for the girl. In a sense he was correct in relation to the disadvantage he was under, for Minny Temple never did know how ill and “disordered a creature” he was in those
7 She was buried in Albany, N. Y. See n. 5. 11 MS letter, Henry James, Jr., to Mrs. Henry James, Sr., Houghton Library. 13 See Notes of a Son and Brother, pp. 296-299.
4 Vol.21
42 American Literature
Newport and Cambridge days. Realizing that during those years of semi-invalidism she had known him at his worst, he naturally looked forward to the time he could advance the friendship on. a stronger basis. Therefore, it was ironic that in 1870, when he had re- gained his health somewhat, although he was far from well, as his letters home during 1870-1873 reveal, Minny was sinking in the last stages of consumption and he was traveling abroad, intensely occupied with his growing question of expatriation and with, of course, his maturing ability as a writer. It seems, therefore, that the truth of the matter is that Henry James’s deep affection for Minny Temple was a vital part of his youth, but that he had not been free openly to encourage and advance his personal relations with her, so that only upon learning of her death did he fully com- prehend what she had meant to him and would mean fo him in the years to come.
The question now turns in the direction of Minny Temple’s feelings for Henry James. In his letter to William he said: “I have been reading over the three or four letters I have got from her [Minny] since I have been abroad: they are full of herself—or at least of a fraction of herself: they would say little to strangers. Poor little Minny! It’s the ving ones that die; the writing ones that survive”? These letters speak very frankly and read as follows:
Newport, June 3rd, 1869 My parLING Harry,
(You don’t mind if I am a little affectionate now that you are so far away, do you?) Your most welcome letter came to me some time ago, and was doubly welcome, as it reached me while I was int the very act of having the third hemorrhage of that day, and it quite consoled me, for them—By which you perceive that I still continue in my evil courses, which, however, don’t seem to have killed me, yet. Since then I have had one other slight attack, last week, here in Newport, where I had come to see my Aunt, Miss Clarke, who has-been poorly all winter, and, incidentally, to meet the Bootts. They spent a week here, and the admirable John Gray regaled us with his pleasant society for a couple of ‘days. Mrs. Shaw is here now for a week, when we all mean to depart, I, to Pelham, where I shall be all summer. |
Aunt Maty spent a day in Boston this week and found all your
28 F, O. Matthiessen, op. cit., p. 262.
Henry James and Minny Tempic 43
people well—your father is coming to spend a day or two with us, while Mrs. Shaw is here, and I propose to reciprocate, by spending a day in Cambridge. I shall miss you, my dear, but I am most happy to know. that you are well and enjoying yourself. I wish I were there too. If-you ` were not my cousin I would write and ask you to marry me and take me with you, but as it is, it wouldn’t do. I will console myself, however, with the thought. that in that case you might not accept my offer, which would be much worse than it is now.
Have you read Col. Higginson’s story. I was rather curious to see it—after his criticism of your productions, but I think now that we can afford to turn up our noses at him, in future. Have you seen Mrs. Lewes yet? Kiss her for me. But from all accounts, I don’t believe that is exactly what one wish[es] to do to her. If I were, by hook or by crook, to spend next winter, with friends, in Rome, should I see you, at all? So the pretty Irish girl pleased you, did she? Write me all about the creatures you like.
Your family had just got news of Mr. Perkins’ death, when Aunt Mary was there. I wonder what effect it will have upon Mrs. Walsh’s plans. There is nothing new to tell you—John Gray and Lizzie Boott were both as nice as ever—the former rather handsomer than ever. Elly and Kitty are at Pelham well and happy. I shall stay there quietly all summer and shall think of you often. You mustn’t be homesick. I hear you find it expensive (not being homesick). How much money would you like me to send you? I have lots. Do write to me, if you have time. Just think how I like to get your letters and remember that all the princes and princesses (so to speak) who now seek your society, none of them love you half so well as I do.
I am now going to bid you good-bye. I shan’t be so long in answering your next letter, but I have had no more interesting news so far, to give you but of my repeated illnesses, so I thought I would spare you. But I am all right again now, for the present. Do you feel strong again? I hope so. God bless you, dear. Don’t forget me—or that I am,
Always your loving cousin, Mary TEMPLE Aunt Mary sends love and was much gratified to get your letter—will write soon, but has had her time much taken up with nursing Aunt C.*
PELHAM, August 15, 1869 Dear Harry, l I have been for some time on the point of writing to you, but the truth is, that, of late, so many things have happened to take up my time
MS letter, Henry James, Jr., from Mary Temple, Houghton Library.
rel ial ae a
44 American Literature
and attention that I have found no fitting opportunity till now. You have no doubt heard before this thro’ your own family of the stirring events that have been happening in my particular family, namely, the birth of Kitty's son, nearly three weeks ago, and Elly’s eugagement, which really occurred four or five weeks ago, but which they did not see fit to anounce until a week ago. Elly’s engagement being the more startling event, let us consider that somewhat, ere we turn to the babe.”
I don’t know whether you know Mr. [Christopher] Temple Emmet who is to be Elly’s husband. He looks a good deal like all the rest of the Emmets, and partakes of the excellent characteristics of the family. He is 28 years older than Elly—being forty-seven. We are all a good deal astonished by her engagement. I never dreamt that she would marry him. Although he is a most estimable man, and will make her a kind and devoted ‘husband, I have no doubt. She is very happy, and they are both, apparently, very much in love with each other—so I suppose it must be all right, altho’ I must confess my imagination had taken higher flights in the way of a spouse for Elly. But as long as she loves him, and they are both happy, what more could one wish? Kitty’s little venture in the way of marrying one’s grandfather has turned out so well that I ought to feel quite safe about Elly’® But I have quite determined that the line must be drawn here. Henriette shall not marry Tom, tho’ he bring all the fascinations of cupid himself, to win her young affections. Elly’s to be married on the 15th of September. Temple may have to go to California in the autumn, in which case she will, of course, go with him—but we are in hopes that he may be able to stay here for the winter. So much for Elly’s affairs,
Now for Kitty—This lady is doing well, likewise her infant who is a most remarkable child, with an intellectual head, and square little brows, and curly brown hair—his eyes are dark and twinkling; his nose very decided and high between the eyes—his mouth rather capa- cious—altogether, he is a fine, handsome little boy. His name is to be William Temple.
I have been at Pelham all summer, engrossed in these domestic events, while you have been wandering among the mountains of Switzerland, without a link or a tie to bind you—sich is life! I suppose you have heard
7®Minny Temple's older sister, Katharine, who was the wife of Richard Stockton Emmet, of Pelham, N. Y., had six children, the first being William Temple, born July 28, 1869, in New Rochelle, N..¥. He is the child here referred to.
“8 Katharine’s husband, Richard Stockton Emmet, was twenty-two years her senior, having been born February 22, 1821. Minny Temple’s younger sister, Ellen James Temple,
married Christopher Temple Emmet, M.D., on September 15, 1869. See Hastings, op. cit., p. 26.
Henry James and Minny Temple 45
about the Bootts’ stay in Pomfret. Lizzie is charmed with your family. They seem to have been a new and delightful sensation to her. In her last letter from Lenox, she said Messers. [sic] Gray and Holmes were at Pomfret for a few days. I was much interested in your account of George Eliot." I want to go abroad and I mean to think deeply about it, and try to get there. The ‘hook’ and ‘crook’ that I mentioned are Mr. and Mrs. Jones, though I have no desire to apply opprobrious epithets to them. Mrs. J. most kindly offers to take me with her to Rome next winter, and by all that is blissful, if I can manage it pecuniarily, I shall go! I am going to write to Mrs. Jones, and ask her what the expense would be, and if it is at all reasonable for me to think of going, I shall make my arrangements to go for a year at least. Think, my dear, of the pleasure we would have together in Rome. I am crazy at the mere thought. It would be a strange step and a sudden for me to take, but Kitty and Elly are doing queer things and why should I be behind-hand? I am not very strong now-a-days, altho’ it is summer, and I am a little afraid that another winter might go far toward finishing me up, and I would give anything to have a winter in Italy. We must trust in Heaven and wait patiently. Then, too, I feel that I must flee this spot, unless I wish to become the prey of a bald-headed Emmet. There seems to be a fatality about it, which I would fain escape. Kitty and Elly send much love. Write soon and believe me, dearest Harry, as ever, Your loving M. TEMPLE
August 22nd.
....1 wrote this letter to you a week ago, and according to my usual habit of forgetfulness have left it until now lying in my desk. In this Jast week nothing of importance has happened—the baby has picked up wonderfully, and Kitty has come downstairs and is quite well again. I have taken no steps about the European trip, and truth to tell, dear, I have not the heart for it. The evening I wrote you I was enchanted with the project, but by the next morning I was disenchanted. I am really not strong enough to go abroad with even the kindest friends, since they be not relatives, or people upon whom I have some special claim. I have been ill nearly all week with a kind of pleurisy, which makes me clearly perceive that it would never do for me to be ill away from home, on the bounty of strangers for my nursing. See’st thou? My dearest Harry what a charming tale is Gabrielle de Bergerac!*® Just as pretty as ever it can
"7 Henry James, Jr., in a letter to his father from London, May 10, 1869, gives an account of his first visit with George Eliot. See Matthiessen, op. cit., pp. 529-530.
78 James's story “Gabrielle de Bergerac” appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, XXIV, 55, 231, 352 (July-Sept., 1869), and was very wel] received. Howells wrote to James,
46 Americun Literature
be. I am proud of you, my dear, as well as fond—have you any special objections? Good-bye. All send love. Write soon and believe me as ever your loving
M. Temete’®
* + *€ * € * ¥*
PeruaM, November 7, 1869 My parung Harry,
I was at Cambridge last week when your letters came to your father and Willy from Florence, giving an account of your health and spirits that went to my heart.” To think that you should be ill and depressed so far way, just when I was congratulating myself that you, at all events, were well and happy, if nobody else was. Well, my dearest Harry, we all have our troubles in this world. I only hope that yours are counter-bal- anced by some true happiness, which Heaven sends most of us, thro’ some means or other. I think the best comes thro’ a blind hanging on to some conviction, never mind what, that God has put deepest into our souls, and the comforting love of a few chosen friends, which comes to us ‘all along of “said” hanging-on,’ and because we have an eternal right to it, and not a mere arbitrary desire for it. Don’t you think so?
I had a delightful visit at Cambridge. Your people were all most kind to me, and I am uncommon glad I went. I saw those photographs you sent out. Lewes and Swinburne are both ‘pretty things’ in their own way. To think that my adored George Eliot should have found among all the human creatures she knew, the most comfort and sym- pathy from that one.
July 18, 1869: “I’m not sure that the August Atlantic will reach you, and so I shall tear out the installments of Gabrielle ... and send .. . in this letter. Your story is universally praised, and is accounted the best thing you’ve done. There seems at last to be a general waking up to your merits; but when you’ve fame as great as Hawthorne's, you won’t forget who was the first, warmest and truest of your admirers, will you?” (Mildred Howells, ed., Life in Letters of William Dean Howells, Garden City, N. Y., 1928, I, 144).
7°MS letter to Henry James, Jr., from Mary Temple, Houghton Library.
2% In writinig to Henry James of this particular visit by Minny Temple to the James family in Cambridge, William James made the following comment about her which shows’ clearly that his relation to her had not been as affectionate and intimate as had his. sbrother’s: “Cambridge, Dec. 5, 1869. ... M. Temple was here for a week, a fortnight since. She was delightful in all respects, and although very thin, very cheerful. I am conscious of having. done her a good deal of injustice for some years past, in nourishing a sort of unsympathetic hostility to her. She is after all a most honest little phenomenon. and there is a true respectability in the courage with which she keeps ‘true to her own instincts. —I mean it has a certain religious side with her. Moreover she is more devoid of ‘meanness,’ of anything petty in her character, than anyone I know, perhaps either male or female. Je tiens a telling you this, as I recollect last winter abusing her to you rather violently” (MS letter to Henry James, Jr., from William James, Houghton Library).
Henry James and Minny Temple 47
I lunched twice with Lizzie Boott and met there both times, Miss Bessie Gray, sister of J. G., whom I found a handsome woman, cordial and attractive. I only saw John Gray himself once, as he went to New York shortly after my arrival to be groomsman for Mr. Jim Higginson. I saw Sargie Perry twice—ditto A. Sedgwick. Sargie has improved, and I liked him much. Arthur did not thrill my soul—but why should he? Miss Dixwell came to see me. I was out. I went to see her. She was to hum, and was satisfactory to me. She gave me one of her embroideries, a good one, representing night and morning. This mark of favor aroused Willy’s jealously—he said she meant it for him, and would fain have taken it from me, but I bore it off triumphantly. When I told W. Holmes that she had given it to me he remarked ‘good lick’—accompanied by the old familiar twinkle of the eye. I had never chanced to hear the elegant expression of approbation before. But you perceive from it, that his style has not been radically changed. He looked well and handsome, and seems to derive much comfort in life from Willy’s society. John Gray made us a little visit, at Pelham, not long ago. It rained all the time. I took him out in a pony-wagon between the showers and shook him up and splashed his clothes, and treated him generally as he had never been treated before—in return, he kissed the baby, at parting, as it had never been kissed before—that is with none of that lingering and caressing fondness that one is apt to indulge in, in kissing babies, but with Libby Gowlay’s kiss, exaggerated tenfold—but you readily imagine how he did it. But he is a most noble gentleman in spite of his not knowing how to kiss! The foregoing has a depraved sound. But I do indeed like him much—better as I know him better. Elly and Temple are safely settled in San Francisco. It is quite within possibility that I may set sail, next Saturday, to join them. The voyage would take three weeks, horrible thought! but on the other side would be soft air and mild climate and fruits and flowers awaiting me.
The baby is too enchanting. By the way, Elly Van Buren Morris has a fine daughter. She is doing well—also the babe. Babe’s name is Bessie Marshall, after Styve’s sister Think of me over the continent—
“When shall we meet again, Dearest and best, Thou going Easterly I, to the West?’ as the song saith. It will-be fun
” Ellen James Van Buren, daughter of Smith Thompson Van Buren, son of President Martin Van Buren and of Ellen King James, who was the sister of Henry James, Sr., and also of Minny Temple’s mother, Catharine Margaret James; Ellen James Van Buren married Stuyvesant Fish Morris, by whom she had five children, the first of whom, Elizabeth ‘Marshall, born Oct. 4, 1869, is the child here mentioned. See Hastings, op. cit, p. 27.
- - mo maa ae
48 American Literature
when we do meet again. Write to me here and if I am at San Francisco it will be sent to me”? Two engagements have just been announced, my friend Fred Jones to Miss Minnie Rawle of Philadelphia, a handsome and brilliant young lady, and Miss Minna Craven of New York to Sydney de Kay! Picture it—think of it! Sydney is just beginning the study of law, from which he hopes to gain a livelihood for himself and beloved. So the nuptials will probably be indefinitely postponed. But what can years of waiting be to Miss Craven, with Sydney at last, for a reward. Sich is life!
My dear, I hope you may henceforth -live in gondolas, since gondolas sometimes make you think of me—so ‘keep a doin’ of it’ if it comes ‘natural.’ I guess it is all right, and even expedient, once in a while. I have had a very good photograph taken of myself lately, one which I meant to send you—but they have all been taken by somebody, and I shall have to wait till some more are struck off. I do hope you are better than when you wrote, and that you will keep on to Rome, and enjoy yourself. I feel much better, now-a-days. Good-bye, Dear Harry— Words is wanting’ to tell you all the affection and sympathy I feel for you. Take care of yourself. Write soon. God bless you.
Your loving cousin, Mary Trempre™
In the light of these letters and of those James wrote to his mother and brother concerning Minny Temple’s death, and in con- sideration of his tribute to her in Notes of a Son and Brother forty years later, it is very possible that his deep feeling for her and her sympathetic, affectionate response comprised the very substance of what he referred to many years later as “the starved romance of my life.”
22 "The California trip was never taken. See Notes of a Son and Brother, pp. 499-502. 7° MS letter to Henry James, Jr., from Mary Temple, Houghton Library.
HOWELLS AND THE COSMOPOLITAN
D. M. REIN Case Institute of Technology
HE ASSOCIATION of Howells with the Cosmopolitan Mag-
azine has not hitherto been explored. Yet it offers biographical facts important to an understanding of his personality and literary career. Delmar Gross Cooke, in his book on Howells, dismissed the association with a single brief statement: Howells “became for a short time editor of the Cosmopolitan (1892), but eventually re- united his fortunes with the house of Harper.”* Oscar W. Firkins, in William Dean Howells (1924), omitted the event completely, and in his article in the Dictionary of American Biography, made only brief mention: “For about six months (1801-92) he edited the Cosmopolitan Magazine.” Other writers repeat the assertion that Howells was editor for six months.”
As a matter of fact, Howells’s editorial connections lasted only two months and he was never really editor, but only associate editor—a distinction which proved crucial. Before, during, and after Howells’s association, the editor with final authority was John Brisben Walker, who both edited and owned the magazine. Mr. Walker was a forceful person with a stubborn will of his own. Before buying the Cosmopolitan, he had been a military adviser in China, had acquired and lost half a million dollars as a manufacturer of iron, had been managing editor of the Pittsburgh Telegraph and of the Washington Chronicle, had developed a successful alfalfa ranch, and had bought, reclaimed, and sold land at a handsome profit. In 1889 he purchased the dying Cosmopolitan Magazine and during the next five years, as editor, made many changes and raised the circulation from 16,000 to 400,000.°
* William Dean Howells (New York, 1922), pp. 29-30. The lack of definite informa- tion concerning Howells’s association with the Cosmopolitan and the possible biographic and literary importance of such information were called to my attention by Professor Lyon N.: Richardson, to whom I am also indebted for valuable specific suggestions.
3 See Alfred Kazin, On Native Grounds (New York, 1942), pp. 3-4. See also Milton Ellis, Louise Pound, and George Weida Spohn, A College Book of American Literature (New York, 1940), II, 454.
3 See Algernon de Vivier Tassin, The Magazine in America (New York, 1916), p. 359.
a ea ee ee EN
iai Nin fame ee
50 American Literature
Caught by the infectious enthusiasm of Walker, and unaware of Walker’s disposition to supervise rigidly all persons under him,
: Howells joined the Cosmopolitan with all the hopes of an editor
who thought his freedom would be reasonably complete. These hopes were certainly supported by the letters Walker was writing to him at that time. In a letter dated December 10, 1891, Walker wrote: “There are advantages in your making a ‘good ready’ and clearing away the work on hand and moreover a longer time will enable you to make your first number one that you will be proud of in every way.”* Howells began planning a future course based on his new association, for it seemed to promise a decisive change in his whole career. In a letter to Charles E. Norton, December 12, 1891, he wrote: |
I fancy that it must have been with something like a shock you learned of the last step I have taken, in becoming editor of this magazine. Nothing was farther from my thoughts when I saw you a few weeks ago. The offer came unexpectedly about the beginning of this month, and in such form that I could not well refuse it, when I had thought it over. It promised me freedom from the anxiety of placing my stories and chaffer- ing about prices, and relief from the necessity of making quantity, as well as full control of the time of publishing them, so that thereafter I can hope to finish each before I begin to print... . Then, the magazine is in such a state that I can hope to do something for humanity as well as the humanities with it. If I cannot, I can give it up, but the outlook is cheerful. ... I am to be associated with the owner, Mr. John Brisben Walker, a man of generous ideals, who will leave me absolute control in literature, and whom I think with in many other matters.”
Several days later, in a letter to his father, Howells expressed similar thoughts, and assumed that the new post would last for years:
I don’t know that I explained in my last the motives that actuated me in accepting the magazine and editorship. I suppose that the life-long habit of being on a salary had something to do with it. Then, though I could sell my stories well, I should have to bargain about each one of them, and I should have to write a great many. Now the magazine work will allow me to write a short one each year, and it will give me
* From an unpublished letter in the Houghton Library, Harvard.
"Mildred Howells (ed.), Life in Letters of William Dean Howells (Garden City, 1928), Tl, 19.
Howells and the Cosmopolitan 51
a change of work. ... The best thing about it is Mr. Walker’s infatuation with his bargain; yet it is terrible, in`a way, to have a man so satisfied with you. He couldn’t be’more so; he might be less.’
The relationship could hardly have begun in an atmosphere of greater harmony. In fact the two men had met over an agreement in social outlook. The circumstances are related by Charles E. L. Wingate in a news letter to the Critic in January of 1892:
Last March Mr. Walker delivered an address before the students of the Catholic University at Washington, and the effect of his bold words upon ‘The Church and Poverty’ was so pronounced that he was led afterwards to put his address in print. In no halting voice he called upon layman and priest to encourage the rich and protect the poor, to learn to produce wealth and to distribute it equitably. In these words, as I am told, Mr. Howells found so much that agreed with his own views that he immediately wrote Mr.. Walker a letter of appreciation. The letter led to a meeting, the meeting to a discussion of business, the discussion to a proposal, and the proposal to the association of the two editors in Cosmopolitan work. . .. An association begun by such a fraternal union in principles ought to be productive of emphatic results.”
How satisfactory the arrangements were to Howells is indicated by Hamlin Garland, who, after discussing the new post with How- ells, reported their conversation at some length in the Boston Tran- script of January, 1892, as reported in the Critic:
It had come to him as a complete surprise, changing many of his plans. Mr. Walker of The Cosmopolitan approached him on the matter by way of asking for a series of essays,® but this seemed too much like the work he had been doing for Harper’s, and which he felt he could no longer do profitably. . . .
Upon his refusal to do that specific work, Mr. Walker asked Mr. Howells to become an editor upon the magazine. This proposition appealed to him in a different way. It did not involve, apparently, any extra writing, but, on the contrary, offered a complete change of work. He gave Mr. Walker’s generous proposition careful study. He at last accepted, on conditions, of course; indeed, it was tendered him practically upon his own terms and arrangement of hours. .
° Ibid., Tl, 20.
7 “Boston Letter,” Critic, XVII, 41 (Jan. 16, 1892).
8 This request was made by Walker in a letter to Howells dated Nov, 18, 1891. The unpublished letter is in the Houghton Library.
52 American Literature
It will bé seen that the change releases him from a great deal of work, .
His forenoons will be reserved as usual for his own writing. The May issue will be the first number of the magazine made up under his charge. This number Mr. Howells will set to work upon soon, and it will be a very notable one, and will forecast the work of the year?
With these apparently happy arrangements Howells prepared for the issue of May, 1892, which was to be his first. He asked Charles E. Norton, Lowell’s literary executor, for some poems by Lowell, and he approached Henry James for material.
Meanwhile, Walker, too, was happily preparing the way for Howells’s entry. Evidently impatient to join the name of Howells to his magazine,” he inserted as frontispiece in the issue of February, 1892, a full-page portrait of Howells with a caption underneath an- nouncing: “On March the first, Mr. Howells will take editorial control of the Cosmopolitan Magazine conjointly with the present editor.”™ In that same issue, he also inserted a laudatory essay, “Mr. Howells and His Work,” by Howells’s good friend, H. H. Boyesen.
As a matter of fact, Howells was not to become an editor until May, as earlier agreed. Late in February, when the March issue was already completed, Howells was still corresponding about the May issue as his “first.” His letter of February 23, 1892, to Henry James not only verifies again the date of his editorship, but indicates the great expectations he still had for his own future on the maga- zine and for the magazine, too, as a leading force in American letters:
Your paper on our dear Balestier is absolutely fit. Nothing could be better.... I shall put it into the May no., which is now the next and my first, and it will appear about April 20th. 50,000 copies of that edition will go to England.... The Cosmopolitan will at once lead all the N. Y. magazines in literary quality; that is not much, but it is a beginning, and I shall count on your help as often as you can give it.”
° Critic, XVII, 28 (Jan. 9, 1892).
10 Walker's unpublished letter of Dec. xo, 1891, indicated his eagerness to have Howells on the staff at an early date.
“ Cosmopolitan Magazine, XII, 386 (Feb., 1892). 12 Mildred Howells, op. cit., Il, 22. -
arene a a ei ar cn tr
Howells and the Cosmopolitan 53
In the entire period preceding the May issue Walker showed his eagerness to please Howells. “If you wish anything done,” he wrote to Howells (April 5, 1892), “make me your clerk for the time being and give me your orders. I will gladly drop everything else.”
The May issue showed a considerable advance in literary quality. It opened with a full-page portrait of Lowell as frontispiece, and devoted the entire opposite page to Lowell’s poem, “The Nobler Lover.” In this issue Howells presented the work of several con- tributors new to the Cosmopolitan: “An Only Son,” a short story by Gertrude Smith, described as the author of “several intensely American and very Western stories which will appear in the course of this year”; “At the Brewery,” a short story by Hamlin Garland; “Asaph,” a short story by Frank R. Stockton; and “The Merit System in Government Appointments,” an article by Theodore Roosevelt. In addition to these new contributors, the May issue con- tinued to publish the works of a number of the best of the older ones, including “Wolcott Balestier,” a memorial tribute by Henry James; “The Passing of Sister Barsett,” a story by Sarah Orne Jewett; “Where Shall Polly Go To School?” an article on education by Ed- ward Everett Hale; and “Concerning Certain American Essayists,” a critical discussion by Brander Matthews. Howells himself con- tributed “Evening Dress,” a farce. The issue as a whole contained about twice as much fiction as usual.
In the June issue there was a decline in the amount of literary material. The issue for July looked even more like the Cosmopoli- tan before the advent of Howells. As a matter of fact, Howells was no longer an editor of the magazine. His connection was severed at the end of June, after he had served for two issues. On June 30, 1892, Howells wrote an explanation to his father:
I may as well tell you now that I have broken with my fellow editor, and shall cease to be connected “officially” with the Cosmopolitan after today, though I may arrange to write regularly for it. My name will come off the title page after August. It was a great mistake ever to let it go on, but I feel great relief in the result. Some time I will tell you all the why and wherefore; but in large it was hopeless incompatibility.
I’m getting on finely with my story, and I guess I shan’t starve.
*° From an unpublished letter in the Houghton Library. 14 Mildred Howells, op. cit, II, 24.
54 American Literature
The “fellow editor,’ Walker, apparently had his own way of doing things, and when he saw that Howells did not fit into his plans, the association had to be ended. However, the unhappy sit- uation was glossed over. Howells did continue to write for the magazine, publishing in November of the same year the first in- stallment of “A Traveler from Altruria,” which was to run in con- secutive issues for two years. This literary work served as explana- tion for Howells’s retirement as editor.” It might be added that Howells, in addition to “A Traveler from Altruria,” continued to write occasionally for the Cosmopolitan and to correspond personally with Walker.
In 1897 Walker, in an editorial review of the progress of his magazine, proudly recalled Howells’s association and gave the same explanation: “William Dean Howells was associate editor for a considerable period, resigning to give his time to the famous ‘Al- trurian’ papers, ...”*°
In the years that followed, Mr. Walker continued to edit the Cosmopolitan with a firm hand. Various observers have com- mented upon his tenacity of opinion as editor and his strict super- vision of all matters related to the magazine.’ Mr. C. H. Towne, who, in the years after Howells, joined the staff of Cosmopolitan as Walker’s secretary, declared:
Nothing could be accomplished without Mr. Walkers O.K., and manuscripts were held up awaiting his decision, to the horror of us all... . Nothing went into his austere pages unless he thoroughly approved of it.’®
It becomes quite clear, as one reads about Walker, that he was simply not the kind of person who could share his leadership in running the magazine, especially with one who, like Howells, proved to have editorial goals different from his own.
16 See the Critic, XVIII, 167 (Sept. 24, 1892). After announcing Howells’s forth- coming series, the Critic continued: “As no man can successfully edit a magazine and write its leading department as well, Mr. Howells has been relieved of all editorial work by Mr. Walker, the proprietor of the monthly, who has really been its editor ever since the property passed into his hands.”
16 Cosmopolitan, XXII, 475 (Sept, 1897).
37 Flora Mai Holly, “Notes on Some American Magazine Editors,” Bookman, XII,
359 (Dec. 1900). 18 Charles H. Towne, Adventures in Editing (New York, 1926), pp. 35, 40.
Howells and the Cosmopolitan 55
Mr. Towne tells a story about the two men which, if not true, is at least significant, perhaps especially so when one recalls How- ells’s plan to keep his mornings for himself:
Mr. Walker had curious methods of work. ... In the first place, he insisted that everyone in his employ—no matter who he was—should be at his desk not later than eight o'clock in the morning.... There was a legend to the effect that once, when William Dean Howells was editor of the Cosmopolitan, he found a note upon his desk one morning, requesting that he report for duty at the unconscionable hour of eight o'clock. Yes, even Mr. Howells. . .. We used to smile at the story, but I am sure it was true.’
19 Ibid., p. 16.
THE IDEALISTIC NOVELS OF ROBERT HERRICK
BLAKE NEVIUS University of California at Los Angeles
I
OBERT HERRICK’S principal contribution to American
literature was made during what is generally considered an undistinguished period in fiction. Except for the emergence of Dreiser and Edith Wharton, and perhaps Ellen Glasgow, the first decade and a half of the present century is notable for the number of second-rate talents it produced. By 1903 Howells and Twain had done their important work, Garland and Fuller had, it seemed, written themselves out, and Crane and Norris were dead. Nearly a decade was to pass before Dreiser’s reputation was established. In that interval Herrick wrote what Newton Arvin has described, per- haps too enthusiastically, as “three of the most impressive novels in our literature”:* The Common Lot (1904), The Memoirs of an American Citizen (1905), and Together (1908). They represent the crown of his achievement. Warmly saluted by Howells and by the forgotten journalistic critics of the day, they not only advanced him to the front rank of contemporary novelists, but were among the few novels of the period to help sustain the belief, here and abroad, that America could produce a serious and mature litera- ture. Upon them for the most part rests what reputation Herrick has been allowed to retain, a reputation preserved mainly by social historians, who value the novels on grounds other than their artistic merit.
It is not with this well-known trio, however, nor with the earlier or later realistic novels, that the present study is concerned. I hope to modify the critical acceptance of Herrick as a realist by calling attention to a division of his fiction which for the past thirty years has been generally disregarded. About a quarter of his work, Her- rick once estimated, “does not conform to the harsh lines of Real-
+ “Homage to Robert Herrick,” New Republic, UXXXIL, 93 (March 6, 1935).
The Idealistic Novels of Robert Herrick 57
> 992
ism.” This important segment comprises the so-called “idealistic” novels (the term is Herrick’s), which were of all his works those nearest his heart, although, as he reluctantly admitted, they held no appeal for the public.* In this category he placed The Real World (1901), A Life for a Life (1910), The Healer (1911), Clark’s Field (1914), and his popular short story “The Master of The Inn” (1907).
It is by means of these curious, overwrought, and on the whole un- successful stories, if at all, that we come to know the real Herrick, for in them he gave unabashed expression to the mysticism that so indefinably colors his realistic novels.
He had always been at best an uncomfortable, somewhat acci- dental guest in the camp of the realists. The same passion for truth that landed him in their midst ultimately took him from it. He reacted first against the sentimentality of the romantic novelists and then against the cramping objectivity of the realists. “I feel within me a number of selves clamoring for expression,” he once wrote, “and no one creed will satisfy me.” And he went on to say: |
Realism did not satisfy my whole nature, did not satisfactorily explain all life. There was something within me, as in every pure-blooded New Englander, of the mystic, the transcendentalist, the idealist."
That “something” it was, particularly as it found expression in the idealistic novels, that lends to his work its most characteristic tone.
II
It is beyond my aim to define at all closely the nature of Herrick’s realism. There are, as a matter of fact, few statements in either his published or unpublished writings to indicate what he under- stood positively by the term. In its cognitive function he regarded
*The statement is from “Myself,” a long unpublished autobiographical fragment, written ca. 1913 and included in the large collection of Herrick manuscripts recently presented to the Harper Memorial Library of the University of Chicago by Robert Morss ‘Lovett, Herrick’s lifelong friend and faculty colleague. All subsequent references to manu- script materials are to this collection.
3 See Herrick’s statement in C. C. Baldwin's The Men Who Make Our Novels (rev. ed.; New York: Dodd Mead & Co., 1925), p. 249.
* The category is not hard and fast. The Healer, for instance, is described by Herrick in “Myself” as “a mingling of my two moods,—realism and idealism”; and it is clear that Together, which was revised about the same time Herrick wrote “The Master of The Inn,” although primarily a realistic novel, concludes on an idealistic strain.
5 “Myself.”
5 Vol, 21
- ry
58 American Literature
it as the intellectual, as opposed to the emotional (i.e., romantic) response to life.” As a literary method, it was “the attempt to create the illusion of actual and contemporary life” and, in a narrower sense, omitting the question of subject matter, “the effort to render surfaces with a precision that will make them identifiable to the observer.” These definitions, taken from different contexts, pro- vide the only explicit statement we have of Herrick’s working philosophy of realism. Reduced to its barest elements, that phi-
losophy seems to insist only that the novelist deal with the known,
the actual, the contemporary, in such a way that the truth he wishes to represent will be verifiable by his audience. For this reason, there is also in his theory a regard for what Frank Norris called “the type of normal life” that led him to ring innumerable changes on the idea that “the obvious and commonplace . . . remain for the artist his chiefest treasurer-house.”” It is clear from his criticism, and from the evidence of nis novels, that he was content to work within the established tradition.
It is equally clear, however, that unlike some of his fellow novel- ists he never regarded realism as the one vital approach to the study of contemporary life. The late nineteenth-century disagreement be- tween realists and romanticists was, he thought, absurd. Neither side had an option on the truth. “There is no ‘pure Realism, ” he declared. “And the controversy about Realism and Romance... is like one of those ancient theological disputes, largely a clatter about words, all loosely defined.”
Consistent realism can be found only in the work of inferior and un- imaginative artists, because they are more easily satisfied with surfaces, and a world of surfaces is the nearest approach to the absolute in a sub- jective universe. Conversely it may be said that consistent romance easily becomes nonsense, and human beings striving on the whole for the use of their intelligence quickly surfeit with undiluted romance."
8 Herrick MSS, “The Romantic Picture,” an unpublished lecture, delivered on tour, 1924-1925.
T Herrick MSS, classroom lecture (1908) on the technique of the novel.
* Herrick MSS, “Telling The Truth in Fiction,” an unpublished lecture dated May 3, 1922.
? Herrick, “The Background of the American Novel,” Yale Review, N.s. Ill, 228 (Jan., 1914).
70 “Myself.”
** Herrick, “The New Novel,” New Republic, XXX, literary supplement, 18 (April 12, 1922).
The Idealistic Novels of Robert Herrick 59
He resented being typed as a realist. Recalling the still-birth of his first idealistic novel, The Real World, he complained that a novelist was too blithely catalogued by the reviewers:
If he has shown that he can do “realism” of a certain sort fairly well, they pigeonhole him forever as a “Realist” .. . and woe to the author who ventures to disturb their conviction about himself. He is trifling with himself if he betrays a romantic or idealistic tendency later on... .”
Moreover, when he spoke of realism, it was usually to suggest its limitations. “The best realism is not always the deepest truth,” he was fond of pointing out. Or again: “No novelist who fails to stamp his material with more than mere reality can hope to live beyond the day.”
The roots of his dissatisfaction with realism lie embedded in his inheritance and early training. There was never any question in his mind regarding the former. “My mother’s mother was a Peabody from the good old stock of Salem Peabodys,” he noted in his mem- oirs, “and her father had been a Salem Manning....
Then there were Hales, Palmers, Welchs, Killums,—all good puritan families-—whose blood in some way I‘had received. In fact, so far as I know, since 1636 when the Herrick brothers, six of them, scattered them- selves along the New England seacoast . . . there has never been a drop of other than puritan blood in my ancestry. I do not mention it in any sort of pride or self-congratulation, but with a due regard to its significance for my outlook upon life. It must be Puritan with all that that implies.
Puritan it was, and it is Herrick’s puritan distrust of materialism that sets the tone and provides the themes of his fiction. His realism, even in the case of Te Memoirs of an American Citizen, is insep- arable from morality, although it is a morality conceived in the broadest sense. “The New England that I knew,” he reminds us, “was strenuously intellectual and serious”; and as for its literature, “mere feeling, mere beauty, was not sufficient excuse for creation: there must be also something of ‘mental improvement’ in it.”** It
12 “Myself,”
13 «Yelling The Truth in Fiction,” loc. cit.
™ Chicago Sunday Tribune, Feb. 15, 1914, sec. 8, p. 3. 18 “Myself,”
1° Thid.
60 American Litera’ re
was an attitude that he early adopted and never abandoned. There were times, especially during the first twenty years of his career, when he looked regretfully upon his inheritance, acknowledging that the puritan preoccupation with sin had brought New England culture to a level of spiritual impotency, a fact that he claimed to understand “as only a New Englander who has had dim perceptions of the ancestral blight within his own veins can understand it.”* Nevertheless, giving way in later years to his habitual irritation in the presence of the “new” novel represented by Joyce and Heming- way, he could defend puritanism vigorously, if somewhat wrong- headedly, against its detractors:
With all its errors, at least, it was concerned with the inner life of men and thus aided rather than repressed the creation of literature. But for a generation or more there has not been sufficient puritanism in Ameri- can character or manners to inhibit any national instinct for expression, yet this spiritual release so much desired by Mr. Mencken and his band has not flowered into anything more beautiful or significant than the drunken revelry of “The Sun Also Rises.”
The years he spent at Harvard, from 1885 to 1890, in no way diminished this native intellectual and moral earnestness. To what he called “the Puritan yet broad-minded ideal of Cambridge life” he gave his permanent allegiance. But it was his introduction to Chicago, when in 1893 he came west to teach at William Rainey Harper’s raw new university on the South Side, that called forth all the prejudices of his New England nature and set off the reaction that was to culminate in the idealistic novels. It was one thing to deal with subtle questions of moral conduct within the closed atmos- phere of Cambridge, as he had done in his undergraduate stories and in his first, unpublished novel, but quite another thing to pit his puritan conscience against the blustering, impenitent materialism of Chicago. What he observed of the commercialism of existence in Chicago, which epitomized the American way of life in its. newest stage of development, struck him with such revelatory force that it provided the raison d’étre of most of his subsequent writing. The crude Western metropolis gave him a theme which he was to
*7 “New England and the Novel,” Nation, CXI, 325 (Sept., 18, 1920). 18 “Why American Literature Is Insignificant,” article in the English section of the Yiddish newspaper Forward, March 4, 1928, p. 1.
The ldealistic Novels of Robert Herrick 61
use not only in those novels which dealt with Chicago life but in those which never trespassed on the Chicago scene. It may be said, in effect, that he spent the rest of his life resolving Chicago’s claim upon his excessively sensitive moral imagination. When in 1920 he wrote his essay on “New England and the Novel,” he must have been thinking in terms of his own experience:
It may be said that the New Englander thrives, once [you] get him beyond the severities of his own lean dooryard, and expresses himself with a renewed vigor.... The transmigrations and transformations of the Puritan offer an alluring subject.”
Like most of the Chicago novelists, Herrick realized that the Chicago of his day provided the best example for the social realist of the emerging urban and industrial civilization, and that if in its energy, its bigness, and its optimism it furnished a vindication of the American spirit, in its materialism it also furnished a warning. But he went further than his contemporaries. In the face of this materialism he persisted, like his puritan forbears, in holding men individually responsible for their own actions. Believing as he did that reform must start from within the individual and that no mere revision of our institutions, no matter how sweeping, can realize the goal of human brotherhood, he was unable to subscribe to the program of social betterment that ‘captured the enthusiasm of the muckraking novelists. As a result of this attitude he remained a fairly lonely figure in his time.
This campaign for a morality centered in the individual, evolving from his perception of an ultimate reality of the spirit, frequently led him, as might be expected, to abandon realism as a literary method, declaring that it was too preoccupied with a world of sur- faces and shadows. “The realist,” he complained, “takes the im- permanent for the ultimate, the immediate aim for the final aim,” whereas the idealist reaches out “beyond the accidental, the exterior, to some inner, hidden, universal truth,” which he endeavors to symbolize and externalize.”” And it was in this latter role that he wrote what, in defiance of the majority opinion, he considered his most important novels.
1° Loe. cit, p. 323. 2° Herrick MSS, “The Idealistic Solution,” an unpublished lecture, delivered on tour, 1924-1925.
62 American Literature
Tit
In contrast to his remarks on realism, Herrick left a fairly definite statement of what he understood by “idealism” and how it influ- enced his fiction. Idealism, he announced, “is the search for truth in its widest application.””* As opposed to realism and romanticism, it is the effort “to get at the essence of character and experience rather than to deal with appearance [realism] or with fancies .[romanticism].”” It is dissatisfied with the essentially meaning- less, un-co-ordinated facts of existence which furnish the sole ma- terial of realism. Idealistic literature, then, is that which
springs from the conviction that the essential in all human phenomena is the spirit, the soul beneath its appearance, not a new belief by any means, but the direct method used in its expression, the bold reversion to type in place of the individual, the experiments in allegory and symbol to express this spirit world, are fresh.”
Elsewhere he wrote:
Literary art that presents character and life under the influence of large, uplifting, and ideal motives and impulses, apart from reality, is idealistic. All great art has something of the idealistic mood.”
It is easy to discern the application of these ideas in the novels which Herrick designated as “idealistic.” All of them more or less faith- fully observe the three basic requirements: (1) the action is rein- forced by symbol and allegory, (2) the characters are types as nearly as possible universal in their significance, and (3) they are motivated by broad humanitarian ideals.” The first and second of these con- ventions have to do simply with the literary method, but the third hints at the fundamental purpose of Herrick’s idealism. | The idealist he characterizes as a person with an imagination of the possible and faith in its attainment; his task is “to mould, at least to try to mould, the human consciousness of his- day into new patterns.”*° This was the faith of Emerson, Thoreau, and Whit-
a Thid.
33 Thid.
23 Ihid. 5
M Herrick MSS, classroom lecture (1908) on the technique of the novel.
3 Thus, in a manuscript note dated Sept, roro, Herrick speaks of The Healer and A Life for a Life as “idealistic romances so-called . . . where I deal with large spiritual themes and the characters are types, the action almost always symbolic... .”
*° “Fiction and Ideas,” Bookman, LXIX, 548 (July, 1929).
The Idealistic Novels of Robert Herrick 63
man, which, almost alone among a later, more skeptical generation of Americans, Herrick tried to sustain. His constant theme is the perfectibility of human nature. In creating the modern novel, he argues repeatedly, “the first falsehood which we must meet and over- come is the easy assumption that ‘human nature remains always the same,’”*’ This, he adds, is the short view, the fatal realistic view.
The progress toward an ideal of human nature is the conscious effort to adapt mankind perfectly to its end on earth—whatever the disagreement regarding that end may be. But this constant remold- ing. of human destiny must be accomplished through the selfless effort of individuals, working not in groups, but singly. For this reason, in the novels we are considering, Herrick dramatizes his theory in individual terms: he follows the lonely ‘idealist in his struggle toward some visionary goal. “What man needs,” he warns,
is a superior sort of average citizen, not a superior sort of governing class. In other words, man must improve his breed, chiefly morally, spiritually. He must beget supermen. Yes, back to Nietzsche, who has been wrongly interpreted and reviled.78
Thus, the protagonists of his two most representative idealistic novels, Jack Pemberton in The Real World and Hugh Grant in A Life for a Life, are of this “superior sort of average citizen.” They are exceptional heroes, who could exist, we sometimes feel, only in the imagination. They do not succumb to the temptations of ordinary men, because they have trained their wills to a point where it is possible for them to offset the pressure of convention and even of the hereditary factors which seek to destroy them. Single-minded idealists both, they are willing to sacrifice their personal interests to a high conception of human destiny which they try to work out in their own lives.
IV
Herrick’s idealism asserted itself when he found himself, as he did periodically, at odds with the reading public, when, tired of the clamorous, misguided objections of the press arising from his frank
*' Herrick MSS, “The Workshop of the Modern Novelist,” an unpublished lecture, delivered on tour, 1924-1925. *8 The Idealistic Solution,” loc. cit.
64 American Literature
treatment of the American scene, he was driven inward upon him- self—forced to take refuge, as he says, “in that other half of my literary nature, the more abstract, the more poetic side.””” When realism failed to satisfy either him or the public (although for widely different reasons), he turned to idealism; and when the public refused to accept him in this role, he reluctantly took up realism again.
This is the pattern of reaction from The Real World (1901) through Clark's Field (1914). “Disgusted by the notorious reception accorded to ‘The Web of Life, ” Herrick recalled,
I began that very summer .. . a new story, which was to appear later as “The Real World” .... This story in its conception, in my feeling about it, was to be something utterly removed from the literary realism that had brought me into two sorts of trouble with my two previous novels,5¢
The writing took him nearly two years, but a happy union of mood and circumstance made it the most satisfying creative experience he was to know." The Real World was his admitted favorite among his novels, and when it failed to capture a public, his dis- appointment was keener than usual.
The third of his published novels, it reveals as none of its pre- decessors had done the fundamental bias of his morality. Central to all his fiction, never quite lost sight of even in the inferior novels, is the problem of the will. Like his puritan ancestors, Herrick insists that the individual will, rightly organized and directed, is the means by which man attains the knowledge of ultimate reality. Misdirected and enfeebled, it is also the means whereby he sinks deeper into illusion. It is the corruption and eventual rehabilitation of the will, or, to state the idea in equivalent terms, the progress from illusion-to reality, which from the very beginning provides the dominant interest in his novels; but it is in The Real World that the relationship between will and insight is first made explicit.
The discovery of the inner world where alone truth resides is preceded by the inevitable puritan conflict between will and appe- tite. It is the attainment of this “real” world which constitutes sal-
26 “Myself.” °° Thid, 31 Ibid.
The Idealistic Novels of Robert Herrick 65
vation, and it is only through the struggle of the moral will to overcome evil that salvation is possible. Jack Pemberton’s dis- covery of the transforming power of the will marks the turning point of The Real World. “The world’s unreal,” Herrick had writ- ten on the flyleaf of one of his notebooks for that novel, “except when created each man for himself by strong deeds, strong thoughts, strong hopes.’”**
The novel traces the spiritual growth of the semi-autobiographic hero, Jack Pemberton,” as he passes through a succession of “unreal” worlds—the drab world of his boyhood, the academic world, the world of sensual gratification, and the world of material success— in his quest of final reality. Even as a boy of twelve, whose life is made wretched by the poverty of his home, the bickering of his parents, and the sense of class distinction forced on him by a small New England town, he cannot escape the feeling—a rather pre- cocious one, to be sure—that he inhabits an unreal world and that there is another beyond his reach that is more harmonious. This consciousness of another world establishes a dichotomy of experience which is to persist throughout his early manhood, until finally the dilemma is solved by means of a crisis in his relationship with Elsie Mason, a worldly-minded woman who, having married unhappily, is trying to revive Pemberton’s old passion for her. Throughout the story she has exercised a strong fascination for the young idealist, by which Herrick intended rather obviously to represent the at- traction of material values. To bring this warmed-over affair to a boil, Elsie arranges for a tête-à-tête at her home, sees to it that the rendezvous is subtly ornamented for a seduction, and makes a final, eloquent bid for his love. In the melodramatic sequel, Pemberton puts her off by an incredible effort of self-discipline, the result of
which is his discovery, at last, of the real world, the world “made afresh by that act of will which had torn him.”
Something created! Something real! Something his own! Out of the shadows of things, out of the broken ideals, the wooden dummies with which he had labored so many years, a world seemed to be born,
*8 Herrick MSS, first manuscript notebook for The Real World.
55 The opening chapters of the novel, for instance, correspond in detail to the opening chapters of a. personal memoir which Herrick wrote in 1931. A second, astonishingly: close
parallel may be found in the beginning chapters of Waste (1924). *4The Real World (New York, 1901), p. 321.
66 American Literature
a new world that was true to the touch, where he could live and work untormented by shadows. He felt the eternal conviction of will, un- debatable and undemonstrable,—the will that shapes and makes; the will that creates the real from the unreal; the will that out of pain and labor gives peace.*°
The denouement follows a pattern established in the earlier novels. After the fashion of most of Herrick’s heroes, Jack Pemberton gives up his profession to enlist in what he conceives to be a selfless, humanitarian cause—in this case, joining a former college friend in the battle to save a paternalistic Western railroad from Eastern mo- nopolists—and later marries the girl who realizes for him the ideal vision of the beloved which has called to him since he was a boy and which in his blindness he had sought to identify with Elsie.
The story of Hugh Grant in A Life for a Life, Herrick’s second and most experimental idealistic novel, is essentially the story of Jack Pemberton retold, except that the hero, while triumphing on the spiritual plane, is tragically defeated on the temporal. Hugh Grant, within sight of the goal of his material ambitions, is granted a sudden insight into the morality of a commercial society and, as a result, experiences the inevitable reaction of a Herrick protagonist against the whole trend of his existence. He abandons a promising career, gives up the woman he loves (Alexandra Arnold, like Elsie Mason, is a thoroughgoing materialist), sinks into obscurity, and is near death when the city in which his ambition has played itself out is torn apart by an earthquake. In the fire that follows he meets his death trying to save a prostitute. The survivors gather in an improvised camp outside the city. Among them is Alexandra ‘Arnold, who, having finally taken fire from the vision of the martyred Hugh Grant, is preparing to devote her life to good works. Even so bald a synopsis of the action (granted, unfortunately, that it emphasizes mainly Herrick’s imaginative deficiencies) may sug- gest its allegorical possibilities.
The novels that preceded Æ Life for a Life had employed a limited, extremely conventional symbolism to express three or four leading ideas. In the death of the child, for instance—an event which recurs often in Herrick’s novels—we have the symbol of the spiritual and emotional death of the parents’ marriage. Even more
35 Thid., p. 322.
The Idealistic Novels of Robert Herrick 67
prominent is the fog symbolism, first introduced in The Real World, where, as in subsequent novels, it signifies illusion and unreality. Throughout the story the mist appears at moments preceding a change in Jack Pemberton’s fortunes, blotting out the old world which has proved unreal and presaging his entrance into a new world, which in its turn may disappear into the fog. Herrick’s trite handling of dream symbolism has been mentioned in connec- tion with The Real World: in novel after novel it takes the form of the idealist’s youthful vision of the beloved which influences his search for a meaning to life, a device he had used as early as 1888 in one of his more self-conscious Harvard Monthly stories. Finally, for his climaxes Herrick outdid the Victorian novelists in the use of conflagrations, which rather feebly symbolized the spiritual purga- tion to which his leading characters were invariably forced to sub- mit. All of these basic symbols except the first reappear in 4 Life for a Life. None of them has the quality of personal emotion or the suggestive indefiniteness of association which distinguish the use of symbolism in modern fiction. In their very literal rendering of spiritual truths they are more like props lifted from inferior allegory, and they suffer invariably from Herrick’s habit of calling attention to their meaning.
In A Life for a Life Herrick for the first time seriously attacked the problem of allegory, utilizing, as he remarked, “the stuff of the modern world, the very pressing everyday world.”** His principal characters are representative of general types. Hugh Grant is the idealist; Alexander Arnold, the materialist. Arnold’s three chil- dren, in their relations to him, represent the conventional attitudes toward materialism: Alexandra embraces its philosophy no less willingly than her father; one son, a follower of Hindu mysticism known as the Prophet, emphasizes the attitude of religious with- drawal; another, the bearded Anarch, is the voice of social protest, often, to Herrick’s ears, strident and fanatical in its tone, calling as it does for a revolution in the social structure rather than in human nature. The minor characters, however, do not have the value of general truths or attitudes. They are stock figures in a commercial society—the lawyer Talbot, the senator Dexter, the publisher Gos- som. the university president Butterfield, the bank president Whiting
Be “Myself.”
68 American Literature
—and like Howells’s summer hotel guests in 4 Traveler from Altruria they are all ranged on the side of big business, as hirelings of Alexander Arnold.
In order to adapt the familiar and characteristic features of the American scene to the uses of allegory, Herrick had to invent his own symbols. Hugh Grant’s experience in the City, typical of the experience of the idealist in modern industrial society, is associated with certain landmarks, the Success School, the Sewing Loft, the Sweet Factory, the Good Deeds Office, the Bank of the Republic— “each had its significance for the youth, became in its way a part of him”? Herricks mind, imaginatively rather unendowed, worked in the most obvious paths. One had simply to capitalize the words “Bank” or “Factory,” and similarly such abstractions as “Ambition,” “Authority,” and “Success,” to give them the force of symbols.
Although Herrick blamed the artistic failure of A Life for a Life on the contemporaneousness of his parable, a better cause lay in his inability to carry out his allegorical intention completely. The story alternates between two modes of representation, between the drab realism of the suburban episodes and the allegory of the fabu- lous, consciously Dantesque pilgrimage of Hugh Grant and the Anarch; and, consequently, it must be regarded as an allegory containing unresolved realistic elements. “What is it,” Herrick once asked, echoing the bewildered reader’s query, “this amorphous novel, neither realism nor good red romance?” And his unsatisfac- tory answer illustrates as well as anything the peculiar weakness of the novel, a weakness arising from the unequal struggle of Herrick’s imagination with the large, vague shapes which he tried to subdue in his allegory:
I wrote of Youth and Manhood, of the Foundling who having con- quered life then voluntarily abandoned all the personal advantages of the conflict; of Beauty that learns too late the lesson of life. I wrote also of Revolt, in the form of an Anarch, who was son to the man of Power and goes down to death with him in Hate. Also of the dispossessed in our social system in the figure of a woman of the streets, whose little worthless spark of life was cherished by the man who scorned the powerful.*®
t A Life for a Life (New York, 1910}, p. 78. 38 “Myself.”
The Idealistic Novels of Robert Herrick 69
The same diffuseness of intention, the same evidence of ideas super- ficially grasped, and the same appalling rhetoric may be found in the novel. If, as Herrick claimed, “it contains in its forgotten pages much of the best writing I have ever done or ever can hope to do””” (a statement we should be permitted to question), it also contains a large portion of his worst. When it failed with the public, it seemed to Herrick “that never again could he feel such fervor, such seriousness about anything, would never make the effort to go deep down into the womb of things.” It was a passing mood, he admitted, but a very real one, and it indicates how much of himself he had put into the book.
What the novel amounts to finally is a forceful, if overwrought statement of most of the characteristic ideas brought forward in his previous books. Its importance resides in its affirmation of the doctrine of individual responsibility, the point to which Herrick always returned in his quest for a solution to the problem of the idealist in modern society. Hugh Grant, like Jack Pemberton, Eric Holden in The Healer, and Jarvis Thornton in Waste, is one of those “special souls who are willing to leave the game, to renounce winning” in the interests of human progress.
In the realistic novels, no less than in the idealistic, the theme is one of personal revolt against the conditions of life, with the simple difference that the end is, more often than not, one of compromise. Here is where the rebels of the realistic novels, notably Adela Anthon in The Gospel of Freedom (1898) and Howard Sommers in The Web of Life (1900), differ from those of the idealistic. The former look for their salvation in a change of environment, occupa- . tion, marital status, or class identity; the latter look within them- selves, realizing that freedom is an individual spiritual concern largely independent of external circumstances, and so manage, through an intense effort of the will, to achieve a kind of victory attractive only to the idealist.
The whole of Herrick’s criticism of American society is mean- ingless unless he can make us believe that the individual can to a large extent shape his own destiny. It was his complaint against
3? Thid.
© Thid. “4 Life for a Life, p. 427.
70 American Literature
Zola, Hardy, and Norris that “their report of humanity tended to belittle the power and beauty of the individual, to subordinate him as a spiritual being to his physical and social environment.’ His whole viewpoint is regulated by two assumptions: that in matters of ethical conduct the individual must be held responsible, and that no interpretation of life that 1s wholly materialistic—that fails to take into account the spiritual aspirations of man—can be considered adequate.
In his eulogy of Hugh Grant, one of the characters in A Life for a Life gives us the most complete statement in any of the novels of Herrick’s particular vision:
To break the circle of ideas that dominate men ... that was what Hugh Grant believed must be done. The vicious circle was broken here for thousands by an act of supreme force from without [a reference to the earthquake]. But it must be done singly, individually, each with himself and those nearest his influence. The great end cannot come through political action, by theory or programme, by any division of the spoils, any readjustment of the laws, but only by Will—the individual good will to renounce, working against the evil will to possess... .%
If there is a single text to be found in all of Herrick’s novels, this is it. *? Herrick MSS, “The Realistic Picture,” an unpublished lecture, delivered on tour,
1924-1925. “8 P, 427.
D n a aiina aaan RE anaa rara eee e -
WILLA CATHER’S NOVELS OF THE FRONTIER:
A STUDY IN THEMATIC SYMBOLISM!
EDWARD A. BLOOM AND LILLIAN D. BLOOM Brown University Rhode Island State College
I
HERE IS LITTLE critical dispute today over Willa Cather’s
position as a first-rate American novelist. Despite this agree- ment, few other contemporary novelists have been so consistently damned by faint praise; nor have many other novelists been so consistently evaluated by means of a single fixed interpretation of the author’s purpose. Because of at least two important factors, a novel may convey and absorb a variety of meanings: the most essential quotient is the author’s skill in the manipulation of his creative framework; another is the reader’s experience, for each brings to the work he is reading his own power of intellect, intensity of feeling, and weight of experience. Miss Cather’s specialized readers have been many, among them Clifton Fadiman, Lionel Trilling, Louis Kronenberger, Alfred Kazin, Maxwell Geismar, Percy H. Boynton, and E. K. Brown.’ With the exception of the last two critics, each of the others has for the most part tended to evaluate her work primarily by the standards—complex though they may be—of a social historian. Consequently, Miss Cather
*Each of the novels examined in this study is in whole or in part directly related to Miss Cather’s idea of the frontier. For permission to quote from the works of Willa Cather, we wish to acknowledge our indebtedness to the following publishers: to Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston and New York, for permission to quote from O Pioneers! (1913), The Song of the Lark (1915), My Antonia (1918); to Alfred A. Knopf, New York, for permission to quote from One of Ours (1922), A Lost Lady (1923), The Professor's House (1925), Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927), Shedows on the Rock (1931), Not Under Forty (1936).
Louis Kronenberger, “Willa Cather,” Bookman, LXXIV, 134-140 (Oct, 1931); Clifton Fadiman, “Willa Cather: The Past Recaptured,” Nation, CXXXV, 563-565 (Dec. 7, 1932); Lionel Trilling, “Willa Cather,” New Republic, XC, 10.13 (Feb. 10, 1937); Alfred Kazin, “Elegy and Satire: Willa Cather and Ellen Glasgow,” On Native Grounds (New York, 1942), pp. 247-257; Maxwell Geismar, “Willa Cather: Lady in the Wilderness,” The Last of the Provincials (Boston, 1947), pp. 153-222; Percy H. Boynton, “Willa Cather,” Some Contemporary Americans (Chicago, 1924), pp. 162-177; E. K. Brown, “Willa Cather and the West,” University of Toronto Quarterly, V, 544-566 (July, 1936).
PN ne TI GY AA HUNAN ttl tata
72 American Literature
emerges, according to their tenets, as the novelist of a reactionary agrarian movement, an escapist unable to deal with the problems of a progressive society, a “malicious” commentator upon a new American materialism. Such evaluations may or may not be justi- fied; but certainly they are limited. The critical weakness of. Miss Cather’s interpreters stems from their divorce of the content and form of the novels. The critic must be concerned not only with what is being said, but with the how and why of its saying. The divorce is a dangerous short cut, and its weakening effects have been written large over Willa Cather’s reputation. Very few of Miss Cather’s critics have attempted to see the over-all pattern of her novels, their profound basis of moral values which gives them uni- versality of theme, their classical unity and selectivity of details which enable the writer to co-ordinate structure and moral mean- ing. For Miss Cather, “the design is the story and the story is the design.”*
The timeless frontiers of the American continent have given Miss Cather her most significant creative materials. In her novels which are concerned with the frontier, the clue to both “design” and “story” is the seeming simplicity which characterizes them. This is a deceptive simplicity since it emerges not from naiveté but from her deliberate and conscious theory of art. According to Miss Cather, “The higher processes of art are all processes of simplifica- tion. The novelist must learn to write, and then he must unlearn it; just as the modern painter learns to draw, and then learns when utterly to disregard his accomplishment... .”* In short, Willa Cather derives her simplicity from the effort to subordinate all de- tails and all subsidiary meanings to what she terms a “higher and truer effect.”> While she frequently—particularly in her descrip- tions—appears unnecessarily rhetorical, she presents a general im- pression of casual unaffectedness in her writing. Nevertheless, Willa Cather writes purposefully in all her novels of the frontier, directing her talents in each to the exposition of one lofty theme and always arriving, with varying success, at her ultimate moralistic goal. In the fulfilment of her aim, Miss Cather is singularly impressed by the
3 “Miss Jewett,” Not Under Forty, pp. 77-78. ““The Novel Démeublé,” Not Under Forty, pp. 48-49. 5 Ibid.
Willa Cather’s Novels of the Frontter 73
artistic principle enunciated by the elder Dumas, who said that “to make a drama, a man needed one passion, and four walls.”®
By evidence of her own often-repeated statements, Willa Cather centers her frontier novels about a single “passion” or theme, char- acterized by “persistence, survival, recurrence in the author’s mind.” That this single theme should “have ‘teased’ the mind for years” is no psychological or intellectual aberration. Indeed, according to I. A. Richards, “when a writer has found a theme or image which fixes a point of relative stability in the drift of experience, it is not to be expected that he will avoid it. Such themes are a means of orientation.” Thus, Miss Cather found the “point of relative stability” in the universal theme of man’s perpetual pilgrimage and struggle to find an ethical ideal, or in that of the barriers that cir- cumvent his attainment of that end.
Part of the novelist’s art, Miss Cather well realized, is to associate and to make clear a moral purpose with each tale that is related. She therefore presents characters and situations that do more than form the framework of a story; they represent large and broad issues that she has observed in her experiences and readings and that she believes to be true. Each of her novels to be considered in this discussion, then, becomes in whole or in part an allegory built upon the one dominating theme mentioned above. By allegory we do not mean an arbitrary, static diagram of point-to-point equations; rather we wish merely to make clear that the surface narrative in Miss Cather’s novels is connected with a background meaning. Since allegories, with some remarkable exceptions like those of Franz Kafka, are essentially simple in treatment, Miss Cather’s avowed aim of simplicity is decidedly to the point. Far from pre- senting depths of personality, her characters offer a flat surface; her situations, in so far as they are counterparts of specific occurrences, are for the most part devoid of psychological complexity. In this respect Willa Cather may be compared with two notable allegorical
*Thid., p. 51. Earlier, Miss Cather had cited this same dictum in The Song of the Lark, p. 140.
7 “Miss Jewett,” Not Under Forty, p. 77. It is interesting to note that E. K. Brown (op. cit.) hints at a continuity of thematic characterization; that is, he suggests a few resemblances between the pioneers of the early Western novels and those of Death Comes for the Archbishop and Shadows on the Rock.
* As cited by Robert Penn Warren in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner—A Poem of Pure Imagination: An Experiment in Reading (New York, 1946), p. 87.
6 Vol, 21
74 American Literature
writers, Hawthorne and Melville, who likewise presented few ani- mated characters. Their symbolic figures are vague when compared with the realistic people drawn by Fielding, Austen, Thackeray, or Dickens. Like Hawthorne and Melville, Miss Cather is interested primarily in the broad outline of human destiny, not in the motiva- tion of individual quirks and foibles. Her people and places are mainly convenient vehicles for ideas, presented in conventional novel form. The idea is the thing, and once the reader has grasped the intellectual motif, all the other elements fall into readily perceivable patterns. )
Examined in the aggregate, Miss Cather’s novels of the frontier reveal an allegory of the individual’s quest—his seeking and finding a direction of life? Born of the spirit, the quest is barren of all external and materialistic prompting. The pioneer’s yearning is, indeed, so basic to the inner spirit that it becomes a creative power, rich in imagination and spiritual values. “Desire is creation,” Miss Cather iterates, “is the magical element in that process.”*° Because the search for an ideal is synonymous with an innate groping for perfectibility, it has great moral value. And because, in Miss Cather’s philosophy, the mere desire for the ideal is in itself an act of creation, the creative instinct has aesthetic significance. That is to say, there is an indivisible union of the moral and the aesthetic, for, as Miss Cather writes, “artistic growth is, more than it is anything else, a refining of the sense of truthfulness.”** Hence Miss Cather’s char- acters, visionaries and mystics, heed only that something within themselves which they divine instinctively to be their real lives and consciousness. They choose as a result to forsake the fixed conven-
*In an early critical work dealing necessarily with incomplete materials, Percy H. Boynton (op. cit.) concluded that Miss Cather’s artistic theme is the portrayal of self- fulfilment. ‘The focus is not on the individual as such, we believe, but upon the individual in his relationship to a higher order.
2° The Professor's House, p. 29. In The Song of the Lark, pp. 75-76, the idea is repeated: “Nothing is far and nothing is near, if one desires... . There is only one big thing—desire.’* Translated into the doctrine of Catholicism, desire becomes synonymous with the miracle. ‘The people have loved miracles for so many hundred years, not as proof or evidence, but because they are the actual flowering of desire. In them the vague worship and devotion of the simple-hearted assumes a form. From being a shapeless longing, it becomes a beautiful image; a dumb rapture becomes a melody that can be remembered and repeated; and the experience of a moment, which might have been a lost ecstasy, is made an actual possession and can be bequeathed to another” (Shadows on the Rock, Pe 137).
12 The Song of the Lark, p. 477.
Willa Cather’s Novels of the Frontier 75
tions of civilized society. They wander forth, instead, orphan souls, searching for an ideal—a divine presence in the early novels, or a Christian God in the later novels. Whether this ineffable being is a divine presence, pagan or Christian, He is endowed with certain immutable qualities. He is not a form but a power, a palpable presence but never imprisoned in matter.’*
This spiritual odyssey drawn by Miss Cather is an eternal one, transcending both time and place. When she began her series of frontier novels, the West of America was her logical setting. She, like the Burdens of My Antonia, had left the fixed conventions of Virginia for a crude and rigorous Nebraska. Like the Burdens, she came to know the simple joys of a new land and the admirable qualities of an emigrant folk, Bohemians, Swedes, and the like. So at first she tapped her own limited experiences to present the pioneer spirit in a locale she came to know well. And always in the frontier novels, in the early as well as in the later ones, she underscores the yearning, the emotional grasping which give shape and substance to the spirit itself.
When the road began to climb the first long swells of the Divide, Alexandra hummed an old Swedish hymn, and Emil wondered why his sister looked so happy. Her face was so radiant that he felt shy about asking her. For the first time, perhaps, since that land emerged from the waters of the geologic ages, a human face was set toward it with love and yearning. It seemed beautiful to her, rich and strong and glorious. Her eyes drank in the breadth of it, until her tears blinded her. Then the Genius of the Divide, the great, free spirit which breathes across it, must have bent lower than it ever bent to a human will before. The history of every country begins in the heart of a man or a woman.”
But the prairie of the Middle West, Miss Cather came to realize, was only one frontier, and the pioneer immigrants were only a
13 Such a concept is typical of Miss Cather’s fusion of Roman Stoicism and basic Christianity. In the early novels she speaks of divinity in philosophical terminology; in the later novels she translates her ideas of divinity into purely Christian terms. But whether Stoic or Christian her conception of the godhead is always the same: “. . . in his essence a living all-wise Being; in his attributes immortal, immutable, active and benevolent; in his disposition occupied in contemplating and controlling his great work the universe, and in his relation to his creatures constantly concerned for their comfort and happiness.” (Such is the Stoic definition of the first-moving principle as stated by E. Vernon Arnold, Roman Stoicism, Cambridge, 1911, p. 229.) For a further discussion of this same problem, see below, pp. 85-87.
18 O Pioneers!, p. 65.
76 American Literature
single people. Her expanded interests, for example, revealed to her the possibilities of establishing the same spiritual motivation among the cliff dwellers and the fulfilment of their primitive culture. In their houses of hewn rock, Miss Cather said, “a dream had been dreamed . . . long ago, in the night of ages, and the wind had whis- pered some promise to the sadness of the savage.”
The rock of Acoma had never been taken by a foe but once,—by Spaniards in armour. It was very different from a mountain fastness; more lonely, more stark and grim, more appealing to the imagination. The rock, when one came to think of it, was the utmost expression of human need; even mere feeling yearned for it; it was the highest com- parison of loyalty in love and friendship. Christ Himself had used that comparison for the disciple to whom He gave the keys of His Church. And the Hebrews of the Old Testament, always being carried captive into foreign lands,—their rock was an idea of God, the only thing their conquerors could not take from them.” |
In Shadows on the Rock the spiritual seeking, again, was the chief stimulus for the pioneer French in seventeenth-century Canada. And on the strength of this seeking, they, like the cliff dwellers, found their rock and built a civilized island in the midst of barbarism.
Why, the priest wondered, were these fellows always glad to get back to Kebec? Why did they come at all? Why should this particular cliff in the wilderness be echoing tonight with French songs, answering to the French tongue? He recalled certain naked islands in the Gulf of the St. Lawrence; mere ledges of rock standing up a little out of the sea, where the sea birds came every year to lay their eggs and rear their young in the caves and hollows; where they screamed and flocked to- gether and made a clamour, while the winds howled around them, and the spray beat over them. This headland was scarcely more than that; a crag where for some reason human beings built themselves nests in the rock, and held fast.7®
And finally, it brought the Catholic missionaries of Death Comes for the Archbishop to the great Southwest. In this unbounded area of the Ur-Americas the reverend fathers finally approach their goal —primitive Christianity untainted by materialism. It is this kind
4 The Song of the Lark, p. 306. %8 Death Comes for the Archbishop, p. 98. 7° Shadows on the Rock, pp. 225-226.
Willa Cather’s Novels of the Frontier 77
of setting that can make altogether credible the parable of the Holy Mexican Family.” And from such a setting the French fathers drew the full force of their religion.
Beautiful surroundings, the society of learned men, the charm of noble women, the graces of art, could not make up to him for the loss of those light-hearted mornings of the desert, for that wind that made one a boy again. He had noticed that this particular quality in the air of new countries vanished after they were tamed by man and made to bear harvests. Parts of Texas and Kansas that he had first known as open range had since been made into rich farming districts, and the air had quite lost that lightness, that dry aromatic odour. The moisture of plowed land, the heaviness of Jabour and growth and grain-bearing, utterly destroyed it; one could breathe that only on the bright edges of the world, on the great grass plains or the sage-brush desert.
That air would disappear from the whole earth in time, perhaps; but long after his day. He did not know just when it had become so neces- sary to him, but he had come back to die in exile for the sake of it. Some- thing soft and wild and free, something that whispered to the ear on the pillow, lightened the heart, softly, softly picked the lock, slid the bolts, and released the prisoned spirit of man into the wind, into the blue and gold, into the morning, into the morning!*®
Thus, Miss Cather’s conception of spiritual desire and yearning is for the most part associated with the frontier. But the frontier is not the scene of melodramatic adventure and outlawry; it is not an economic, sociological force. It is the locale of idealistic quests, spiritual struggles, and religious awareness. Her frontier is as much a philosophical concept as it is a physical actuality.
Just as Miss Cather’s idea of the frontier was one of subtle fusion of the real and the ideal, so her handling of the spiritual quest is a similar blend of the intangible and the material. The quest was always against the odds of monumental, physical struggle, being
7 The entire atmosphere of Death Comes for the Archbishop is one of a primitive Christianity. It is an atmosphere which draws its “greatness” from its “simplicity.” For Miss Cather “there is always something charming in the idea of greatness returning to simplicity—the queen making hay among the country girls—but how much more endearing was the belief that They, after so many centuries of history and glory, should return to play Their first parts, in the persons of a humble Mexican family, the lowliest of the lowly, the poorest of the poor,—in a wilderness at the end of the world, where the angels could scarcely find Them!” (Death Comes for the Archbishop, p. 284). See also the story of the Pima Indian convert in the same work, pp. 207-208.
28 bid., pp. 276-277.
78 American Literature
inextricably linked with a seemingly cruel, insensitive nature. It is this aspect of the seeking that Willa Cather treats most capably. With artistic insight she saw and portrayed the paradox involved in the struggle itself. Her characters, whether immigrant pioneers or erudite Frenchmen, are long sheltered by fixed social traditions. Suddenly they find themselves engaged in conflict with a primeval force that is infinitely older than the traditions themselves. The irony implicit in the paradox is further enforced by the realism with which the struggle is described. Indeed, Miss Cather, who was so skeptical of the validity of physical concreteness,” limits her use of realistic details largely to the description of this struggle. Actually, the realism was implicit in the situation itself. Her pioneers were a people fighting to master a language, to conquer the soil, to hold their land, and to establish for themselves a set of working ethical doctrines. Abandoning their earlier unsatisfactory environment with its decadent mores, they bring only their yearning, their religion, and the best of their culture into the wilderness to prepare them- selves for a newly purposeful life.
Inferretque deos Latio. When an adventurer carries his gods with him into a remote and savage country, the colony he founds will, from the beginning, have graces, traditions, riches of the mind and spirit”?
Obviously, there is no despair in Miss Cather’s philosophy of an absolute idealism. Accordingly, the pioneer spirit was innately vic- torious because—and only because—it was an ideal, a dream of youth; and “to fulfill the dreams of one’s youth,” argued the mis- sionary priests in Death Comes for the Archbishop, “that is the best that can happen to man.””* Indeed, to Captain Forrester of A Lost Lady, the dream, the idea was at its very inception “an accomplished - fact.” Thus, for the pioneer the hardships which he endures and
1° See below, pp. 79-80. ,
Shadows on the Rock, p. 98. There occurs in this same work, pp. 24 ff, a long discussion of the need for transplanting in modified form the age-old traditions and conventions of European society into the new soil of the frontier.
*1 Death Comes for the Archbishop, pp. 263-264.
3a 4 Lost Lady; p. 55. See also The Professor's House, p. 29: “A man can do anything if he wishes to enough, St. Peter believed. . . . If there were an instrument by which to measure desire, one could foretell achievement.” In O Proneers!, p. 48, Miss Cather says that “a pioneer should have imagination, should be able. to enjoy the idea of things more than the things themselves.” And in One of Ours, the idea appears in the following form: “Ideals were not archaic things, beautiful and impotent; they were the real sources of power among men.” (p. 420).
Willa Cather’s Novels of the Frontier 79
the struggles which he undergoes are merely a test. For after long strife he seems to advance in his spiritual quest, arriving at a tri- umph that for him is ultimate proof that his way is the only right way.
Human experience is a graph of rising and falling events, cor- responding to man’s fortunes and misfortunes. And man, Miss Cather believed, is responsible for his periods of rise and of decline. Once he begins to lose sight of spiritual ideals and to give precedence to material gains, he negates his spiritual advance. The frontiers- man or pioneer—the term is of little consequence—represents for Willa Cather the creature of his own desires, for good or evil. In recording his adventures she constantly emphasizes his inner strength and weakness and the decay that results once he permits himself the luxury of material desire. The wish for good demands particular strength if the pioneer is to withstand the debilitating force of a materialistic society. Good intentions alone are in- sufficient; the man of true spirit must supplement purpose with active striving. This recognition leads Miss Cather to her philo- sophical interpretation of life as a kind of gigantic tug-of-war, with idealism tugging against materialism. The theme that de- velops throughout her novels is devastatingly plausible, for mate- rialism inevitably seems to exhibit the superior strength. But the essentially optimistic Willa Cather searches beyond contemporary society. Instead she examines man’s trials in other eras. Always the conclusion is the same and implacable. Cyclically, even as mate- rial progress and evil flower from yearning and desire, good must ultimately come from the temporary condition of evil.
Unlike many of the other novelists of her generation who set themselves up as dispassionate or satirical observers of mankind, Willa Cather records her theme with delicate, subjective adumbra- tions. In so doing she follows an anti-realistic tradition already established in the nineteenth century by Hawthorne and James, and by E. M. Forster in the twentieth. Turning away from a tendency current in her generation toward muscular realism, Miss Cather says:
There is a popular superstition that “realism” asserts itself in the cata- loguing of a great number of material objects, in explaining mechanical
80 American Literature
processes, the methods of operating manufactories and trades, and in minutely and unsparingly describing physical sensations. But is not realism, more than it is anything else, an attitude of mind on the part of the writer toward his material, a vague indication of the sympathy and candour with which he accepts, rather than chooses, his theme???
She objects, then, to the merciless uninterpretative reports on the condition of mankind—mere photographic observations. She strives, instead, to modify physical probability with moral necessity. Miss Cather arrives at an artistic theory that is much akin to Haw- thorne’s when he proposed the distinction between Romance and Novel.* But even closer is she to Henry James’s opinion of the realistic and the romantic,
. .. the real represents to my perception the things we cannot possibly not know, sooner or later, in one way or another. ... The romantic stands, on the other hand, for the things that, with all the facilities in the world, all the wealth and all the courage and all the wit and all the adventure, we never can directly know; the things that can reach us only through the beautiful circuit and subterfuge of our thought and desire.”
And Willa Cather is undeniably motivated throughout her works by the twin ideas, beauty and desire. Although there is danger of conventional tags and diversity of terms, it is apparent that all three novelists—Hawthorne, James, and Cather—were defending roman- ticism and in particular that aspect of romanticism commonly called moral realism, “which is not the awareness of morality itself
but of the contradictions, paradoxes and dangers of living the moral life.”?°
II
For the enunciation of her theme Miss Cather turns inevitably to the use of symbols. The moral idea for her is always an empirical one. As a novelist she faces the necessity of making clear and cred- ible her underlying theme. This she discovers. she can do most readily with symbols which illustrate and magnify her ideas in con- crete terms. To understand Willa Cather, therefore, is to under-
79 “The Novel Démeublé,” Not Under Forty, p. 45.
*4 Preface to The House of the Seven Gables.
25 As cited by F. O. Matthiessen, Henry James: The Major Phase (New York, 1944), p. 103.
28 Lionel Trilling, E. M. Forster (Norfolk, Conn., 1943), pp. 11-12.
Willa Cather’s Novels of the Frontier 81
stand her meaningful employment of a system of symbols, all of which are segments of the whole theme. Each symbol is a part of