The roving critic

Emerson lived in Concord and took villages for granted, as natural microcosms in any one of which a sage might study the world. Whitman lived in Manhattan and sent his imagination on strong flights over the entire body of his land, and to the remotest regions, neither denying nor rejecting whatever signs of life he saw. Lincoln in Springfield, whitherto by no means all the philosophies had come and little enough of culture in any composition, mastered not only an incomparable wisdom but an incomparable style. To no one of these men could it have been quite understandable that a second or third generation after them would begin to display among certain of its intellectual leaders that restless and intense hatred of the provinces which marks, for example, the critics of Paris and the professors of Berlin. Yet something of precisely this sort has come to pass. Voice after voice is added to the regiments of criticism being raised against suburban Philistia and the villatic bourgeoisie.

That is to say, a reaction is commencing against the frontier which has had so large a hand in making us. It is no longer a natural device to put critical sagacity in the mouth of a rural sage. When Lowell created Hosea Biglow he did so with the brash originality of a young man who was taking venturesome shots at his age; no young American of Lowell’s scholarship would think a second time of such a device today. Josh Billings and Artemus Ward to all but a few have come to seem “old stuff.” Even Mr. Dooley is not a crossroads loafer but a native son of the city streets. In return for a long course of ridicule from rustic philosophers a new order of philosophes is striking back. We need not wonder, perhaps, that the riposte is often acrimonious; the weight of all this village ridicule has often been heavy. We need not feel too much distressed at the look of snobbishness which some of the critics of our frontier somewhat too continually wear; nothing ought to be so easy to forgive as a zeal for enlightenment. It is important to remember, however, that there is a point of vantage a little above this particular critical melee from which the battle appears less crucial than it doubtless appears to those who wage it.

That point of vantage is the artist’s, at least so far as the artist is concerned with the reproduction of life without the Puritan’s anxiety to make it—or to make it out—the kind of life he thinks it ought to be. The moralist condemns the “bad” people and the wit condemns the dull; but these are phases of argument. With argument the dramatist or novelist is much less concerned. His task is first of all a representation of what he finds, and his obligation ends—though he may decide to do more—when he has represented it. At his lowest level he yields himself wholly to the manners of his society and sets them forth with implied approbation, as if they were the laws of God. At a higher level, he turns violently against its prejudices and assails them as if they were the sins of Satan. But there is a level higher still, from which, as he looks upon his community, he sees it as men and women involved in the exercises of life, and he makes his record of them without either uncritical admiration or vexed recrimination. Those novelists and dramatists who now hate our provinces most are nearly all dissatisfied men lately escaped from stodginess and devoted to getting their revenges. In this fashion the heretic, while his wounds smart, lashes back at the doctrines which oppressed him. But the truly emancipated spirit no longer has time for recrimination or revenge. He goes, as artist, about his proper business, accepting stupidity as his material as well as intelligence, vice as well as virtue, gentleness as well as cruelty. In every community, he knows, all the types and tendencies of humanity may be found, and it does not occur to him to be partisan of one neighbourhood—town or country—against another. He knows, too, that familiarity with mankind comes partly from affection for it, and that the truth is therefore not unrelated to affection. How then shall he tell the truth about the provinces so long as he feels nothing but animosity for them? It was not in this temper that Fielding drew Squire Western, or Scott his Caleb Balderstone, or Balzac poor stupid Père Goriot. After long years in which this temper has sweetened and softened American fiction too much, we do indeed need more iron in it. But likewise it is well to remember that hatred rarely speaks the last word.

WHAT THE FATHERS READ

The later Elizabethans and the Jacobeans thought of the realm of Britain as comprising England, Scotland, Ireland, and Virginia—the fourth of these provinces being a more or less natural outlet for the energy of men who, cramped at home, had to seek gold or glory or adventure in wider regions. As the century advanced there grew up in the parent islands a party who felt no less cramped by theology than by geography, and they turned their imaginations to New England, where, it seemed, the faith might grow in the way they wanted. Certain of the proletarian members of this group went to Plymouth and a more prosperous body shortly afterwards to Boston, but neither they nor the sympathizers left behind understood that the saints had been really sundered by the emigration. Not for a century and more did the inhabitants of Boston and thereabouts, in Massachusetts, cease to look towards London as their cultural capital much as they had looked towards it while they lived in and near Boston in Lincolnshire; they were further removed, and that was all. The tongue that Shakespeare spoke, the faith and morals Milton held....

The Puritans in New England, indeed, knew or cared little enough about Shakespeare. The late Thomas Goddard Wright’s scrupulous researches have unearthed no signs that Shakespeare’s works reached the Puritan colonies before 1722, when the reprobated James Franklin announced that he had them at the office of the New England Courant for any writer who might want to use them; or before 1723, when Harvard, also under fire for its lack of orthodoxy, listed them in its library catalogue. Nor was even Milton greatly valued for his poetry, though four copies of Paradise Lost are known to have been shipped to Boston in 1683; though Cotton Mather clearly knew the epic; though Yale received a gift, among other books, of all Milton’s poetical works in 1714; and though Harvard in 1721-22 acquired “a new & fair Edicon” in two volumes (probably Tonson’s noble quartos of 1720). Mather once or twice quotes Chaucer, whose writings were in both the Yale and Harvard libraries by 1723; Anne Bradstreet makes a solitary—and conventional—reference to “Spencer’s poetry”; her father, Gov. Thomas Dudley, curiously enough, possessed the “Vision of Piers Plowman.” But on the whole there was scanty demand in New England for imaginative literature of any kind.

It is the contention of Mr. Wright, persuasively sustained, that while New England was no great country for poets it was a good country for scholars, and that it does not suffer by comparison with provincial Britain as regards its literary culture. The press at Cambridge was set up before the first one at Glasgow, or Rochester, or Exeter, or Manchester, or Liverpool. The ministers and magistrates of the colonies brought books with them, and regularly received more. Theologians and theological treatises flowed back and forth across the Atlantic in a consistent stream. “Old England,” says the Magnalia with pride, in 1702, after the founding of Harvard “had more ministers from New, than our New England had since then from Old.” The younger John Winthrop was one of the early fellows of the Royal Society, and but for the Restoration might possibly have drawn Robert Boyle and others like him to Connecticut to establish there a “Society for Promoting Natural Knowledge”; Jonathan Brewster of that colony was by 1656 already a practising alchemist who felt sure he could perfect his elixir in five years. Even scholarship, however, tended to fall into a lower status as the first generation passed; in 1700 Harvard had certainly a smaller prestige abroad than it had had in 1650. The distance from London and the English universities was beginning to have its effect, precisely as would have happened had any of the English counties suddenly been cut off from them by a thousand leagues of dangerous ocean. Irrepressible scholars like Cotton Mather kept up the European tradition, but learning can hardly have been so generally diffused as it was during the first half century.

The creative instincts underwent a similar decline. John Cotton and his contemporaries were as eminent in theology as the Puritan ministers in England, and the funeral elegies which were their sole contributions to belles-lettres can stand unashamed side by side with similar English performances. But as the Restoration succeeded the Commonwealth, and in turn was succeeded by “Anna’s reign,” New England neither evolved a literary class to follow, at a distance, the modes of the capital nor produced, as the English provinces were doing, an occasional wit who could leave home and make his literary fortunes in London. For that there was needed a stronger secular taste than New England had. Literature settled down to sermons. Instead of Marlowe’s tragedy, people read the prose History of the damnable Life and deserved Death of Dr. John Faustus; the earliest play printed in New England seems to have been Lillo’s edifying George Barnwell, issued by James Franklin in the Weekly Journal in 1732. And yet the importers’ lists which Mr. Wright has unearthed make it clear that for a long time such plays and romances as Sidney’s Arcadia, Head’s English Rogue, Pilgrim’s Progress, Guy of Warwick, and Reynard the Fox had been coming over in considerable numbers. John Dunton—an unreliable fellow, it is true—tells that during his stay in Boston in 1686 he had a customer who bought such books, “which to set off the better, she wou’d ask for Books of Gallantry.” In 1713 Cotton Mather was so much annoyed by the “foolish Songs and Ballads, which the Hawkers and Pedlars carry into all parts of the Countrey,” that he wanted, “by way of Antidote,” to issue “poetical Composures full of Piety”—including some of the “excellent Watts’s Hymns.” And shortly thereafter the influence of the English wits had become so strong that Benjamin Franklin is seen to begin his literary career with imitations of the Spectator and that Mather Byles,

as a poetical friend neatly put it at the time.

THE KIND MOTHER OF US ALL

I imagine that those of our ancestors who first struggled up from the aboriginal slime used to sit occasionally in moody caucuses and talk of the good old days and perhaps envy the slower creatures which still drew their breath—such as that breath was—in the simple freedom of the mud. I know that at this very moment there are excursion steamers plying, as a certain wit says, from the foot of Main Street to the Blessed Islands of the Pacific, where the air never dreams of biting, where love lies for ever in the green shade, and where the noble savage runs wild and beautiful and good—but not too good—on the lovely land or gives himself ecstatically to the tumbling surf. And I have just been reading of a time in the eighteenth century—most amusing of centuries—when curiosity and sentiment and a kind of cosmic libido among Englishmen focussed themselves upon the State of Nature and found what they were looking for, first abroad in many quarters of the earth and then at home, where proper English explorations end.

Little Britain, as Chauncey B. Tinker shows in a solid and jolly monograph called “Nature’s Simple Plan,” was waking up. During the sixties of the century Commodore Byron had come back with yarns about the giant Patagonians; Wallis had seen Tahiti and named it after the idyllic George III; Cartwright, having lived for years in Labrador, had brought live Eskimos to London; Bruce had studied deepest Abyssinia, and Captain Cook had begun to plough the most distant seas with many a home-keeping eye upon him. Not only did the poets hymn the delights of new paradises, but the more or less sober men of science took up the ardent chorus. Lord Monboddo claimed that the Golden Age still lingered in the South Seas and tickled all the wags with his talk about men with tails and about the cousinship of men and monkeys. Luxury was under fire: Dr. Johnson defended it, but Goldsmith wept to see it devastating villages and consequently to

see the rural virtues leave the land.

Rousseau, orator and laureate of the primitive, called the attention of mankind to Corsica, where liberty still survived and where it might be possible for some wise man to teach the people how to preserve it. He himself began a constitution for the island, though he never finished it. Half Europe looked on encouragingly—but idly—while Pasquale Paoli led his Corsican revolt against Genoa. Boswell, visiting Rousseau while the philosopher was about his constitutional task, formed such a passion for the hardy island that he ventured into it, talked with Paoli, carried back to England a Corsican costume, and now and then conspicuously wore it while he tried to arouse the interest of Englishmen at large in the heroic little revolution. When Genoa gave Corsica to France and England let France keep it the lovers of liberty had a dreadful shock.

They need not have been quite so shocked if they had viewed the matter more in its political and less in its literary aspect. But most of the partisans of Corsica were men, or amateurs, of letters, and they believed its defeat meant the loss to the world of that outburst of song which they had made up their minds they would hear as soon as Corsica should be free. Without liberty, they thought, there would be no lyres. At the very moment when countless peasants of England, unable or unwilling to endure the hard conditions of life in that tight realm, were taking themselves off in droves to the colonies, the poets of the country, partly stifled by a smug atmosphere and a tame tradition, sent their imaginations voyaging into lands and ages more hospitable to their profession. In The Progress of Poetry Gray talked about the behaviour of the Muse in Lapland and Chile; in The Bard he set forth the figure of an ancient minstrel whose rage lifts him to the point of prophecy. And whereas Gray had created a primitive singer, James Macpherson created a primitive song and filled the world with the wails of Ossian. The dream of a State of Nature had borne at least that much fruit.

But there was more to come. Romance had sown its seeds broadcast and the mood of the race kept on writhing in parturition. Gray had brooded over the mute Miltons of Stoke Poges churchyard; the generation which saw his poem did what it could to see that no such persons should be mute. With the somewhat famous Stephen Duck the Poetical Thresher must stand, Professor Tinker points out, Mary Collier the Poetical Washerwoman and Henry Jones the Poetical Bricklayer and James Woodhouse the Poetical Shoemaker and Ann Yearsley the Poetical Milkwoman—all of them being wonders whom the fashionable exploited to this or that extent. Poetically, it happened, they were unanimously fizzles; and yet they paved a kind of way for a later peasant who was a genius. The discoverers of Robert Burns the Poetical Ploughman must at first have thought that here was merely another Duck. When they had caught him, indeed, they did not know what to do with him, and it is a question whether they helped or hurt him. He did not come, somehow, in the garb and gesture they had expected. Where were the high strains of the primitive bard? Where were the abstract declamations about liberty? Where the novel “numbers” in which he might be expected to dress his “natural” thought? Where the noble suavity? Where, I am afraid they asked in some chagrin, was the meek gratitude that even an inspired peasant should feel towards those who had unearthed him? So far as they could see, this was a man very much like other men.

Well, give them credit for what they did, whatever it was. They had been hunting for a simple, holy plan of nature, and they had looked for it in the wrong places. They had looked into dim pasts and into distant islands about which they knew too little to be able to distinguish between nature and art. In their ignorance they had taken to pleasant guesses, to pretty sentiments, to poetical inventions. At least, however, they had longed for something simpler than the muddled universe they lived in; and at last they must some of them have understood that there is no State of Nature and there never has been and there never will be. Among the turbulence of things the mind, each mind, must discover and conquer its own simple plan.

Professor Tinker’s book, besides being a pungent footnote to human history, is allegory. Its hero, which was a generation, set out to find simplicity. It travelled into very far countries and was disappointed, but in the end it turned back and learned that simplicity begins at home.

MOCHA DICK

Moby Dick, the hugest character in American fiction, had his original in a whale which Melville’s biographer does not even mention but which must have been known to Moby Dick’s. The name of the creature, according to the principal authority, was Mocha Dick, and he was first seen and attacked near the island of Mocha about 1810. For years he resisted capture. “Numerous boats are known to have been shattered by his immense flukes,” wrote J. N. Reynolds a dozen years before Moby Dick was published, “or ground to pieces in the crash of his powerful jaws; and on one occasion it is said that he came off victorious from a conflict with the crews of three English whalers, striking fiercely at the last of the retreating boats at the moment it was rising from the water in its hoist up to the ship’s davits.... From the period of Dick’s first appearance his celebrity continued to increase, until his name seemed naturally to mingle with the salutations which whalemen were in the habit of exchanging in their encounters upon the broad Pacific, the customary interrogatories almost always closing with ‘Any news from Mocha Dick?’”

No wonder that “nearly every whaling captain who rounded Cape Horn, if he possessed any professional ambition, or valued himself on his skill in subduing the monarch of the seas, would lay his vessel along the coast, in the hope of having an opportunity to try the muscle of this doughty champion, who was never known to shun opponents.” No wonder, either, that his fame went so far. “From the effect of age, or more probably from a freak of nature, ... he was white as wool. Instead of projecting his spout obliquely forward, and puffing with a short, convulsive effort, as usual with his species, he flung the water from his nose in a lofty, perpendicular, expanded volume, at regular and somewhat distant intervals; its expulsion producing a continuous roar, like that of vapour struggling from the safety-valve of a powerful steam engine. Viewed from a distance, the practised eye of the sailor only could decide that the moving mass which constituted this enormous animal was not a white cloud sailing along the horizon.”

In time Mocha Dick’s back came to be serried with irons which had pierced his mighty hide and his wake was tangled with yards of line which he had broken in his rush or which had been cut off by desperate whalers to keep their boats from being dragged under water. Caution, too, entered that head with the barnacles clustered hard and tight upon it; he learned to present his back to the harpooner and to guard his “small” and the softer area under his fins. But with so many allies against him he finally met his fate. Attacked in his last battle, off the coast of Chile, he charged the boat at the first encounter and frightened the harpooner into missing him and then, on being accused of fear, of plunging into the water to drown himself for chagrin. Later Mocha Dick, who had been keeping out of sight though suspected to be still near the ship, was angered at the attack which the whalers made upon a calf and its mother and again charged them. This time the first mate made a surer stroke and, after a furious struggle, got his victim. “Mocha Dick was the longest whale I ever looked upon. He measured more than seventy feet from his noodle to the tips of his flukes; and yielded one hundred barrels of clear oil, with a proportionate quantity of ‘head-matter.’”

This material underwent a great alchemy in Melville’s imagination. He would not let his Moby Dick be mortal, but carried him unscathed through his adventures and at the end sent him off, victorious, shouldering the troubled waves with his ancient head. Nor would Melville allow the war against Moby Dick to be the plain war of the hunter and the hunted, but gave his hunter the excuse to chase the whale that the whale had chased him and had bitten off his leg. Nor would Melville allow the story to be conducted on the simple plane of mere adventure, but lifted it up into the regions of allegory and symbolism, added the fury of hot passions, drenched it with poetry and dark mystery, lighted it with irony and satire and comic vividness and vast laughter. It was his genius which made the story of Moby Dick important. Because it is important, the neglected story of Mocha Dick deserves at least its little moment.

FOLK-LORE IN KENTUCKY

The first and second members of the firm of Mencken, Nathan, and God must have shouted for joy when they first opened—as doubtless they have opened—the compilation lately made of nearly four thousand “Kentucky Superstitions,” in the volume of that name. The American Credo had only about an eighth as many vulgar errors, for all its satiric malice. And satiric malice can find nothing in the national mind more primitive than some of the beliefs here set forth. For instance: “To cure a child of thrush, let a stallion snort into the child’s face”; “Gunpowder is given to women to facilitate childbirth”; “Catch a toad, put it under a rock, and let it starve to death. After it has dried thoroughly, beat it into a powder, and sprinkle this powder on the person whom you wish to fall in love with you.” Doctrines like these recall medieval medicine, aboriginal witchcraft, the jungle, and the cave. And yet side by side with them are recent absurdities as new as the news: “Billikins bring good luck”; “It is well for an aviator to wear a lady’s stocking around his neck”; “It brings bad luck for the last of three people to use a lighted match in smoking.” The idol has become a Billikin, and the knight wearing his lady’s favour has taken to the air, but these are superficial accidents. Otherwise it looks as if the folk changes not much more rapidly than mountains grow.

The compilers of Kentucky Superstitions have in a fashion perfectly impartial printed all they have found (with some expurgations) without distinction of age or novelty, universality or locality. “The good die young,” according to one of the citations; and “No news is a sign of good news.” Such notions belong to folk-lore everywhere. Others among these Kentucky superstitions are more specific: “If once you get your feet wet in the Cumberland River, you will always return to the Kentucky Mountains”; “It is firmly believed by the people of Leslie County, a mountain county, that President McKinley’s name was written by spiders in their webs as a prophecy of his death.” There are ceremonies for May Day that point to the rites of Flora: “To become beautiful, wash your face in dew before sunrise on May Day”; there are quaint fancies about Christmas old-style, such as that “At midnight of Old Christmas the elders bloom”; there are sortileges and incantations, divinations and auguries, weather wisdom, dream-lore, signs of the moon and of the zodiac, witchcraft and hoodoos. The most numerous of all are concerned with animals, birds, insects, and reptiles; then follow cures and preventives, divinations concerning love (most of them practised by girls), weather, household and domestic life, the human body, in the order named.

The total result is an amazing palimpsest, as if each new generation had written its lore upon an original manuscript, partly erasing the old symbols and partly employing them to make new symbols; altering the old text or adapting it; adding new illustrations or comments; bringing in fresh material that flatly contradicts the old. One superstition says that “If you take the next to the last biscuit on the plate, you will never marry”; but another, that in such an event “you will have a handsome husband.” A merely mnemonic change may alter the whole point of a saying: “A whistling woman or a crowing hen never comes to a very good end”; but “A woman that whistles, or a hen that crows, has her way wherever she goes.” Most of these superstitions are, of course, held by few people, and many by no one very seriously. The more highly educated sections of the state, while represented by a large number of superstitions, report rather trivial ones, for the reason that they are of little importance in the life of these sections. The mountain whites and the Negroes cherish a larger number of superstitions, which are more barbarous but obviously more authentic than those of the lowland whites. “If you drink water out of a stranger’s shoe,” they say in the mountains, “your sore throat will be cured.” This is not so casual an invention as the notion that “It brings bad luck to see an empty street-car.” “If you curse God and shoot at the sun, you will be able to see the wind,” according to mountain doctrine: according to the Louisville Negroes, “If you cut your eyelashes, you will be able to see the wind.”

Such a compilation is genuinely valuable to the anthropologist, the folk-lorist, the historian, the teacher, but to none of them more so than to the student of imaginative literature or, indeed, to the creative writer. Every folk-superstition alluded to in Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn is here recorded. Other superstitions in this collection it is easy to remember from various novels and tales of Kentucky life. And yet to read the book with such matters in mind is to realize how little the riches of our folk-lore have been utilized. Consider Thomas Hardy, working away like a profound mole among the buried lores and memories of Wessex, and then consider the so much more trivial, the sentimental use that literary Kentuckians have made of their materials. The ordinary attitude of American men of letters is that inasmuch as we have a briefer history on this continent than Europeans have on theirs, there is hardly an excuse for investigating our own folk-lore and employing it. But, of course, the folk here is as old as the folk there, in any but a political or geographical, and therefore superficial, sense. It has, too, customs and superstitions developed on the native soil. Here is an extraordinarily important field for the imaginative writer to plough. We write of our smart sets, tinkling and cosmopolitan; we write of our Indians and Negroes, looking for essentially native material there; but between these extremes, except in the highly circumscribed “local colour” stories, we have done little to sound the life and opinions of our folk as regards anything deeper than their outward manners. In Kentucky Superstitions we have a document to help us in going deeper. There is the germ of such another story as Hardy’s The Withered Arm in the Kentucky belief that “You may remove birth-marks by rubbing them with the hand of a corpse.” There are poetry and drama both in one superstition from the mountains: “A maid says: ‘If I’m not going to marry anybody, knock, Death, knock!’ If she hears nothing, she says: ‘If I’m going to marry a young man, whistle, bird whistle!’ If her appeal remains unanswered, she says: ‘If I’m going to marry an old man, hoot, owl, hoot!’”

PAUL BUNYAN GOES WEST

It was idle, of course, to expect that Paul Bunyan would continue to be satisfied with the home in the neighbourhood of the Great Lakes where that mighty man seems to have reached his majority. Call it invented, if you will; true it is that the epic Paul sprang from the imaginations of many lumbermen competing at evening fires for the honour of having told the biggest whopper about the career of Paul the logger’s darling. But a ghost of such heroic vigour is not lightly raised; Paul’s fame has widened out, by word of mouth alone till very lately, to a thousand camps in many forests; in that sense he has gone himself, for the man lives, like your true epic hero or your politician, by the breath of reputation. Now, as the first chapbook about Paul records for us, he has moved west and done magnificent new deeds under the sunset. The chapbook is called Paul Bunyan Comes West and it should make all lovers of Americana and all collectors of chapbooks snatch for it. What are copies of the first Faustbuch fetching now?

I admit that Paul Bunyan still lacks his Marlowe and his Goethe, but I contend that he is a fellow at least as well worth keeping an eye on as Bevis of Southampton or Guy of Warwick or any of the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus or the Seven Champions of Christendom, to say nothing of Jack the Beanstalk-climber or Jack the Giant-killer. In this first book about him Paul Bunyan has fallen into the hands of a certain Yank, still living somewhere in the valley of the Willamette and devoting the hours he can spare from the neglect of his professional duties as camp cook to the elaboration of tales about Paul. Art thus makes an advance upon nature; in real life the mighty Bunyan grows almost by repartee, as when one logger tells one tall tale about his hero and another tries to go him rather better and some third attempts to outdo both; but the epic has its rights. Robin Hood moved from separate ballads to a ballad sequence, and the wily Ulysses from epic lays to the grand march of Homer himself. So Paul Bunyan starts up.

It will be a shame if, like George Peele and some others, he ends in a jestbook and never flies further. Exaggeration such as that in some of the stories presses upon genius. His pick drags behind him on his way West and the first thing he knows he has cut out the Colorado Canyon; he blows the new dinner horn and down fall three square miles of timber; with his Blue Ox to help him he brings an Alaskan glacier down to the States and digs out Puget Sound for the Government; he raises corn in Kansas enormous enough to suck the Mississippi dry and interfere with navigation; he builds a hotel so high that he has “the last seven stories put on hinges so’s they could be swung back for to let the moon go by”; his ax “had a wove grass handle and Paul he jist swung it round in a circle an’ cut all the trees within reach to wunst.” He has a daughter Teenie of the same heroic breed, an adequate dog named Elmer, and the Blue Ox, Babe, “a ’normous critter—forty ax-handles an’ a plug o’ Star terbacker between the eyes.”

The question what the American imagination will make of Paul Bunyan is a curious one. Will it make him another Hercules or another Munchausen? Or will it extravagantly think itself rich enough to afford to neglect him?

THE WORST AMERICAN BOOK

Now and then an honest superlative is both a luxury and a necessity, and I take real pleasure in declaring my confident belief that the worst book in American literature is one which was written by Milo Erwin of Williamson County, Illinois, and published at Marion, the county seat, in 1876 under the title The Bloody Vendetta. Though intended to be an authoritative county history, it concerns itself chiefly with a feud which had lately flourished in the neighbourhood between the Bulliner and Henderson clans, with their allies. Only ruthless quotation can do the work justice.

“On the morning of December 12, 1873, George Bulliner started to Carbondale, on horseback. The sun was standing against the murkey haze of the east, red and sullen, like a great drop of blood. The pearly, vapour-like sails dotted the sky, and covered the more delicately sculptured clouds with their alabaster sides. The great oak trees lifted their parapets to the morning sky, and spangled the earth with shadows. The voiceless winds swept the earth with sublime resignation lawless through the leafless woods, and a melancholy breeze stirred the dead ferns and droping rushes. A cold-scented sleuth-hound had followed the tracks of Bulliner remorselessly. This morning two of them, with stealthy movement, took their position near the Jackson county line in an old tree top, on the ground. There, planted on the spot, their ears drank in every sound that broke the air, mouth half open, ears, eyes, soul, all directed up the road to catch, if possible, each passing object.... Bulliner came riding along and one of the assassins fired on him; only two or three of the balls took effect in his hip and leg; but his horse wheeled and threw his back to the assassins, who fired on him again, and forty-four buck-shot took effect in his back, and he fell to the earth. The assassins then escaped. Bulliner was soon found and carried to the nearest house, and his sons notified, but after desperate riding John reached the place only in time to hear his father say, ‘Turn me over and let me die.’ He did so, and George Bulliner escaped from the cruelties of earth to the charities of Heaven.”

A few months later David Bulliner, another son, was shot, also from ambush. “David was carried home by a host of friends, who had gathered at the gate. At the gate he asked ‘Is it a dream? is it a dream?’ and each broken word gurgled up out of the red fountain of his life. His brothers were standing around, their faces sealed with the death seal of inexpressible suffering, and their hearts hushed in the pulsation of woes. His mother lay trembling against the casement, her heart throbbing with its burden of sorrow, while the issues of life or death were being waged in the soul of her son. His sisters were standing in the vortex of misery, praying for the dreadful slaughter to be stopped, and suing for happiness with the sunny side of life in view....

“This was the worst murder of them all. No other equals it in heinousness. You may combine corruption, debauchery and all the forms of degredation known to inventive genius of man, and cord them together with strings drawn from maiden’s hearts, and paint the scene in human blood bespangled with broken vows and seared consciences, and still it will redden Heaven with revengeful blush and leave you blacken hell to make it equal.”

Thomas Russell, an ally of the Hendersons, was brought to trial for the murder. Here are sketches of certain persons present at the trial: “One of The People’s witnesses was Miss Amanda Bulliner ... about sixteen years old. She took the stand with a helpless and confiding look, her voice was a little softened by emotion, her rose-left lips curled delicately, but soon her clear, translucent eye lit up with a brilliant lustre. The shadows of misery seemed to depart. Her soft, round cheek dimpled and dimpled again, like the play [of?] waters in the sun, in the lovely and touch [touching?] assembly of charms. Her features were of classic regularity. Her presence seemed to shadow the place. So pure, so truthful, so charming her actions, that all pronounced her a most gentle, and most noble creature. Though never a jewelled wreath may span the curls of her beautiful brow, yet, happiness may as well erect its shrine around her, for Nature can no further gifts bestow.... One of the witnesses was the famous Sarah Stocks [John Bulliner and Russell had both courted her], who swore to threats. Her contour is not as faultless as a Greek goddess, but her form and features had caught some new grace from the times. Her eye was as clear and cold as a stalactite of Capri. She wore a sigh, and there is something in a sigh for everybody. But I will throw no shadow over her, for life in her is as mysterious as in the rich belle; and when the golden chariot of destiny rolls through the skies, she may take her seat among the great.”

Yet all these charms arrayed against Russell could not convict him. He was acquitted, and, though pursued by the Bulliners, got away. Fate, however, tangled him in the snare of Milo Erwin’s prophecy. “If Thomas Russell is guilty, it may be that the almighty sovereignty, love, was too strong for him, and envy seized him, and John and not Davis [David] was the one he wanted to kill. If he could have wrung this lady from John Bulliner, and unstained her life, I doubt not if the shadow of his own would not have again darkened it; and inasmuch as he did not, it may be that the arrowy words wrung by the hand of passion from each of them were destined to hang quivering in memory’s core till they festered and bled, making an irremedial wound, shaped in the red-hot forge of jealousy, and cured only by the exultant feelings of gratified revenge. These little bubbles of joy that jet up from the tumultuous waters of passion, soon evaporate, and leave but mingled dross and shame to fester and canker the mind of its possessor, who ever after leads a life of infamy and its accompanying wretchedness. Whoever committed the murders is the guiltiest of them all. It was he who with death first knocked at our portals, and with buck and ball opened the flood gates of misery, and let murder rush with living tide upon our people. And today his life is ruined, his hopes blasted, and sooner or later he will come to sorrow, shame and beggary, and have the scorpion thongs of conscience lashing his guilty bosom as he promenades the sidewalks of destiny.”

Consider the plight of the Bulliner boys, thus denied justice by the law. “Must they be driven to the bushes by this hard bargain, or be placed for a lifetime at the mercy of assassins, with their hearts enclosed in palisades of sorrow? They saw their father and brother shot down by vandal hands, and their own lives threatened by fiends stalking in midnight darkness.... What could they do but pick up the gauntlet hurled into their faces, and give vent to anger long pent up?... Embassadors were at an end. Words of menace and expostulation were exchanged for the thunders of the shot gun.... The god of the bushes had been invoked.”

This is enough to justify my claim for Milo Erwin’s book, but I must cite one anti-climax from the sequel touching Marshall Crain, who joined the vendetta and was later hanged for murder. “Soon after, Marsh’s wife entered his cell, and he took her on his knees and embraced her.... Her eyes glittered with a metallic gleam, and the soft curl of her lips was lost in a quiver of despair. Her’s was a deadly pallor. It was the incandescence, and not the flame of passion, that was burning in her inmost being. She would burst out into shrieks of great anguish, and then subside into sobs. She dreaded the heaving of her own bosom—dreaded the future and the world. If she could have died she would have been happy and holy in the hope of mercy. To be torn from a love made holier by past sorrows, was an insult to the attribute of Heaven. Marsh was in his sock feet, with a pair of jeans pants on, and a ragged jeans coat. He looked care-worn, and shed a few tears.”

AT THE SATURDAY CLUB

Few clubs have had a more distinguished membership than the Saturday Club of Boston, not even Dr. Johnson’s, to which the Saturday often compared itself in its golden days. It had Boston’s best learning, best poetry, best wit, best philanthropy, best statesmanship, and only lacked Boston’s best fashion because it had no great fondness for the Cotton Whigs of Beacon Street. Its origins were predominantly literary. As early as 1836 there had been a sort of informal organization which held a “Symposium” now and then, and which Emerson enjoyed for all that it was very clerical and that he said its seal might well be “two porcupines meeting with all their spines erect.” This organization languished, however, and Emerson—who here appears as very hungry for companions—and his friend Samuel Gray Ward planned in 1849 a Town-and-Country Club. This also languished under that name; but in the fifties two clubs grew up, existing side by side and more or less interlocking. The Magazine or Atlantic Club, purely literary, gradually faded, or rather gave way to the Atlantic dinners; the Saturday Club, for which Ward had suggested a less didactic membership and monthly dinners, was kept alive, clearly in no small part by Horatio Woodman’s special talent as high steward of the feasts, held on the last Saturday of each month except July, August, and September. Some such civilizing influence must have been needed in a group among whom Woodman’s introduction of mushrooms as a food seemed a startling novelty. According to Emerson’s journal Dwight was chosen to experiment first with the unfamiliar delicacy, and he amiably reported: “It tastes like a roof of a house.”

Something more than the fact that the publishers have made Edward Waldo Emerson’s The Early Years of the Saturday Club somewhat in the likeness of The Education of Henry Adams keeps reminding one of that other book, though Adams, nipping critic of orthodox Boston, is nowhere mentioned. The horribly dreary Boston world of Adams’s second chapter assuredly did not exist for the Saturday men, a body so festive that when Agassiz returned from Brazil in the summer of 1866, Lowell, Holmes, Fields, and the rest “joined hands, made a ring, and danced around him like a lot of boys, while Mr. Emerson stood apart, his face radiant.” In fact, no more genial chronicle of New England in negligee has been written. The Pundits were a long way from the Frog Pond when the Adirondack Club, most of its members then or later members of the Saturday Club as well, went to its first camp in 1858. Holmes would not leave the daily felicities of the Hub, and Longfellow, also no frontiersman, gave as excuse for staying at home the report that Emerson was taking a gun, though in fact Emerson never touched man or beast with a bullet. But Emerson was enchanted with the transcendental paradise which he found in the wilderness; and Lowell, younger and robuster, climbed a pine tree over fourteen feet in girth and sixty feet to the lowest branch.

Still, the Club dined more than it picnicked. While it unfortunately had no systematic Boswell, not a few of its good sayings are brought together in the record, particularly as taken down by Emerson in his omnivorous journal. There is Tom Appleton’s praise of horse-chestnuts: “I have carried this one in my pocket these ten years, and in all that time have had no touch of rheumatism. Indeed, its action is retrospective, for I never had rheumatism before.” And the same wit commented as follows upon a sad defect in the economy of nature: “Canvasback ducks eat the wild celery; and the common black duck, if it ate the wild celery, is just as good, only, damn ’em, they won’t eat it.” Once William Morris Hunt was asked if he would like to see a Japanese vase or cup which Norton had just received. “Like to see it?” Hunt exclaimed. “By God, it’s one of those damned ultimate things.” Felton, kept from a meeting by illness, “horizontally but ever cordially” wrote that he was “living on a pleasant variety of porridge and paregoric.” Holmes, referring to the immense vitality of Agassiz, said: “I cannot help thinking what a feast the cannibals would have if they boiled him.” Judge Hoar declared he valued the Book of Common Prayer for its special recognition of his native town: “O God who art the Author of good and the lover of Concord.” Holmes, no beauty, declared: “I have always considered my face a convenience rather than an ornament.” Longfellow, vexed at seeing plover on the table in May, 1858, “proclaimed aloud my disgust at seeing the game laws thus violated. If anybody wants to break a law, let him break the Fugitive Slave Law.” Whittier complained to Lowell over some delay in connection with a poem sent to the Atlantic: “Let me hear from thee some way. If thee fail to do this, I shall turn thee out of thy professor’s chair, by virtue of my new office of overseer.” To commentators who tamper with Shakespeare’s text, Lowell felt “inclined to apply the quadrisyllablic name of the brother of Agis, King of Sparta”; Felton identified the brother of Agis as Eudamidas.

A characteristic conversation between Holmes and Hawthorne goes thus: “Holmes said quickly ‘I wish you would come to the Club oftener.’ ‘I should like to,’ said Hawthorne, ‘but I can’t drink.’ ‘Neither can I.’ ‘Well, but I can’t eat.’ ‘Nevertheless, we should like to see you.’ ‘But I can’t talk, either.’” Actually, Hawthorne hardly ever spoke at the Club, preferring to sit next to Emerson or Longfellow and to let the other speak for him. Once, however, he spoke to amusing effect. Anthony Trollope, a guest, had roared out that only England produced good peaches or grapes. Lowell reports: “I appealed to Hawthorne, who sat opposite. His face mantled and trembled for a moment with some droll fancy, as one sees bubbles rise and send off rings in still water when a turtle stirs at the bottom, and then he said: ‘I asked an Englishman once who was praising their peaches to describe to me what he meant by a peach, and he described something very like a cucumber.’” A brilliant letter from the elder Henry James still further visualizes Hawthorne at the Club: “He has the look all the time, to one who doesn’t know him, of a rogue who suddenly finds himself in a company of detectives. But in spite of his rusticity, I felt a sympathy for him amounting to anguish.... It was so pathetic to see him, contented, sprawling Concord owl that he was and always has been, brought blindfold into the brilliant daylight, and expected to wink and be lively like any little dapper Tommy Titmouse or Jenny Wren. How he buried his eyes in his plate, and ate with a voracity that no person should dare to ask him a question ... eating his dinner and doing absolutely nothing but that, and then going home to his Concord den to fall on his knees and ask his Heavenly Father why it was that an owl couldn’t remain an owl, and not be forced into the diversions of a canary.”

Some of these things were not actually uttered at the Club, but they pretty accurately represented its conversation. An abridgment would have to be almost as long as the book to do full justice to its wealth of material; it would have to repeat countless literary incidents: such as the fact that Lowell for a long time tried to find out something of Forceythe Willson, only to discover him living in Cambridge within two hundred yards of Elmwood; that E. J. Reed, the Chief Constructor of the British Navy, thought Longfellow had written “the finest poem on shipbuilding that ever was or probably ever will be written”; and that one of the members said Emerson’s “good word about a man’s character is like being knighted on the field of battle.” No one, indeed, emerges from the history in such noble proportions or in such an agreeable light as Emerson. Nor is this due to any partiality of his son. The truth plainly appears that even in the company of Agassiz and Hoar and Holmes and James and Lowell and Norton, Emerson was the spiritual master of the Club. Sumner, on the other hand, though heartily praised in a good many pages, simply refuses to seem attractive. He had the vices of manner for which Boston is too famous—its egotism, its insolence, its complacency. The early history of the Saturday Club goes far toward proving that fame unjust. Its members at least can be called inhuman only in the sense that they were honourable, conscientious, busy, temperate, and kind much beyond the common run of men conspicuously talented. And they lacked neither mirth nor fellowship. Why are their books on the whole not as good as themselves? Did the thinness of the product of most of them come from Puritan inhibitions? The history of the Saturday Club unconsciously emphasizes a discrepancy, for the men who wrote the gentle, pure, noble, but not too rich or varied classics of New England were themselves men of pretty full blood and high hearts.

THE SILVER AGE OF OUR LITERATURE

To what is due the fact, which can hardly be denied, that the great older magazines no longer dominate the fields of journalism and literature in the United States as they once did? Many answers may be given, and all have been given by observers of varying predilections: that the tide of proletarian vulgarity has risen; that the levels of art have fallen; that public taste demands more violent stimulants; that the non-English elements of our national composition are asserting themselves as never before; that a sharper critical temper has invaded the atmosphere; that the Bolsheviki are among us, red and raging; that our democracy has just begun to live. Each of these is but explanation from one angle. Speaking as historian, I see in that shift of leadership the end of an epoch, the period from about 1870 to 1910 which may be called the Silver Age of our literature.

It is no essential contradiction of that title that during the era there throve such glorious barbarians as Whitman and Mark Twain; they came from a class and a region which flowered later than the Shantung of the nation, the New England of the image-breaking Emerson, the philosophical hired man Thoreau, the transcendental critic and artist Hawthorne, the fighting Quaker Whittier, the many-tongued translator Longfellow, the jolly Cantabrigian Lowell, the festive Bostonian Holmes. Nor is it a contradiction that at the end of the century came such a rollicking philosopher as William James or such a silken ironist as George Santayana, or such naturalistic young men as Stephen Crane and Frank Norris and Jack London, or such a multitudinous cynic and sentimentalist as O. Henry; or even that during the era lived those three terrible infants of the Adams family, Charles Francis 2d, Henry, and Brooks, to flay the era and all its inherited conceptions. The background and the prevailing colour of the age were still silver. It was then that reminiscence began to enrich the texture of our literary past. Most of the epigones—Thomas Wentworth Higginson and Frank B. Sanborn, for instance—devoted a good part of their lives to writing about the lives of the protagonists. Holmes, of the greater line, wrote memoirs of Emerson and Motley; Howells, later but greater too, gave us dozens of precious memorial essays. Our classics settled into comfortable positions to wait till some revolution should spill them out. Washington as chief national hero gave way to Lincoln, whom the Silver Age softened and sweetened until his angularities hardly showed. The old flaming ardours about manifest destiny considerably cooled, not so much because the national humility was stronger but because there was a stronger sense of decorum current. Poetry was dainty and smooth and rounded as never before in this country. The short story after many experiments straitened itself to a few prevailing types of a distinctly native form and substance. The novel, with Howells as choragus, even subdued Mark Twain from the extravagance of his earlier burlesques to the suaver annals of Huckleberry Finn and Joan of Arc; and it taught the drama that reality had a place on the stage as well as in books. Our essayists grew lighter and gayer, not without a good deal of orthodoxy and a gusto which somehow seemed to have been trained upon sweet cider, but still mellow and kindly and urbane. After the faun Thoreau, the sage John Burroughs! Scholarship grew to Alexandrian proportions; dissertations showed their heads. At the best, these silver qualities all tended towards art; at the worst they bred dilettantism and languor.

Now such unaccustomed qualities as dilettantism and languor in the midst of a nation which had plunged into furious industrial competition and was beginning to cherish imperialistic schemes without quite realizing what it was about, hardly belonged to the setting. In the Silver Age this discrepancy had seemed not to matter very greatly, for the reason that the opinion of the day held that after all a fairly decisive cleavage exists between art and affairs. The trouble began when a more strenuous generation arose and demanded that literature perform a larger, or at any rate a different, share in the national work. It is a hot and impatient generation, not tolerant of its elders. It damns the gentle tradition by calling it genteel. It suspects it of lukewarmness, accuses it of prudery, and believes it to have been verbose and trivial. The older magazines were essentially the children of that Silver Age which is now under indictment. The question seems to be whether they can renounce their old virtues, now become sins, and acquire the new virtues, which certainly would have been sins in their proper day.

JOHN BURROUGHS

John Burroughs long seemed old to many of his readers, but measured by anything but mere linear years he was older than he seemed to most of them. Measured, for instance, by reference to the fame of Whitman, Burroughs went back to the days when he was a clerk in the Treasury, and Whitman, then likewise a Government clerk, was dismissed from his post by a Secretary of the Interior who now survives in the memory of his nation chiefly by reason of this episode. Burroughs wrote the earliest book ever written about his greatest friend, and for more than half a century he neither forgot nor long neglected to praise Whitman’s large sanity and seerlike wisdom. Measured by the reputation of Thoreau, of whom it was easy for the most casual to perceive that Burroughs was in some fashion a disciple, he went back so far that he had been seventeen when Walden came into the world, and he began himself to write about birds and green fields before Thoreau died. And measured by a line even longer than the fame of either Whitman or Thoreau, Burroughs went back so nearly to the origins of American literature that he saw the Catskills, of which he was to remain the particular singer and annalist, within three or four years after Irving, heretofore acquainted with them only from the deck of a Hudson River boat, had first visited the neighbourhood already sacred to the quite mythical but also immortal spook of Rip Van Winkle.

To mention Irving is to suggest a comparison actually more fruitful than that which some thousands of pens have recently made between Burroughs and Thoreau. The bland old man whose beard was latterly as well known in these States as that of Bryant in its day, had hardly anything in common, except an affectionate concern for external nature, with the dry, hard, vivid Yankee who acted out his anarchistic principles on the shores of Walden Pond and fiercely proclaimed the duty of civil disobedience to all men who might find the world travelling along false paths. Burroughs had in him too much of the milk of American kindness to thrive in a comparison with an authentic genius like Thoreau, who might not be half the naturalist that Burroughs was but was twice the poet and a dozen times the pungent critic of human life. Nor, in another direction, does Burroughs appear to much advantage by comparison with Whitman, who had a cosmic reach and a prophetic lift and thrust that never visited Slabsides. Rather, for all Burroughs employed a modern idiom and took to the country instead of staying snugly in town, he points back to the earlier tradition of smoothness and urbane kindness and level optimism which Irving practised. Did Burroughs not but a few weeks before his death take a mild exception to the “naked realism” of Howells? In that phrase a very old school speaks. Perhaps we shall in the long run remember best that Burroughs annually made one of an odd triumvirate of campers which included besides him Thomas A. Edison and Henry Ford. Let us, for the sake of seeing the group in its true perspective, call Mr. Ford the village blacksmith who happens to have the fortunate touch of Midas; let us call Mr. Edison the village inventor who happens to have the touch of a mechanical Merlin; let us call Burroughs the village naturalist who to his native instincts adds the winning gift of language and makes himself heard, as his friends do by their machines, outside the village.

BROAD HOUSE AND NARROW HOUSE

There is a broad house of life and there is a narrow house of life. What marks the broad house is not so much the breadth of the walls within which its people live nor the height of the deeds they do or of the passions they experience; rather it is the insulation—as it may be called—which protects their nerves against the agony of too rough contact. Custom is the larger part of this insulation. In the broad house men and women grow unconcerned about irritating things with which they are familiar. The minor imbecilities of their relatives and their companions do not pain them greatly. They do not tug at leashes or kick against pricks or cry over spilt milk or strain at gnats. They can live in the presence of their own thoughts without discomfort. And when custom is not enough to keep the insulation stout, change of scene or mood or occupation mends it. In the broad house memory is not very long. When the occupants begin to feel stifled they stir about and soon forget. When they begin to brood they expose themselves to laughter or excitement and pull themselves together. When they have been bored beyond a certain point they turn to a new job and get lost in it. From too much thinking they take refuge in sleep or liquor.

In the narrow house things are different. Custom does less there, being an insulation which does not fit the sorer nerves. Instead, it rasps them. They wince and keep on wincing more and more at the burden and the pressure of mere existence. Lying so near the surface they suffer from the proximity of other nerves in other people and nearly as much from the proximity of other people without nerves. Men and women who are so tender first feel irritation at minor imbecilities, then pain, then anger, and may go on to madness. The contempt which familiarity breeds is in them an active passion—not, as in the broad house, a comfortable ease or even entertainment. Their memories are too long and too alive for that. Each scratch leaves a scar and the scar smarts for ever. Imagination sets in with the neurotic when he feels stifled or begins to brood or grows bored or finds himself deep in thought. It carries him, as the imagination can, beyond the actual occasion, calling up future or conjectural irritations or injuries and bringing them to wound the nerves, which are already twitching. Retreating from the unendurable frontiers of his experience he lives tautly at the centre, his scrutiny fixed inward. He may hate what he sees there or he may love it.

Narcissus, the youth who loved himself until he died of his passion and was transformed by the gods into a flower, is in some respects the very symbol of the neurotic, whose fate it is to resemble a flower in fragility if not always in beauty or in fragrance. With a happy accuracy Evelyn Scott, who called her first novel The Narrow House, calls her second one Narcissus. Her creative faculty has allowed itself to seem submerged by the troubled flood of life which it chooses to represent. It does not laugh, it is rarely ironical or pitiful, it suggests no methods of escape. For the time being it is preoccupied with the inhabitants of the narrow house and with their careers. It accepts their own sense that the doors are locked and the windows tight and that there is nothing to do but to run round and round in the sticky atmosphere. By thus accepting her neurotics Mrs. Scott intensifies her art: she brings her characters upon a cramped stage under a glaring light; she crowds them into a cage which they think a trap and there inspects their struggles. With the fewest reticences she sets them forth, making stroke after stroke of the subtlest penetration, shearing away disguises and subterfuges till she reaches the red quick. What she finds in all of them is essentially narcism.

What further intensifies this biting art is that, narrowed to the narrow house and concentrated upon self-love, it anatomizes and subdivides self-love with minute analysis. The plight of practically all the characters in Narcissus has the complication that they are in love and are therefore habitually on edge as they might not be in calmer circumstances. But love does not liberate them. Julia turns from her dullish husband first to one lover and then to another without any genuine escape from the inversion of her desire. Her husband cannot take her as seriously as she demands; he too is bound up in his own hard self. Her first lover, Allen, has no passion more expansive than a sort of sadistic cruelty; her second, Hurst, none more generous than a sort of masochistic modesty. Paul, the adolescent tortured by the longing to realize himself, flinches at the knowledge of his awkward movements towards freedom. Each of them, looking for love as Narcissus did in his pool, sees in lover or beloved something not entirely expected: sees, that is, another face and not a mere reflection of the looker’s. Here lies the particular ground of their irritations. Whereas the lovers of the broad house reach eagerly out for qualities unlike their own, the Narcissuses of the narrow house cannot endure unlikeness. And as there are no absolute likenesses in nature, they must be disappointed and must agonize.

One of the commonest devices in fiction is to show a narrow house with its inhabitants invaded and purged by a large breath from the broad house. Mrs. Scott denies herself this compromise. Her method, no less than her reading of life, compels her. She marshals her characters in a fugue of pain and exasperation. They have no career, in her novel, besides that of their passions; they do not appear at work or at play or in relaxed moments. When they try to speak lightly they speak stiffly. She never forgets the tense business in hand. That business, obviously, is not to make a general transcript of human existence, but to fit certain materials into a certain pattern in order to make a work of art. The pattern in this case does not equal the materials. Though the novel has form and proportion, its whole is partly hidden by the brilliance of its parts, which glitter with fiendish thrusts of observation delivered in a style of cruel curtness and vividness. The paths of the characters through the action seem tangled in a multitude of sensations. It is the tone which gives unity: the tone of passionate frustration sustained by art till the familiar sanities fade out of sight and the narrow house has shut out the sun, the wind, the soil, and the healing hands of time. Narcissus, heedless of the broad house, strikes through the skin to the nerves; it finds fierce atavisms, stubborn wilfulnesses, inexplicable perversities, rages, attacks, retreats in the forest, in the morass, in the jungle of the mind.

GOOD NAMES

There are good names and good names. Seedsmen use them to catch young gardeners; lovers woo with them; maps, full of them, become a sweet adventure to the eye; men and women who always wear them please the moralists. And since they play their part in life, they have a part in novels. Consider the course of English fiction, from Defoe to Thomas Hardy, with its many names and fashions of names.

Defoe, who lacked few other realistic arts, seldom named a character. In his anonymous underworld brisk Moll Flanders knows even her husbands better by their callings than by their names. Colonel Jacque speaks of only his fourth wife as if she had been christened. Roxana’s Europe has hardly more souls with names than Crusoe’s island. Some of the titles seem to come from the stage, such as Count Cog, “an eminent gamester,” Alderman Stiffrump, and Christallina the virgin; but Defoe was, perhaps, too much a democrat to care much for names for their own sake. So, it seems, was Richardson, though not in the same way; he named his people, but nearly all in plain and simple terms, as became a blunt tradesman: Andrews, Jones, Williams, Adams, Jenkins, Tomlinson. Pamela, indeed, can tell her children the fates of Coquetilla, Prudiana, Profusiana, Prudentia, yet the lady herself becomes Mrs. B—— without a backward sigh. At times, however, Richardson grew less neutral and wrote character neatly into proper nouns. Mrs. Jewkes could be only a wicked conspirator, Polly Barlow a faithful maid, Dorcas Wykes full of guile and arts, Sally Godfrey a woman of spirit. Could the Harlowes be people of no breeding, or Miss Harriet Byron? And there are syllables that breathe gentility: Lovelace, Grandison, Sir Rowland Meredith, Sir Harry Beauchamp, Sir Hargrove Pollexfen, Bart.

Fielding, turned novelist, remembered the old comedies of his nonage and christened half his younger children with a pun in his cheek. This is not true of the most important persons, as a rule. Tom Jones, Amelia Booth, Sophia Western, Joseph Andrews, Parson Adams are nearly all as straight from life as Jonathan Wild himself, though Adams and Andrews do come through Richardson. In the second rank fall Mr. Booby, the importunate Slipslop, Heartfree and Allworthy, pictures of virtue, Partridge, whose name has both a poaching and pastoral air, Blifil, Thwackum, Square, and the unrelenting Mrs. Honour. And still further from the centre of his stories belong those men and women whom Fielding has too little time to portray at length but whom he dockets with names very appropriate to them. One thinks of Peter Pounce, usurer-general, the incompatible Tow-wouses, pig-keeping Trulliber, Tom Suckbribe the venal tipstaff, Mrs. Grave-airs the curious prude, Varnish and Scratch, painters, Arsenic and Dosewell, physicians, Fireblood, Blueskin, Strongbow, rogues all, Betty Pippin and Tom Freckle, rustics body and soul; and then one remembers that such names are less frequent in Tom Jones and Amelia, by Mr. Justice Fielding, than in Joseph Andrews and Jonathan Wild, written while the old Harry Fielding was not so far away.

For Smollett, alliteration was almost a necessity when it came to heroes: Roderick Random, Peregrine Pickle, Ferdinand Fathom. In this and other artifices he outdid his age in general, for he had high spirits and he did not fret over little realisms. His sailors, Tom Bowling, Oakum, Jack Rattlin, Tommy Clewline, Lieutenant Hatchway, Pipes, and Commodore Hawser Trunnion, are sailors, that and nothing more. Roger Potion is a druggist, Comfit Colocynth a doctor, Obadiah Goosecap a Quaker, Captain Weazel a coward, Sir Giles Squirrel and Sir Timothy Thicket country gentlemen, Timothy Crabshaw, Dolly Cowslip, and Hodge Dolt, children of the greenest fields. Unsuccessful playwright that he was, Smollett could call an actor Mr. Bellower and a manager Mr. Vandal with a clear conscience and doubtless with some delight. He named a gentleman commoner of Christ Church Mr. George Prankley and he put the smack of Cambria in Cadwallader Crabtree, deaf and caustic.

After Smollett, whom Sterne called Smelfungus, there were many to practise the punning trick, which lasted, even after Jane Austen, whose names are nature itself, into Scott, who is a world of many natures. History kept him close to fact with a large part of his characters, but he could invent names, when he liked, as rich and varied as his plots. He was most fantastic, perhaps, with his clergymen: witness John Halftext the curate, canny Peter Poundtext, and the Episcopalian Mr. Cuffcushion; witness the two Presbyterian Nehemiahs, surnamed Solsgrace and Holdenough; witness martyred Richard Rumbleberry, covenanting Gabriel Kettledrummle, and the most violent Habakkuk Mucklewrath. Pedants, too, are broadly named in Scott, even to the extent of Jonathan Oldbuck, Jedidiah Cleishbotham, Cuthbert Clutterbuck, Chrystal Croftangry, and Dryasdust, who has fathered a tribe. With some others, besides parsons, the calling gives the titles, as in Tom Alibi the lawyer, Raredrench the druggist, Saddletree, who sells harness, and Timothy Thimblewaite, tailor. Such names are for the sake of comedy, and comedy, with Scott, generally plays with humble life. But he had names for the virtuous poor as well: Caleb Balderstone, David Deans, Dandy Dinmont, and on through the alphabet. Where Scott was best, however, seems to have been at naming those gentlemen and ladies who bring chivalry to his books. What certain signs of birth in the bare surnames Waverley, Redgauntlet, Glendenning, Mannering, Osbaldistone! Could Diana Vernon have changed names with Alice Lambskin, or Lucy Ashton with Meg Dods, or Rose Bradwardine with devoted Phoebe Mayflower even? Cosmo Conyne Bradwardine has not the same savour as Saunders Broadfoot; Quentin Durward is not of a rank with Giles Gosling. Scott could and did devise fit syllables for every order and station of life.

Dickens had no such pretty courtliness, but spoke brusquely of Lady Coldveal and Lady Jemima Bilberry and Lady Scadgers, Lord Snigsworth, Sir Mulberry Hawk, Sir Morbury Dedlock, Lord Decimus Tite Barnacle. But so he spoke of all the world, making names for every creature like a new comic Adam in a new topsy-turvy paradise. All the power of Smollett passed into him to be enlarged to quite new proportions. Smollett could call a bumpkin Hodge Dolt, but only Dickens could invent the gigantic titles of Nicodemus Boffin, Luke Honeythunder the unlaughing philanthropist, the Pardiggles, rapaciously benevolent, or Chevy Slyme. Smollett, indeed, might have called an undertaker Mould, as Dickens did, a visiting nobleman Count Smorltork, a schoolmaster Bradley Headstone, a canting preacher Melchisedech Howler; might even have named Nicholas Nickleby, Betsy Prig, Sally Brass, Miss Mowcher, Mr. Pugstyles, or Zephaniah Scadder; but Smollett could never have attained to Gradgrind, the Cheerybles, Mrs. Kidgerbury the oldest charwoman in Kentish town, Uriah Heep, Septimus Crisparkle, Daniel Quilp, Pecksniff, Podsnap, or the firm of Chicksey, Veneering, and Stobbles. It is a quality and glory of Dickens that he could caricature words as he did people. Micawber and Skimpole and Pickwick are caricatures no more than the syllables which name them. Humorous hybrids of language, they sometimes seem to suggest parent words, as if Scrooge were the child of screw and gouge, and Wardle of warden and waddle, but they commonly elude analysis and seem new words for new persons.

Thackeray took certain advantages, not only in the linguistic gargoyles of his burlesques but in the wild words he coined from Germany and Ireland. In English, however, he was rather nearer nature and directories. He has his Lord Bishop of Bullocksmithy and the Archbishop of Mealypotatoes, indeed, as well as their humbler brethren of the black cloth, Charles Honeyman the unctuous, Silas Hornblower, missionary, Thomas Tufton Hunt, tufthunter, Felix Rabbits the curate with fourteen daughters, dull Thomas Tusher, and Lemuel Whey, “full of the milk and water of human kindness.” The Earl of Bagwig can, without leaving the Thackerayan world, consort with the Earl of Bareacres, Lord Trampleton, who walks on his dancing partners, Lord Tapeworm, Lord Brandyball, Lord Castlemouldy, Lord Deuceace, or with Sir Huddlestone Fuddlestone and Sir Giles Beanfield. Jack Snaffle keeps a livery stable, the Hawbucks are parvenus, George Marrowfat, snob, eats peas with his knife, Poseidon Hicks is a drysalter with a turn for classical poetry, Tom Eaves gossips, Clarence Bulbul has travelled in the Orient, Squire Ballance holds the scales of justice. But these are fun and ornament. Foreigners aside, Thackeray chose to be more real than Dickens, in this matter, though not commonplace. He leaned a little towards distinction and genteel dignity in his families: the Gaunts, Warringtons, Sedleys, Newcomes, Osbornes, Kews, Amorys, Claverings, Crawleys, Esmonds. The Kickleburys, after all, are snobs, and the Hoggartys are Irish.