Part 12

The face of _Batouala_ is the face of Esau but the voice is the voice of Jacob. Paris speaks through René Maran, as it spoke recently through Louis Hemon and his _Maria Chapdelaine_: the Paris which is subtle yet bored with subtlety and cruel yet bored with cruelty and eager for art yet bored with art. Such complex towns are hungry for idyll and for epic, the more so if, sitting at the centre of an empire, they can look out toward dim provinces and see idyll and epic transacting on their own soil. Paris, looking into French Canada, is thrilled along unfamiliar nerves at the sight of the girl of Peribonka who, having lost her dearest lover, chooses rather to stay in that hard native wilderness than to take what comfort may be found in softer regions: it is as if some Arcadian maiden had preferred Arcadia to Athens or some Shropshire lass had preferred Shropshire to London. So Paris, looking into French Africa, exults over the deeds of the black chief Batouala, who loves and fights and loses and dies, like a bison or an eagle, without a thought deeper than sensation and without a future longer than quick oblivion. _Batouala_ is no primitive piece of art: no naïve ballad of the people; no saga, remembering the harsh conflicts of actual men; no epic even, calling up the large days of Agamemnons and Aeneases and Rolands and Siegfrieds and Beowulfs for the edification of smaller days. It is a document of civilization, of civilization turning, with a touch of nerves, from the contemplation of itself to a vicarious indulgence in the morals and manners of the jungle which, whether they exist in Africa or not, exist somewhere beneath the surface of every civilized person.

To say this is to say that René Maran, though himself of Batouala’s race, has learned in Paris to make Parisians understand him and that the fame of his book depends upon his skilful use of a sophisticated idiom. But there is more to be said than that. _Batouala_ is a document as well upon the process by which an inarticulate section of mankind is beginning to be articulate. Out of the heart of a dark continent comes a tongue which uses neither the rant of the imperialist nor the brag of the trader nor the snuffle of the missionary. That tongue is hot with hatred for what Europe has done to Africa through the exercise of a greed which is the more malevolent because it is incompetent. The world of Batouala is a world spoiled by alien hands and laid waste as fever and tribal wars never laid it waste. Back of the quiet accents which M. Maran uses is the impact of a whole race’s wrongs and resentments. And yet those accents are quiet, for the book, though not primitive art, is art of a high order. It is, says M. Maran in his preface, “altogether objective. It makes no attempt to explain: it states.” Being a genuine work of the imagination, _Batouala_, of course, is less impersonal than its author believes it to be; its material is shaped at every point by a hand which, beating with the pulse of Africa, loves these contours and expresses its passion through them. Its passion, however, has been so guided by principle that it is emphasized by reticence much as that reticence is warmed by passion. In the circumstances, a plain story is enough, given, too, merely as a series of etchings from the career of Batouala, and only partly concerned with his relations to the whites. Candid pictures (considerably softened in this translation) of his daily life and final tragedy pass vividly by: all the customs and rites and sounds and stenches of his village, the throbbing of drums, the ferment of sexuality, the conflict of races, the pressure of nature upon man, the irony of primitive plans, the pity of primitive defeat. A great novel? Not quite, because it is febrile and fragmentary. But it has some of the marks of greatness upon it: energy, intensity, vitality.

STUPID SCANDAL

The story that Abraham Lincoln was an illegitimate son became a matter of gossip about the time of his first nomination for the presidency and was given a wide if stealthy circulation by the malice of the disaffected. He himself always spoke with reticence of his ancestry, for the reasons that he believed his mother to have been born out of wedlock and that, supposing his parents to have been married in Hardin County, Kentucky, he had looked in vain for the record of their marriage which was all the time lying in the court house of Washington County, where Thomas Lincoln and Nancy Hanks had been married 22 September, 1806. Lamon’s biography in 1872 first put the scandal into print, though in veiled language. Since then it has been repeated in varying forms, for the most part obscurely and always uncritically. While there has never been any good excuse for crediting it, there has come to be a better and better excuse for undertaking to refute it. That has now been done by William E. Barton in _The Paternity of Abraham Lincoln_, a convincing study which leaves not a square inch of ground for the scandal to stand on. Mr. Barton’s researches have been exhaustive and—barring a few minor slips—accurate; he follows the rules of evidence in a way to put to shame those many lawyers who on such trivial testimony have believed the story; at the risk of making his book too bulky he has included practically all the documents in the case; he writes everywhere with good temper, although he might well have been forgiven for being vexed at the inanity or insolence of most of those who have argued that Lincoln was the son of this or that Tom, Dick, or Harry.

Mr. Barton’s arguments remove most of the charges into the territory of the ridiculous. Abraham Enlow of Hardin County, Kentucky, for instance, turns out to have been no more than fifteen—perhaps fourteen—years old when Abraham Lincoln was conceived. As to Abraham Enlow of Elizabethtown, Kentucky, there was no such man. George Brownfield, of what is now La Rue County, was real, and may have known Lincoln’s father and mother as early as eight or nine months before the child was born, but no scandal ever touched Brownfield’s name in this connection for fifty years after 1809, and then the yarn was apparently invented because the story of Abraham Enlow of Hardin County to the older citizens in the locality seemed untenable. The “Abraham” Lincoln of Ohio who was formerly identified with the President, and about whose birth there was a scandal, turns out to have been named John. Abraham Inlow of Bourbon County is said to have paid Thomas Lincoln five hundred dollars to marry Nancy Hanks, who already had a child named Abraham; as a matter of fact, the pair had been married nearly three years when their son was born, and there is nothing in the Abraham Inlow story that even hints at an adulterous connection. If such an affair ever took place it concerned a certain Nancy Hornback. The rumour that Martin D. Hardin was the father of Lincoln died of its own impossibility with the discovery that Lincoln was neither born nor conceived in Washington County, where Hardin lived. Patrick Henry, occasionally asserted to have been Lincoln’s father, died ten years before Lincoln was born. The foolish affidavits which attempt to credit the paternity to Abraham Enloe of North Carolina are too ignorant and contradictory to be noticed. That a foster son of John Marshall was Lincoln’s father seems unlikely in view of the fact that Marshall never had a foster son; this report is about of a piece with another which says that one of Marshall’s own sons was the father of Nancy Hanks, when as a matter of fact she was a year older than the eldest of them and might have been the mother of the youngest. John C. Calhoun may possibly have indulged in a flirtation with a young woman at a tavern at Craytonville, North Carolina, in 1808-9, and she may just possibly have been a Nancy Hanks, but she cannot have been Nancy Hanks Lincoln, who had already been married for two years and had been living in Kentucky, it seems on good evidence, since early childhood.

All this is sheer gossip, motivated partly by an ugly desire to hurt Lincoln’s fame and partly by a vulgar attempt to account for his genius by giving him a father more promising than Thomas Lincoln. At the worst it is disgusting; at the best it is stupidly unimaginative, for the Hardin, Henry, Marshall, Calhoun stories are singularly frail, and the Enlows and Inlows and Enloes of the legend were certainly no more likely to beget a genius than the actual father. Even the Baconians have chosen a great man to explain Shakespeare with. The only use of the whole matter is to throw some light upon the way in which in unenlightened ages, when there was no Mr. Barton to investigate the facts and lay the ghosts, various nations of mankind have sought to explain their heroes and leaders of humble birth by finding for them, among gods or demigods, fathers more suitable than the plain men who, such is the mystery of genius, are all that need be taken into account.

THE MUSE OF KNICKERBOCKER

We guiterman a volume when, Though but one pen can rightly do it, We view it reasonably, then With ripe and rippling rhymes review it.

(How delicate should be the eye, How deft and definite the hand Of the audacious poet by Whom Guiterman is guitermanned!)

This Arthur with the nib of gold, The quaintest of the critic carpers Who sang New York, has sung the Old Manhattan now in ballads (Harpers).

The color of his music moves From Dobson’s to our Yankee Doodle’s; Assay his mixture, and it proves, However, Guiterman in oodles.

He sings the founders: “Kips, Van Dorns, Van Dams, Van Wycks, Van Dycks, Van Pelts, Van Tienhovens, Schermerhorns, And Onderdoncks and Roosevelts.”

Of Tappan Zee, of Nepperhan, Of Hellegatt, of Spuyten Duyvil, Of’t Maagde Paetje, Guiterman Here rhymes in rings around each rival.

Adieu vers libre, adieu the news, Adieu the horrid shilling-shocker; We hail the marriage of the Muse To Mynheer Diedrich Knickerbocker.

IX. POETS’ CORNER

GREEK DIGNITY AND YANKEE EASE

The single solid volume of Edwin Arlington Robinson’s _Collected Poems_ holds without crowding all but a few lines of the verse into which one of the acutest of Americans has distilled his observations and judgments during thirty studious, pondering, devoted, elevated years. Never once does Mr. Robinson show any signs of having withdrawn his attention from the life passing immediately under his eyes; but he has no more frittered away his powers in a trivial contemporaneousness than he has buried them under a recluse abstention from actualities: he has, rather, with his gaze always upon the facts before him, habitually seen through and behind them to the truths which give them significance and coherence. That he from the first chose deliberately to follow an individual—however solitary—path appears from a very early sonnet, _Dear Friends_:

The shame I win for singing is all mine, The gold I miss for dreaming is all yours;

that he from the first deliberately chose the path of stubborn thought rather than of genial emotion appears from his unforgettable _George Crabbe_:

Whether or not we read him, we can feel From time to time the vigour of his name Against us like a finger for the shame And emptiness of what our souls reveal In books that are as altars where we kneel To consecrate the flicker, not the flame.

In the nineties, when England was yellow with its Oscar Wildes and Aubrey Beardsleys and America was pink-and-white with its Henry van Dykes and Hamilton Wright Mabies, Mr. Robinson was finding himself in the novels of Thomas Hardy—the sonnet on whom has been omitted from this collection—and fortifying himself in the study of Crabbe’s “hard, human pulse.” His absolute loyalty to the ideals of art and wisdom thus achieved is a thrilling thing.

The long delay of the fame to which he had every right may possibly be held in part to account for his countless variations upon the theme of vanity—even of futility, of which he is the laureate unsurpassed. Leaving to blither poets the pleasure of singing the achievements of the successful at the top of the wave, Mr. Robinson took for himself the task of studying the unarrived or the _passé_ or the merely mediocre. Consider Bewick Finzer,

Familiar as an old mistake, And futile as regret;

consider Miniver Cheevy, who wept that he was ever born because he could not stand the present and longed for the colours of romance—

Miniver Cheevy, born too late, Scratched his head and kept on thinking; Miniver coughed, and called it fate, And kept on drinking;

consider the Poor Relation, who has perforce outstayed her welcome and on whom

The small intolerable drums Of Time are like slow drops descending;

consider the women-maddened John Everldown, and Richard Cory committing suicide in the midst of what the world had thought triumphant prosperity, and Amaryllis shrunk and dead, and Aaron Stark so hard that pity makes him snicker, and Isaac and Archibald each telling their little friend that the other has grown senile, and the graceless, ancient vagabond Captain Craig discoursing gracefully from his death-bed like some trivial Socrates, and Leffingwell and Lingard and Clavering—

Who died because he couldn’t laugh—

and Calverly and that incomparably futile Tasker Norcross whose

tethered range Was only a small desert,

and yet who knew that there was a whole world of beauty and meaning somewhere if he could only reach it—all these are the brothers and the victims of futility. Even when Mr. Robinson ascends to examine the successful he bears with him the sense of the vanity of human life. The peak of his poetry is that speech in which Shakespeare, in _Ben Jonson Entertains a Man from Stratford_, likens men to flies for brevity and unimportance:

Your fly will serve as well as anybody, And what’s his hour? He flies, and flies, and flies, And in his fly’s mind has a brave appearance; And then your spider gets him in her net, And eats him out and hangs him up to dry. That’s Nature, the kind mother of us all. And then your slattern housemaid swings her broom, And where’s your spider? And that’s Nature, also. It’s Nature, and it’s Nothing. It’s all Nothing. It’s all a world where bugs and emperors Go singularly back to the same dust, Each in his time; and the old, ordered stars That sang together, Ben, will sing the same Old stave tomorrow.

And in his great flight into legend, in _Merlin_ and _Lancelot_, Mr. Robinson elected to view a crumbling order from angles which seem opposite enough but which both exhibit Camelot as a city broken by frailties which on other occasions might be heroic virtues: Merlin follows love to Vivien’s garden at Broceliande and the kingdom of Arthur falls to ruin because it has no strong, wise man to uphold it; Lancelot leaves love behind him to follow the Light, like a strong, wise man, but the Light dupes him as much as love has duped Merlin, and ruin overtakes Camelot none the less. This is Mr. Robinson’s reading of existence: We are all doomed men and we hasten to our ends according to some whimsy which establishes our hours soon or late, leaving us, however, the consolation of being perhaps able to perceive our doom and perhaps even to understand it.

What is it that holds Mr. Robinson, with his profound grasp of the tragic, from the representation of those popular, magnificent hours of tragedy when—as a more pictorial critic might say—the volcano bursts from its hidden bed and the thunder reverberates along the mountains? Well, Mr. Robinson is a Yankee, free of thought but economical of speech; he is another Hawthorne, disciplined by a larger learning, a more rigorous intellect, and a stricter medium. The light of irony plays too insistently over all he writes to allow him to indulge in any Elizabethan splendours. His characters cannot rave. They, too, in a sort, are Yankees poet-lifted, and they must be at their most eloquent in their silences. Consequently the fates which this poet brings upon his quiet stage must all be understood and not merely felt. He gives the least possible help; he pitilessly demands that his dramatic episodes be listened to with something like the tenseness with which the protagonists undergo them and without alleviating commentary or beguiling chorus; he never ceases to cerebrate or allows his readers to. Such methods imply selected readers. They imply, too, on the poet’s part, that he pores too intently over the white core of life to look long or often at the more gorgeous surfaces. If Mr. Robinson has any strong passion for the outward pageantry of life—such as men like Scott or Dickens have—he does not communicate it. His rhythms throb with heightened thought not with quickened pulses, or only with pulses quickened by thought. No line or stanza escapes his steady, conscious, intelligent hands and runs off singing. Endowed at the outset with a subtle mind and a temperament of great integrity, he has kept both uncorrupted and unweakened and has hammered his lovely images always out of the purest metal and in the chastest designs.

To lay too much stress upon the tragic and the fateful in his work is to do it, however, less than justice. It contains hundreds of lines of the shrewdest wordly wisdom, of the most delicate insight into human character in its untortured modes, of rare beauty tangled in melodious language. He has employed the sonnet as a vehicle for dramatic portraiture until he has almost created a new type; he has evolved an octosyllabic eight-line stanza which is unmistakably, inalienably, inimitably his; he has achieved a blank verse which flawlessly fits his peculiar combination of Greek dignity and Yankee ease; he has, for all his taste for the severer measures, taught his verses, when he wanted, to lilt in a fashion that has put despair in many a lighter head. Nor must it be overlooked that Mr. Robinson has written some of the gayest verses of his generation, as witness these from the ever-memorable _Uncle Ananias_:

His words were magic and his heart was true, And everywhere he wandered he was blessed. Out of all ancient men my childhood knew I choose him and I mark him for the best. Of all authoritative liars, too, I crown him loveliest.

How fondly I remember the delight That always glorified him in the spring; The joyous courage and the benedight Profusion of his faith in everything! He was a good old man, and it was right That he should have his fling....

All summer long we loved him for the same Perennial inspiration of his lies; And when the russet wealth of autumn came, There flew but fairer visions to our eyes— Multiple, tropical, winged with a feathery flame, Like birds of paradise....

THROUGH ELLIS ISLAND

Pascal D’Angelo was born, he says in an autobiographical sketch which he has let me see, “near the old walled city of Sulmona, Italy. It is a small town in the beautiful valley that was once the stronghold of the Samnites, walled in by the great blue barrens of Monte Majella. Few roads run to this quiet land and ancient traditions have never entirely died out there. Below the town is the garden of Ovid with its wild roses and cool springs, and above is an ancient castle that in summer is fantastically crowned with the mingling flight of pigeons which take care of their young on its towered heights. In the valley below are finely cultivated fields dotted with the ruins of Italica, the capital of fierce Samnium.” There Pascal D’Angelo went to school a very little during his childhood, handicapped by the fact that his parents at home could neither read nor write and that, because of their poverty, he was frequently obliged to stay at home to herd the family’s six or seven sheep and four goats. At sixteen he came with his father and a number of fellow-villagers to the United States.

“In this country immigrants from the same town stick together like a swarm of bees from the same hive and work where the foreman, or ‘boss,’ finds a job for the gang. At first I was water-boy and then shortly after I took my place beside my father. I always was, and am, a pick-and-shovel man.” Pascal D’Angelo worked here and there at similar rough labour, in New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Vermont, West Virginia, Maryland—at first unable to read newspapers printed in English and unaware that there were any printed in Italian. But gradually he learned to read, and always he was a poet. “When night comes and we all quit work the thud of the pick and the jingling of the shovel are not heard any more. All my day’s labours are gone, for ever. But if I write a line of poetry my work is not lost, my line is still there—it can be read by you today and can be read by another tomorrow. But my pick-and-shovel works can be read neither by you today nor by another tomorrow.... So I yearn for an opportunity to see what I can accomplish ... before suffering, cold, wet, and rheumatism begin to harm me in the not distant future.”

One of the finest lyrics of his which I have seen thus gives a picture of the world in which he then moved:

In the dark verdure of summer The railroad tracks are like the chords of a lyre gleaming across the dreamy valley, And the road crosses them like a flash of lightning.

But the souls of many who speed like music on the melodious heart-strings of the valley Are dim with storms. And the soul of a farm lad who plods, whistling, on the lightning road Is a bright blue sky.