Part 2
The notion that unhappy men and women employ reading as an anodyne is not quite accurate. With them reading furnishes more than a substitute for thought; it furnishes them the occasion to set going in their minds a dance of images, a sequence of ideas, a march of memories which run parallel to the matter of the book, and to which the book, indeed, may be but the exciting cause. Neither is it quite accurate to say that inveterate readers, happy or unhappy, lead their lives within the pages of this volume or that for want of the more robust outlet which action affords those who do not care to read, or at least to read so much. Rather, such readers may be full of creative impulses which they prefer to exercise in a purer and more plastic universe than they have found elsewhere. There happens to be no standard by which to measure the relative value of the forces which are released by action and of those which are released by contemplation. If the man of action is associated in his career with other active persons, why may not the man of contemplation be equally associated in his with others whose society he enjoys through the medium of printed words? As there are men of action who drive blindly forward, without thought, to some goal which they hardly see though their instincts urge them in that general direction, so there are men of contemplation who drift with the tide of some—or any—poet or historian or philosopher without critical resistance; but the creative reader challenges, disputes, denies, fights his way through his book, and he emerges to some extent always another person. He has been a creator while he seemed to be merely passive and recipient.
To take another easy illustration, a scholar engaged in actual research may wade through rivers and climb mountains of books while in the pursuit of proofs for his thesis, and may yet at every step be full of creative fire, throwing aside what he does not need and choosing what he does as emphatically as if he were a soldier on the most difficult campaign. The researcher is but a common type of creative reader, his process and his aim being more readily comprehensible than those of the other types but not essentially unlike them. All creative readers have at any given moment some conscious or unconscious thesis which they are seeking to prove, some conscious or unconscious picture they desire to complete, some conscious or unconscious point they mean to reach if they can. By it they are sustained through what would be unendurable labour to another, or even to them at an earlier or a later day. It gives them resoluteness, it gives them form. More potent than has been ordinarily recognized, it belongs with that faculty whereby the mind arranges its impressions in some sort of order and comes to some kind of conclusion without always consulting the will or even inviting the consciousness to be aware of what is going on.
The token by which the creative reader can best be known is his lack of the pedantic expectation with which many readers of considerable taste begin to read. For instance, there was that professorial critic, for whom no pillory can be too high or naked or windy, who declared he could not approve of _The Playboy of the Western World_ because it was neither tragedy nor comedy nor tragi-comedy. He did not create as he read; he could not even follow a free representation of human life; he was tied brain and mood to a prejudice which shut him in from any liberation by novel wit or beauty. Like many better men, he was a victim of an obsession for the classics into which creative readers never allow themselves to fall. They may have formed their literary principles upon the strictest canon and they may be richly responsive to the great traditions of style and structure; but they have not been made timid by their training and they know that the heartiest reader, like the heartiest spectator of human affairs, must occasionally have his fling outside narrow circles or must begin to stifle. It is as snobbish to feel at home only among the “best” books as to feel at home only among the “best” people. After all, the best books have been made up out of diverse elements, transmuted by some creative spirit from the raw materials which lay around. The reader who in some degree can share that spirit’s vision can share also its delight in the same sort of original stuff. Imagine, for example, the state of mind of a person who can argue that it is a weakness, if not a literary impropriety, to prefer Goethe’s conversations with Eckermann at times to _Faust_.
There are very proper moods which the noblest work of art cannot satisfy as well as some casual memoir, some quaint history or book of travel, some halting speculation, some mere array of facts. Who has not preferred the nasturtiums or turnips of his own garden to more sumptuous flowers or vegetables from the open market? The pleasant odours of many mornings and the colour of many fine sunsets cling about the blossoms which he has tended; the plain roots from his soil have in them the savour of honest sweat and the contour of agreeable hopes. So the creative reader likes frequently to shape his own designs and make his own conclusions out of raw materials which no other hand—however better he may know it is—has worked with. In fact, it is now and then hard for a reader in the full strength of some creative impulse to keep himself as aware of the positive aesthetic merit of what he is reading as perhaps he should. If the matter of life is there in large abundance he may overlook the lack of form and proportion and interpretation because he is himself able to supply them. It is for this reason that generous spirits like Sir Walter Scott, and even more rigid critics, seem often to have gone too far in their praise of this or that book which has not survived or pleased as much as they expected; they were misled by finding in the book an element of creation which they had contributed but which colder readers do not find there. If criticism, professional or amateur, were an exact science, practised in a vacuum, the creative reader by his vagaries might deserve the accusation of being a sort of astrologer among the scientists; but it is not, and so his more creative vagaries must be classed less with the winds of bad doctrine than with the breath of life.
II. THREE OF OUR CONQUERORS
THE POETICAL CULT OF LINCOLN
When Secretary Stanton at the bedside of Lincoln declared that the dead man now belonged to the ages, he had a vision which was probably not without melodrama, not without the large pomp and plumage which went in the sixties with the expectation of renown. He must have seen rows of ample bronze statues in innumerable parks, where togaed or equestrian Lincolns would look blandly down, mindful of the dignity of history, upon a reverent people hushed in part by the very weight of the metal which commemorated the great man. It is after all too much to have hoped from Stanton that he could foresee how familiar fame would be with Lincoln, how colloquially it would treat him on the one hand, and on the other how quickly it would make him out not an iron demigod, or a wooden hero, but a friendly saint, an immanent presence, a continual comforter. Richard Henry Stoddard, in his _Horation Ode_ written almost at the first news, was not even sure that Lincoln was great: he saw in him a curious epitome of the people, a genius who had risen from them yet safely stood above their variable antipathies and affections. A consciousness of class sounds also in Lowell’s more impassioned lines, though the _Commemoration Ode_ perceives the nation not as divided within itself into grades and ranks but as united upon a common ground of simple humanity against the ingenuities and insubstantialities of feudal caste. It remained for Whitman to disregard all thought of Lincoln’s modest origins and to utter, without argument or doctrine, the intimate grief of the great American poet of the age for the great American leader, the cautious-handed, gentle, plain, just, resolute, the sweetest, wisest soul, the natural captain who had brought in the victor ship from her fearful voyage.
No such memorable utterance rendered at the moment, or has rendered since, proper tribute to the aspects of Lincoln which on the whole have most touched the daily memories of his fellow-countrymen: his habit of humour and his habit of pardons. Everywhere in the North, but particularly on his own frontier, he was, even in 1865, reputed for his mirth—for his illuminating repartee and his swift, homely, pertinent apologues. Lincoln stories multiplied, many of them gathered year by year in tolerant volumes which paid no attention to any canon; and still others, often too indelicate for type, clustered about his name through their casual ascription to him by narrators who wanted the effect of his authority. Our folk-lore is permeated with anecdotes of this description. And side by side with them go other tales of a sentimental sort, tales of wives who went begging to him for the lives of their husbands under military sentence, and of plain, dull, sad old mothers who pled—never in vain by the popular records—for sons who had slept on sentry post almost in the face of the enemy. Of all folk-heroes Lincoln most strikingly unites a reputation for wit with a reputation for mercy. The American folk has done nothing more imaginative, and nothing more revealing, than to build up this tender, merry myth.
In the hands of our newest poets, however, the myth is changing both outlines and dimensions. Lincoln’s laughter has lost something of its rusticity since we have ceased to live so close to frontier conditions. To Edwin Arlington Robinson, who has cut as in steel his conception of Lincoln the smiling god, the laconic Olympian, that laughter was only a cryptic mirth with which a sage met the rancour of blind gentlemen, sullen children who had to be taught what they could not understand until it should be too late to acknowledge that their master had after all been right and they pitifully wrong. The homespun mantle which Lincoln originally wore in the myth has entirely fallen away, as Mr. Robinson perceives him; and with it have gone both the buffoonery of so much of the popular tradition and the sentimental humanitarianism. What survives is the elemental, ancient matter of heroic genius and wisdom. By this sense of the cosmic elements which shaped his hero Mr. Robinson stands in the centre of the latest Lincoln cult, a cult which has the distinction of bringing the most revolutionary and most reactionary poets together to pay equal honours to the sole American whom they all agree to honour.
Lowell struck this note tentatively when he spoke of the sweet clay from the West out of which nature had chosen to fashion the new hero who should be less a lonely mountain-peak than a broad, genial, friendly prairie. Edwin Markham more fully analyzed him: the tried clay of the common road, warmed by the earth, and dashed through with prophecy and laughter; the colour and tang and odour of primal substances, with a dozen virtues caught from external nature. This rhetoric John Gould Fletcher translates into a subtler language in his massive image of Lincoln as a gaunt, scraggly pine which has its roots so deep down in the very foundations of human life, in the old unshakable wisdom and knowledge and goodness and happiness, that wind and weather cannot hurt it and that a nation of men may safely rest in its shade.
The image is finely illustrative of a common attitude taken toward Lincoln during the late war, when men constantly turned to him, more by far than most people realized, for words which would quiet their bitter fears and doubts, and for instructions how to act in a time so nearly parallel to his. He was the symbol and seal of American unity; he was the American proof that greatness may emerge from the people; he was the American evidence that supreme nobility may come very close to normal love and comprehension. Vachel Lindsay, in Lincoln’s own Springfield, gave true voice to this feeling in the poem which speaks of Lincoln as so stirred even in death by the horrors which alarmed the universe that he could not sleep but walked up and down through the midnight streets, mourning and brooding over the violent dangers as in the days when he himself bore the burden of a similar, however smaller, strife. It is precisely thus, in less critical ages, that saints are said to appear at difficult moments, to quiet the waves or turn the arrow aside. These more vulgar manifestations Mr. Lindsay naturally did not use. Lincoln as he walks at midnight is only the desire of living hearts realized, the apparition for a moment in its bodily vesture of a spirit too precious ever to have become merely a memory. He lives as the father of every cult lives, in the echoes of his voice on many tongues and the vibrations of his presence in many hearts. For poetry such a cult offers an enormous future as yet only just suspected. Our poets have a folk-hero who to the common folk-virtues of shrewdness and kindness adds essential wit and eloquence and loftiness of soul. Perhaps the disposition just now to purge him of all rankness and to make him out a saint and mystic may not last for ever, but obviously it is a step in his poetical history analogous to those steps which ennobled Charlemagne and Arthur and canonized Joan of Arc.
WHITMAN IN HIS CRISES
Documents increase around the great and mysterious figure of Whitman, but they add little to his greatness and take away little from his mystery. The two volumes called _The Gathering of the Forces_ contain after all only ephemeral material which Whitman wrote for the Brooklyn _Daily Eagle_ during his editorship in 1846-47 and which, though important because by him, would be less important if it were by any one else. And it might have been by almost any one else. Generally sensible, occasionally rather noble, now and then eloquent, often symptomatic of the prophet who was to come, these editorials and essays and book reviews are most of the time perfunctory and commonplace. Here Whitman loses himself in trivial political rows, echoes conventional opinions, scrambles up to a few peaks of originality with obvious effort. The demands of his occupation perhaps account for this; and yet at that very period he was beginning to undergo the spiritual upheaval which seems to have taken place in him during 1847-48 and out of which he emerged with his loins girded for the mighty race. Something of the nature of that upheaval appears in the manuscript notebooks lately published for the first time in _The Uncollected Poetry and Prose of Walt Whitman_. What Whitman wrote for the _Daily Eagle_ came, one may say, from the top of his head; in his notebooks he set down the record of dim perturbations which were then going on in his very spirit, his very tissue.
The moment when Whitman found his wings and dared them is the most interesting moment in his entire career. There the mystery of the poet centres. He who had once screamed with the spread-eagle now proposed to “sky-lark with God.” His excursion to New Orleans and back in 1848 does not sufficiently explain his awakening, much as it stirred him to wonder at the body of his land; neither does the troubled love which may then have entered his life and have shaken him out of his established routines. Some change was taking place in him, some annunciation, which roused the man into the seer. What are the actual causes and processes of that change no one yet knows how to explain. It may be God, it may be glands; it is the deep, unseen behaviour of genius.
I am habitually at a loss to know why so few critics of Whitman have paid due attention to what he himself reveals in his poems concerning the crucial moments in his growth. Is it because he dramatizes those moments with such fierce intensity that the biography in them is neglected? He is unmistakably explicit in his account of the experience reported in the fifth section of the _Song of Myself_, of his experience with what he called his Soul:
“I mind how once we lay, such a transparent summer morning, How you settled your head athwart my hips and gently turn’d over upon me, And parted the shirt from my bosom-bone, and plunged your tongue to my bare-stript heart, And reach’d till you felt my beard, and reach’d till you held my feet.
Swiftly arose and spread around me the peace and knowledge that pass all the argument of the earth, And I know that the hand of God is the promise of my own, And I know that the spirit of God is the brother of my own, And that all the men ever born are also my brothers, and the women my sisters and lovers.”
Yet this mystical experience, which has been often noted, is in no respect more illuminating than the poetical experience of which Whitman tells quite as explicitly in _Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking_. In that supreme song of separation he not only gives voice to bereavement in the guise of a bird’s wailing for its lost mate by the seashore: he also records the sudden genesis of his consciousness that he was a poet, “the outsetting bard of love.”
“Demon or bird! (said the boy’s soul,) Is it indeed toward your mate you sing? or is it really to me? For I, that was a child, my tongue’s use sleeping, now I have heard you, Now in a moment I know what I am for, I awake,
And already a thousand singers, a thousand songs, clearer, louder, and more sorrowful than yours, A thousand warbling echoes have started to life within me, never to die.”
Awakened to his function, however, and vowed to be the singer of death, Whitman had yet to find a mode of utterance. He would not find it among traditional modes because he was wedded to the conception of a new democratic aesthetic; he could not respond to current rhythms because he was too stoutly original. What happened he makes clear enough in _Proud Music of the Storm_. The poet lies in his “lonesome slumber-chamber” haunted by the rhythms of life:
“Blast that careers so free, whistling across the prairies, Strong hum of forest tree-tops—wind of the mountains, Personified dim shapes—you hidden orchestras, You serenades of phantoms with instruments alert, Blending with Nature’s rhythmus, all the tongues of nations.”
Thither come to him the strophes of love, of martial enterprises, of folk-dances, of the hymns of religions, till he is so shaken that
“Give me to hold all sounds, (I madly struggling cry,) Fill me with all the voices of the universe, Endow me with their throbbings, Nature’s also, The tempests, waters, winds, operas and chants, marches and dances, Utter, pour in, for I would take them all.
Then I woke softly, And pausing, questioning awhile the music of my dream, And questioning all those reminiscences, the tempest in its fury, And all the songs of sopranos and tenors, And those rapt oriental dances of religious fervour, And the sweet varied instruments, and the diapason of organs, And all the artless plaints of love and grief and death, I said to my silent curious soul, out of the bed of the slumber-chamber, Come, for I have found the clue I sought so long, Let us go forth refresh’d amid the day, Cheerfully tallying life, walking the world, the real, Nourish’d henceforth by our celestial dream.
And I said, moreover, Haply, what thou hast heard O soul was not the sound of winds, Nor dream of raging storm, nor sea-hawk’s flapping wings, nor harsh screams, Nor vocalism of sun-bright Italy, Nor German organ majestic, nor vast concourse of voices, nor layers of harmonies, Nor strophes of husbands and wives, nor sound of marching soldiers, Nor flutes, nor harps, nor the bugle-call of camps, But, to a new rhythmus fitted for thee, Poems bridging the way from Life to Death, vaguely wafted in the night air, uncaught, unwritten, Which let us go forth in the bold day and write.”
There was never a bolder conclusion to a poem in the world.
THE LION AND THE UNIFORM
In _The Ordeal of Mark Twain_ Van Wyck Brooks studies the tragedy which he sees in the career of a genius who was born with the nature of a great artist but born into an environment so uncongenial to art that he had to struggle against it all his life, and vainly, except for a few radiant occasions when he escaped it rather by accident than by any natural sense of his best direction or any wisdom which he had been able to acquire. In “that dry, old, barren, horizonless Middle-West of ours,” according to Mr. Brooks, where in Mark Twain’s boyhood and youth the frontier had not yet lightened the hand of death which it always laid upon every uncomplacent urge toward art or creativeness or even distinction, Mark Twain had a smaller opportunity for free growth than he would have had on “the fertile human soil of any spot in Europe.” Moreover, not only his general environment but the individual who touched him most intimately contrived, however unwittingly, to clip and bind his instinctive wings. His mother, keen, spry, witty, energetic, but hungry for the love she had missed in her marriage and therefore insatiate in her maternal passions, checked all the impulses in her sensitive son which looked to her like eccentricities and tenderly hammered him into the only mould tolerated in Missouri—the mould of respectability and amiability. That he did not quite stay hammered is testimony to the strength of his desire, but it was never to become fully conscious. So, though his episode on the river as pilot partly liberated him, for there he had a craft and an authority which he never had anywhere else in his life, he was capable of relapsing again into the temper and texture of the herd when he drifted to the still wilder frontier of the Rockies and the Pacific Coast. There, where any affection for privacy seemed a contempt for society and any differentiation from the crowd seemed almost an insult to it, Mark Twain had no choice, if he was to express himself and still be respectable and amiable, but to express himself in the permitted idiom of the humourist. “Plainly, pioneer life had a sort of chemical effect on the creative mind, instantly giving it a humorous cast. Plainly, also, the humourist was a type that pioneer society required in order to maintain its psychical equilibrium.” Laughter was the only ultimate weapon in the desperate battle with the wilderness. “Women laughed,” as Albert Bigelow Paine phrases it, “that they might not weep; men when they could no longer swear.”