Part 7

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.