So no wonder Professor Sherman sounds a little wistful, and somewhat pathetic, as he begs us to follow Ralph Waldo’s trail.
Hawthorne: A Puritan Critic of Puritanism. This essay is concerned chiefly with an analysis and praise of The Scarlet Letter. Well, it is a wonderful book. But why does nobody give little Nathaniel a kick for his duplicity? Professor Sherman says there is nothing erotic about The Scarlet Letter. Only neurotic. It wasn’t the sensual act itself had any meaning for Hawthorne. Only the Sin. He knew there’s nothing deadly in the act itself. But if it is Forbidden, immediately it looms lurid with interest. He is not concerned for a moment with what Hester and Dimmesdale really felt. Only with their situations as Sinners. And Sin looms lurid and thrilling, when after all it is only just a normal sexual passion. This luridness about the book makes one feel like spitting. It is somewhat worked up-, invented in the head and grafted on to the lower body, like some serpent of supposition under the fig-leaf. It depends so much on coverings. Suppose you took off the fig-leaf, the serpent isn’t there. And so the relish is all two-faced and tiresome. The Scarlet Letter is a masterpiece, but in duplicity and half-false excitement.
And when one remembers The Marble Faun, all the parochial priggishness and poor-bloodedness of Hawthorne in Italy, one of the most bloodless books ever written, one feels like giving Nathaniel a kick in the seat of his poor little pants and landing him back in New England again. For the rolling, many-godded medieval and pagan world was too big a prey for such a ferret.
Walt Whitman. Walt is the high priest of the Religion of Democracy. Yet “at the first bewildering contact one wonders whether his urgent touch is of lewdness or divinity,” says Professor Sherman.
“All I have said concerns you.” But it doesn’t. One ceases to care about so many things. One ceases to respond or to react. And at length other things come up, which Walt and Professor Sherman never knew.
“Whatever else it involves, democracy involves at least one grand salutary elementary admission, namely, that the world exists for the benefit and for the improvement of all the decent individuals in it.” O Lord, how long will you submit to this Insurance Policy interpretation of the Universe! How “decent”? Decent in what way? Benefit! Think of the world’s existing for people’s “benefit and improvement.”
So wonderful says Professor Sherman, the way Whitman identifies himself with everything and everybody: Runaway slaves and all the rest. But we no longer want to take the whole hullabaloo to our bosom. We no longer want to “identify ourselves” with a lot of other things and other people. It is a sort of lewdness. Noli me tangere, “you.” I don’t want “you.”
Whitman’s “you” doesn’t get me.
We don’t want to be embracing everything any more. Or to be embraced in one of Waldo’s vast promiscuous armfuls. Merci, monsieur!
We’ve had enough democracy.
Professor Sherman says that if Whitman had lived “at the right place in these years of Proletarian Millennium, he would have been hanged as a reactionary member of the bourgeoise.” (‘Tisn’t my spelling.)
And he gives Whitman’s own words in proof: “The true gravitation hold of liberalism in the United States will be a more universal ownership of property, general homesteads, general comforts — a vast intertwining reticulation of wealth. . . . She (Democracy) asks for men and women with occupations, well-off, owners of houses and acres, and with cash in the bank and with some craving for literature too” — so that they can buy certain books. Oh, Walt!
A lions! The road is before us.
Joaquin Miller: Poetical Conquistador of the West. A long essay with not much spirit in it, showing that Miller was a true son of the Wild and Woolly West, in so far as he was a very good imitation of other people’s poetry (note the Swinburnian bit) and a rather poor assumer of other people’s played-out poses. A self-conscious little “wild” man, like the rest of the “wild” men. The Wild West is a pose that pays Zane Grey today, as it once paid Miller and Bret Harte and Buffalo Bill.
A note on Carl Sandburg. That Carl is a super-self-conscious literary gent stampeding around with red-ochre blood on his hands and smeared-on soot darkening his craggy would-be-criminal brow: but that his heart is as tender as an old tomato.
Andrew Carnegie. That Andy was the most perfect American citizen Scotland ever produced, and the sweetest example of how beautifully the Religion Civile pays, in cold cash.
Roosevelt and the National Psychology. Theodore didn’t have a spark of magnanimity in his great personality, says Professor Sherman, what a pity! And you see where it lands you, when you play at being pro-German. You go quite out of fashion.
Evolution of the Adams Family. Perfect Pedigree of the most aristocratic Democratic family. Your aristocracy is played out, my dear fellows, but don’t cry about it, you’ve always got your Democracy to fall back on. If you don’t like falling back on it of your own free will, you’ll be shoved back on it by the Will of the People.
“Man is the animal that destiny cannot break.”
But the Will of the People can break Man and the animal man, and the destined man, all the lot, and grind ‘em to democratic powder, Professor Sherman warns us.
A lions! en-masse is before us.
But when Germany is thoroughly broken, Democracy finally collapses. (My own prophecy.)
An Imaginary Conversation with Mr. P. E. More: You’ve had the gist of that already.
Well there is Professor Sherman’s dish of cookies which he bids you eat and have. An awfully sweet book, all about having your cookies and eating ‘em. The cookies are Tradition, and Heroes, and Great Men, and $350,000,000 in your pocket. And eating ‘em is Democracy, Serving Mankind, piously giving most of the $350,- 000,000 back again. “Oh, nobly and heroically get $350,000,000 together,” chants Professor Sherman in this litany of having your cookies and eating ‘em, “and then piously and munificently give away $349,000,000 again.”
P.S. You can’t get past Arithmetic.
A Second Contemporary Verse Anthology
“It is not merely an assembly of verse, but the spiritual record of an entire people.” — This from the wrapper of A Second Contemporary Verse Anthology. The spiritual record of an entire people sounds rather impressive. The book as a matter of fact is a collection of pleasant verse, neat and nice and easy as eating candy.
Naturally, any collection of contemporary verse in any country at any time is bound to be more or less a box of candy. Days of Horace, days of Milton, days of Whitman, it would be pretty much the same, more or less a box of candy. Would it be at the same time the spiritual record of an entire people? Why not? If we had a good representative anthology of the poetry of Whitman’s day, and if it contained two poems by Whitman, then it would be a fairly true spiritual record of the American people of that day. As if the whole nation had whispered or chanted its inner experience into the horn of a gramophone.
And the bulk of the whisperings and murmurings would be candy: sweet nothings, tender trifles, and amusing things. For of such is the bulk of the spiritual experience of any entire people.
The Americans have always been good at “occasional” verse. Sixty years ago they were very good indeed: making their little joke against themselves and their century. T oday there are fewer jokes. There are also fewer footprints on the sands of time. Life is still earnest, but a little less real. And the soul has left off asserting that dust it isn’t nor to dust returneth. The spirit of verse prefers now a “composition salad” of fruits of sensation, in a cooked mayonnaise of sympathy. Odds and ends of feelings smoothed into unison by some prevailing sentiment:
My face is wet with the rain
But my heart is warm to the core. . . .
Or you can call it a box of chocolate candies. Let me offer you a sweet! Candy! Isn’t everything candy?
There be none of beauty’s daughters
With a magic like thee —
And like music on the waters Is thy sweet voice to me.
&n
bsp; Is that candy? Then what about this?
But you are a girl and run
Fresh bathed and warm and sweet.
After the flying ball
On little, sandalled feet.
One of those two fragments is a classic. And one is a scrap from the contemporary spiritual record.
The river boat had loitered down its way,
The ropes were coiled, and business for the day
Was done
Now fades the glimmering landscape on the sight,
And all the air a solemn stillness holds;
Save where
Two more bits. Do you see any intrinsic difference between them? After all, the one means as much as the other. And what is there in the mere stringing together of words?
For some mysterious reason, there is everything.
When lilacs last in the dooryard bloomed
It is a string of words, but it makes me prick my innermost ear. So do I prick my ear to: “Fly low, vermilion dragon.” But the next line: “With the moon horns,” makes me lower that same inward ear once more, in indifference.
There is an element of danger in all new utterance. We prick our ears like an animal in a wood at a strange sound.
Alas! though there is a modicum of “strange sound” in this contemporary spiritual record, we are not the animal to prick our ears at it. Sounds sweetly familiar, linked in a new crochet pattern. “Christ, what are patterns for?” But why invoke Deity? Ask the Ladies’ Home Journal. You may know a new utterance by the element of danger in it. “My heart aches,” says Keats, and you bet it’s no joke.
Why do I think of stairways
With a rush of hurt surprise?
Heaven knows, my dear, unless you once fell down.
The element of danger. Man is always, all the time and for ever on the brink of the unknown. The minute you realize this, you prick your ears in alarm. And the minute any man steps alone, with his whole naked self, emotional and mental, into the everlasting hinterland of consciousness, you hate him and you wonder over him. Why can’t he stay cozily playing word-games around the camp fire?
Now it is time to invoke the Deity, who made man an adventurer into the everlasting unknown of consciousness.
The spiritual record of any people is 99 per cent a record of games around a camp fire: word-games and picture-games. But the one per cent is a step into the grisly dark, which is for ever dangerous and wonderful. Nothing is wonderful unless it is dangerous. Dangerous to the status quo of the soul. And therefore to some degree detestable.
When the contemporary spiritual record warbles away about the wonder of the blue sky and the changing seas, etc., etc., etc., it is all candy. The sky is a blue hand-mirror to the modern poet and he goes on smirking before it. The blue sky of our particular heavens is painfully well known to us all. In fact, it is like the glass bowl to the goldfish, a ne plus ultra in which he sees himself as he goes round and round.
The actual heavens can suddenly roll up like the heavens of Ezekiel. That’s what happened at the Renaissance. The old heavens shrivelled and men found a new empyrean above them. But they didn’t get at it by playing word-games around the camp fire. Somebody has to jump like a desperate clown through the vast blue hoop of the upper air. Or hack a slow way through the dome of crystal.
Play! Play! Play! All the little playboys and playgirls of the western world, playing at goodness, playing at badness, playing at sadness, and playing deafeningly at gladness. Playboys and playgirls of the western world, harmlessly fulfilling their higher destinies and registering the spiritual record of an entire people. Even playing at death, and playing with death. Oh, poetry, you child in a bathing- dress, playing at ball!
You say nature is always nature, the sky is always the sky. But sit still and consider for one moment what sort of nature it was the Romans saw on the face of the earth, and what sort of heavens the medievals knew above them, and your sky will begin to crack like glass. The world is what it is, and the chimerical universe of the ancients was always child’s play. The camera cannot lie. And the eye of man is nothing but a camera photographing the outer world in colour-process.
This sounds very well. But the eye of man photographs the chimera of nature, as well as the so-called scientific vision. The eye of man photographs gorgons and chimeras, as the eye of the spider photographs images unrecognizable to us and the eye of the horse photographs flat ghosts and looming motions. We are at the phase of scientific vision. This phase will pass and this vision will seem as chimerical to our descendants as the medieval vision seems to us.
The upshot of it all is that we are pot-bound in our consciousness. We are like a fish in a glass bowl, swimming round and round and gaping at our own image reflected on the walls of the infinite: the infinite being the glass bowl of our conception of life and the universe. We are prisoners inside our own conception of life and being. We have exhausted the possibilities of the universe, as we know it. All that remains is to telephone to Mars for a new word of advice.
Our consciousness is pot-bound. Our ideas, our emotions, our experiences are all pot-bound. For us there is nothing new under the sun. What there is to know, we know it already, and experience adds little. The girl who is going to fall in love knows all about it beforehand from books and the movies. She knows what she wants and she wants what she knows. Like candy. It is still nice to eat candy, though one has eaten it every day for years. It is still nice to eat candy. But the spiritual record of eating candy is a rather thin noise.
There is nothing new under the sun, once the consciousness becomes pot-bound. And this is what ails all art today. But particularly American art. The American consciousness is peculiarly pot-bound. It doesn’t even have that little hole in the bottom of the pot through which desperate roots straggle. No, the American consciousness is not only potted in a solid and everlasting pot, it is placed moreover in an immovable ornamental vase. A double hide to bind it and a double bond to hide it.
European consciousness still has cracks in its vessel and a hole in the bottom of its absoluteness. It still has strange roots of memory groping down to the heart of the world.
But American consciousness is absolutely free of such danglers. It is free from all loop-holes and crevices of escape. It is absolutely safe inside a solid and ornamental concept of life. There it is Free! Life is good, and all men are meant to have a good time. Life is good! that is the flower-pot. The ornamental vase is: Having a good time.
So they proceed to have it, even with their woes. The young maiden knows exactly when she falls in love: she knows exactly how she feels when her lover or husband betrays her or when she betrays him: she knows precisely what it is to be a forsaken wife, an adoring mother, an erratic grandmother. All at the age of eighteen.
Vive la vie!
There is nothing new under the sun, but you can have a jolly good old time all the same with the old things. A nut sundae or a new beau, a baby or an automobile, a divorce or a troublesome appendix: my dear, that’s Life! You’ve got to get a good time out of it, anyhow, so here goes!
In which attitude there is a certain piquant stoicism. The stoicism of having a good time. The heroism of enjoying yourself. But, as I say, it makes rather thin hearing in a spiritual record. Rechauffes of rechauffes. Old soup of old bones of life, heated up again for a new consomme. Nearly always called printaniere.
I know a forest, stilly-deep . . .
Mark the poetic novelty of stilly-deep, and then say there is nothing new under the sun.
My soul-harp never thrills to peaceful tunes;
I should say so.
For after all, the thing to do
Is just to put your heart in song —
Or in pickle.
I sometimes wish that God were back
In this dark world and wide;
For though some virtues he might lack,
He had his pleasant side.
“Getting on the pleasant side of God, and how to stay there.” — Hints by a S
tudent of Life.
Oh, ho! Now I am. masterful!
Now I am filled with power.
Now I am brutally myself again
And my own man.
For I have been among my hills today,
On the scarred dumb rocks standing;
And it made a man of him . . .
Open confession is good for the soul.
The spiritual record of an entire . . . what?
Hadrian the Seventh, by Baron Corvo
In Hadrian the Seventh, Frederick Baron Corvo falls in, head over heels, in deadly earnest. A man must keep his earnestness nimble, to escape ridicule. The so-called Baron Corvo by no means escapes. He reaches heights, or depths, of sublime ridiculousness.
It doesn’t kill the book, however. Neither ridicule nor dead earnest kills it. It is extraordinarily alive, even though it has been buried for twenty years. Up it rises to confront us. And, great test, it does not “date” as do Huysmans’s books, or Wilde’s or the rest of them. Only a first-rate book escapes its date.
Frederick Rolfe was a fantastic figure of the nineties, the nineties of the Yellow Book, Oscar Wilde, Aubrey Beardsley, Simeon Solomon, and all the host of the godly. The whole decade is now a little ridiculous, ridiculous decadence as well as ridiculous pietism. They said of Rolfe that he was certainly possessed of a devil. At least his devil is still alive, it hasn’t turned into a sort of gollywog, like the bulk of the nineties’ devils.
Rolfe was one of the Catholic converts of the period, very intense. But if ever a man was a Protestant in all his being, this one was. The acuteness of his protest drove him, like a crazy serpent, into the bosom of the Roman Catholic Church.
He seems to have been a serpent of serpents in the bosom of all the nineties. That in itself endears him to one. The way everyone dropped him with a shudder is almost fascinating.
Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence Page 1030