by Thomas Wolfe
Who ever did give you the more wholesome and well-rounded view of things?"
"Well," said Alsop judicially, "I think Dickens gave it to you."
There was a dutiful murmur of agreement from the disciples, broken by the rebel's angry mutter: "Ah--Dickens! I'm tired hearing about Dickens all the time!"
This was sacrilege, and for a moment there was appalled silence, as if someone had at last committed a sin against the Holy Ghost. When Alsop spoke again his face was very grave, and his eyes had narrowed to cold points: "You mean to say that you think this Russian fellow presents as wholesome and well-rounded a pictuah of life as Dickens does?"
"I told you, "the other said in a voice that trembled with excitement, "that I don't know what you're talking about when you say that. I'm only saying that there can be other great writers in the world besides Dickens."
"And you think, then," said Alsop quietly, "that this man is a greater writer than Dickens?"
"I haven't--" the other began.
"Yes, but come on now," said Alsop. "We're all fair-minded people here--you really think he's greater, don't you?"
Monk looked at him for a moment with a kind of baffled indignation; then, spurted to a boiling point of irrational resentment by the expression of the stern faces all about him, he suddenly shouted out: "Yes! He was! A hell of a sight greater! It's like Pascal said--that one of the grandest surprises in life is to open a book expecting to meet an author, and to find instead a man. And that's the way it is with Dostoevski. You don't meet the author. You meet the man. You may not believe everything that is said, but you believe the man who is saying it. You are convinced by his utter sincerity, by the great, burning light of him, and in the end, no matter how confused or bewildered or unsure he may himself be, time and again you know that he is right.
And you see also that it doesn't matter how people say things, so long as the feeling behind the things they say is a true one. I can give you an example of that," he went on hotly. "At the end of The Brothers Karamazov, where Alyosha is talking to the boys in the cemetery, the danger of falseness and sentimentality in such a scene as this is over whelming. In the first place, the scene is in a graveyard, and Alyosha and the children are there to put flowers upon the grave of another child who has died. Then again, there is the danger of Alyosha, with his convictions of brotherly love, his doctrine of redemption through sacrifice, of salvation through humility. He makes a speech to the children, a confused and rambling speech, of which sentence after sentence could have been uttered by a Y. M. C. A. secretary or a Sunday School teacher. Why is it, then, that there is nothing sickly or dis gusting about it, as there would be in the harangue of such men as these? It is because we know from the beginning that the words are honest and sincere, because we believe in the sincerity and truth and honesty of the character who is speaking the words, and of the man who wrote the words and created the character. Dostoevski was not afraid to use such words," Monk went on in the full flood of his passion, "because he had no falseness and sentimentality in him. The words are the same as the Sunday School teacher might use, but the feeling behind them is different, and that makes the difference. There fore they express what Dostoevski wanted them to. Alyosha tells the children that we must love one another, and we believe him. He tells them never to forget their comrade who has died, to try to remember all the countless good and generous acts of his life, his love for his father, his courage and devotion. Then Alyosha tells the children that the most important thing in life, the thing that will expiate our sins, pardon all our mistakes and errors, make our lives prevail, is to have a good memory of someone. And these simple words move us more than the most elaborate rhetoric could do, because suddenly we know that we have been told something true and everlasting about life, and that the man who told it to us is right."
During the last part of this long speech, Alsop had reached over quietly to his bookshelves, taken a well-worn volume from the shelf, and, even while Monk talked, begun to thumb quietly through its pages. Now he was ready for him again. He had the book open in his hand, one fat forefinger marking the spot. He was waiting for Monk to conclude, with a patient and tolerant little smile.
"Now," he said quietly, when the other finished, "that situation which you described there interests me very much, because Charles Dickens deals with the same situation at the end of A Tale of Two Cities, and says the same thing that Dostoevski says." Monk noticed he got the name right this time. "Now," said Alsop, looking around at his congregation with a little misty smile that prefaced all these tributes to sentiment and, in especial, to that chief object of his idolatry, Charles Dickens--and which said to them plainer than any words could do: "Now I'm going to show you what a really great man can do with sweetness and light"--he said quietly: "I think you'll all be interested to see how Dickens handles that same situation," and immediately began to read the concluding passages of the book, which are devoted to Sidney Carton's celebrated utterance as he steps up to the guillotine to sacrifice his own life in order that the life of the man beloved by the woman he himself loves may be spared: "'I see the lives for which I lay down my life, peaceful, useful, prosperous and happy, in that England which I shall see no more. I see her with a child upon her bosom, who bears my name. I see her father, aged and bent, but otherwise restored, and faithful to all men in his heating office, and at peace. I see the good old man, so long their friend, in ten years' time enriching them with all he has, and passing tranquilly to his reward.
"'I see that I hold a sanctuary in their hearts, and in the hearts of their descendants, generations hence. I see her, an old woman, weeping for me on the anniversary of this day. I see her and her husband, their course done, lying side by side in their last earthly bed, and I know that each was not more honored and held sacred in the other's soul, than I was in the souls of both.
"'I see that child who lay upon her bosom and who bore my name, a man, winning his way up in that path of life which once was mine.
I see him winning it so well, that my name is made illustrious there by the light of his. I see the blots I threw upon it, faded away. I see him, foremost of just judges and honored men, bringing a boy of my name, with a forehead that I know and golden hair, to this place--then fair to look upon, with not a trace of this day's disfigurement--and I hear him tell the child my story, with a tender and a faltering voice.
"'It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to, than I have ever known.'"
Alsop read these famous lines in a voice husky with emotion, and, at the end, paused a moment before speaking, to blow his nose vigorously. He was genuinely and deeply affected, and there was no doubt that his emotion and the way in which he read the passage had produced a profound effect on his audience. At the conclusion, after the vigorous salute into his handkerchief, and a moment's silence, he looked around with a misty little smile and said quietly: "Well, what do you think of that? Do you think that comes up to Mr. Dusty What's-His-Name or not?"
There was an immediate chorus of acclamation. They all agreed vociferously that that passage not only "came up" to Mr. Dusty What's
His-Name, but far surpassed anything he had ever accomplished.
In view of the fact that none of them knew anything about Mr.
Dusty What's-His-Name and were yet willing to pass judgment with such enthusiastic conviction, Monk felt his anger rising hot and quick, and broke in indignantly: "That is not the same thing at all. The situation is altogether different."
"Well, now," said Jerry persuasively, "you must admit that fundamentally the situation is essentially the same. It's the idea of love and sacrifice in both cases. Only it seems to me that Dickens' treatment of the situation is the superior of the two. He says what Dostoevski is trying to say, but it seems to me he says it much better. He presents a more rounded pictuah, and lets you know that life is going to go on and be just as fine and sweet as it ever was in spite of everything.
No
w," he said, quietly and persuasively again, "don't you agree, Monk, that Dickens' method is the best? You know you do, you scannel!"
Here he chortled richly, shoulders and his great belly shaking with good-natured glee. "I know how you feel at the bottom of your heart.
You're just arguing to hear yourself talk."
"Why not at all, Jerry," Monk came back with hot earnestness, mean everything I say. And I don't see any similarity at all between the two situations. What Sidney Carton says has no relation to what Alyosha is trying to say at the end of The Brothers Karamazov. One book is a skillful and exciting melodrama, which makes use of some of the events of the French Revolution. The other book is, in this sense, not a story at all. It is a great vision of life and of human destiny, as seen through the spirit of a great man. What Alyosha is saying is not that man dies for love, not that he sacrifices his life for romantic love, but that he lives for love, not romantic love, but love of life, love of mankind, and that through love his spirit and his memory survive, even when his physical self is dead. That's not the same thing at all as the thing that Sidney Carton says. What you have on the one hand is a profound and simple utterance of a great spiritual truth, and what you have on the other is the rhetorical and sentimental ending to a romantic melodrama."
"No suh!" Jerry Alsop now cried hotly, his face flushed with anger and excitement. "No suh!" he cried again, and shook his big head in angered denial. "If you call that sentimental, you just don't know what you're talking about! You've just gone and got yourself completely lost! You don't even know what Dickens is trying to do!"
The upshot of it was that a cat-and-dog fight broke out at this point, a dozen angry, derisive voices clashing through the air trying to drown out the rebel, who only shouted louder as the opposition grew; and it continued until the contestants were out of breath and the entire campus was howling for quiet from a hundred windows.
It wound up with Alsop standing, pale but righteous, in the center of the room, finally restoring quiet, and saying: "We've all tried to be your friends, we've tried to help you out. If you can't take it the way it's meant, you don't need to bothah with us any more. We all saw the way that you were going-" he went on in a trembling tone; and Monk, stung by these final words into maddening and complete revolt, cried passionately: "Going--going hell! I'm gone!" And he stormed out of the room, clutching the battered volume underneath his arm.
When he had gone the tumult broke out anew, the loyal cohorts gathering round their wounded chief. The end of it all, when the whole tumult of bitter agreement had quieted down, was summed up in the final dismissal of Alsop's words: "He's just an ass! He's just gone and played hell, that's what he's done! I thought there was some hope for him, but he's just gone and made a complete damned ass of himself! Leave him alone! Don't fool with him any longer, he's not wuth it!"
And that was that.
"Get the Facts, Brother Webber! Get the Facts!"
The square Sphinx head, shaven, paunch-jowled, putty-grey; the grim, dry mouth, puckered with surly humor; the low rasp of the voice.
He sat in squat immobility, staring at them ironically.
"I am a Research Man!" he announced finally. "I get the Facts."
"What do you do with them after you get them?" said Monk.
"I put salt on their tails and get some more," said Professor Randolph Ware.
His stolid, ironic face, iron lidded, enjoyed the puzzled worship of their stare.
"Have I any imagination?" he asked. He shook his head in solemn negation. "No-o," he said with a long grunt of satisfaction. "Have I any genius? No-o. Could I have written King Lear? No-o. Have I more brains than Shakespeare? Yes. Do I know more about English literature than the Prince of Wales? Yes. Do I know more about Spenser than Kittredge, Manley, and Saintsbury put together? Yes.
Do I know more about Spenser than God and Spenser put together?
Yes. Could I have written The Faery Queen? No-o. Could I write a doctoral thesis about The Faery Queen? Yes."
"Did you ever see a doctor's thesis that was worth reading?" asked Monk.
"Yes," said the implacable monotone.
"Whose was it?"
"My own."
They answered with a young yell of worship.
"Then what's the use of the Facts?" said Monk.
"They keep a man from getting soft," said Randolph Ware grimly.
"But a Fact has no importance in itself," said Monk. "It is only a manifestation of the Concept."
"Have you had your breakfast, Brother Webber?"
"No," said Monk, "I always eat after class. That's to keep my mind fresh and active for its work."
The class snickered.
"Is your breakfast a Fact or a Concept, Brother Webber?" He stared grimly at him for a moment. "Brother Webber made a One in Logic," he said, "and he has breakfast at noon. He thinks he is another convert to Divine Philosophy, but he is wrong. Brother Webber, you have heard the bells at midnight many times. I have myself seen you below the moon, with your eyes in a fine frenzy rolling. You will never make a Philosopher, Brother Webber. You will spend several years quite pleasantly in Hell, Getting the Facts. After that, you may make a poet."
Randolph Ware was a very grand person--a tremendous scholar, a believer in the discipline of formal research. He was a scientific utilitarian to the roots of his soul: he believed in Progress and the relief of man's estate, and he spoke of Francis Bacon--who was really the first American--with a restrained but passionate wisdom.
George Webber remembered this man later--grey, stolid, ironic--as one of the strangest people he had ever known. All of the facts were so strange. He was a Middle-Westerner who went to the University of Chicago and learned more about English literature than the people at Oxford knew. It seemed strange that one should study Spenser in Chicago.
He was gigantically American--he seemed almost to foreshadow the future. George met few people who were able to make such complete and successful use of things as they are. He was a magnificent teacher, capable of fruitful and astonishing innovation. Once he set the class in composition to writing a novel, and they went to work with boiling interest. George rushed into class breathlessly three times a week with a new chapter written out on the backs of paper bags, envelopes, stray bits of paper. And Randolph Ware had the power of communicating to them the buried magic of poetry: the cold sublimity of Milton began to burgeon with life and opulent color--in Moloch, Beelzebub, Satan, without vulgarity or impertinence, he made them see a hundred figures of craft and rapacity and malice among the men of their time.
Yet it always seemed to George that there was in the man a cruelly wasted power. There was in him a strong light and a hidden glory.
He seemed with deliberate fatalism to have trapped himself among petty things. Despite his great powers, he wasted himself compiling anthologies for use in colleges.
But the students who swarmed about him sensed the tenderness and beauty below his stolid and ironic mask. And once George, going in to see him at his house, found him at the piano, his blunt, heavy body erect, his putty face dreaming like a Buddha, as his pudgy fingers drew out with passion and wisdom the great music of Beethoven. Then George remembered what Alcibiades had said to Socrates: "You are like the god Silenus--outwardly a paunched and ugly man, but concealing inwardly the figure of a young and beautiful divinity."
In spite of the twaddle that the prominent educators of the time were always talking about "democracy and leadership,"
"ideals of service,"
"the place of the college in modern life," and so on, there wasn't much reality about the direction of such "education" as George had had.
And that's not to say there had been no reality in his education. There was, of course--not only because there's reality in everything, but be cause he had come in contact with art, with letters, and with a few fine people. Maybe that's about as much as you can expect.
It would also be unfair to say that the real value of this, the beautiful a
nd enduring thing, he had had to "dig out" for himself. This wasn't true. He had met a lot of other young people, like himself, and this fact was "beautiful"--a lot of young fellows all together, not sure where they were going, but sure that they were going somewhere.
So he had this, and this was a lot.
13
The Rock
SOME FIFTEEN OR MORE YEARS AGO (AS MEN MEASURE, BY THOSE DIURNAL instruments which their ingenuity has created, the immeasurable universe of time), at the end of a fine, warm, hot, fair, fresh, fragrant, lazy, furnacelike day of sweltering heat across the body, bones, sinews, tissues, juices, rivers, mountains, plains, streams, lakes, coastal regions, and compacted corporosity of the American continent, a train might have been observed by one of the lone watchers of the Jersey Flats approaching that enfabled rock, that ship of life, that swarming, million footed, tower-masted, and sky-soaring citadel that bears the magic name of the Island of Manhattan, at terrific speed.
At this moment, indeed, one of the lone crayfishers, who ply their curious trade at this season of the year throughout the melancholy length and breadth of those swamplike moors which are characteristic of this section of the Jersey coast, lifted his seamed and weather-beaten face from some nets which he had been mending in preparation for the evening's catch, and, after gazing for a moment at the projectile fury of the Limited as it thundered past, turned and, speaking to the brown-faced lad beside him, said quietly: "It is the Limited."
And the boy, returning his father's look with eyes as sea-far and as lonely as the old man's own, and in a voice as quiet, said: "On time, father?"
The old man did not answer for a moment. Instead, he thrust one gnarled and weather-beaten hand into the pocket of his pea-jacket, fumbled a moment, and then pulled forth an enormous silver watch with compass dials, an heirloom of three generations of crayfishing folk. He regarded it a moment with a steady, reflective gaze.