The Gulf in American Literature

A Discussion of the Irreconcilable Breach between the Illiterates and the Illuminati

EDMUND WILSON, Jr.

SINCE the death of Henry James, we have heard little but the enthusiastic praise of his most passionate admirers. His failure as a portrayer of life (fine artist as he was at his best) has scarcely, so far as I know, been touched upon at all; yet this failure affords a perfect illustration of a tragedy perhaps more interesting than any he ever wrote. I mean the tragedy of the artist in the America of the last half century.

According to. the popular tradition, Henry James was a haughty expatriate, who got away from the United States as quickly as he could and wrote novels in which Americans abroad were compared to their disadvantage with the inhabitants of Europe. His long residence in England, even without his fastidiousness and obscurity, would have been enough to make him unpopular and suspect among his countrymen.

The truth was, of course, as is amply proved by his letters, that he himself suffered terribly from his long exile. He was convinced that exile was a necessity for him and yet he knew that it handicapped him. Henry James' artistic appetite was singularly sensitive and special: it demanded a certain sort of fine impression and a certain sort of social richness which America couldn't supply. And, having been nourished on the food of Europe during so many of the years of his boyhood, he could never quite feel anything but starved in the United States.

Henry James and the New England Landscape

STILL, he stood out for America as long as he could before he capitulated to Europe. "I know what I am about," he writes to his mother in 1878 from London, "and I have always my eyes on my native land." He returns to America bravely determined to turn it to artistic account, but his creative imagination finds almost nothing to work on in the social barrenness of New England: there are no great traditions, no art, no counts and duchesses and princes, no landscapes "toned" by age and picturesque associations. He can never forgive the American landscape for its psychic barrenness. "Ah, the thin, empty, melancholy American 'beauty'—which I yet find a cold prudish charm in!" he writes when revisiting New England in his old age. But that charm, such as it was, had not been enough to hold him. He had hungrily returned to Europe and definitely made his home there.

In Europe the sensitive plate of his art will be exposed to those impressions which alone the finely ground lens of his mind has been focussed by nature to record. But in Europe he will find himself pulled up by another frustration which will still stand maddeningly between him and artistic satisfaction. He is a mere onlooker at a society of which he has never been a part. "I feel forever , he writes in 1874, "how Europe keeps holding one at arm's length, and condemning one to a meagre scraping of the surface." In 1899, after sixteen years' unbroken residence abroad, he advises William James—from France—as follows in regard to the latter's sons: "What I most of all feel, and in the light of it conjure you to keep doing for them, is their being a meme to contract local saturations and attachments in respect to their own great and glorious country, to learn and strike roots into its infinite beauty, as I suppose, and variety. Then they won't, as I do now, have to assimilate but half-heartedly, the alien splendours—inferior ones, too, as I believe—of the indigestible midi of Bourget and the Vicomte Melchior de Vogue. . . . The beauty here is, after my long stop at home [in London, that is], admirable and exquisite; but make the boys, none the less, stick fast and sink up to their necks in everything their own countries and climates can give de pareil et de superieur. Its being that 'own', will double the use of it."

In his last years we see him living alone in his little Sussex town, a lonely and somewhat tragic figure, exiled from America and yet to a great extent insulated from the life of England—at no point could you ever mistake his letters for the letters of an Englishman— still grumbling at the English for their stupidity and their indifference to beauty, half home-sick for America, which, however, when he finally revisits it, only shocks him with its materialism and bewilders him with its confusion and drives him back again to take refuge among the shadows of his solitude.

The voices and lights of that "rich" European life which he has loved and chosen reach him only dimly across the gulf of his isolation. He has understood Europe with the last intelligence, but he has never really lived it. Contemptuous to his dying day of New England and all its taboos, he has, none the less, as an American, not escaped their blighting influence. He has shaken off provincial prejudices and the dogmas of Puritan morality, but the Puritan conscience, civilized away in its crudest form, still persists in its sterilizing tendency to turn emotion into casuistry, to bleach life into a grey web of ratiocination, to prevent Henry James, a born artist, a born savourer of sensations, from drinking deeply of the environment he has come so far to enjoy. He writes novels full of luxuries and passions, but their beauty is always melancholy: all the levers and splendours of life have become remote and sad. He loves those fevers and splendours, but he is always observing them from without, never taking part in them. In his very last novels, it is still a case of the mildest of Americans looking on with wonder and only partial comprehension at flaming Europeans, and he finally (in A Small Boy and Others) returns with prodigious gusto to the dim America of his youth and executes pictures of more value and beauty than any he has done of England. He is still the American in Europe, detached from both Europe and America, lonely, incompletely satisfied, living and working in a vacuum.

The Man Without a Country

AND in this aspect he stands almost as a type of the superior American of his generation, the "cultivated" American who was never quite happy in America and yet never quite at home anywhere else. Think of Henry Adams devoting the greater part of his life to the study of American politics (which he examined with the alien irony of a superior sophistication and from which he came away hungry), and finally deciding that his "spiritual home" was really France, where he spent so much of his latter years in a not altogether successful attempt to become a XIIIth century mystic. Adams could no more be satisfied with the political epoch that was ushered in by the Gould-Fiske Gold Conspiracy than James could be satisfied with the social scene of Boston and New York,—or Whistler with the artistic nourishment of the Hudson River School of painting.

These men were all born too old in a world too young. The educated American found himself the offspring of an ancient European stock, from which he had been cut off, the heir to a magnificent inheritance, which lay on the other side of the Atlantic. He could do nothing but turn back to Europe for the storehouse of that inheritance. America offered him almost nothing wherewith to feed his soul. If he was a really first-rate man, like James or Henry Adams, he could not get very far on a diet of New England transcendentalism and the Christmas-card school of poetry of Longfellow and Lowell, or even on the XVIIIth century political philosophy of the founders of the Republic, which had long been swallowed up in the sordidness and stupidity of the industrial-commercial regime. And yet when the culture of Europe was imported to the United States, it seemed to go flat like tea or cigars that have spoiled in crossing. Have you ever noticed how thin, how pale, how incredibly like Longfellow and Lowell, a French or Italian lyric becomes as soon as it has been put into English by an American of that chaste period? A poem by Heine or Baudelaire that seems to leap like a flame in the original takes on a bleached and frozen appearance when John Hay has translated it. Think of what Longfellow did to Dante!

And even in these days of Huneker and Mencken and a deeper appreciation of foreign culture, how little is an American writer at home when he tries to make serve him some legend or tradition of the rich European background! Think of Mr. E. A. Robinson trying to recreate the Arthurian legends, with Guinevere and Lancelot and Merlin turned to "cultivated" American intellectuals who spin their once barbaric passions into the thinnest fogs of casuistry! Even Mr. Cabell's Jurgen, admirable as it is, seems handicapped by its American origin: a fatal thinness of atmosphere and bareness of style betrays the fact that the author has not learned his legendary figures,—his Koschkei and Helen and Erda,—from the soil where he first walked or felt their presence in the mountains and skies upon which his eyes first opened: he has read about them in libraries, and Jurgen, for all its brilliance, is still not Anatole France. We Americans may wander through our racial past, but we have been too sharply divorced from it: we can never quite possess it.

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The Age of Refinement

BUT, to return to James's letters, we find that they illustrate another characteristic of the educated American minority of the last half century, a characteristic which was summed up at the time in the word "refinement". In that American shadow of the Victorian Age, all the superior people were "refined"; for New England was "refined," and New England fixed the standards of taste. And poor Henry James, deriding New England as he did and a rebel against her prudery, remains also, none the less, profoundly "refined." He has a morbid terror of the "vulgar." He is always finding things and people "vulgar"; he is always fearing he has said something "vulgar" himself and apologizing for it. It was the last provincial prejudice from which he could never free himself.

When Sir Charles Dilke was a boy at school, he once wrote home to his grandfather that one of his class themes had been criticized by the master as vulgar. "The fact that your essay has been stigmatized as vulgar," the grandfather wrote back, "predisposes me strongly in its favour."

But James had never quite learned that the continual fear of the vulgar was a confession of provinciality and really nothing more, in essence, than the fear of life itself. His mind was fundamentally virile and he got as close to life as he could, but there were too many things and too important ones that he couldn't bear to do more than hint at.

It is true that almost everyone else of his class and profession in America was much worse than he. They were isolated on a barren peak, practising "refinement" for all they were worth, while the flood of democracy below them rose higher and higher. If it happened that any was obliged to take a plunge into the depths, he refined the experience afterwards and did his best to make his picture of the jungle of American life fit in with the proprieties, the unalterable commandments handed down from Beacon Hill.

For between the "refined" and the "vulgar" flood was a great gulf fixed. The saving remnant, shuddering on their summit, were bent upon keeping themselves pure from the muddy and tumultuous encroachments of the democratic tide. They had all the education and culture and they were going to guard it from destruction.

This gulf has hitherto been—and too frequently still remains—one of the most important facts to be recognized in American literature. It has split the literary activity of the country into two . parties so widely separated that they scarcely speak the same language. For far below the rarefied level of refinement there were giants struggling out of the earth. When a man of great imagination was born into the common life he could neither escape nor ignore the realities of the country. He had perhaps more that was vivid and vital to say than all the illuminati put together, but the chances were enormous against his ever being able to get it properly said. There was Mark Twain, whose stultification Mr. Van Wyck Brooks has just exposed, shamed through his lack of a background, through his ignorance of what literature might mean, into suppressing his real convictions and emasculating his imagination. There is Dreiser, scarcely literate, writing dignified and truthful tragedies in the language of the American newspaper and the dime novel. An artist held a spiritual prisoner by bourgeois ideas and an artist with no vehicle of expression but the cliches of journalism! And, however much you may admire these men, you must admit that Philistinism and illiteracy are poor guarantees of permanence.

So they stand on either side of the gulf, the "refined" and rather superficial literati and the born poets and prophets with no background save the soil,— neither side adequately equipped, neither properly balanced. Who will ever be able to reconcile them?

The Submersion of the Ark

"WELL, the truth is, I believe, that they will never be reconciled: the saving remnant will expire; they will be engulfed by the vulgar tide which is rising around them. The sacred ark has slipped from their drowning hands and been emptied into the sea and the rough creatures from the depths have seized upon its contents. The news of the fall of Troy has reached the Middle West. Apollo of the silver bow has been seen in Spoon River. Mr. Vachel Lindsay has likened Springfield to Athens and Florence.

And is the sacred heritage, after all, in worse hands than before? There is no abatement of the industrialization and materialism of the country: it is difficult to see why the arts should not perish completely, and yet, perhaps because the cheapness and oppressiveness of American life have gone so far that humanity can endure no more and reaction has become inevitable, there does seem to have been in the last few years something like a more vigorous demand for ideas and beauty: the so-called New Poetry movement, the growth of the "little" theatres, the revival of genuine political discussion by the liberal and radical reviews. It would seem that every influence in America was directly opposed to the pursuit of beauty and the exchange of ideas: the plutocracy sits in judgment over our opinions and the Anti-Vice Society over our works of art, and yet one cannot help feeling that both art and intelligence have more life in them to-day than they had in the unleavened half century which drove Henry James to England and Henry Adams to France.