English Institute essays, 1949 zw12z568n

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English Institute Essays ¥ 1949

English Institute Essays « 1949 Edited by

Alan S. Downer _

NEW YORK + COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS + 1950

COPYRIGHT 1950 CoLuMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS, NEW YORK

Published in Great Britain, Canada, and India by Geoffrey Cumberlege, Oxford University Press London, Toronto, and Bombay Manufactured in the United States of America

Editorial Committee YE

Dorotuy BETHURUM, Connecticut College } ALAN S. Downer, Princeton University

NorMAN Homes Pearson, Yale University Davip ALLAN ROBERTSON, JR., Barnard College

Henry H. Wiccins, Columbia University Press

Preface TT SEVEN PAPERS which make up the present addition to the series of English Institute Essays were selected by the Editorial Committee from sixteen de-

livered at the eighth meeting of the Institute, held from September sixth through September tenth, 1949. Continuing the practice of recent years, in the hope of producing a unified volume, the selection was con-. fined to the papers read in two conferences.

It is a pleasant duty to extend the thanks of the members of the Institute to the chairmen responsible for the selection of speakers; to the speakers, for lively and provocative papers; to Columbia University, for again acting as host for the session; and to the Columbia University Press and its staff, through whose cooperation the publishing of this record of the meetings of the English Institute is made possible.

Princeton, N. J. March, 1950

A.S.D.

Contents Poetic Drama: an Analysis and a Suggestion, by

Moopy E. Prior

Northwestern University 3 Poetic Drama and the Well-made Play, by ARTHUR MIZENER

Carleton College 33

Poetry in the Theatre and Poetry of the Theatre: Cocteau’s Infernal Machine, by Francis FErGUSSON

Princeton University 55 Literary Economics and Literary History, by WILLIAM CHARVAT

Ohio State University 73,

Civilization and Savagism: the World of The

Leatherstocking ‘Tales, by Roy Harvey PEARCE

Ohio State University Q2

The Smiling Aspects of Life and a National American Literature, by BENJAMIN TOWNLEY SPENCER

Ohio Wesleyan University 114 Points of Moral Reference: a Comparative Study of Edith Wharton and F. Scott Fitzgerald, by FREDERICK J. HOFFMAN

University of Wisconsin 147

X Contents Appendixes

Supervising Committee, 1949 179 The English Institute Program, 1949 180

Registrants, 1949 183

English Institute Essays % 1949

Poetic Drama: an Analysis and a Suggestion YE

By MOODY E. PRIOR HE TERM “poetic drama’ has come to occupy an ac-

‘Decpted place in our critical vocabulary, and its use seems to take for granted some fairly clear agreement concerning its meaning and proper application. Actually, however, there is no exactness in our use of the expression. It frequently denotes drama of which the dialogue is in verse; but the occasional use of the expres-

sion “poetic prose,” as applied, for instance, to such plays as Oscar Wilde’s Salomé or Maeterlinck’s Pélleas et Mélisande, seems to imply that verse dialogue is not

an essential feature of poetic drama but rather a particular quality of language. Occasionally, again, the term ‘‘poetic drama” is used in such a way as to involve

a historical distinction, in which case it embraces the tragedies of ancient Greece, of Elizabethan England,

and of seventeenth-century France, and sets these against the prevailing dramatic traditions of recent times. When this historical distinction is implied, such plays of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as use verse are generally viewed not as part of a continuous development, but as archaic survivals, or self-conscious

4 Poetic Drama: an Analysis imitations, or as “sports.” In this context, “poetic drama’ has acquired for some critics pejorative overtones; for certain others it has become a badge of un-

appreciated merit. In certain instances, finally, the term “poetic drama’ appears to have lost all these distinctions and to have assumed wider and more compre-

hensive—though indefinite—implications; for in-

stance, in a recent book entitled The Poet in the Theatre, separate chapters are devoted to Henry James, Chekhov, and Shaw. It is evident from this brief survey of usage that the only thing which the various meanings of the term have in common is the assumption that there may be distin-

| guished two distinct types of drama, one of which is poetic, in any one of a number of senses, and the other

presumably non-poetic. It is also apparent that the various applications of the term are a consequence of certain developments in the history of the drama and of dramatic criticism, and that the various artistic distinctions which it has come to convey are peculiar to our times. To the first great critic of the drama, what the expression conveys to us would have represented a confusion

of the issue and a misinterpretation of the problem. For Aristotle, all drama was a species of poetry because

it was a species of imitation. He objected to the common usage of his day which gave the title of poet to

writers “indiscriminately in virtue of the meter” (i, 10): Empedocles in verse was still a scientist, and He-

rodotus versified, still a historian; neither should be

) confused with a writer like Homer, a poet properly

Poetic Drama: an Analysis 5 speaking, though all three might have verse in common (ix, 33 ix, g). Conversely, he recognizes that poetic im1tation may be in discourse without meter (1, 7). Since,

however, Aristotle thought that rhythm, like the m1metic impulse, was natural to man (xard ¢dvow) he seems to have assumed that metrical writing would contribute to the pleasure in poetry. These are the general

considerations. The Poetics, however, is not about all poetry, nor even about all drama, but primarily about tragedy. With respect to language (Aé£us), the Poetics tells us that the appropriate meter for tragedy is iambic (iv, 18-19; xxiv, 12); with respect to diction, the merit consists in being clear and not commonplace (cad7) Kat 7) Tamewyy; Xii, 1)—a consideration that receives

provocative if not very full explanation. Surveying inductively the tragedies available to him,

Aristotle seems to have taken verse dialogue for granted, and he argued, further, for certain qualities of language and diction as best suited to the form he was discussing; but it was not through these special considerations that he approached the problem of the nature of tragedy or that he attempted to draw distinc-

tions with other modes of literary imitation. In this respect Aristotle’s approach differs from our own. Many critics today appear to have distinguished a par-

ticular species of drama in terms of its meter or its language or both, and through these differentia attempt to establish its essential nature and its position among dramatic forms.

This modern approach would have been puzzling also to the dramatists and critics of the Renaissance,

6 Poetic Drama: an Analysis though for somewhat different reasons. On the problems which seem of paramount interest to us, the theorizing about the nature of drama during the sixteenth century was not, either by Greek or modern standards, very rigorous. Renaissance criticism was oriented in part by the necessity for establishing the importance and righteousness of secular literature, and some of the subtlety of argument was diverted into such channels. Of possible technical problems, the unities and decorum are the chief ones to occupy an important place. ‘The drama, however, especially in Spain and England, flourished without much concern for these restrictions, though occasionally the theorists found disciples, notably Ben Jonson. In the writings on the drama there are occasional references to the dramatist as a poet or maker, and the distinction 1s sometimes drawn between the more philosophic nature of drama as compared to history. But whereas such statements reflect at least a superficial knowledge of Aristotle, neither in principles nor method are any of the Renaissance critics strictly Aristotelian, whatever similarities there may be on particular points. In the matter of language, for instance, it seems to be assumed that

in tragedy there must be eloquence and an appropriate elevation of diction. It is not clear, however,

whence this notion is derived, and there appears to be no consistent basis for its justification. The artifices of language were regarded as one of the means at the disposal of the poet which enabled him

to delight while instructing, and the commonplace

} about the didactic function of literature seems to

Poetic Drama: an Analysis 4 underlie such statements as that of Chapman, that tragedy is a “‘sententious excitation to virtue.” ‘The re-

spect for approved models seems originally also to have had considerable influence on the language; for instance, Sidney praises Gorboduc for “climbing to the heighth of Seneca his style.’ ‘There is also the more

general consideration that everywhere during the sixteenth century eloquence and the artifices of language

were admired simply because they were delightful in themselves. The question which has become so troublesome to us, whether verse is appropriate for dramatic dialogue, is not considered at all. ‘This diffuse-

ness, this lack of rigor in approaching such technical questions, indicates that for dramatists of the sixteenth and early seventeenth century no problems really existed. It was assumed that drama could and in general

should be written in verse, and that under certain conditions eloquence and artifice of language were required and desirable. Particularly in England, such questions as the proper occasions for prose or the appropriate degree of heightening of language in any given case appear to have been referred not to any theo-

retically grounded principles but to what might be called a cultivated professional habit, a trained technical sensibility.

A fortunate accompaniment of this untroubled approach to the problem was that the almost universal employment of verse did not impose any limitations on the handling of language. Tamburlaine is in blank verse; sois A Woman Killed with Kindness, a domestic

tragedy; and so is The Lady of Pleasure, a social

8 Poetic Drama: an Analysis problem comedy. In each, the rhythms, the diction, the figures of speech, the idiom, are adjusted to the subject and setting. Jonson affords an effective illustra-

tion: Volpone and The Alchemist are both in blank verse; but there 1s a world of difference between the gorgeous, hectic beauty of the opening lines of the former and the raucous, colloquial vulgarity of the latter. ‘he general use of verse imposed no restriction on the range of Elizabethan drama, and in this respect the Elizabethans differed in their attitude toward the question from the dramatists and critics of the present day. Our general rejection of verse has tended to restrict the range of our drama. Moreover, where the term “poetic drama’ today implies the use of verse, it usually, as a further limitation, carries the suggestion that verse calls for a particular style and language

in conjunction with a particular kind of play. The dramatists of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century were the last to view the writing of plays in a

relatively free and comprehensive spirit. With the end of this era, the modern problems and attitudes begin to emerge. ‘The change 1s already visible during the later years of the seventeenth century. Shakespeare's plays stand

out as the great accomplishment of the earlier age; it is the genius of Racine that dominates the next, and it is no disparagement of that genius to note that his

work represents a considerable narrowing of range in the matter and technique of serious drama. More- over, the loose general commentary on dramatic matters that accompanied the development of English

Poetic Drama: an Analysis 9 drama is replaced by the more exacting French critical spirit, which substituted a body of principles and precepts and an elaborate dialectical method for the practical trials and adaptations, the professional habits of the English dramatist as a means of determining solutions to dramatic problems. Corneille might fret under

official disapproval, but he submitted. This critical spirit set the tone for much of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and had a great and prolonged effect on European drama. The case of Dryden is instructive, since he protested against the presumed superiority of French drama, defended Shakespeare against the strictures of the new critical system, and in his finest tragedy went for guidance to Shakespeare.

Yet in his plays, Dryden shows the influence of the

French and—though he uses it without narrowness | or pedantry—he is a master of the new critical method. And so, unlike most of his Elizabethan predecessors, he is not content simply with the fact that a particular

style or work is gratifying to him and has public approval; he must justify everything by measuring it up to the demands of the proper principles and test the matter out through the refining fire of the new dialectic. Dryden anticipates, further, certain attitudes characteristic of the modern approach to the problem of verse drama. He is conscious of his historical relations to the past, and recognizes the difficulties attendant on his position. He is certainly one of the first to reveal an awareness of being a victim of the phenomenon of literary exhaustion—a complaint that becomes common after the middle of the nineteenth century.

10 Poetic Drama: an Analysis Surveying the English drama of the previous age at the outset of his own career, he saw himself the inheri-

tor of spendthrift forebears who “have ruined their estates themselves, before they came to their children’s hands.” Nothing remained, Dryden felt, but to attempt

what they had left untried or unexploited. Dryden thus explained his choice of rhymed verse, the popular dramatic style at the Restoration in England, and the established idiom for French tragedy. ‘The use of rhymed verse in drama represents an acceptance a forizorz of the traditional mechanical artifice of poetic drama, since in couplet verse—unlike blank

verse—the fact of artifice is ostentatiously insisted upon. ‘he occasional objection to rhyme among certain neoclassical critics affords, therefore, a clue to an important step in the direction of the modern attitude. Early in his career, Dryden became involved in a controversy over his use of the heroic couplet in drama, and in consequence the two sides of the issue are effectively presented in An Essay of Dramatic Poesy. ‘The arguments against rhyme are assigned to Crites, who,

it 18 important to note, earlier in the dialogue had defended the superiority of the ancients over the moderns and presented the theoretical justification for the unities: First, then, I am of the opinion that rhyme is unnatural in a play, because dialogue there is presented as the effect

of sudden thought: for a play is the imitation of nature; and since no man without premeditation speaks in rhyme

| neither ought he to do it on the stage. ‘This hinders not but the fancy may be there elevated to an higher pitch of

Poetic Drama: an Analysis 11 thought than it is in ordinary discourse; for there is a prob-

ability that men of excellent and quick parts may speak noble things extempore: but those thoughts are never fettered with the numbers or sound of verse, and therefore it cannot be but unnatural to present the most free way of speaking in that which is the most constrained.

In Cyrites’ argument, the propriety of any dramatic contrivance is judged by the degree of closeness which

it permits to the reality that men experience and observe, and the test of its success 1s the readiness with

which it produces approval, and hence delight, in those faculties of the mind which are able to judge of its conformity to reality. He appears to take for granted the traditional notion that discourse in a serious play

may be more elevated than ordinary discourse, but the reason he assigns is not the traditional one. It is, in fact, grounded on an appeal to psychological reality —the presumed fact that men of excellent parts, such as a serious play might represent, can be supposed to

be more brilliant extempore speakers than ordinary men. On this basis, Crites concludes that the verse form closest to ordinary speech is the best. Dryden, however, was aware that the criterion of verisimilitude inherent in this type of argument would, strictly speaking, rule out even blank verse as undesirable. Neander, his spokesman in the dialogue, accordingly replies by insisting upon the artistic requirements of any particular genre as the determining consideration: “I answer

. . . by distinguishing betwixt what is nearest to the nature of the comedy, which is the imitation of common persons, and ordinary speaking, and what is near-

12 Poetic Drama: an Analysis est the nature of a serious play: this last is indeed the representation of nature, but ‘tis nature wrought up to a higher pitch.” ‘There is, that is to say, a significant distinction between the object of imitation and the work of art. In the continuation of the controversy in A Defence of An Essay of Dramatic Poesy Dryden insists

again on this distinction: ‘‘As for what he urges, that a play will still be supposed to be a composition of several persons speaking extempore, and that good verses are the hardest thing which can be imagined to be so spoken; I must crave leave to dissent from his

opinion as to the former part of it: for if I am not deceived, a play is supposed to be the work of the poet,

imitating or representing the conversation of several persons. . . .. Dryden’s perception of where Crites’ argument must lead was shortly justified by the event. Early in the eighteenth century Houdar de la Motte was attacking on similar grounds the use of verse of any sort in tragedy. ‘The essential difference between these two views involves a difference of approach toward the basic neo-

classical formula, assumed by everyone, that a play, like any other work of art, is an imitation or representa-

tion of nature. Crites emphasizes the second term of the definition: a play 1s an imitation of nature, in which case verisimilitude becomes a primary criterion of excellence. Dryden places the emphasis on the first term:

a play is an imitation of nature and in consequence the conditions and demands of the art as art become first considerations. In the course of time, it is the principle invoked by Crites which has generally pre-

Poetic Drama: an Analysis 13 vailed in dramatic criticism; that underlying Dryden's position has generally lost caste.

‘The principal clash of these views, however, was not over the question of meter and rhyme, which was, after all, a minor issue at the time. One of the ironies of neoclassical controversy is that the arguments used to discredit rhyme were essentially the same as those used to support the unities: the stage being one place, it cannot be presumed to be two, and the spectators seeing the events during an unbroken period of time cannot be supposed to accept the fact that more than one day has elapsed—and all this because the mind delights at length only in truth, which is to say, in a duplication of the conditions of reality. What strikes us now as the most extravagant of all artifices, the unities, was defended by means of arguments that strike dramatic artifice at its foundations. It will be noticed that the principles which Dryden invoked to justify his use of rhyme were in large part those which served him to defend the failure of Elizabethan drama to adhere to the unities, and they were to serve others. Thus, Johnson coming to Shakespeare’s defense: “‘It will be asked, how the drama moves if it is not credited.

It is credited with all the credit due to a drama. ... . The delight of tragedy proceeds from our consciousness of fiction. . . .” For nearly two centuries, however, defenders of the unities reiterated the principle of strict verisimilitude and thus developed a form of argument which ultimately proved useful as the wedge that was to split verse drama from the main stem. ‘’hey supplied weapons for Diderot, and Lessing,

14 Poetic Drama: an Analysis and for the admirers of Lillo in their support of a serious drama of middle class life. ‘Those critics of our century who have insisted upon “truth to life” as the main if not the sole criterion of dramatic excellence in extolling the prose drama of everyday life are not appealing to a new principle. Originally the defenders of the unities were motivated by a desire

| to preserve what they believed to be the most venerable traditions of ancient drama against innovation and artistic anarchy. In pursuit of this end, they introduced

into dramatic criticism an argument that was to encourage a separation of modern drama from some of the most vigorous and enduring dramatic traditions of the past. It would probably have shocked most of them if they could have realized that they were prepar-

ing the theoretical foundations of modern realism and the rejection of old “impure” conventions. The discussions of the drama during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries laid the groundwork for still another present-day notion, one common current form of which may be illustrated by Maxwell Anderson’s statement, in his essay, “Poetry in the Theatre,” that “prose is the language of information and poetry the language of emotion.” The association of the poet with

the passions in the drama took a number of forms before it reached the simple distinction, based on dif-

ferences in the use of language, between the prose dramatist and poetic dramatist which it generally assumes today. The distinction in its modern form would

have been unsuitable as long as serious drama was still verse drama and the word “poet” still had a more

Poetic Drama: an Analysis 15; inclusive meaning than it enjoys today. Poetry and passion became associated in the drama originally through an interest in determining the peculiarly crea-

tive function of the dramatist. For instance, in the course of Dryden’s Essay of Dramatic Poesy, Lisideus, one of the speakers, asserts in passing that the repre-

sentation of the passions “we have acknowledged to be the poet’s work”; and elsewhere, Eugenius, with the same assumption of general consent, explains that a concern with sentiment and passion as aspects of character “is properly the work of the poet,” since plot, or the changes of fortune, the poet “‘borrows from the historian.” Lisideus’ statement recalls to mind

the distinction between history and poetry which Aristotle develops in establishing the dramatist’s func-

tion as a maker of plots. The difference between the two positions indicates that the idea of imitated action as the central element in a theory of drama has been set aside, and that the poet as dramatist has been assigned a quite specialized role. In both respects, Dryden approaches, mutatis mutandis, a familiar modern view.

The association of passion and poetry, common in a variety of forms in dramatic criticism of the eighteenth

century, continues into the nineteenth. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, for instance, it appears in the writings of Joanna Baillie, who composed a number of plays under the title Plays of the Passions and who announced the theory that great tragedy must concern itself with individuals under the domination of “‘strong fixed passions,’’ and that poets should con-

fine their art only to delineating the passions since

16 Poetic Drama: an Analysis “bold and figurative language belongs peculiarly to them.” It seems extraordinary today that such persons as Coleridge, Scott, and Byron should have admired Joanna Baillie’s plays, and from the same perspective it seems equally curious that she should have thought there was anything essentially novel about her theories.

Both in associating poetry with the passions in drama and in justifying this relation on grounds of psychological verisimilitude, she was anticipated during the preceding century, though her formulation of the idea

is closer to our own. Before the nineteenth century ended, however, the idea was to have artistic and theoretical developments of such complexity and magnitude as to make Joanna Baillie’s precepts and examples seem timid and trifling by comparison.

‘The nineteenth century witnessed the emergence and increasing popularity and prestige of prose drama contrived on realistic premises, and the simultaneous decline in merit and vitality of drama which tried to continue in the older tradition of verse dialogue and heroic subject matter. ‘This decline was rendered. particularly striking through the unsuccessful attempts of many of the leading poets to compose creditable verse tragedies. ‘The occasional practice of writing such

plays with the avowed intention of not having them performed is symptomatic of the arid atmosphere in which they were undertaken. The banality of much of the popular theatrical fare of the nineteenth century had something to do with inducing aloofness on

. the part of the poet-dramatists, as well as with encouraging the feeling which some of them seem to have

Poetic Drama: an Analysis 17 entertained that in turning to the drama they had dedicated themselves to the high mission of perpetuating the standards and ideals of a great dramatic past. This was in many ways an unfortunate attitude, however, for it led them to approach verse not as a medium

adaptable to the art of the dramatist in a variety of ways or desirable and useful for some particular play,

but rather as a traditional convention inseparable from serious drama. Now, whereas the essential means of an art do not wear out, conventions do. Moreover, conventions as such arouse certain established expectations which exercise their own tyranny and, particu-

larly when they have grown stale, thwart freshness. The dramatic poets of the nineteenth century lost sight of the variety possible in verse, and found themselves burdened by the clichés of an aging tradition. Few of them consequently achieved anywhere near the originality in their plays that they did in their non-dramatic pieces, and their confusion and failure had something to do with making the issue of verse in the drama more

important than it deserves to be. They encouraged the suspicion that verse was a stale and useless convention that stood in the way of a living drama, that it fostered qualities merely decorative and therefore unessential, and that 1t must be uprooted and destroyed like an old vine choking a growing tree. Only in Germany did the efforts to write verse dramas suggestive of older traditions succeed in achieving sufficient vivid-

ness and originality to command general and continued approval. From the late eighteenth century to the middle of the nineteenth—from Schiller and

18 Poetic Drama: an Analysis Goethe to Hebbel and Grillparzer—Germany succeeded where other countries failed in adding a few memorable verse plays to the world’s literature. Yet this accomplishment was limited, for outside of Germany its influence was not productive, and even within Germany itself it did not consist so much of a continuous development as of a series of striking individual accomplishments. And, in fact, the most devastating blows to the waning prestige of conventional verse drama came out of Germany.

The names which highlight most effectively the original dramatic developments of the nineteenth cen-

tury are Ibsen and Wagner. The role of Ibsen has been widely recognized and evaluated; that of Wagner less so, in so far as it bears on the development of nonmusical drama. What Wagener wished to do was to dis-

cover the proper medium and technique for an ideal drama, and to this end he devoted a great deal of serious, if at times pompous, thought, which he worked out in a series of important essays. As a practicing artist, he was influenced by the general decline of verse drama

and by the recent extraordinary developments in music, especially in the works of Mozart and Beetho-

ven, the latter because he had greatly increased the range and subtlety of music and the former because he had revealed new possibilities in opera. In his speculations, Wagener found inspiration chiefly in Schopen-

hauer’s theories of music, in certain romantic notions about language, and in the intellectual stimulus pro-

| vided by his association with Nietsche before they parted ways. Wagner’s speculations centered in the

Poetic Drama: an Analysis 19 theory that the primary element of importance in drama was emotion and in the conviction that words were deficient as a means of giving expression to emotion. Wagner adopted the notion that though originally language was directly allied to the emotions it had in the course of time become the instrument of the intellect. It had therefore lost any real capacity for giving expression to the emotions and was in conse-

quence defective as a medium for great drama. In music, however, especially since Beethoven, Wagner believed there now excited a medium capable in the highest degree of expressing the emotions, with the additional advantage that music raised what was particular and unique to the universal and ideal sphere. As, on the one hand, the growing prestige of Ibsen encouraged dramatists to follow in the new direction which he had taken, the growing recognition of Wagner’s accomplishment encouraged a rejection of the

older traditions. It has at times been suggested that the invention of photography accelerated certain developments in the theory of painting; it might, in an analogous fashion, be maintained that Wagner’s “‘invention” of music drama helped to focus the icono-

clastic thinking about traditional verse tragedy. In The Perfect Wagnerite Shaw compares the imaginative, expressive power of music to that of words, to the great advantage of the former: “After the symphonies of Beethoven it was certain that the poetry that lies too deep for words does not lie too deep for music.”

From the success of Wagner’s new musical idiom, he argued that Shakespeare, like Mozart, had succeeded

20 Poetic Drama: an Analysis dramatically in spite of the verse element that seems

to be an inseparable part of his writing, and maintained that the brilliance of Shakespeare and Mozart had unfortunately encouraged the ‘“‘confusion of the decorative with the dramatic element in both literature and music,’ a confusion largely responsible for what Shaw called “the devastating tradition of blank

verse still lingering. .. .” In the light of the great success of Ibsen and Wagner, Shaw was convinced that the choice for the modern dramatist lay simply between music drama and the drama of thought. William Archer’s The Old Drama and the New appeared some twenty-five years later than Shaw’s Perfect Wagnerite, but it is clear that Wagner was still in Archer’s mind when he hailed the separation of modern prose drama

from the “impure” Shakespearean tradition: “The two elements of the old drama, imitation and lyrical passion, have at last consummated their divorce. For lyrical passion we go to opera and music drama, for interpretation through imitation we go to the modern realistic play.” To these remarkable extremes had the notion been carried that the special function of the poet in the drama was the expression of emotion: in the theatre, Wagner; 1n criticism, William Archer. In consequence, therefore, of its own success and the

drift of dramatic theory during the preceding two or more centuries, almost the whole of modern serious drama became separated from that of the past, and one

| sign of that separation has been the introduction into our critical vocabulary of the term “poetic drama.” It has often, therefore, been little more than a counter

Poetic Drama: an Analysis 21 in the debates over new developments in the theatre, so that sometimes it has conveyed the jibes of the irrepressible apologists for the new drama, and sometimes the sense of superiority of its critics. Even where these extremes are not present, it is almost impossible to find the term in a neutral context or wholly free of confusions generated by the tensions of critical debate. With all these disabilities, however, it has been serviceable in crystallizing certain distinctions. For instance, the phrase poetic drama has had some analytical value

in consequence of the aims and conventions of the new realistic styles. As truth to everyday life, or as thought, came to be insisted upon as the primary legitimate aims of the dramatist, metrical speech, eloquence, vividness of diction such as was characteristic of Eliza-

bethan or French tragedy, became irrelevant. By its very nature, the new drama needed to cultivate the idioms of everyday speech or else the kind of speech best suited to the interplay of ideas; at most, it required the eloquence of the rhetoric of persuasion. The differences in speech idiom between the old and the new came to be regarded as essential differences, not as a

matter of detail, and they appeared crucial because the new ideals and conventions could find success only by restricting the range of possibilities in language and thus ruling out certain qualities and effects possible in

the older drama. The phrase “poetic drama” implied a recognition—with whatever implications or overtones—of the fact that certain qualities once common in the theatre have been restrained in, if not excluded from, the stage of today.

22 Poetic Drama: an Analysis To the extent, however, that the term became associated with this distinction, it encouraged a distortion of our view of the older verse drama. One symptom

of this distortion is the failure to distinguish between

lyric poetry and the function in drama of language which does not conform to the conventions of dramatic realism. How far this confusion has contributed to the

failure of writers who have persisted during modern times in the composition of verse plays it is impossible to estimate, but there is little question of its profound effect on the criticism of Shakespeare and of the Eliza-

bethans in general. It has not been uncommon for critics to consider the “poet” and the “‘dramatist’’ in Shakespeare as distinct and separable aspects of his genius. There have been professed admirers of Shakespeare who have described his dramatic technique as “primitive” with an Archerian logic, while at the same time supporting their enthusiasm with parenthetical exclamations of praise for the “poetry.” In a different manner, other modern critics have, explicitly or by implication, regarded the dramatic features of Shakespeare’s plays as irrelevant and trivial contrivances, and concerned themselves only with the images as static patterns of a poetic art or as the terms of an elaborate dialectic of symbols. As applied to Elizabethan drama in general, this approach has produced a picture of the Elizabethan dramatist as a man who could serve two masters—one, the creatures in the pit for whom he provided the plot and other divertissements, and the other, his serious view of life which he ex-

Poetic Drama: an Analysis 23 pressed as a poet. It is not difficult to see in this develop-

ment the effect of the principles and methods of realistic drama and the consequent separation of “‘poetry” from “drama.” Many uses of the term “‘poetic drama” have perpetuated this confusion. On more neutral ground, the term has come to stand for any of the colorful, emotional, imaginative quallties not profusely supplied by the modern drama or encouraged by its accompanying theory, and perhaps

its most significant role has been to help focus the various developments in the theatre that lie outside the prevailing tradition of modern play writing. Wagnerian music drama, as we have seen, was once hailed

as the final answer to the problem of poetic drama. Later, a great deal of excitement was aroused by experiments with new lighting techniques and novel scenic designs which, it was argued, would restore a vital poetic quality to the theatre. For some, Diaghilev

and the modern ballet provided the best solution. It will be noticed that the one thing which most of these experimental excursions toward a poetic theatre have in common is that they call upon a combination of different arts and presuppose that the effect they seek to attain cannot be obtained by words. Even expressionistic drama, once regarded as the one serious development in our theatre which supplies the imaginative, non-realistic effects that other modern drama lacks, makes far more use of ingenious devices of spectacle than it does of the possibilities of language. Where

the term “poetic” has been used in connection with

24 Poetic Drama: an Analysis such developments in the theatre, it has tended to reinforce the conviction that the eloquence of the old drama has no place in the new. In the drama of today words have been assigned a fairly restricted role. While doubt has been raised concerning the virtues of the drama in which language may

be floridly used, even greater doubt has been cast on the possibility of ever using language that way again. It has been said any number of times that blank verse has been exhausted—that, 1n fact, all verse has become

exhausted. It has been maintained that the fine imitation of the accents of everyday speech is a more difficult

art than the inflated rhetoric of the Elizabethans or the showy brilliance of the classical French dramatists.

: Some critics contend that the general intellectual tenor of our times is against poetry, and that even lyric poetry is becoming an anachronism. The effect of certain 1nfluential schools of philosophy and semantics has added

to the contempt of such uses of words as lie outside strict rational approval. The poets themselves have expressed despair at the way journalism, advertising, and propaganda have left language a flabby thing and

driven them to recondite resources of expression. Among all the varieties of experimenters in the modern theatre, only the poets are uncertain and modest. Of the many perplexities which confront the writer in this situation, the dramatic career of Yeats offers a striking illustration. He responded to the new real-

: istic drama with something less than enthusiasm. It was, he thought, even at its best lacking in the important essential of vivid and impressive language, and it

Poetic Drama: an Analysis 25, dealt with local and surface experiences and thus fell short of the permanent and universal. He wanted to

establish a theatre for the people, and he wanted a drama with rich and exciting speech. Since the language of modern educated men had become lifeless and impersonal, he urged the use of the imaginative and unspoiled language of the Irish countryman. In time he became discouraged with the theatre he helped

to found, because he realized that in spite of its use of national materials it had really gone the way of the realists. He began to wonder whether the conditions of the modern world left one with any other choice than that between realism and the most refined lyricism: ‘“The two great energies of the world that in

Shakespeare’s day penetrated each other have fallen apart as speech and music fell apart at the Renaissance, and that has brought each to greater freedom, and we have to prepare a stage for the whole wealth of modern lyricism, for an art that is close to pure music for those

energies that would free the arts from imitation, and

would ally acting to decoration and to the dance” (Plays and Controversies, 1923). He abandoned his notion of a people’s theatre in favor of a small audience, “‘like a secret society,” and in the delicate and decorative pieces he composed he indulged in recondite symbolism and deliberate obscurities. ‘'oward the end of his career he even became diffident about the importance of his contribution as a poet to the final effect of his pieces. He wrote concerning Fighting the Waves, in 1935: “it is in itself nothing, a mere occasion

for sculptor and dancer, for the exciting dramatic

26 Poetic Drama: an Analysis | music of George Anthiel.” Beginning with a determination to restore words to their ancient sovereignty in drama, Yeats ultimately came in his reflections to paral-

lel the proponents of music drama and ballet and in his dramatic writings to resemble the works of those experimenters who sought in the arts of dancing, music, and design the way to poetry in the theatre.

The modern innovations in the theatrical arts and the extension of the scope of such forms as music drama

and the ballet must be credited as positive additions to our theatre, and the enthusiasm with which they were ushered in was in large part justified. Nevertheless, the conviction has grown that though these developments have given us something new and fine, they are not

adequate modern surrogates for Racine and Shakespeare, and are therefore not proper or full compensa-

tion for the narrowing of the range of language im-

posed on the playwright by the modern dramatic idiom. ‘Che art of using language in such a way as to realize the full potential of a dramatic situation has been replaced by the art of imitating colloquial speech, since that is the best vehicle for conveying a truthful representation of a “‘slice of life,” and the effect of great

vividness of speech has been neglected, since drama given over to thought needs no vividness beyond that of

effective dialectics and no eloquence beyond that of the oration. This criticism 1s not new, but there was a time when those who made it were suspected of special

) pleading—poets, for instance. But now that Ibsen and Shaw have become household words and the promise of the new stage fully realized, the judgment is being

Poetic Drama: an Analysis 2" made by those who have no special case to establish. Lee Simonson cannot be accused of lacking sympathy for modern scenic design, yet the final chapter of his book, The Stage Is Set, is entitled ‘““The Playwright and

the Spoken Word,” and it develops the thesis that the designers ‘cannot perform the functions of the dramatic

poets” and that, moreover, they cannot realize the full possibilities of their own art until the dramatists give them something more subtle and vivid to work with. We may recall also Kenneth Burke’s comment that R.U.R. was “but a scenario for a play by Shakespeare,”

or Joseph Krutch’s regret that Mourning Becomes Electra lacks “just one thing and that thing is lancuage.” Recently, in connection with certain comments of Arthur Miller concerning The Death of a Salesman,

George Nathan remarked, “Commonplace language, though it may be exactly suited to the tragedy of the

underdog, may make for the first-rate theatre but scarcely for first-rate and overwhelming drama.” Such views do not necessarily imply disapproval of these particular plays or a denial of the impressive accomplishments of European and American drama since the nineteenth century, but rather a recognition of the limits which the theory and to a large extent the practice of modern drama has forced on the playwright. This realization, however, does not open the way for a generation of modern Marlowes and Shakespeares. Everything appears to be against such a turn. The fail-

ure of the nineteenth century still haunts the critics and dramatists. There are no established traditions which permit a dramatist a free use of the full resources

28 Poetic Drama: an Analysis of language in play writing. The idea of “‘poetry’’ has largely come to mean almost exclusively lyric poetry, and the contemporary poetic idiom is in many ways ill adapted to the uses of a play. The modern poet who aspires to be a serious playwright has formidable artistic and psychological difficulties to overcome. He may envy the ease with which an Elizabethan poet could turn to the theatre and there adapt his verse and diction to the extremes of lofty tragedy or realistic comedy,

but he is excluded from this paradise. He can no more solve his difficulties by deciding to imitate the freedom of these writers than can modern man resolve the complexities of his industrial and scientific society by deciding to return to primitive life with the noble savage.

It is possible, however, to do some fresh serious thinking about modern drama. If the example of Marlowe, Jonson, and Shakespeare cannot help us directly, perhaps the spirit of Aristotle might, though our task is vastly more complicated than his. It is true, of course,

that a knowledge of sound principles and good theory will not necessarily enable a writer to write a great play,

but it can save him from the confusion caused by bad ones. Many of our commonest critical phrases today turn out on inspection to be legacies of over two centuries of theatrical activity and critical debate—their origins obscured, their initial role altered, their simple distinctions vastly complicated by later accretions, and their premises carried to unexpected extremes. A great

: deal of what passes for dramatic theory today is cluttered with such relics uncritically taken over out of habit. And one example of this condition is the loose-

Poetic Drama: an Analysis 29 ness and confusion in our use of the term “‘poetic drama.” The theoretical means by which the term has been established, developed, and supported, more frequently than not help promote this looseness and con-

fusion by appeal to half truths, insistence on battle slogans, and repetition of formulas coined in forgotten controversies. Yet today we are in a favorable position to make an effort to tidy up our critical equipment. We have before us the products of nearly a century of brilliant and energetic theatrical activity which we can ex-

amine inductively. Moreover, we are now remote enough from the controversies on which this drama was nourished to distinguish between apologetics and anal-

ysis. We are therefore in a position to challenge every cliché, to examine every implied distinction, and to subject every normative term to skeptical inquiry. This is a formidable task, and just where it would all lead one would hesitate to prophesy. But on the specific problem of poetic drama, I should like to hazard a few not very novel suggestions. They grow out of the fact that the last two centuries have raised the problem of language to abnormal magnitude. A play consists of dialogue and dialogue is a matter of words. Though a great deal of high speculation has identified the essence of drama with everything from ballet to high mass, the playwright can dispense with such heady theoretical luxuries and concentrate on the simple fact that he can write a play only by writing dia-

logue and that dialogue calls for skill in language. Moreover drama is an art—it is not, in other words, an imitation of nature, but an zmitation of nature. Now,

30 Poetic Drama: an Analysis the means of this art being words, the dramatist must govern his choice and use of words by the artistic demands of his play. The most general guiding principle is, therefore, that his art is that of the dramatist—he 1s not a writer of lyric poetry, or a debater of public issues, or a sociologist. (He may be any or all of these at need, but they are secondary functions and not of the essence

in his role of dramatist.) The particular consideration

must be the special requirements of the individual play. The ultimate criterion of excellence in the matter of language is the appropriateness of the diction to the artistic demands of the work as a whole. ‘These elemen-

tary facts have become obscured because the pressure of modern drama has been, directly or by implication,

to force recognition chiefly of only one kind of appropriateness required by one kind of play, and thus to place at a premium verisimilitude or rhetorical force as marks of perfection in the use of language— even in plays that have ranged outside the strict limits of the realistic convention. Against this tendency toward limitation, the use of verse in the old drama can be seen to have carried with it at least one advantage: since metrical speech is by its nature an artifice, the presence of verse proclaimed by implication that the

reproduction of normal speech was neither the sole possibility nor the primary criterion of excellence. From a comprehensive point of view, precisely the same criterion applies to Ibsen and Shaw as to Shake-

| speare. The measure of success in each case is the completeness with which the dramatist has utilized the resources of the kind of language required by his plot

Poetic Drama: an Analysis 31 and characters and by the final effect aimed at by his play. One of the defects, in fact, of strict realistic dramatic theory has been that it has not allowed adequate justice to be done to the skill in the use of language of the best plays in the tradition. It is the continuous artistic problem of the dramatist to discover and perfect devices which will enable him to realize the maximum

capacity of the language required by his play. If a dramatist is fortunate, he will find these in the drama of his immediate predecessors or contemporaries; if he does not find them at hand, he must create them for himself. If the dramatists of our times were to develop

an absorbing interest in dramatic conceptions for which the idiom of modern drama was inappropriate or useless, they would be forced to contrive means that would enable their words to rise to the height of their ereat argument. Certain kinds of dramatic actions call

for an extraordinary and unprecedented range and subtlety of diction, and such works when successful will

necessarily receive our highest admiration. Moreover, they demand of the critic a high degree of subtlety of perception and of complexity in methods of analysis. But there is no one, single, absolute level of language

which must necessarily serve the needs of serious drama, therefore the test of success and effectiveness in any given case is that of artistic appropriateness to the needs of the play considered as a whole. In this sense,

all fine and enduring drama, in which proper means

have been properly used to proper ends, is poetic drama.

Such an approach to the problem of dramatic lan-

32 Poetic Drama: an Analysis guage may require some modification in our critical concepts all along the way, but the effort to establish a well-rounded theory of drama consistent with this principle may well be worth it if it resolves the confusions about poetic drama and helps establish and support a

common sense understanding of the problem of language ina play. If we ever arrive at this point of critical

felicity, we may perhaps discover that whatever troubled usefulness the term “poetic drama” once had, criticism of the drama might do better without it.

Poetic Drama and the Well-made Play YE

By ARTHUR MIZENER

ipof Louis MacNeice’s bad verse the Picture there very is a parody of aplay BBCentitled lectureOut on Aristotle and The Modern Stage in which the lecturer sums up what he calls “the one and only plot of Chekhov’’ by saying, ““To be excluded from the great city, the culture, the caviare, the interminable brilliant conversations—this was something the young men could

not face. So they started shooting.” Then he adds: “Now Aristotle wouldn’t have liked that kind of plot. Aristotle insisted on unity and dignity. Further, Aris-

totle liked to know where he was. . . . But in these plays of Chekhov and many other plays which have succeeded them, whoistosay? . . . [They are] terribly inconsequent; but, ladies and gentlemen, terribly true to life.”

I suppose nearly everything wrong with the verse plays written by poets during the last twenty years is evident in the sprightly condescension of that passage. Yet, sadly enough, it has a kind of truth in it, not ap-

plicable, perhaps, to Chekhov but to most of the play- : wrights who, since William Archer's day, have con-

34 Poetic Drama and the Well-made Play centrated on that particular conventionalized version of truth-to-life which has been current in their theatre. By now even the simplest intention beyond that leaves Wolcott Gibbs baffled and inclined to ask, in his bluff manly way, whether we do not all agree that Shakespeare or Eliot 1s, after all—let’s be frank now fellows—

an old bore. We all know the air leaked some time ago out of the opinion that The Second Mrs. Tanqueray is one of the

great plays of the English theatre. No one can any longer convince himself that the well-made problem play about the soiled skirt and “‘a man’s life” or public

housing projects or what-not fulfills the serious demands of our understandings. Such plays, earnest and well-meaning as they often are, constitute for us only the staple fare of the theatre, the high-grade, book-ofthe-month-club product, competent but concerned with ideas and feelings which are too near the surface to move anyone more than temporarily. “You do it,” Picasso is supposed to have said, “and then some one else does it pretty.” Except for Shaw and perhaps O’ Neill, we have been doing it pretty in the theatre for a long time now. Our plays occasionally dress themselves up in technical devices borrowed from the experimental theatre and venture boldly into simplified weekly-news-magazine versions of the ideas of Freud

or Marx or whoever happens to be the latest thing going in up-to-the-minute circles. But the technical devices fit them about as well as Macbeth’s royal robes did him; and the snappy new ideas turn out to be only

: trick versions of the old ones.

Poetic Drama and the Well-made Play 35 It is impossible, I think, in the face of Saroyan's good-

hearted prostitutes and Tennessee Williams’ variations

on Gone with the Wind not to sympathize with the poets who, in the thirties, came boldly into the theatre to show the old hands what was the matter with them: at least they were right that what the more or less tradi-

tional plays had to say was, however pretentious, second-hand; they knew how very mediocre the imag}-

nations of the Elmer Rices and the Maxwell Andersons were. Because they were to this extent right, it is a real misfortune that they had almost no knowledge of how to make a play, as distinguished from a lyric poem, and that most of them were much too cocksure of themselves to think of learning. This natural incompetence was compounded by the

widespread conviction throughout all the arts that in order to do anything big you had to do it differently, experimentally, so that to their natural ignorance of the resources and limitations of the theatre these poets added a fear of doing anything in the way it had been done before, and much of their energy flowed into trying to improve what they would never understand half so well as a Pinero or a Williams, and very little of it into what the journeyman playwrights would never understand half so well as they.

Thus, after all the stew and fuss about the theatre, we are left, for the most part, with unplayable plays by genuine poets and skillfully made plays by men who are, at best, serious journalists. I suspect this difficulty exists—and this is my thesis, for what it is worth—because the drama is a far more demanding form than

36 Poetic Drama and the Well-made Play writers trained in the art of verse or the novel suppose,

and potentially a far more eloquent one than the theatrical craftsmen know how to use. Much of the blundering about this very simple possibility must surely be the result of that vicious term “the poetic drama.” Why do we talk so solemnly about

“poetic drama” and not about “poetic novel,” or “poetic epic,’ or “poetic Life articles’? All the sensible meaning—as the discussion here has shown clearly— contained in that word “‘poetic’’ is taken for granted

with these other forms, because all we can sensibly mean by it is that a writer has a serious imagination: we ought to mean that by drama anyway. And because the

great plays of the Elizabethan theatre were written in verse, the phrase “poetic drama’”’ is positively misleading. It makes us suppose a good deal of the time that if, like Maxwell Anderson, we do up a costumed and vul-

earized piece of history real pretty in meter we have poetic drama; or to suppose with Auden and MacNeice that if we have good verse of any kind at all we have poetic drama. ‘These suppositions are about as sensible as our thinking that we will have a poetic novel if we versity Forever Amber or that Paradise Lost is a great

epic only because it is in good verse. | Richard Blackmur remarked recently that what makes Ulysses a fine novel is not the Homeric parallels or the fancy footwork of Joyce's verbal experiments but

what he called, in a beautiful phrase, “the intransigence of Stephen.” In so far as Joyce’s technical facility and inventiveness are a means to the ordering and com-

: munication of that imagined substance, they are ad-

Poetic Drama and the Well-made Play 37 mirable: we would not have the intransigence of Stephen without them. But in so far as Joyce was a man

who delighted in playing with language and, losing sight of his book’s purpose, introduced into it devices which destroy its basic form, these things are only an interesting and irrelevant game. The general proposition here—that technical facility which is irrelevant to the occasion is frivolous—is commonplace enough: nothing is more familiar when it is asserted of Swin-

burne, for instance, or the Miltonizing poets of the eighteenth century. But something like this confusion of means and ends is the curse of the contemporary arts,

so that with rare exceptions the people with genuine imaginations who have ventured into the theatre in the last hundred years have ignored the art of the theatre. And in the theatre, art—craft—is more necessary than in any of the other kinds of literature. In what is written to be read the words are everything: they are all we have. We talk about “character’’ and ‘‘setting’’ and such things in the novel; but these

are terms borrowed from the theatre and we are, whether we realize it or not, using them metaphorically when we apply them to other kinds of fictions. In the novel they are secondary things, constructions in the reader’s mind which have been built up by the words and sentences and paragraphs he has read. But in the theatre this is not so. In the theatre the audience sees— though under certain controlled conditions which are

very important—actual, three-dimensional persons moving about in an actual, three-dimensional space. I do not mean to sound here as if I were advocating that

98 Poetic Drama and the Well-made Play theory which holds that drama ideally approaches the

condition of the ballet and that the fewer words

spoken, the better “theahtah.” In the drama people speak, and what they say contributes its share to the total effect, as much as does the visible interplay of con-

crete persons in concrete places. But even these words are heard words, spoken by particular persons, a part of them in the same way that their facial expressions, their gestures, their movements, are a part of them. I think it is possible to argue that their speech is, like the talking we do in life, the most important single means available to the dramatist for realizing his subject. Still, it is only one of his means; and the dramatist who writes only talk is creating for the stage a blind man’s world. Moreover, talk isa means he cannot use without imagining it always very vividly as the speech of the character it 1s given to, since each character is so overwhelmingly, visibly a person on the stage. In short, the conditions of the drama, unlike those which exist for some other kinds of fiction, are such that the integrity of the characters must be very strictly preserved. I suspect no convention ever endured very long

in any theatre if it ran counter to its society's everyday criteria for determining what conduct is or 1s not possible for a given person. ‘Take, for example, the solil-

oquy, which endured in our theatre until the end of the nineteenth century. ‘The soliloquy is generally scorned today for the relatively superficial reason that it requires a character to talk to himself—to say aloud

, to himself what we suppose he would, in actual life, only think to himself. But if this convention offends

Poetic Drama and the Well-made Play 39 against our demand for a lifelike surface, it does not offend against the fundamental requirement of the integrity of character. It is a far sounder device in the context than, say, having firmly established and difterentiated type characters, such as the collection that is gathered at Wishwood in the first act of Eliot's F amily

Reunion, suddenly turn somnambulist and recite in chorus a lot of ominous and uncomplimentary notions about themselves which, given their established characters, it is impossible to believe they would ever know at all. No dramatist who understood and respected his medium would think of playing such tricks because he would realize that no one must ever say what the audience will not believe he can know.

Compare Eliot’s device with the one used by Philip Barry in Hotel Universe. Barry is not in Eliot’s class as

a writer at all; but he is an intelligent and sensitive man, and a playwright who has by no means had his due, perhaps because he does not, like Williams, trick his plays out in neon lights. When he wanted to do what Eliot wanted to do, he did not make the mistake of writ-

ing a lyric and then freezing perfectly sensible characters into dummies so that they might speak it. What he did was to imagine a piece of action.

I do not know how familiar Hotel Universe 1s, so I am going to risk summarizing this piece of business. Three of the characters in the play are men who have known each other since boyhood. We see them first being very ‘‘Lost Generation’’—as a matter of fact they

are The Lost Generation, for Barry once said that the Starting point of the play was the villa owned by the

40 Poetic Drama and the Well-made Play Gerald Murphys at Antibes where the Hemingways and the Fitzgeralds and the Dos Passoses and such people gathered so often in 1926 and 1927. As soon as Barry

has completed his skillful exposition, he has two of these lifelong friends, with an actress named Lily Malone, fall into a bit of play-acting about the third, a man named Norman Rose, who has been an enormously successful business man. It is started by Rose’s getting a little pompous, like this: Norman. No.—I’ll tell you, Ann, here’s how I see my life.

Lily. Tune in on the Norman Rose Hour. Norman. —There are several angles to it: When a man decides he wants to accumulate a fortune— Lom. It’s going to be a speech. © Pat. —I can’t speak to Mr. Morgan just now. Tell him I'll call him back. Tom. —Nine-thirty A. M. The great Norman Rose enters his office— (He goes to the table . . . Lily knocks three times upon her book. Tom turns.) Who’s there? Lily. It’s me, Mr. Rose, Little Lily Malone. You know me. Tom. (Wearily) Come in, come in! (Lily enters the great man’s office.)

Lily. —A gentleman to see you, sir.

Tom. I don’t like gentlemen. It’s Jadies I like-—Come closer, Miss Malone. (Lily stiffens.)

Lily, —A Mr. Patrick Farley. Morgan and Company. Sleighs and Violins Mended. Tom. Show him in. Lily, —Mr. Rose will see you now, Mr. Farley. (Pat comes

oo in. Lily announces him:) Mr. Farley, Mr. Rose. —J know you'll like each other. (Lily retires. Tom indicates a chair. Pat seats himself.) Tom. Well, Farley, what is it? Pat. It’s just everything, Doctor. I feel awlul.

Poetic Drama and the Well-made Play 41 A moment later Farley is asking Rose about a shipment of ear-marked gold for Sweden. “It’s you who are bluffing, Rose,” he says. “What zs ear-marked gold?” Tom. (confused) I—why, it’s—I’m not sure, but I think it’s—

Pat. We have no place here for men who are not sure. .. . Tom. But who—who are you? (Pat rises, opens his coat, and points to his badge.)

Pat. The Chairman of your Board of Directors. (fom covers his face. Pat speaks quietly:) Good afternoon, Mr. Rose.

When this little performance is completed Rose himself laughs and says, ‘‘All right! I'll resign!” and one of the women who has been watching says: “It was lovely! Do another—” But Tom’s wife says, “No, they mustn't. I’m always afraid they'll slip over the line and turn into _

the people they’re pretending to be.” Apart from the bearing this little show has on the underlying natures of the characters involved—and it is considerable— Barry has established for us the idea that such performances are the family joke of the group. ‘Thus, when he

wants to show us the inner meaning of these people, to | have them say the kind of thing they would not ordinarily say to one another, he is able to have the three men begin to play they are boys together again and slip imperceptibly over the line. In this way, without violating the integrity of their characters, they reveal to us their buried lives. The poet-playwrights of the thirties not only ignored the basic necessity of maintaining the integrity of their characters. ‘They also ignored the conventions of the drama of their time. Yet the formal conventions are

42 Poetic Drama and the Well-made Play far more important in the drama than in any other kind of fiction. They are important, to be sure, in all kinds. But they are particularly important in those directed to an audience which is not pre-selected, in those, that 1s, which are “popular” as the theatre is. And they are superlatively important in one which depends on the audience's direct understanding, where the audience cannot go back and mull or read over what was not, at least narrative-wise, clear the first time.

No doubt it is true that such conventions as the chorus in the Greek theatre or the indeterminate stage in the Elizabethan had advantages not provided for our dramatists, and there is, of course, no reason why they should not, in their time and place, have worked just as well as any other conventions; in fact there is every reason to suppose they did. But that doesn’t mean they do now; because the one necessary characteristic of a convention is that it should be conventional—that is, like good conventions in any sphere, accepted habitually and unself-consciously. ‘The conventions of theatres not our own make even a learned audience selfconscious, like an anthropologist trying to feel at home on a social occasion 1n a primitive tribe whose culture he has painstakingly studied. ‘This is no place to go into the etiology of the conventions of our theatre, even if I knew enough to do so, but it is obvious that there is an important connection between the kind of conventions which become established in a theatre and the culture of the society that theatre serves. Ihe mechanical images which are scat-

tered like autumn leaves through William Archer’s

Poetic Drama and the Well-made Play 43 The Old Drama and the New show clearly enough the

connection between the rise of our kind of play, for instance, and the general concern in our society for somewhat mechanical cause-and-effect explanations of experience. I suspect a study of this relationship would show that to be accepted by an audience any set of con-

ventions must circumvent literal reality in the same way the common imagination of its age does so. If this is true, no convention, however ingenious and fruitful, which circumvents literal reality in some other age’s way will be viable in our theatre. Theatrical conventions are not, any more than the conventions in terms of which organized society exists, a formal contract. Once established, however, they work like a kind of contract between the imaginations of playwright and audience, and if the playwright evades his contractual obligations, the audience’s imaginations are likely to walk out on him. You cannot, of course, have drama at all without conventions. They allow the playwright to save time in an art where time is immeasurably precious, so that, for instance, a slight pause and a long look between hero and heroine can spare him the time-consuming and— for everyone except the principals—dull process which

falling in love so often actually is. And they allow a piece of action to be cleared of all the muddying contingency of real experience and concentrated, so that it can take on meanings larger than those of unordered.

experience. The real problem is not conventions as such or the degree of artificiality they involve; the real problem is the conditions in which the audience will

44. Poetic Drama and the Well-made Play fulfill its contractual obligation and suspend without self-consciousness its disbelief. A set of conventions may

be—in Kenneth Burke's terminology—‘‘stretched”’; it

may be manipulated in all sorts of new ways. But it must be coherent. We must not be made conscious of the artificiality of a set of conventions by the insertion among them of one devised for different imaginative conditions; and the basic imaginative assumption of the set as a whole must not be violated by the way they are handled.

All this was obvious to a dramatist like Pinero; a man does not write twenty-seven apprentice plays, as Pinero did, without learning his trade. It has not been clear at all to the poet-playwrights of our time who refuse to recognize that a trade exists. Pinero’s deficiencies were deficiencies of the understanding. But such understanding as he had he embodied with great skill in a form which 1s still the form of our theatre. He was, if a minor one, still a genuine poet of the drama, in the only meaningful sense of the word. Within his limits, he even understood the kind of verbal effects required by his theatre. “And besides,” says Aubrey Tanqueray to Drummle, ‘“‘yours is the way of the world.” Drummle. My dear Aubrey, I live in the world. Aubrey. The name we give our little parish of St. James. Drummle. (Laying a hand on Aubrey’s shoulder) And are

you quite prepared, my friend, to forfeit the

- esteem of your little parish?

The deficiency of this is not in art but in imaginative orasp.

It was this imaginative grasp that Shaw had, and he

Poetic Drama and the Well-made Play 45 provides a fine illustration of “poetic drama” for our theatre. There is nothing conventional about Shaw's imagination; its complications are in fact very great and I am not sure he is not the most difficult writer of our time. But in the dramatic sense of the word he was

thoroughly conventional because he knew that you , cannot destroy the means your form provides for com-

munication and still expect it to communicate, any more than you can destroy the conventions of language itself and expect it to work for you. It is fascinating to compare Shaw's uses of the familiar resources of his theatre with those of merely workmanlike playwrights such as Pinero. When, at the end

of Act III of The Notorious Mrs. Ebbsmith, the curtain comes down on the tableau of Agnes kneeling before the stove with the charred Bible clutched to her bosom and Gertrude and Amos watching her in aston-

ishment, Pinero has summed up in a frozen piece of action all he wants to say about Agnes’ character and its relations to the larger ideas of the play. ‘Thanks to his skill in using the conventional act-ending of our kind of play, he has been able to give the maximum

dramatic focus to his understanding. But what he understands is comparatively little.

Think of that moment at the end of Scene IV in St. Joan, where Shaw uses the same conventional actending. We have listened to Warwick and Cauchon discussing the case of Joan from their different points of view. These points of view are sharply defined as those of the nobility and the church—Shaw is even capable of a little joke about the patness of their formula-

46 Poetic Drama and the Well-made Play tions in now familiar historical terms. Yet so wonderful is his power of visualizing any idea whatsoever in terms of the character who speaks it, that we feel each speech first as a recognizable product of the speaker’s

character and only after that as a general idea. The scene ends with Warwick’s rising, politely but authoritatively. ‘‘My Lord,” he says to Cauchon: “we seem to be agreed.” Cauchon. (Rising also, but in protest) I will not imperil my soul. I will uphold the justice of the Church. I will strive to the utmost for this woman’s salvation. Warwick. I am sorry for the poor girl. I hate these severities. I will spare her if I can.

The Chaplain. (Implacably) I would burn her with my

own hands. Cauchon. (Blessing him) Sancta simplicitas!

And the curtain descends on the tableau. It is a magnificent though entirely conventional moment—perhaps I ought properly to say, because entirely conventional. Without stepping outside the habitual language of its theatre, it even gets most of the advantages of verse. Cauchon and Warwick each speak three declarative sentences which are parallel in structure and threestressed. De Stogumber caps their exchange with one more such sentence and Cauchon rounds off the pattern with his comment, which—counting the necessary pause before 1t—1is also three-stressed.

But what is far more important than the poetry of the language is the poetry of the action, the amazing variety

of implication and irony within the visually simple

Poetic Drama and the Well-made Play 47 pattern of movement. Warwick rises, suavely, a little wearily, Cauchon’s answering movement is polite, too, but almost violent with controlled indignation; Warwick faces this indignation with the perfect self-possession of his own sophisticated sincerity. And then de Stogumber erupts beside them with the uncontrolled and comically naive violence of his conviction. Each movement, with its accompanying speech, is a comment on all the others, and the Bishop’s gesture applies to all three of them. It is beautifully simple and clear, because it isa moment perfectly realized in terms of the theatre with which its audience is completely at ease. Yet it is a moment which echoes in the imagination because the implications Shaw has embodied in it are so

wonderfully varied and penetrating. We can say, of course, that both Warwick and Cauchon are hypocrites,

intent on maintaining the power of their orders and pretending otherwise only for appearance’s sake; we will then add that de Stogumber exposes their real pur_ pose and that Cauchon’s blessing is a sarcastic comment

on that exposure. We will be right so far as we go. But

we have seen also that Cauchon is a very intelligent man and a deeply sincere Christian, and that he means everything he says about saving Joan. We know too that Warwick is, in his skeptical and cultured way, a very

humane man who cannot endure to watch a heretic burning. ‘Their actions display all the mixed motives of men caught between conviction and practical necessity. For them both, in their different ways, de Stogumber’s attitude is the product of stupidity and lack of imagination. But they are too intelligent not to recognize

48 Poetic Drama and the Well-made Play how closely it touches them both. Cauchon’s blessing states something of all this for them. But it would be a bold man who would say how much of the irony is a thing the characters themselves are to be thought of as

understanding and meaning and how much of it a thing that exists, as it were unbeknownst to them, between play and audience. It would be an even bolder man who would say how the interanimating meanings of this moment add up. It is as impossible to answer the

examination question about “what Shaw means” in any serious way as it 1s to answer that question about any great poet. Shaw’s plays are, in one sense, easy. All their elaborate and necessary artificiality is of a kind which is so familiar that we do not feel it as artificial, and no self-

consciousness about means intrudes between us and the action of the play. We are watching the kind of characters we have agreed for decades to think real, moving about familiar sets in the ordinary stage way, and talking an imperceptibly heightened and lovely version of what we have agreed to accept as the real language of men. In another sense, however, Shaw’s work

- has—again like the work of all great poets—the inexhaustible fascination of thought and feeling dramatically suspended in a controlled medium. Meaning thus suspended is always in significant motion and never

exists in the fixed relations of exposition and never eventuates in fixed conclusions. Because it is thus in motion it can never be abstracted for translation into other terms; and because it is held within a controlled medium, every great moment in the play echoes the

Poetic Drama and the Well-made Play 49 whole play, exactly as do the great moments 1n a poem. Shaw’s great plays are dramatically conventional not

only in detail but also as wholes. If a play starts with » characters conventionally defined and related to one another in action, it ends by being a completed action. Even Auden, after fiddling around with scenes quite unrelated to his chosen action and long choruses of beautiful and completely undramatic verse to be delivered by Ignoto, eventually brings Alan and Francis back to Pressan Ambo to give the best ending he can to an action which was posited in the first scene but never really begun. What a completed action looks like in our theatre is, I think, clear from Heartbreak House. Here 1s the familiar drawing room of the English country house in-

habited by the cultivated English ladies and gentlemen, who are being visited by a few relatives and friends. The surface action of the play appears to move rather loosely through the familiar series of drawingroom conversations—the surface looseness is about the

only important result of Chekhov’s much talked-of | influence. Only, without violating these conventional elements, Shaw has stretched them until they serve the complex purposes of his imagination, has made them a

full and evocative symbol of the world of his time which exposes itself to us bit by bit as I suppose the world of reality would expose itself if we were wise enough and the world well enough made.

| He has made the country-house drawing room an old-fashioned ship under at least the nominal command of an eccentric and very old captain, sailing, as

ro Poetic Drama and the Well-made Play we quickly realize, God knows where. The ladies and

gentlemen, while beautifully realized as ladies and gentlemen, are something more, something more at which their names hint from the beginning: Captain Shotover, Mazzini Dunn, Ariadne Utterword, Hesione

and Hector—not, we notice, Heracles—Hushabye.

possesses it. |

There is a small drama in the play of ironies between each of these names and the character of the person who

Shaw begins with a conventional situation. A pretty and apparently simple girl named Ellie Dunn is about to marry a middle-aged capitalist named Mangan because she believes he has, out of kindness, saved her

father’s business career. Hesione Hushabye, in the play’s first extended scene, struggles to make Ellie see that this pious intention is wicked, because she is not marrying for love. She is in love, as she gradually admits, with a romantic and—to everyone but her—quite implausible stranger who calls himself Marcus Darn-

ley. When none other than this gentleman himself enters, as patly as the clown in the old comedy, and turns out to be Hesione’s husband, Ellie’s romantic heart breaks. She signals the fact by saying, “Damn!” She is damning neither some one else nor fate but, as she says, herself “for being such a fool”’ and letting herself ‘“‘be taken in so.’”’ A new, unexpected, and admirable layer of her nature has been exposed by the scene.

In this same way each of the characters is presented

and forced to expose a new layer of understanding through a series of scenes which emerge from one another so plausibly and with such a variety and range of

Poetic Drama and the Well-made Play 51 revealed meaning that it is as difficult to plot their pattern as it is not to feel their beautiful articulation. As soon as the characters have all been established at a new level of understanding, Shaw repeats the process

by recombining them in another series of conversations where the new understanding of each is the instrument for uncovering in another a deeper layer of his nature. The process goes on until everyone has been plumbed to the bottom. “In this house,” as Hector puts it, ‘““We know all the poses; our game is to find out the man under the pose.” Captain Shotover exposes Mangan’s moving-picture conception of himself as a man of force and a husband for Ellie, only to have it emerge that Mangan, having fallen in love with Hesione, does not want to marry Ellie; whereas Ellie, disillusioned about romantic love and thrown back on that practical view of marriage which everyone in Shaw can always espouse so brilliantly, is prepared not only to marry Mangan but to blackmail him into marrying her. Her lack of scruple so exasperates Mangan that he tells her the real motive for his treatment of her father. But he only succeeds in convincing Ellie that she should marry him and recover the money

Mangan stole from her father. Ellie goes from this astonishing triumph over Mangan to the exposure of

standing. |

the soft spot in Hesione’s romantic view of marriage, so that Hesione is, in her turn, forced to a deeper under-

All this is, if you will, merely the stock action of drawing-room comedy, the clever shifting of a set of characters through all the possible permutations of

52 Poetic Drama and the Well-made Play relationship. It 1s. But because of what the characters are and what they come to understand, the issues involved are the very largest. In this way the play is built

up, until the action implicit in its mitial situation has completed itself. By its end each important character—and therefore most of the important attitudes of

our time—has clashed with every other. None triumphs—"“ What did you expect,” as Captain Shotover

says to Ellie, “a Savior?’ On the contrary; because Shaw can see everything there is to be said for as well

as against each character, we have been shown the surprising but convincing wisdom of the stupid people like Mazzini Dunn and Lady Utterword and the stupidity of the clever people like Hesione and Hector. Even Captain Shotover, the old, powerful King Lear of the play, has been seduced by the happiness of old age, rest. Then Ellie Dunn says: ““There seems to be nothing real in the world except my father and Shakespeare. Marcus’s tigers are false; Mr. Mangan’s millions

are false; there is nothing real or strong about Hesione

but her beautiful hair; and Lady Utterword is too pretty to be real. The one thing that was left me was the Captain’s seventh degree of concentration; and that turns out to be—” and Captain Shotover says: “Rum.”

We have been taken down to the bedrock of these people who so visibly represent—without ceasing to be their particular, individual selves—the possible attitudes in our world, and we have been shown that they are all, even Captain Shotover, helpless and defeated.

The best of them has nothing finally to suggest but courage. Shaw closes the play with one of his wonder-

Poetic Drama and the Well-made Play 53 ful tableau curtains. The thunder of the air raid fades into the distance, and the two practical men of bustness—Mangan and the burglar—are dead, because they had the selfishness and foresight and lack of honor to hide in a cave which, for all their selfish foresight,

they did not know contained thirty pounds of dynamite. “Turn in all hands,” says Captain Shotover. “The ship is safe’’—at least for the moment it is. And he sits down and goes to sleep. But neither Hesione nor Ellie is that old or that capable of irony. “What a glorious experience!’’ says Hesione, “I hope they'll come again

tomorrow night.’’ And Ellie adds: “Oh, I hope so.” For a moment they have all lived, as Captain Shotover

had lived on his bridge in a typhoon, in the midst of “hardship, danger, horror, and death, that I might feel the life in me more intensely.” Their courage will not save them, as Captain Shotover tells them, but it shows that their souls are still alive. It will not save them because there is no one on the bridge of their ship, really.

“The Captain is in his bunk drinking bottled ditchwater; and the crew is gambling in the forecastle. She will strike and sink and split,” says Captain Shotover. “Do you think the laws of God will be suspended in favor of England because you were born 1n it?” _ _Itisa wonderful moment. Shaw has imagined a final event which suggests, visually and aurally, England’s striking and sinking and splitting; it is also an event which allows each character an opportunity to sum up himself and his attitude by his response to a mo-

ment of violence and danger. They all do so. Shaw knows just how they will all act, from Hector with

54 Poetic Drama and the Well-made Play his romantic and despairing courage, through Lady Utterword who cannot imagine the governor's wife in the cellars with the servants, and Mazzini, the efhcient and wholly mistaken subordinate officer of society, to Ellie who thinks the thunder of exploding bombs is like Beethoven—which is always an important comparison for Shaw. ‘They all show some virtue: even Boss Mangan shows that enlightened self-interest

which Shaw, much as he hates its social results, has always been willing to recognize is effective in most ordinary situations—such situations, for imstance, as

Undershaft had to face. The terrible question 1s whether, as Captain Shotover put it earlier, any one of them knows his business. When the curtain finally comes down with Ellie “radiant at the prospect’ of further Beethoven, Randall the Rotter manages to steady his lips enough to play “Keep the Home Fires Burning” on his flute—burning with both their courage and their destruction. ‘This is poetic drama of a very high order, because

an imagination of great range and depth has found its expression completely within the conventions of its form.

Poetry in the Theatre and Poetry of the Theatre: Cocteau’s Infernal Machine YE

By FRANCIS FERGUSSON

TT QUESTION of poetic drama—its possibility in our time—is perhaps the question of the contemporary theatre. ‘Chere is no better way to see into the nature and the limitations of the theatre as we know it, than

to ask the perennial question, Why don’t we have a living poetic drama?

But this question has occupied some of the best minds of our time and has received a vast variety of answers. It would take a book, at the very least, to han-

dle the matter at all adequately. In a brief paper one can do no more than suggest one approach—expound a sample, more or less arbitrarily chosen from among many—of the attempt to make a modern poetic drama. I have chosen Cocteau’s Infernal Machine for this purpose. But first of all, I should give a word of explana-

tion of this choice—why Cocteau, who did not even write his play in verse?

When we talk about modern poetic drama in English we think of the long line of poets, beginning with

Shelley and Coleridge, and continuing right up to Yeats and Eliot, who have aspired more or less in vain

56 Cocteau’s Infernal Machine to the stage. But on the continent the picture is quite different. Ibsen and Wagner, Chekhov and Pirandello,

: Cocteau and Stravinski and Lorca—one can think of many writers who worked directly for the stage and who produced works, whether in verse or not, which could in some sense be called poetic drama and which

are certainly “poetic” in the widest meaning of the term. There is no question that they produced viable theatrical pieces, while the work of poets writing in English for the stage is all too likely to be unstageable. The fact is that on the continent the idea of the theatre is even yet not quite lost. ‘The state-supported theatres,

the repertory theatres and art theatres, have kept the ancient art of drama alive and provided the means

which poets of the theatre would require. But in English-speaking countries the idea of a theatre has succumbed, except for a few undernourished little theatres, to the stereotypes and the mass-production methods of the entertainment industry. In the shallow medium of our commercialized entertainment the poet

is lost, however true his inspiration or authentic his dramatic talent. It is for this reason, I think, that contemporary poets

in English who wish to write for the stage so often look to the continent for their models of dramatic form—and especially they look to Paris in the twenties, Paris between the Wars; and above all to Jean Cocteau

who was one of the leaders of that Paris Theatre. I am thinking of Eliot, from Sweeney Agonistes to Murder in the Cathedral; of the later Yeats—the Yeats of Plays for Dancers; of ‘Thornton Wilder, e.e.cummings, the

Cocteau’s Infernal Machine 57 Virgil ‘Thompson—Gertrude Stein operas, of the ballet.

It is probable that the theatrical dexterity of these more or less poetic theatre-works is largely due to the influence of the Paris Theatre, and, as I say, especially to Cocteau. In other words it is certain that Cocteau

is one of the chief sources of contemporary theatre poetry, or poetry in the theatre, even in English. COCTEAU'S GROWTH; HIS NOTION OF THEATRE POETRY

When Cocteau started to write in Paris just after World War I, he found artists from all over Europe gathered there; and he found a theatrical life nourished from Russia, Italy, Germany, Sweden, as well as a fairly

lively native theatre. Copeau’s Théatre du Vieux Colombier for instance, had been in existence since 1912. Paris in the twenties still looks fabulous to us: Bergson and Valéry, Joyce and Picasso and Stavinski; Pirandello and the Moscow Art Theatre, Milhaud and Gide and Maritain and Ezra Pound—if we think over some of the names associated with that time and place, we can see very clearly what an impressive effort was

being made, in the center of Europe, to focus and re- , vive the culture which had been so shaken by the war. If there was to be a favorable opportunity in our time to build a poetic drama, it should have been there and then, where the most enlightened audience and great-

est talent were concentrated.

When Cocteau began to work, his immediate allies were the young French musicians who were to be called

les six, a few painters, and the Swedish and Russian

58 Cocteau’s Ivifernal Machine Ballets. ‘The collection of his early critical writings, The Call to Order, throws a great deal of light upon his

labors in this period. He was trying to sort out the extremely rich influences which bore upon him; and to select the elements of a contemporary, and French, theatre poetry. In very general terms, I think one may say that he was trying to fuse two different traditions, one ancient,

the other modern. What I call the ancient tradition was that of myth, of ritual, and of primitive or folk art. What I call the modern tradition was French— that classical spirit of intelligence, wit, measure and proportion, which the French are supposed to have at their best—especially the French since Racine and

Moliére. ‘The formula which Cocteau invented to describe the fusion of these two strands was une poésieé de tous les jours—an everyday poetry. He was looking

for a dramatic or theatrical art which should be poetic as myth, ritual, and the inspired clowning of the Fratellinis is poetic—and yet at the same time acceptable to the shrewd and skeptical Parisians in their most alert moments and as part of their daily lives, like red wine, for instance, as an indispensable part of the diet. He wanted to acclimatize mythopoeia in the most up-todate, rational, and disillusioned of modern commercial cities.

You will Iam sure remember that during this period many other artists were trying to nourish themselves upon myth, upon ritual, and upon primitive and popular forms of art. The painters were studying African

and South Pacific sculpture; Stravinski was doing

Cocteau’s Infernal Machine 59 Petrouchka, Les Noces, and Sacre de Printemps; Eliot was writing The Wasteland; Joyce was between Ulysses

and Finnegan’s Wake. When Cocteau and his friends began, most of this work was still to come; Cocteau

himself was one of the pioneers in the movement. When he looked around for clues to the ancient and perennial theatre art he was seeking, forms which he might imitate or adapt, he found, not the works I have

just mentioned, but Wagner and the all-pervasive Wagnerian influence.

Wagner was in a sense a forerunner of this whole movement. He had made use of myth in his operas,

elaborated a whole theory of mythic drama, and ~ worked out a singularly potent poetic theatrical form in the very heyday of bourgeois positivism. Cocteau remembered that Baudelaire had greeted Wagner as an ally against the Parisian Philistines of his day. Baudelaire’s studies of Wagner remain one of the fundamental documents for any modern theory of poetic drama. Nevertheless Cocteau and his friends found Wagner extremely unsympathetic. ‘The Parisians in Cocteau’s day, like the rest of the world, had learned to accept and even to depend on Wagner, as an indulgence whether hypnosis or drug. They had the bad habit of swooning when they heard that kind of music, and this prevented them from listening to the young French composers who were trying to speak to them in their alert, critical, and wakeful moments. ‘Thus for Cocteau and his friends, the Wagnerian taste or habit of mind became the great enemy, in spite of their respect for Wagner's achievement. They saw Wag-

60 Cocteau’s Infernal Machine. nerianism as an alien mode of awareness which was impeding the development of native French forms of

: art. The Wagnerian tradition, Cocteau says in The Call to Order, is like ‘‘a long funeral procession which

prevents me from crossing the street to get home.” Probably he felt in Wagner’s magic the potent elements which the Nazis were so soon to use for their own pur-

poses—drowning not only the French spirit but the

physical life of France also. :

However that may be, Cocteau developed his own conception of poetic drama, as it were, in answer to Wagner's. He too wanted to tap the ancient sources of myth and ritual, but without resorting to religiosity, hypnosis, or morose daydreaming. He wanted to bring ~° mythopoeia and some of the ancient myths themselves into the center of the faithless, nimble, modern city— but he sought to establish them there by the clarity and integrity of art. The Call to Order is a collection of working notes and critical obiter dicta from the very beginning of Cocteau’s career, between 1918 and 1926. The Infernal Machine was published in 1934; and yet that play seems

to be exactly the poetic drama which he had planned and foreseen fifteen years earlier. It presents a very ancient myth, the myth of Oedipus, not as a joke, but as a perennial source of insight into human destiny. Yet at the same time the play is addressed to the most advanced, cynical, and even fashionable mind of contemporary Paris. It is at one and the same time chic and timeless—rather like the paintings of Picasso’s classic period, or his illustrations for Ovid. If one were

Cocteau’s Infernal Machine 61 to try to describe it briefly, one might say it shows the

myth behind the modern city: both the mysterious fate of Oedipus and the bright metropolitan intrigues for pleasure and power which go on forever. ‘To have achieved such a fusion of contradictory elements 1s,

of course, an extraordinary feat of virtuosity. And therefore this play illustrates, from one point of view at least, the problem of modern poetic drama: that of presentation on the public stage, at a time when poetry has lost almost all public status.

After this prolonged introduction, I wish to look briefly at the play itself, in order to illustrate more concretely what I mean. THE PLAY: THE MYTH BEHIND THE MODERN CITY

The story of The Infernal Machine is the same as that of Sophocles’ tragedy, Oedipus the King. Before the curtain goes up, a voice reminds us of the main facts.

Jocasta, Queen of ‘Thebes, was told by the oracle of

Apollo that her infant son Oedipus would grow up to murder his father and marry his mother. ‘To avoid

this terrible fatality she has the infant exposed on Mt. Kitharon with his feet pierced. But a shepherd finds him on the mountain and saves him, and eventu-

ally the young Oedipus makes his way to Corinth, where the childless king and queen adopt him as their son. He is brought up to think he is really their son;

but in due time he hears the oracle, and to escape his fate he leaves Corinth. At a place where three roads cross, he meets an old man with an escort; gets into a

62 Cocteau’s Infernal Machine dispute, and kills him. The old man is, of course, his own father Laius. Oedipus continues his journey, and reaches ‘Thebes, where he finds the Sphinx preying on the city. He solves the riddle of the Sphinx and like other young men who make good, marries the boss's daughter, the widowed Queen Jocasta, his own mother. ‘They rule prosperously for years and raise a family; but at last, when ‘Thebes is suffering under the plague,

| the fate of Oedipus overtakes him. The oracle reports that the plague is sent by the gods, who are angry because Laius’ slayer was never found and punished. Oedipus discovers his own identity and his own guilt —but thereby becomes once more, and in a new way, the savior of the city. Such are the facts, in Cocteau as in Sophocles. But the question is how Cocteau presents them. What attitudes,

what dramatic and theatrical forms does he find to bring the ancient tale alive in our time? His dramaturgy is utterly unlike Sophocles’; he presents both the mythic tale, and, as it were, the feel, or texture, of contemporary life, in which no myth 1s supposed to have any meaning.

When the curtain goes up we see the stage hung with nocturnal drapes, as Cocteau calls them; in the center of the stage there is a lighted platform, set to represent the city wall of ‘Thebes. ‘The play is in four

acts, and each act is set upon that lighted platform. Everything that occurs in the set on the lighted platform is in the easy, agile style of the best sophisticated modern comedy—Giraudoux’s Amphitryon, or the

acting of Guitry. In other words Cocteau tells the

Cocteau’s Infernal Machine 63 story in the foreground in a way that his blasé boulevard audience will accept. Thus he achieves the “every-

day” part of his formula for “everyday poetry.” But the tinkling modern intrigue is itself placed in a wider and darker setting represented by the nocturnal curtains—and in this vaster surrounding area the cruel machine of the gods, Oedipus’ fate, is slowly unrolled,

almost without the main actors being aware of it at all. Thus the “poetry” part of the formula is ironically hidden; it is to be found in the background, and in the mysterious relation between the hidden shape of the

myth and the visible shape of Oedipus’s ambitious career.

The first scene on the lighted platform represents the city wall of Thebes. It is the night when Oedipus is approaching the city. —T'wo young soldiers are on

ouard. They have seen Laius’ ghost, who is trying to | warn Jocasta not to receive Oedipus when he comes. Queen Jocasta herself has heard rumors of this ghost, and arrives with the high priest ‘Tiresias to investigate. But the ghost cannot appear to Jocasta; he can appear only to the naive, “‘the innocent, the pure in heart,” such as the young soldiers; and Jocasta departs none the wiser.

The second scene shows the suburbs of ‘Thebes, where the Sphinx lies in wait for her prey. Occurring at the same time as the first act, it discloses Oedipus’s interview with the Sphinx. The Sphinx is not only a goddess but a very mortal woman, who falls in love with Oedipus and lets him guess her riddle in the hope that he will fall in love with her. But he is more inter-

64 Cocteau’s Infernal Machine ested in his career than in love; he takes her mortal remains to town as a proof of his victory, while she departs to the realm of the gods, thoroughly disgusted with mortals. She is willing to let him get away with his

heroic pretenses because she sees the terrible fate in store for him. In both of these scenes the most important characters—Jocasta in the first and Oedipus in the second —are unaware of their fate. It 1s separated from them as by a very thin curtain; they almost see what they are doing, but not quite. Moreover, in both scenes the characters and the dialogue are felt as modern, like the scandals in the morning paper. In the first scene, for instance, Cocteau gives us the atmosphere of ‘Thebes by means of the slangy gossip of the two soldiers. ‘The soldiers, exactly like any GI’s,

are fed up with military service and especially with the brass hat who commands them. We hear the music,

hot or blue, from the cafés and cheap night clubs of the popular quarter, where the people are trying to forget the rising prices, the falling employment, and the threats of war or revolution. We gather that the authorities do not know how to deal with the Sphinx. To explain their failure there are rumors of bribery, corruption and scandal in high places. In other words,

Thebes is wholly familiar and acceptable to our worldly understanding—it might be any demoralized modern Mediterranean city of our time or any time. In this atmosphere even the Sphinx and the ghost of Laius are scarcely more surprising or significant than

our more commonplace public nightmares. When

Cocteau’s Infernal Machine 65 Jocasta arrives with Tiresias to find out what all this talk of a ghost is about, she, too, is sharply modern: she speaks, Cocteau tells us, with the insolent accent of international royalty. He might have been thinking of Queen Marie of Roumania, or any other Elsa Maxwell character from café society. Jocasta is full of fore-

bodings; she is nervous and overwrought; she complains about everything—but she does not have the naiveté or the ‘‘purity of heart” to grasp her real situation, or to see the ghost which appeared to the soldiers.

In the second act the young Oedipus is also a modern portrait, almost a candid-camera picture in the style of Guitry or Noel Coward. He is an ambitious and worldly young Latin—he might be the winner of a bicycle marathon or a politician who managed to — stabilize the franc for a day. It is inevitable that he and Jocasta should get together—two shallow careerists, seekers after pleasure and power. ‘The third scene shows

their wedding night. It is set in the royal bedroom, and beside the royal bed is the crib which Jocasta kept as a memento of her lost son. In this scene the tenuous

curtain of blindness which keeps them from seeing what they are doing is at its thinnest. But they are tired after the ceremonies of the coronation and the marriage; and they proceed sleepwalking toward the fated consummation. In these first three acts of his play, Cocteau keeps

completely separate the mythic fate of Oedipus and the literal story of his undoing, in so far as Oedipus and Jocasta themselves are concerned. ‘The audience is aware of the fact that the terrible machine of the

66 Cocteau’s Infernal Machine gods is slowly unwinding in the surrounding darkness; but the audience also sees that the victims are winning their victories and building their careers in total ignorance of it. In this respect the plan of The Infernal Machine resembles that of Joyce’s Ulysses. Joyce also shows the lives of the people of a modern city in the form of an ancient legend which they are quite unaware of. Bloom wanders through his Dublin life according to an abstract scheme like that of the Odyssey; the reader sees this, but Bloom does not. ‘The

audience of The Infernal Machine sees Oedipus both as a contemporary politician and as the character in the myth. But at this point the resemblance between Cocteau’s play and Joyce’s novel ends. For Cocteau proposes to bring the two levels sharply together—to confront the city with the myth, and the myth with the city. This he proceeds to do in the fourth and last act.

We have been prepared all along for the sudden shift

in point of view—for the peripety and epiphany of the last act. ‘The naive soldiers saw Laius’ ghost, though

Jocasta did not. In the second scene the Sphinx saw what was happening to Oedipus, though he did not. And on the wedding night, Tiresias almost guessed who Oedipus was, though the bride and groom themselves could not quite make it out. Moreover, at the beginning of the play, and at the beginning of each | of the first three acts, a Voice bids us relish the perfec-

tion of the machine which the gods have devised to destroy a mortal. ‘The emphasis is on mortal stupidity and upon the cruelty of the gods. But before the last

Cocteau’s Infernal Machine 67 act, the Voice reminds us of a different meaning in these events; the Voice makes the following proclama-

tion: “After false happiness, the king will learn real unhappiness: the true ritual, which will make out of this playing-card king in the hands of the cruel gods, at long last, a man.” The fourth act, unlike the other three, follows fairly closely the order of events in Sophocles’ tragedy. Oed1pus feels, like an unsuccessful bluffer in poker, that the

jig is up; he received the evidence of the messenger and the old shepherd which unmistakeably reveals him as his mother’s husband and his father’s killer. Tiresias, who had half-guessed the truth all along, watches this terrible dénouement and explains it to Creon and for the audience. When Oedipus gets the final piece of evidence which convicts him, he runs off to find Jocasta. Tiresias tells Creon, “Do not budge.

A storm is coming up from the bottom of time. The lightning will strike this man; and I ask you, Creon, let

it follow its whim; wait without moving; interfere with nothing.” As in the Sophoclean tragedy, Jocasta kills herself and Oedipus puts out his eyes, while their bewildered child Antigone tries to understand. Cocteau, like Sophocles, imagines these horrors with great _

intimacy, sparing nothing. But Cocteau brings the play to an end on a different note. In Sophocles the final pathos and enlightenment of Oedipus is presented in a series of steps, and by the time we finally see him

blind at the end, the chorus has pretty well digested, or at least accepted, the tragic and purgatorial meaning of it all. But Cocteau ends the play with a coup de

68 Cocteau’s Infernal Machine thédtre, a spectacular effect, a piece of theatrical sleight-

of-hand, which visibly presents the tragic paradox on which the whole play is based. The dead Jocasta appears to Oedipus, who is blind and can therefore see—but she appears not as the cor-

rupt queen and dishonored wife of the sordid tale, but as a sort of timeless mother. “Yes, my child,” she

says to Oedipus, “my little son. . . . ‘Things which seem abominable to human beings—if you only knew

how unimportant they are in the realm where I am dwelling.” ‘The blind Oedipus, the child Antigone, and the ghostly Jocasta depart on their endless journey. Creon can see Oedipus and Antigone, if not Jocasta, and he asks Tiresias, ‘““To whom do they belong now?’ to which Tiresias replies, “To the people, to the

poets, to the pure in heart.” “But who,” asks Creon, “will take care of them?” ‘To which ‘Tiresias replies, ‘La Gloire’—glory, or renown. The effect is to remind us, all of a sudden, that Oed1-

pus, Jocasta, Antigone, are not only literal people as we know people, but legends, figures in a timeless

myth. We had in a sense known this all along; but during the first three acts we forgot it—we laughed at Oedipus’s youthful vanity, grinned with cynical understanding when we saw his shallow ambition, his

bounder-like opportunism. Now he and Jocasta are safe from our irony—as poetry and myth are sate—both

more human and less human than the intriguing puppets which we found so familiar in the first three acts. Cocteau, I think, must have learned a great deal from

Cocteau’s Infernal Machine 69 Pirandello before he wrote this play. The final effect, when Oepidus and Jocasta are suddenly taken up into the legend, like saints receiving the stigmata, is very much like the effect Pirandello contrives for his six characters in search of an author. When the six characters first appear on the stage they have some of the quality of masks, of the achieved and quiet work of art; when they fight with each other about their story, they are all too sharply human; and when they leave at the end, their tragic procession is like the procession of Oedipus, Jocasta, and Antigone—a steady image in

the mind’s eye, and in the light of the stage, of the tragic human condition in general: they have the eternity, if not of heaven, at least of the poetic image. Moreover the paradox on which the tragedy 1s based

is very much like Pirandello’s favorite paradox—the contradiction between myth or poetry on one side, and the meaningless disorder of contemporary lives on the other. We live in two incommensurable worlds, neither of which we can do without—that of myth-making, and that of literal, unrelated, and therefore meaningless facts.

I do not mean to say that this is the only way to understand tragedy. On the contrary, Pirandello and Cocteau write a particular kind of tragedy, which is much more closely akin to the Baroque than it is either to Sophoclean or Shakespearean tragedy. Both of these

authors may seem to us artificial; certainly they are Latin, rationalistic, deflated; they work with brilliant images, clear and distinct ideas, sharp contrasts, strong

70 Cocteau’s Infernal Machine chiaroscuro. If we are used to Shakespeare, the plays of Cocteau like those of Pirandello may seem arbitrary and invented to us, Music and philosophy, curiosity,

The purple bullfinch in the lilac tree, | as Eliot's ‘Thomas of Canterbury says rather scornfully

of the refined pleasures of the mind. I do not say that we could ever succeed in making that kind of modernized Baroque tragedy in English—I don’t think it fits the genius of our language, or our peculiar habits of mind. Nevertheless, as I said at the beginning of this paper,

many fine playwrights and poets, writing in English, have learned from Cocteau; and I believe that there is much more still to be learned from him, short of

direct imitation, about poetic drama in our time. I wish to conclude these remarks with two observations

on the dramaturey of The Infernal Machine, which bear upon the problem which concerns us. The first observation is this: The whole play of The

Infernal Machine, if properly understood, may be read as a discussion of the most general problem of dramatic poetry in our time: how are we to place upon the public stage, which is formed to reflect only literal snapshots, slogans, and sensationalism, a poetic image of human life? ‘The play, as we have seen, answers this question in its own wonderful way, which cannot be exactly our way in English; but the general question is the same as Wagner answered according to his taste, and Yeats and Eliot according to theirs. The Infernal

Cocteau’s Infernal Machine 71 Machine thus takes an important place in the long line of attempts which have been made, for over a hundred years, to build a modern poetic drama.

The other observation has to do with the nature of Cocteau’s poetry from which, I think, much technical

lore is to be learned. The play is not in verse; and though the language is beautifully formed, the poetry is not to be found in the first instance in the language at all. The play is theatre-poetry, as Cocteau defines it in his preface to Les Mariés de la Tour Evffel: The action of my play is in images, while the text is not. I attempt to substitute a poetry of the theatre for poetry an the theatre. Poetry in the theatre is a piece of lace which it is impossible to see at a distance. Poetry of the theatre

would be coarse lace; a lace of ropes, a ship at sea. Les

Mariés should have the frightening look of a drop of poetry under the microscope. The scenes are integrated like the words of a poem.

Though the language in The Infernal Machine is of course more important than it is in Les Mariés (essentially a dance pantomime), Cocteau’s description of the underlying structure applies also very accurately to The Infernal Machine. The poetry is to be found in the relationships of all the main elements: the relationship between the lighted platform in the center of the

stage with the darker and vaster area around it; between Oedipus’s conscious career with the unseen fatality that governs it; between the first scene and the second, which ironically occurs at the same time; and between the first three acts, when we see Oedipus as a contemporary snapshot, and the last act, when we

72 Cocteau’'s Infernal Machine see him asa legend. In other words, the basic structure, or plot—the primary form of the play as a whole—embodies a poetic idea; and once that is established the language need only realize the poetic vision in detail. If Cocteau, more than any other contemporary playwright, is thus a master of poetic-dramatic form, it is

partly because he has learned from the neighboring arts of music painting and ballet, and partly because he found his way back to a root notion of drama itself, that which Aristotle expressed when he said the dra-

matic poet should be a maker of plots rather than of verses. If Auden and MacNeice do not succeed in making poetic drama, it is because they do not understand

the poetry of the theatre—they take an unpoetic wellmade plot from the commercial theatre and add, here and there, a pastiche of verses. This concludes what I have to say about The Infernal Machine as a poetic drama. If there is a moral to

the tale, it is this: poetic drama, real poetic drama, comparable to the landmarks of the tradition, when the ancient art has really flourished—cannot be invented by an individual or even a small group. IE it is

to perform its true function it must spring from the whole culture and be nourished by sources which we may perhaps recognize, but can hardly understand. Will such a drama ever reappear? We do not know. In the meantime, all we can do is pick together the pieces, save and cultivate such lesser successes as have

been achieved. The Infernal Machine is one of these successes—one of the clues, so to say—to the nature and the possibility of poetic drama in our time.

Literary Economics and _ Literary History ve

By WILLIAM CHARVAT NE of the most interesting reactions to the Literary

Ovristor of the United States has been a demand for a revision of the methods of literary history. Discussing the work in a recent issue of the Kenyon Review, Professor Réené Wellek declares that the way out of the problem of literary history ‘“‘can only be through

a definition of its subject matter, through a development of a clear methodology, through a conception of what is meant by history and what is meant by literature.” I agree on all counts. It is easy to agree also with

the opinion quite evidently held by Wellek and Warren, in their distinguished book, The Theory of Literature, that literary history is not sufficiently literary.

I believe that it is equally important to recognize, however, that much literary history is arid because it is not historical enough. It is a safe estimate that 95 percent of all past literature, by any definition of that word, has little or no intrinsic value for the intelligent, non-academic, non-scholarly reader of today. The real present value of books that once interested readers is historical, the same kind of value that we attach to

"4 Literary Economics a past election, revolution, railroad system, school law, or system of ideas. Literary historians sometimes try to persuade us that a dead book 1s really still alive because it embodies an idea or exhibits a form that is still

current. One might as well argue that grandfather is still alive because he was a Republican or a Yogi. Literary history has been much too busy trying to prove that past writers shouted loud enough to be heard by posterity. We should be more interested in knowing how far their voices carried in their own generation, and—equally important—whether their generation talked back. It has been recognized often enough that the relation between the writer and society is reciprocal. But recog-

nition is not enough; we need more demonstration. The tendency is to assign a dynamic role in this relationship to the author only, and a merely passive one to society as represented by the reader. Still worse, most scholars assume that literary history can be adequately represented by a line—with the writer at one end and the reader at the other. Actually, instead of being merely linear, the pattern is triangular. Opposite both the writer and the reader stands the whole com-

plex organism of the book and magazine trade—a trade which for the last two centuries, at least, has had a positive and dynamic function in the world of literature. In this triangle, cultural force or influence runs in both directions. ‘The booktrade is acted upon by both writer and reader, and in receiving their influence the booktrade interprets it and therefore transmutes

Literary Economics 76 it. Correspondingly, writer and reader dictate to and are dictated to by the booktrade.

These reciprocal influences are complex, and our instruments for determining and evaluating them are, to say the least, inadequate. Current criticism and an- | thropology are attempting to illuminate them through the concept of ““myth.’’ According to Wellek and War-

ren, the imaginative artist’s “need” for myth is “a sign of his felt need for communion with his society, for a recognized status as artist functioning within society.” Certainly the concept of “myth” 1s a rich and rewarding one for literary study. But though critics identify past myths readily—and recklessly—enough (recent articles on The Confidence Man and Billy Budd are

examples), how do they know whether or when the artist succeeded in communing with society by means

of mythr Surely the question is relevant. Until we know more about public response to myth, mythhunting will remain what it is at present—a playground for the critical imagination, rather than a branch of cultural history. A writer's success in communing with society cannot be determined by guesswork. The critic and historian both need instruments: publishers’ records; the correspondence of authors and editors (much of it still unpublished); facts about the circulation of magazines and sales of books; and—most difficult of all to find—reliable evidence of reader response.

I propose from this point on to explore some readerwriter-booktrade relations in America between 1800

76 Literary Economics and 1860, with the purpose of suggesting methods for getting at some of the neglected realities of cultural history. I hope to show that recognition of the triangu-

lar pattern I have suggested will contribute a better understanding of the ways in which writers have produced and communicated.

The booktrade first. We recognize at once that through the booktrade the whole economic life of the nation was brought to bear upon literature and literary life. ‘Che rise and decline of literary centers is to be explained not by theories of “culture cities,” but by the facts of transportation. In one period a new and regular packet line to England gave Philadelphia priority

in the reprinting of Scott and Byron, thus enabling that city to dominate American literary publishing for two decades. The geographical isolation of Boston kept it from being the literary center it is generally supposed

to have been, until mid-century, when a railroad line across the Berkshires enabled its publishers to compete in the Western market. But a deep harbor and the Erie Canal insured the eventual and permanent leadership of New York in literary publishing. Other economic facts were equally compelling. Any

| depression, any spurt of wild-cat banking, an early freeze on the inland waterways, might result in a writer’s being told, ““We are accepting no new books,”

or ‘‘Yours must wait two or four or six months.” Improvements in technology, leading to cheap printing, helped to kill the American novel temporarily in the forties because the market was flooded with ten and twenty-five cent editions of British novels. Publishers

Literary Economics m4 then said to American writers, “Stop writing novels and turn out short stories for magazines.” But competition killed off the reprinters of foreign works, and publishers said, “‘Give us novels again.” Stereotyping was perfected, and books that might have died in a year were kept in circulation for ten or twenty. ‘Then, too, we have never recognized the effect of dis-

count policy upon the sale and circulation of books, upon the American writer’s prosperity, and ultimately

upon regional culture. In the 1820's for example, native novels retailed in America for the same price as British novels—about two dollars, but Cooper had to be paid and Scott did not, and Cooper’s royalties had to be squeezed out of discounts. A Philadelphia bookseller got a 45 percent discount on Scott in quantity; a

maximum of one-third on Cooper. His profit on a Cooper book was adequate when he sold it at retail in Philadelphia, but when he sold it to bookshops in the interior he had to split the discount, and half of onethird was not an attractive profit for either wholesaler or retailer. Therefore in a Pittsburgh bookshop Scott had an advantage over Cooper that had nothing to do with literary quality. As a result, American literature in the twenties had an adequate circulation in Atlantic urban centers, where distributors could take the whole discount; but for obvious reasons its circulation in the interior was limited. On the other hand, British literature flowed west in much greater quantity. This fact,

tory. |

of course, has some implications for cultural hisUntil mid-century Emerson’s essays were not widely

"8 Literary Economics sold outside New England because he would not let his publishers discount his books at more than 10 or 20 percent. When a new race of enterprising Boston publishers took over his books in the fifties, his work was

for the first time made easily available to a national audience. Literary history tends to place Emerson’s

audience and influence in the thirties and forties, which is correct as far as his relations with contemporary writers 1s concerned. But he did not have a national audience or a national response until the second half of the century. Other economic factors also influenced literary form.

When Scott began to write his romances the booksellers of Great Britain had established the threedecker as the most profitable form for the publication of fiction. By 1820 new Waverley romances were selling at thirty shillings a set. Scott’s share of this was one-

sixth, and his return on the first issue of Ivanhoe was $15,000 (about $60,000 in terms of modern money). At

that rate Scott could not afford to worry about functional or organic construction. ‘The material for every novel was poured into the three-decker like so much concrete into wooden forms. But, as the American market could not absorb the expensive three-volume set, Scott was republished here in two-volume, twodollar sets. When Cooper began writing in 1820, the two-volume novel was his predetermined form. For

thirty years, no matter what his theme or plot, he padded and stretched and invented incident to fill two volumes of four hundred pages each. So did his contemporaries—Neal, Kennedy, Sedgwick, Simms. Any study

Literary Economics 79 of the form of novels in that period ought to begin with recognition of this crude fact. As economic pressures had formed the two-volume

pattern so, in the 1840's, other economic pressures broke it. In the violence of American competition for

British books, our publishers were forced to print novels in one volume, because that form was cheaper, and to charge according to length. Now a novel in one volume could be as short as The Scarlet Letter or as long as Moby Dick. We discern organic form in both works. We should remember that both were published during a brief era when the booktrade did not dictate some aspects of form to the professional novelist.

In the late fifties a new economic influence on the form of the novel took up where the old one left off. Magazine serialization of fiction had been going on sporadically since the eighteenth century, but in 1850 Harper’s New Monthly Magazine established permanently the lure of the words “to be continued.” Because from then on the novelist could sell his books at least

twice, it was a foregone conclusion that the novel would become the dominant literary form for professional writers. But the novelist paid for his new prosperity by submitting to a new tyranny. Editors began to dictate the length and number of installments, and installment publishing itself predetermined form to a certain extent. A writer could not simply send an editor thirty pages of his manuscript for the March issue; he had to finish off the installment as a unit, and, if possible, make the reader look forward to April. Can there be any doubt that the form of the novel after 1850

80 Literary Economics was affected by the economic fact of serialization? Much

criticism of the form of James and Howells is simply naive because of a failure to look at their work as it appeared serially in magazines, and at the correspondence

(most of it unpublished) in which they quarreled, sometimes bitterly, with editors over problems of installment publishing. Poetry was not exempt from such material pressures, as a rather appalling episode of 1845 shows. Graham’s Magazine is mentioned in all the literary histories, but

one is rarely taken into its inner sanctum where literary history was made. ‘The editor had agreed to pay Longfellow fifty dollars a poem on condition that he publish in no other magazine. Longfellow consented, but one of his contributions drew a protest from Graham. ‘The poet had charged fifty dollars for a sonnet. This, hinted the editor, was cheating: it raised the cost of verse to almost four dollars a line, and did not fill enough space tor the money. The editor’s economy was not the poet's. Graham operated on a budget—so many

pages to be filled, so much cash to be paid for filling them. But, as ‘Phoreau had pointed out, the poet has an economy too. From Longfellow’s point of view, a sonnet might cost as much in time, work, and inspiration as forty lines of quatrains. One can assume a connection

between this episode and the fact that, before the fifties, Longfellow, an excellent sonneteer, wrote few sonnets but many poems in space-consuming quatrains.

The foregoing examples and episodes indicate, I

| think, that the role of the booktrade in American liter-

ary culture was anything but passive. We are only now

Literary Economics 81 beginning to write the history of that trade; but the findings of such scholars as W. S. Tyron, Rollo Silver,

and Walter Sutton, when made available, will con-

tribute to a much needed revision of our literary history.

So much for the place of the booktrade in the pattern. We are perhaps even more ignorant of the reader

as a force in literary culture. Here the problem of method is particularly troublesome. ‘Theoretically there can be no complete account of the reception of a

work of literature until every reader's reaction to it has been polled and classified, and this, of course, is impossible. Actually, there are many little used shortcuts which offer acceptable clues to reader response. Publishers’ sales records, of course, are primary evl-

dence. So are the library circulation reports which began in the seventies and which were printed in the

booktrade journals. Otherwise, the most valuable evidence lies scattered in the correspondence of authors, publishers, and editors.

To return to the unpublished Longfellow-Graham

letters for illustration. Before the Graham era of

economically efhcient literary magazines, American poetry was seldom paid for, and editors did not think it worth while to copyright the contents of their issues. Asa result, newspapers throughout the country clipped freely from the magazines such poetry as most pleased their readers. For this reason, by 1840, some poets were

beginning to enjoy a national reputation even before the advent of national magazines and publishers. It is probably safe to say that the rise of a truly popular na-

82 Literary Economics tional poetry was directly connected with this neglect of editors to take advantage of copyright law. After Graham had built up a circulation big enough to permit high payment to authors, he used the statistics of newspaper reprints as a measure of a poet’s popularity and rate of pay. Thus Graham wrote Longfellow in 1844, explaining why Lowell’s poems were worth only

twenty-five dollars: “I know the test of general popularity as well as any man—and he [Lowell] has it not. He is well-known in New England and appreciated there but has not a tythe of the reputation South and W est possessed by yourself and Bryant. This, of course,

I know—it is no guess work, for with a thousand exchange papers scattered all over the whole Union I should be a dolt in business not to see who is most copied and praised by them.” Graham was right, and the records of ‘Ticknor and Fields, Lowell’s publishers after 1848, confirm his judgment. Here is evidence of reader response which should not be overlooked by historians. Nothing better demonstrates the dilemma of literary

history than its uncertainty about what to do with popular writers in general, and with the fireside poets —Bryant, Longfellow, Whittier, Lowell, Holmes—in particular. In every new history the space devoted to them shrinks. ‘The shrinkage may be justified on criti-

cal but hardly on historical grounds, for the importance of these poets in their own century cannot decrease. We err, as historians, in allowing the taste of the

modern reader to nullify the taste of the nineteenthcentury reader. It is as if the political historian were to

Literary Economics 83 ignore the administration of Grant because it was not

in accord with the social principles of Franklin D. Roosevelt.

The error, I think, arises in part from our persistent neglect of the reader as a force in literature. Ihe more we neglect him the more we lose in historical perspective. And I suggest that we do not gain perspective by

relying on the contemporary critical reception of a writer as an index to his standing with his readers. We

have had a good many “reception” or “reputation”’ studies in recent years, and historians have drawn upon them heavily. A doctoral candidate faithfully and tiresomely quotes from all the contemporary reviews he can find, adds them up, and says, this book was successful in its time, this one was not. The method 1s unrealistic and misleading, because it ignores certain practices of the booktrade. In some periods the favorable tone of most book notices means simply that period)cals wished to be kept on the publisher’s free list and to receive complimentary copies of his expensive books

along with those which he simply wished to plug. Sometimes publishers put reviewers on their pay rolls as professional readers and enjoyed, as a result, a certain amount of immunity or privilege. Often favorable reviews originated in the publisher's office; or the publisher clipped a good notice from a journal, copied it, and sent it around to all the other journals where the reviewers were too busy, or too tired, to read all the books they discussed. In some periods criticism reflected inter- or intra-urban literary gang squabbles. In the era of the gentleman-author, well-known writers

84 Literary Economics had friends in practically all the leading magazine and newspaper offices. We cynically recognize that many of

these facts are operative in the publishing world of today. Why do we become credulous when as literary historians we make use of past criticismp But beyond all this stands the fact that the reviewer, or critic, was and 1s simply another reader. His thinking may have represented that of a group or a class, but so did that of the individual reader. Particularly before the establishment in the 1850's of regular signed bookreview columns, which bore the stamp of professional and predictable critics like George Ripley, a book notice —

might represent the opinion of a thousand, a hundred, or no readers at all—except the critic. Consider the hostile critical reception of Cooper's The Bravo, and then note that sales records show this to have been one of his most popular books. Cooper himself early decided that

sales figures were the only true index to his standing with the public, that there was no necessary correlation between critical response and reader response. Publishers have always recognized the unreliability of criti-

cal opinion as a trade index. They do not care what a critic says as long as he says it. In the booktrade it is not criticism that matters, but publicity. To the historian, past criticism, though sometimes useful as a clue to the thinking of the segment of society that produced it, is almost valueless as a guide to reader taste.

Turning finally to the place of the writer in the pattern, we recognize at once that in so far as he was de-

pendent upon and influenced by the reader and the booktrade, he was not only artist but economic man,

Literary Economics 85 and that his artistry and economics were usually at war with each other. As artist he had his private vision, his

values, his aesthetic or intellectual or spiritual mission, which rarely corresponded exactly with the values and ideals of the society in which he lived. Inevitably he was alienated from much of society part of the time, and from some of it all the time.

This alienation was intensified by his sense of his social place as an artist. Historically, the creative writer

was not a worker or producer, but a gentleman-amateur who exhibited his talent to his social equals but did not depend upon it for a living; or he accepted the patronage of a social superior, and was still independent of buyers and readers. He wrote when the spirit moved him, endured none of the pressures of com-

mercial time and the market, sought reputation— “fame” in the Renaissance sense—but not publicity. In a pecuniary society under democratic patronage, this proud and independent attitude was an anach-

ronism, but vestiges of it survived until 1850 and later. We recognize the typical attitudes of the patrician writer in the literary magazines of early decades, like the Monthly Anthology, which, according to their title pages, were edited by “‘societies of gentlemen’’— | and not for profit. We perceive them in the letters of

Jefferson, William Wirt, Hugh Swinton Légaré, Francis P. Gilmer, and young Emerson, who conceived

of the “literary profession” as a life of study and scholarship to be pursued by gentlemen of independent income. Long after Byron and Scott had proved that a gentleman could write for money, we see the

86 Literary Economics mark of the patrician in the American writer’s demand for privacy, for dignity in his commercial relations, and in his resistance to commercial exploitation. Gentleman psychology largely explains the persistence of lit-

erary anonymity—the fact that Cooper and Irving kept their names off their title pages until the early forties. Irving in 1820 even hesitated to send out review copies to strangers lest he seem to be courting the favor of the market; Longfellow in the forties objected to the use of his name on the mastheads of magazines to which he contributed; Emerson in the fifties severely restricted the advertising of his books—at the very mo-

ment when Barnum, Beecher, and Bonner were inventing the modern art of ballyhoo. But such reticences were doomed. Books had become articles of commerce,

as Cooper frankly recognized. Authors’ names were brand names; to be sold, goods must be “promoted.” And of what avail was an anonymous title page when copyright law required that the owner of a work put his name on the back of that page?

Under these conditions the fastidious attitudes of gentleman authors could not survive. During the twen-

ties and thirties writers like Irving, Cooper, and Emerson, who began as patrician amateurs, were trans-

formed into hard working professionals, but they never ceased resenting the forces that brought about that change. Yet the American author of the period was resourceful in protecting his integrity from the pressures of the market and of democratic patronage. During the twenties he learned that if he went to a publisher with nothing but a manuscript in his hands

Literary Economics 87 he was at the mercy not only of the shaky financial structure of the booktrade but of the publisher’s inter-

pretation of public taste. The publisher might, and frequently did say, ‘“‘No, I cannot risk my capital on this

book; take it away, and write it differently, or write something else’’—or, just “Take it away.” But the writer was not so vulnerable if he could reply, “I will take the risk of manufacturing costs; you will simply distribute for me. I will decide the probable market and the number of copies to be printed; I will dictate the terms of discount to retailers; I will tell you how much and what kind of promotion I will endure. In short, I will decide who and where my public 1s, and on

what terms I will meet it.” There were other ways of controlling the booktrade and resisting reader pres-

sures, but all of them, like this one, required the writer’s investment of capital. Conspicuously absent from the ranks of those who had this protective margin

of capital were Poe, Hawthorne, and Melville; they were also the writers who suffered most in their struggle to make some adjustment with society.

But even for writers without capital there was another strategy for maintaining a kind of independence from democratic patronage. Most of them—not of course fortunates like Cooper and Prescott, or unfortu-

nates like Melville—had secondary occupations, to which they resorted either regularly or occasionally— ‘teaching, lecturing, or public office. For the writer who

either could not or would not write regularly books which the public would buy in sufhicient quantity to support him, this protection was essential. But the

88 Literary Economics secondary occupation was not and never has been a complete solution of the artist’s problem. An artist rarely has full control of the flow of his creative energy;

he can seldom keep his other energies in a separate tank, to be drained from nine to five, and then turn on the creative tap after supper. Hawthorne in the customhouse is an example, and his problem justifies a brief digression into the subject of the American writer as officeholder. I estimate that from 1800 to 1870, from 60 to 75 percent of all male American writers who even approached

professionalism either held public office or tried to get it. James Kirk Paulding set the pattern, by managing, during his twenty-five years with the Navy Department,

to write seventeen books, contribute to at least ten magazines and gift books, and grind out the equivalent of twenty or thirty volumes of political copy for news-

papers. One may either suspect the quality of Paulding’s public service, or question the propriety of wellpaid public sinecures which permitted an officeholder to channel so much of his energy into another occupa-

tion; but there is no doubt that Paulding’s achieve-

ment opened new vistas to the American writer. Officeholding seemed a perfect solution for the writer’s problem. It offered financial security, leisure to

create as one could and freedom to say what one pleased rather than what the public demanded. It was

a kind of republican patronage, similar to the monarchical variety, but better. Some editors even suggested that such employment of writers be put on an

Literary Economics 89 official basis, as a way of subsidizing the arts, and that beneficiaries also be granted pensions. By 1860 some customhouses and foreign legations

resembled salons, but no miracles occurred. Some __-writers, like Hawthorne and Irving, took their jobs too seriously to have any creative energy left over. Others

found that monotonous routine killed their literary |

spirit, or that enforced loyalty to the party that held them under obligation damaged their integrity. Still others discovered that it was easier simply to live in an official rut than to use the job as they had originally intended. In the end this new resource left the American author where it had found him: in the trap that always catches the creative artist who is also economic man.

The tensions within the artist, and between himself and society, are revealed in the very form and substance of his work. In the last twenty years of Cooper's career we see political novels and tracts. sandwiched in among romances of land and sea and the past, and we call it versatility. But we do not see the stubborn threecornered battle between him, the reader, and the publisher in which he tried to force upon the reader sugarcoated political doctrine which he thought medicinal.

In the long run the reader was right in rejecting the medicine: Cooper’s best novels were those which the public liked and bought most. We see Hawthorne as a short-story writer whose tales are often blighted by bald explanations of obvious symbolism; but we do not see the magazine and giftbook audience which demanded these awkward and extraneous clarifications; nor do

Ye Literary Economics we see the trade conditions which led to his abrupt abandonment of the short story entirely in 1850. We see in his novels wretched final chapters in which he tied the threads of story lumpily together as if he were afraid the whole plot might unravel; but we do not see that such devices were forced upon him by publishers in response to the demands of readers who wanted to know what finally happened to Miriam and Donatello, and whether Hilda and Kenyon got married. We see

Emerson's recent and able biographer transforming him from an aspiring transcendental essayist into a worldly observer of English civilization and a stale repeater of his own ideas. But is it not more important to recognize that twenty years of professional lecturing on the lyceum platform taught Emerson how to communi-

cate, and transtormed him from a spokesman for a small coterie into a spokesman for a nation? We see Melville's Pierre as a complicated philosophical performance, not as the desperate and unsuccessful attempt it really was to write a novel in the popular vein. We, as modern readers of these writers, have gained about as much as we have lost by the pressures which contemporary readers and the booktrade exerted upon them. Men like Poe, Melville, Hawthorne, and Emerson, who had the humility to recognize reader taste and reader resistance not as a blank wall of banality and

superficiality, but as a challenge to their ability as craftsmen, were at their best when they accepted the challenge. Emerson's Essays of 1841 and 1844 are supe-

rior to his Nature of 1836 because in the intervening years his lyceum audiences had made him express

| Literary Economics Q1 himself more plainly and more concretely. Poe's great short stories might never have been written had not the public, by rejecting his first three books of verse, forced

him into the field of fiction. The superb balance of physical and imaginative adventure in Moby Dick is partly traceable to the contemporary reader’s preterring Typee and Omoo to Mardi. Hawthorne might never have turned to the novel had not a publisher—a

shrewd interpreter of reader taste—persuaded him that his professional future lay in that field. To sum up, the artist was sometimes at his best when the two pressures—creative and social—were in equilibrium. Many of the books which we still read, and most of those which we reject, reflect an imbalance—

too much artist, or too much society. But it was the artist in balance with society who produced Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, English Tratts, and Moby Dick.

The limitations of the approach I have presented. are obvious. It has little relevance, for example, to the historical study of non-professional writers like ‘Thoreau, Whitman, and Emily Dickinson. It is ancillary —and subordinate to—the historical study of ideas, of nationalism, of regionalism, and of cultural dynamics. But for all of these fields it is a potential corrective.

Civilization and Savagism: the World of The Leatherstocking Tales YE

By ROY HARVEY PEARCE | I

Rowe theofrecord of American society the firstin half the nineteenth century there in is evidence of a deep compulsion to understand that westward-moving frontier-creating process known, simply enough, as “civilizing.” ‘The problem was one of comprehending cultural history even as it was being made;

of simultaneously defining, directing, and rationalizing the inexorable progress of civil society in a new

world. So it is that the novels which make up ‘The Leatherstocking Tales are significant above all as they are attempts to categorize this radical problem, to give it body, and so to solve it—finally to understand “civilizing.” Moreover, the tales are significant within this perspective as they give body to the classical nine-

- teenth-century categorization of the civilized and the

noncivilized, of the civilized and the savage (as | Cooper’s society would have it), of the civilized and

| the primitive (as we, in our time, would have it). For in The Leatherstocking ‘Tales, as in the society out of which they rise, the savage is taken at once as

) The Leatherstocking ‘Tales 93 anterior and inferior to the civilized, not, as in our society, merely a different, somewhat less complex order of the civilized. Indeed, the nineteenth-century American was obsessed with his knowledge of the terrible gulf between the civilized and the noncivilized. For he was aware of the riches of a land stretching infinitely to the west and of a future stretching out as far

—all, nature, all the future, waiting sublimely yet supinely to be informed by the civilized American intelligence; and he was aware equally that in this Western future, there stood, somehow as measure of what civilization really was, because they were evidence of what it really was not, creatures possessing this land,

creatures whose way of life was, as any man could plainly see, not civilized. ‘These were Indians, living in a state of what was termed savagism; and they were in the path of civilization, of progress. If that civilization

was to progress to its glorious destiny, that destiny would have to take into account these savages and their savagism. So the savage Indians became for nineteenthcentury Americans a powerful and exact symbol for the noncivilized, as the conditions and qualities of savage lite were in fact seen to be all that the noncivilized by

definition had to be, all that the civilized had grown away from, all that the civilized would be in danger of becoming when it should, as it must, go West. So, further, the savage Indians entered Cooper’s Leatherstocking ‘Tales and furnished the symbolic basis in terms of which the nature of the frontier and frontiersman, of civilization, of progress, and of American destiny westward could be concretely and particularly understood.

94 The Leatherstocking Tales It is the growth towards meaning of that symbol and what 1t comes to in The Leatherstocking Tales that I wish to outline here. This is an enterprise in the history of an idea and its symbolic manifestations which takes us into American cultural history from about 1750 to about 1830. It leads us to investigate the integrating,

the bringing into proper focus and relationship, of a set of empirical data (that 1s, the Indian and primitive life as observed) and ideologies (that 1s, theories of the good life, of social process, of savage society, and of American destiny). Once Americans had squared what they saw and felt with what they knew they must see and feel, once they had “placed” the savage Indian in American life, they were able to interpret themselves

and their destiny in terms of their symbolic relationship with him. I should like to indicate the process by

which the Indian acquired his symbolic value for and entered into his symbolic relationship with civilized Americans, and to point toward and examine one outcome—for us, the chief one, I think—of that process whereby the Indian became a major subject for American fictionists in the second quarter of the nineteenth century—this, in its beginnings in The Leatherstocking ‘Tales. I should like to show wherein the history of the idea of the Indian as primitive, in its cultural matrix, furnishes us a way into the study of the fiction of the frontier as a special kind of cultural history, a history in the process of being made and understood. Correlatively, I should like to point

| to this fiction in itself, for good and for bad, as a way of understanding the particulars and dynamics of the

The Leatherstocking ‘Tales 95 problem of “‘civilizing’” in earlier nineteenth-century American culture.

II The history of American concern with the Indian as primitive begins long before 1750, of course. But such concern is largely in terms of special and local ideolo-

' gies—Puritanism, Quakerism, and the like—or in terms of the virtuoso’s collection of odds and ends of interesting facts. In the 1750’s control of colonial Indian affairs was placed under centralized authority; systematic and concerted efforts were made to separate

frontier Indians from their French allies; implicitly “national” feelings began to appear in the colonies, along with attempts to define those feelings. In all this one can see taking form and direction the forces which by the 1830’s had made for the final removal of all Indians to the western side of the Mississippi—out of the lives of civilized Americans forever, it seemed. During those proceedings, and especially in their final phase from the 147g0’s to the 1830's, there took shape the

American understanding of the Indian as primitive. Certainly by the 1790's both the times and the condition of the Indian made for such an understanding. With the end of the Revolution, the Indian had become virtually a curiosity and a rarity along the settled

parts of the Eastern seaboard, was, in fact, already thought to be the vanishing American. Liquor and civilization had done him in. On the frontier he was feared and hated; and he was steadily pushed westward. It was, in the words of a toast (the tenth) drunk

96 The Leatherstocking Tales on the Fourth of July by officers fighting an Indian campaign during the Revolutionary War, “Civilization or Death to all American Savages.” To be sure,

Indian troubles on the frontier and, in particular, the Indian wars in the Northwest Territory and in the Southeast, at once aroused the sympathy of Ameri-

cans behind the frontier and troubled their social consciences. But, as often as not, they simply regretted the “necessary’’ passing of the Indian, felt dimly that it would always be possible to resettle him somewhere

in the West, and even hoped that his way of life and the lesson contained therein could be studied carefully

before he disappeared entirely. This is an irony in American cultural history: It was not until the Indian

was in fact disappearing that Americans wanted— perhaps could want—to study his nature and his way

of life. )

For there was no hope that that way of life could

or should last. Systematic Christianization had failed. Even the missionaries came to admit this, and by the 1830's they were frankly comforters of the oppressed (not converters, bursting with God's Grace), hoping

to work with whatever Indians might be left somewhere far to the west. And civilization—that is, civiliz-

ing the savages—was itself failing; government authorities, Indian agents in particular, admitted this more and more in the 1820’s and 30’s. In general, missionaries, educators, philanthropists, all who concerned themselves with the future of the Indian, had felt that the process of acculturation—of throwing off one culture, one life, for another—would be a rela-

The Leatherstocking Tales Q7 tively simple matter. One would simply have to isolate a group of Indians and bring it in a generation or two

to God’s chosen civilization. But acculturation was not a simple thing—as we know now, at least. A culture is a kind of organism which is made up of a del1-

cately balanced system of attitudes, beliefs, conditions, and patterns of behavior; the system does not absorb new components, does not change or reinteerate itself overnight, or even in a generation or two. This is what the missionaries and the others inevitably discovered—although they did not know it precisely as this; they seem always to have believed that if only

they could have kept evil whites from the Indians, if only they could have had the Indians to themselves,

things would have been different. . . . Meantime, as they saw themselves failing, all they could do was to pray for the strength and grace to save souls, and maybe to remove themselves west with their savages

and to bring a few to civilization. It still had to be God and Civilization or nothing; the Indian still had to be brought into the pattern of American life or be crushed forever. Only as a civilized American could the savage Indian find his place in the new world. In

all, it was clearly seen that the Indian would have to change his ways if he were to survive, even after he had been removed from the immediate path of civilized American advance to the Mississippi. In the

long run, he would have to settle down, no longer a roamer, a hunter, and take up the good agrarian life.

_ The last is most important—this feeling that the

98 The Leatherstocking Tales difference between civilized and savage society was a difference between an agrarian and a hunting culture. It is a feeling that 1s coeval with the white man’s coming to the Indians; it furnished, for example, the official justification for the Puritans’ taking the land of the Massachusetts Indians. By the last quarter of

the eighteenth century it was being elevated to a principle of natural philosophy. So it was precisely on this basis that the frontiersman interested in rational-

izing the extirpation of the Indian could proceed. It was on this basis that extirpation could be termed politically, morally, and religiously valid. And it was on this basis that the whole complex of the character, ideals, religion, customs, even appearance, of the Indian could be finally accounted for.

That the Indian’s culture—at least, the culture of most of the Indians whom they knew—was as much agrarian as hunting, they could not see. ‘They forgot too, 1f they had ever known, that many of their own farming methods were taken over directly from the Indians. ‘hey wanted to believe that an Indian culture was a hunting culture, and they did believe it and think and live by it. ‘Ihe matter was entirely prac-

tical: the Indian with his “known” hunting ways needed many square miles on which to live, whereas the white farmer had progressed to a stage where he needed only a few acres. ‘The latter way promoted

cooperative living, some division of labor, and all the ‘“‘social affections’’; it represented a chronologically

, later and culturally higher state than the former; it was obviously the more economical, the more intel-

The Leatherstocking ‘Tales 99 ligent, and the more civilized—and it was the more Christian.

This view and its concomitant social, economic, moral, and political assumptions receives abundant expression in late eighteenth- and early nineteenthcentury America. There is, for example, toward the beginning of the period which culminated with the removal of the Indians westward, this concluding portion of a three-page meditation from the diary of Ben-

jamin Lincoln, New England soldier-statesman.’ In July, 1793, on his way to a meeting at Detroit with representatives of various northwest Indian tribes, Lincoln looks over Lake Erie, surveys the shoreline lovingly and acquisitively, and philosophizes thus: ... WhenI.. . consider the many natural advantages, if not peculiar to, yet possessed by this country, and that it is capable of giving support to an hundred times as many inhabitants as now occupy it, (for there is at present little more to be seen on the greatest proportion of the lands than here and there the footsteps of the savage,) I cannot persuade myself that it will remain long in so uncultivated a state: especially, when I consider that to people the earth fully was in the original plan of the benevolent Deity. I am so confident that sooner or later there will be a full accomplishment of the original system; and that no men

will be suffered to live by hunting on lands capable of improvement, and which would support more people under a state of civilization. So that if the savages cannot be civilized and quit their present pursuits, they will, in consequence of their stubbornness, dwindle and moulder away, from causes perhaps imperceptible to us, until the whole race shall become extinct, or they shall have reached 1 Massachusetts Historical Society Collections, ser. 3, V (1836), 138-30.

100 The Leatherstocking Tales those climes about the great lakes, where from the rocks and the mountainous state, the footsteps of the husbandman will not be seen. Here they may find an asylum fitted

to their use, in the enjoyment of which none will envy them. I am strengthened in this belief, when I carefully examine the first laws given to man by his kind and watch-

ful Creator, and the consequences which resulted from their being kept or rejected.

And there is toward the end of that period this statement, on Indian affairs, by President Jackson—this in his annual message of December 6, 1830: IHumanity has often wept over the fate of the aborigines

of this country, and Philanthropy has been long busily employed in devising means to avert it, but its progress has

never tor a moment been arrested, and one by one many powertul tribes have disappeared from the earth. To follow to the tomb the last of this race and to tread on the eraves of extinct nations excite melancholy reflections. But true philanthropy reconciles the mind to these vicissitudes as it does to the extinction of one generation to make room

for another. . .. Nor is there anything in this which, upon a comprehensive view of the general interests of the

human race, is to be regretted. Philanthropy could not wish to see this continent restored to the condition in which it was found by our forefathers. What good man would prefer a country covered with forests and ranged by a few thousand savages to our extensive Republic, studded

with cities, towns, and prosperous farms, embellished with all the improvements which art can devise or industry execute, occupied by more than 12,000,000 happy people, and filled with all the blessings of liberty, civilization, and religion.

ess... . .

, The present policy of the Government is but a continuation of the same progressive change by a milder proc-

The Leatherstocking ‘Tales 101 Here, for all intents and purposes, stated first explicitly and then implicitly, first exposited and then assumed, is the way Americans were viewing the Indian whom they knew. ‘The good life, the godly life, was the agrarian life and the urban mercantile life according to the agrarian ideal. ‘The Indian simply didn’t belong. And, most important, it was as someone who didn’t belong, who by the end of the 1830’s was literally removed out

of immediate American lives, that the Indian was studied and understood. Complete understanding in the concrete terms of which Americans could comprehend the place of the savage in the grand scheme of civilized progress westward required an integration and conceptualization of all the ideas, impulses, and observations that I have just sketched. And one can observe just such integration and conceptualization gradually taking place in the 1780's and 1790’s. What is important here, however, is not the process but the outcome, the development of an immediately American theory of the primi-

tive and of primitive life. We can examine such an outcome in the lengthy article on ““America”’ in the first

volume of the American Encyclopedia (1790). This is by Jedidiah Morse, the New England historianclergyman, who until the 1820’s was a constant student of the Indian. Morse’s article is particularly significant

for us because it was much reprinted and referred to in the last decade of the eighteenth and first quarter

of the nineteenth century, because in its own time it was considered as “standard” an account as a Wissler’s or a Kroeber’s or a Hodges’ in our time. For its point

102 The Leatherstocking Tales of view, scope, and popularity, it will serve here as sufficient indication of what was to be received understanding on the Indian and his savage nature. Beyond

the general outline of the pattern as Morse draws it, Americans were not to go until the 1850's. At the very outset, Morse sets this theme: ‘““The char-

acter of the Indians is altogether founded upon their circumstances and way of life.’’ Morse points out that the Indian is hunter and warrior— essentially an indi-

vidualist. His life and its standards are built entirely

around hunting and warfare; he doesn’t think; he acts. And his virtues and vices are part of a life of action. For such conclusions—and he backs them up with a plethora of special detail—Morse can cite the authority of trustworthy travelers, historians, and his own personal observation. He summarily dismisses views of the savage as being completely noble or ignoble. As he concludes:

. . . such partial and detached views . . . were they even free from misrepresentation, are not the just ground upon which to form an estimate of their character. ‘Their qualities, good and bad (for they certainly possess both), and their way of life, the state of society among them, with all

| the circumstances of their condition, ought to be considered in connection, and in regard to their mutual influence.

The plea is for taking everything into account, on its own grounds, and for coming to a rounded conclusion.

Morse—and he is most typical here—achieves what

The Leatherstocking Tales 103 we would call a kind of cultural relativity. Before we judge the Indian, so his argument goes, we must understand him. And when we understand, we will see that judgment of the savage as being noble or ignoble is precluded. For—and this is the main point—savage life and civilized life are seen to be realms apart. What is good for a savage is not necessarily good for a civilized

man. Specifically, to follow up a favorite example of Morse and many other American writers of the period, in an Indian society women must do all the manual labor, because in order for that society to survive the

men must be occupied with nothing but the basic problem of feeding and defending it—with hunting and warfare. This is to be condemned on a moral, not a cultural basis. The Indian is not a beast because

he treats his women as he does; our saying that he “mistreats” them is tantamount to our judging behavior in a savage society in terms of behavior in a civilized society. Even as what seem to us to be the Indian’s inferior traits are the products of his immature society, so are his superior traits. American writers will note again and again that the Indian's ability to bear tremendous physical pain stoically makes him neither better nor worse than the civilized man, but rather is simply a characteristic result of the natural

ideals and aims of a warrior-dominated society in which all men must expect to do just that, in fact, grow used to doing just that. ‘This concept, worked out in more and more detail,

but always within the framework as it is developed by Morse, becomes, as I have indicated, the received

104 The Leatherstocking Tales American notion of the nature of the Indian and his society. It 1s thus that the Indian becomes a symbol of the primitive. To detail the elaboration upon this pattern would be beside the point here; for it is actually no more than elaboration. ‘Thomas Jefferson, Samuel

Stanhope Smith, John Heckenwelder, Lewis Cass, Caleb Atwater, Samuel Gardner Drake, McKenney and Hall, William Leete Stone, Henry Rowe Schoolcraft—to namely only big names—all these write elab-

orately of the Indian and his savage nature, and all

manage to come to or point to a conclusion like Morse’s. And at the middle of the nineteenth century even Lewis Henry Morgan takes this assumption into the beginnings of modern ethnology. And historians like Trumbull, Hildreth, Bancroft, and at mid-century Parkman, come to accept the pattern as something to be taken for granted in American history. Even Southern Congressmen argue from such a basis when they are trying to justify the removal of the Southeastern Indians westward in the 1820's and go’s. And, of course,

as one finds the pattern becoming more and more an implicit assumption of Americans writing on the Indian and his society, one finds that those Americans are less and less concerned with demonstrating the validity

of the pattern. It is so; and that is all there is to it. ‘Theorizing as such is forgotten. ‘The theory of the savage becomes integrally part of American social thinking. And the Indian becomes “‘placed’”’ in American life. ‘There had thus been worked out by the first quarter

of the nineteenth century an idea of the Indian, what

The Leatherstocking ‘Tales 105 was termed a theory of “savagism,’’ which Americans could truly comprehend, which satisfied their cultural “needs.” ‘Chis Indian was one who was by definition—

a civilized definition—basically different from and basically inferior to civilized Americans. He was found to be living in a chronologically earlier and culturally

simpler state of society than that which Americans were to bring to him. Since his society, owing to its isolated situation and rude environment, had progressed in no way toward high civilization, he was literally an anachronism and an anomaly. He was literally “un-” civilized; and his virtues and vices— his bravery and his cruelty—were part of his being uncivilized. He was a simple being; he was overwhelmed when faced with the complexities of the

higher and better sort of life that the white man brought to him. This was his tragedy. He was in some ways better than the white man, in some ways worse.

But he was cut off from and to be cut down by the white man and his civilization entirely. The American Indian thus became a symbol of savage reality, defined in its relationship to civilized reality. As such a symbol he could be comprehended by the American mind and creative imagination. He was, in fact, part of that mind and imagination.

III It is this Indian whom James Fenimore Cooper put in The Pioneers in 1823 and in those four other novels which he published after it and which, taken together, constitute he Leatherstocking ‘Tales. Or, say, it is this

106 The Leatherstocking Tales Indian whom Cooper discovered and to whom he gave imaginative body as he wrote the Tales. Or, say, this

is the Indian whom Cooper’s culture gave to him. Moreover, this is essentially the Indian in American fiction of the twenty-five years or so after Cooper. This

is not the Indian, it must be noted by the way, who is in most fiction before Cooper or in most poetry and drama before and after him. That is another Indian, a noble savage stemming from the Anglo-French prim1-

tivistic tradition, scented always not a little of Atala and his kind. In the case of drama and poetry (‘‘heroic”’

drama and “epic” poetry, generally), it would seem that the conceptual, symbolic tradition was so strongly

linked with the literary tradition, the idea with the genre, that a “new” Indian could not be conceived of

poetically or dramatically. But that is another and longer and very complex story which must be traced out elsewhere. Here we must see how and wherein the savage Indian functions as symbolic vehicle in Cooper's fiction. For Cooper’s fictions, their manner and meaning, may here give us further and deeper awareness of our culture trying to know itself. Now, The Leatherstocking ‘Tales, viewed within the perspective of our cultural history, constitute an examination of the heroic, adventurous progress west-

| ward. At the center of the Tales stands neither a savage nor a civilized man but rather Natty Bumppo, Leatherstocking, somewhere between savagism and civiliza-

tion, the beau ideal (as Cooper insisted on calling him) of the frontiersman—with all of goodness and greatness that the pioneer could have in the circum-

The Leatherstocking ‘Tales 107 stances of pioneering. Yet even Leatherstocking is steadily pushed westward until he dies on the prairies; and the progress which makes for his death is known

ultimately to be good.

To look at the story of the ales according to Leatherstocking’s chronology: In The Deerslayer he is young, not sure of himself, not having yet proved himself; offered the love of a woman of the civilized world, he will have none of it, for his loyalties are to Chingachgook and the Indians with whom he has matured. In The Last of the Mohicans and in The Path-

finder he is Leatherstocking treumphans, fighting Indian-style to make the world safe for civilization. In The Pioneers he is old, driven westward with his

now debauched friend Chingachgook, albeit by a kindly, understanding civilizer. And in The Prairie he is alone in the West, and he dies at peace with his simple life, aware that in the richer, complex life which

is coming to the West he can have no part. Leatherstocking’s tale, in all its abundant adventurousness, is thus taken to be a kind of tragedy; the progress of civilization is to have the tragic meaning which 1s part of any growth to maturity. Cooper's task was to trace

that growth as it was to be seen in American growth westward and as it was to be remarked in the difference

between civilized and primitive actuality in America. We may observe in Cooper’s Indians and the part they play in The Leatherstocking ‘Tales precisely what we have observed in the evolution of the idea of the primitive upon which the Tales depend. ‘The interest is not in the Indian as Indian, but in the Indian as a vehicle

108 The Leatherstocking Tales for understanding the white man, in the primitive defined in terms of the ideas and needs of civilized life. Leatherstocking, as the beau ideal of the frontiersman, mediates between the civilized and the primitive. He is a type which is created as an intermediate

result of the civilizing process. To the East there is _ an ordered complex way of life; to the West there is unordered simple nature. To the East there are civilized Americans; to the West there are savage In-

dians. Ihe Leatherstocking Tales focus on the area between the civilized and the primitive. In the Tales the mediating frontier type is understood essentially as a primitive variant of the civilized; our recognition that Leatherstocking’s disappearance is necessary, albeit tragically necessary, must be a product of such an

understanding. That is to say, we are to understand that the frontiersman is inadequate for the kind of life for which he clears the way simply because he is, to some extent, a savage—even though he may be as noble

a savage as Leatherstocking.

Leatherstocking is made to recognize this inadequacy in himself and his type again and again; such recognition forces him ever westward, however much

he knows that those who are coming after him are living absolutely the best kind of life; for, being as he is, he cannot participate in that life. And Cooper makes those who do come after Leatherstocking know just

this, however tritely and awkwardly. Thus in The Prairie, what is virtually Leatherstocking’s epitaph is spoken, significantly, by the grandson of a soldier whom Leatherstocking had helped long ago in the

The Leatherstocking ‘Tales 109 East: ‘‘In short he was a noble stock of human nature, which never could attain its proper elevation and im-

portance, for no other reason, than because it grew in the forest.” Having grown in the forest, having participated directly in a primitive way of life, Leatherstocking is virtually killed off by the very society for which he has prepared the way. And, for Cooper, there

is triumph in that death, because it occurs as civil |

society is moving westward. He observes toward the beginning of The Prairie: The gradations of society, from that state which is called refined to that which approaches as near barbarity as connection with an intelligent people will readily allow, are to be traced from the bosom of the States, where wealth, luxury and the arts are beginning to seat themselves, to those distant, and ever-receding borders which mark the skirts, and announce the approach, of the nation, as moving mists mark the signs of day.

Progressing thus toward high civilization, American society sweeps over Leatherstocking, the man of the forest mythically perfected. For even such perfection

perfection. ,

as his must disappear, since it is in the end not civilized

Cooper defines Leatherstocking’s character as one

who shares savage ways but is not a savage. His radical

inadequacy for civilized life derives from the portion of savagism he shares. So it 1s that the savage furnishes the primary dimension of meaning in the ‘Tales exactly

as he symbolizes at once what Leatherstocking is and

is not. Cooper, if we take to The Leatherstocking ‘Tales a knowledge of received ideas of the nature of

110 The Leatherstocking Tales “Savagism,” is here virtually scientific, certainly explicit. Leatherstocking is forever finding it necessary

to explain the savage man to the civilized and the civilized man to the savage. What we must remark is that Leatherstocking’s explanations are always in terms

of savage life taken in the context of savage environment. In the ‘Tales the explanations most often come as part of a discussion of Indian and white “gifts.” Thus in The Deerslayer Leatherstocking is the philosopher of nature discussing savage religion. “I am too Christianized to expect anything so fanciful as

hunting and fishing after death; nor do I believe there is one Manitou for the redskin, and another for a paleface. You find different colors on ’arth, as any one may see, but you don’t find different natur’s. Different gifts, but only

one natur’.”’

“In what is a gift different from nature: Is not nature itself a gift from God?” [he is asked.]

“Sartain; that’s quick-thoughted and creditable, .. . though the main idee is wrong. A natur’ is the creatur’ itself; 1ts wishes, wants, idees, and feelin’s, as all are born

in him. This natur’ never can be changed in the main, though it may undergo some increase or lessening. Now, gifts come of sarcumstances. Thus, if you put a man in a town, he gets town gifts; in a settlement, settlement gifts; in a forest, gifts of the woods. A soldier has soldierly gifts, and a missionary preaching gifts. All these increase and strengthen until they get to fortify natur’ as it might be, and excuse a thousand acts and idees. Still the creatur’ is the same at the bottom; just as a man who is clad in regimentals is the same as the man that is clad in skins. The garments make a change to the eye, and some change in the

conduct perhaps; but none in the man. Herein lies the apology for gifts; seein’ that you expect different conduct

The Leatherstocking ‘Tales 111 from one in silks and satins from one in homespun; though

the Lord, who didn’t make the dresses, but made the creatur’s themselves, looks only at his own work. This isn’t ra’al missionary doctrine, but it’s as near it as a man of white color need be.”

This, with its cultural relativism and its moral absolutism, is virtually a summary of received understanding of the nature of savage and civilized society; it could come, particularized in this form, only when that theory had been completely worked out and found

to apply to the particular conditions of savage and civilized life as they were known to exist. Elsewhere in The Deerslayer, Leatherstocking is made to apply the theory even more particularly: “God made us all, white, black, and red; and, no doubt, | had his wise intentions in coloring us differently. Still, he made us, in the main much the same in feelin’s: though I’l] not deny that he gave each race its gifts. A white man’s gifts are Christianized, while a redskin’s are more for the

wilderness. Thus, it would be a great offense for a white man to scalp the dead; whereas it’s a signal virtue for an Indian. Then ag’in, a white man cannot amboosh women and children in war, while a redskin may. ‘Tis cruel work; I'll allow; but for them it’s lawful work; while for us, it would be grievous work.”

This is an analysis which is made abundantly ex- | plicit throughout the Tales. Virtually all savage traits are so accounted for and so explained and rationalized in their context. The heroic Indian and the villainous, the noble savage and the ignoble—each is to be accepted in the context of his kind of life. And always the man of the frontier is found to be caught between

112 The Leatherstocking Tales surrendering to such Indian gifts as his frontier situation would develop in him and preserving the culture which he has brought from the East. What fascinates Cooper, as it did so many American historians and writers on society in his time, is the problem of the kind of semi-civilized character which would, as a result of inevitable progress westward, develop on the Indian frontier. And Cooper’s analysis and evaluation of that character are almost exclusively in terms of the savage side of the frontiersman’s nature, in terms of the inadequacies of that nature. There are in the Tales frontiersmen, bloodthirsty, cruel, uncontrolled, who have developed only the worst side of the Indian char-

, acter; and there is Leatherstocking who has developed only the best side. Best or worst, it does not matter in the end; for best or worst, Indian gifts are not white gifts, the frontier is not ordered East, and the savage is not the civilized. And so, Leatherstocking and his kind,

frontiersman and Indians, must pass. Their passing and its significance is defined precisely by what are known to be the inadequacies of savage life, taken in its relationship to civilized life. In the figure of Leatherstocking, facing his fate squarely, ignorant of its grand meaning, Cooper justifies the ways of civiliza-

tion and progress to man. For the Indian is kept from having any real part in American life—and with him, so is Leatherstocking. In Cooper, the frontiersmen are defined only as they absorb or resist savage life, not as they carry a portion

of civilization to the frontier. A cruel frontiersman like Hurry Harry in The Deerslayer is made out to

The Leatherstocking ‘Tales 113 be much worse than even the villainous savages simply

because he has no right to their gifts. Ishmael Bush

in The Prairie is a dishonest squatter about to go native and to be even worse than savage. Even Leatherstocking himself finds that this chiefest gifts are those

of the Indians, gifts of acting, not thinking—and so he must go West, and so he must die. Ultimately, what

interests Cooper, as a civilized man, is what these men are not—what they are not, measured positively in terms of the savages which, for good and for bad, they have become. In The Leatherstocking ‘Tales the nineteenth-century theory of the savage (with its concomitant theory of civilized progress) has been sufhciently

absorbed to furnish a symbol’ by means of which American destiny—civilized destiny—may be located

immediately, made fictive, recounted in detail, and so comprehended imaginatively. In this sense, the Tales may mark for us that point when Americans were most fully and naively and confidently aware of their westward destiny, as it marks that point when they seemed to understand that destiny most completely. Such understanding was now not a matter of theory, of natural philosophy; it was a matter of the life of the imagination. And it could be sustained only in a society 1n which

the victory of the civilized over the primitive could be accepted as a cruelly triumphant fact of life—cruel because a good man was being destroyed, triumphant because a higher good was replacing a lower. So Cooper

wanted it always to be in American life. But it was not. And we know now that the progressivist, liber-

114 The Leatherstocking Tales tarian, “social” gifts of the society whose cutting down

of Leatherstocking Cooper celebrated, such gifts could, in the industrialized, mercantilistic America of the mid-nineteenth century, be taken out of their frontier-agrarian context and be converted into the gifts of the Gilded Age, laissez faire, monopoly capital-

ism, and an unnatural aristocracy. With the Leatherstockings gone, civilized men could demonstrate their belief in natural progress only by destroying one another. All unaware, Cooper may give us an insight into the vices of the Gilded Age as he shows us their partial origins in the fundamentally agrarian ideals and virtues of Jeffersonian democracy. Cooper, however, could see nothing but the glory of an agrarian,

free-holding American society. The triumph in Leatherstocking’s tragedy is Cooper’s testimony to such a glory. Beyond that glory he could not see—nor should we look to see in The Leatherstocking Tales.

Yet at this late juncture, we may justly pause and suppose that if Cooper had not been thus limited, if he could have seen beyond his time, if he had been more of an artist, an artist seeing all men for what they really were and categorizing them only then, perhaps he could have created a world as solid as Leather-

stocking’s and much nearer home, much nearer the world which came after his and Leatherstocking’s time,

which, indeed was taking form about him. Perhaps he could have looked squarely at the savages in his world, traced them back to their origins in the civilized,

looked squarely at the civilized, and protested that it should, in simple human terms, offer more than

The Leatherstocking ‘Tales 115 death to Leatherstocking and all American savages. . . . But Cooper was not a great—a universal—artist; he worked with what he had and with what he was given, with what he knew of the past as it bore on what he knew of the present. In this sense he is one of those small writers whose function is primarily to “express” their cultures, for good and for bad. Herein he is most

significant for us; and we must take him for what he

was, or, at least, for what he did. In the context of what he had, what he was given, and what he did— with his genius for detailing alarums and excursions and with his understanding of the savage as simply the noncivilized—he is sure enough of his art to make us sure of his world. So it is only in The Leatherstocking ‘Tales that we get the kind of understanding which 1s proper to savage

alarums and excursions. ‘That understanding is made

effective because it is gained directly through our coming to know such rich and varied details of savage

and frontier life as will give it body. As a commonplace of our criticism has it—if we wish the Tales to have imaginative worth, to mean anything immediately, we must be satisfied with worth and meaning at the level of the savage and the frontier, with adventure, with aboriginal blood and thunder. Yet we must likewise hold to our culture perspective and remember that these are savages and this is a frontier known in the light of a set of self-consciously civilized ideals.

| We may understand Leatherstocking in terms of the savages with whom he lives; but we have understood those savages in terms of the progress and the civiliza-

116 The Leatherstocking ‘Tales tion for which he and his kind were immediately to clear the way. Knowing Leatherstocking, we have, in the end, known our civilized and civilizing past precisely as he could not participate in it.

The Smiling Aspects of Life and a National American Literature YE

By BENJAMIN TOWNLEY SPENCER OWELLS’ FAMOUS DICTUM that American literature

H.. be representative should treat “the more smiling aspects of life, which are the more American” has gen-

erally been interpreted in a personal and contemporary rather than in a traditional context. It was conceived, so the general assumption runs, in Howells’ own benign and generous temperament, and fathered by the optimistic strain of his generation. Yet somewhat overlooked has been the fact that Howells’ statement stands as almost the swan song of a long-estab-

lished and salient critical assumption regarding the proper character of an autochthonous American litera-

ture. In contending that suffering and despair were - not representative of the tenor of the American experience, in asserting that therefore the large cheerful average of health and success among the people should

fix the atmosphere of American letters, Howells was betraying no more roseate conclusions about the texture of the national life than had Barlow and Emerson,

| Hawthorne and Whitman, anda dozen other dominant

118 A National American Literature American authors in explicit comments during their respective generations.*

The difference between Howells and some of his forerunners in what may be called the optimistic trad1tion lay rather in the implications which the “smiling aspects” held for the creation of a creditable national literature. To certain early nineteenth-century literate Americans, indeed, the beneficent effects of American society and polity and enterprise seem to have all but eliminated the need for works of the imagination. Perhaps it is not surprising that Gouverneur Morris should

, have assured the members of the New York Historical Society in 1816 that, since “Poetry is the splendid effect of genius moulding into language a barbarous dialect,’ Americans had no need to create a “mellifluent verse’ but could rather find a sounder satisfaction in launching the first steamboat on the Hudson. As the “‘child of science,” the “parent of useful arts,”

Columbia’s destiny seemed to Morris not to be an attempt at an aesthetic reconciliation of man and nature but an amelioration of the condition of men through control of nature. To this doctrine of Progress,

moreover, even young Emerson was prone to subscribe: “It is admitted we have none [no literature], he wrote in 1824. “But we have what is better. We have a government and a national spirit that is better than poems or histories. . . . "Tis no disgrace to tell Newton he is no poet, nor American even.” Like Haw1Cf. W. D. Howells, Criticism and Fiction (New York, 1891), pp. 128-29; E. H. Cady, “A Note on Howells and ‘The Smiling Aspects of Life,’”’ American Literature, XVII (May, 1945), 175-78.

A National American Literature 119 thorne later, Emerson showed little hesitancy in preferring the happy firesides of a prosperous democracy to a national literature, if the price of that literature, as some of the Romantics supposed, were an accretion of political tyranny and social corruption.? By the late nineteenth century, however, the transition from romantic to realistic premises had altered at least the face of the problem posed by Emerson and Hawthorne. Supposing that romantic effects depending on passion and crime and duty were essentially cheap effects irrelevant to the sturdy, pragmatic Amer1-

can character, Howells pressed rather for a literature that should celebrate the cheerful, rational norm of his society. Such a conjunction of optimistic nationalism and realism was no doubt forced upon him by the numerous attacks of romantic authors in the 1880's and 1890's on realism as practiced by the contemporary French and Russian schools: Maurice ‘Thompson was lashing out at the cesspool of Zola and the miasmatic jungle of ‘Tolstoi; and Marion Crawford, afiirm-

ing that in America fiction must be tempered “to the sensitive innocence of the ubiquitous shorn lamb [the young American girl],’”’ rejected realism as better suited for the portrayal of the bad than of the good. It was therefore this reiterated assertion that realism was a literary adjunct of Old World corruption which Howells countered by his sweeping dictum, which first affirmed his belief in American social progress 2G. Morris, “An Inaugural Discourse .. .” (New York, 1816), pp. 22-23; R. W. Emerson, Journals (Boston, 1909-1914), I, 388-89; N. Hawthorne, Preface to The Marble Faun.

120 A National American Literature and secondly proclaimed that a worthy national literature could and must derive from a realistic portrayal

of it. To follow the realistic prescription, he argued in essence, did not commit American authors to pessi-

mism because the donné of their work was not decadent. If, as has been pointed out, he took the occasion

to assert his Americanism, he was even more concerned to consolidate his realism as the mode appropriate to a democratic society.* Yet in his confidence in

the possibility of a sunny American realism Howells evidently was too sanguine; for not only did he himself increasingly focus on the shadows and frustrations incident to life in America, but also the realistic trad1tion which he did so much to inaugurate confirmed

during the next half century Crawford’s suspicion that it would more readily fasten on the “bad” than on

the “good” (on the somber rather than the smiling) in American life. Howells’ dictum and its critical context raise, therefore, two related questions: how integral a part of the

traditional prospectus of American literature was Howells’ insistence on a reflection of social well-being,

and how did succeeding literary modes adapt themselves to such an optimistic premise? If one may rely on explicit critical pronouncements during the century preceding Criticism and Fictton—and this essay confines itself to this explicit tradition—he may find a persistent definition of American literature in terms 8M. Thompson, Public Opinion, VI (March 16, 1889), 538; F. M. Crawford, The Novel: What It Is (New York, 1893), pp. 28, 32, 40-41; and E. H. Cady, loc. cit.

A National American Literature 12] of its denial of the defeatist implications allegedly found in Old World letters. The recurrent critical syllogism of numerous literary nationalists went thus: Old World tragic literature is the utterance of a corrupt society; New World institutions are alleviating the conditions which permit and necessitate such tragic

relationships; therefore New World literature will not commemorate the tragic but rather implement the devices and principles which can eliminate it. Practitioners of the succeeding modes of neoclassicism, romanticism, and realism all faced the problem, therefore, of adapting forms and genres sprung from the soil of Old World frustration to the soil of New World hopes. That is, the American imagination nur-

tured (if not dominated) in succeeding generations by Gray’s Elegy and by Scott’s Waverley and Zola’s Nana felt itself obliged to create a literature consonant

with the hopes of free individuals in an expansive nation. The result was a century of denial that the tragic element in Old World literature was relevant

to that of the New. The distinctive flavor of American _

literature was to derive from its celebration of the potentialities of the individual and the social will. The new literature was to serve as an instrument of the will rather than as a cathartic medium to ease its frustration. [The consideration of American tragedy rarely appears, therefore, in the innumerable designs

for a national literature. Tragedy belonged to the Old World. As early as Cotton Mather, the Old World stood as a

referent of corruption against which the purified and

122