Main currents in American thought An interpretation of American literature from the beginnings to 1920
“Settle the lands compactly and railroads will be constructed through
them rapidly and abundantly,” he said later. “The grants do essentially
interfere with the true policy of granting lands in limited allotment
to actual settlers” (_ibid._, March 16, 1852). His proposed policy was
far-sighted and socially just, but it was repudiated by a speculative
middle class that would not have its unearned increment curtailed by
visionaries.
Thoughtful as was Greeley’s concern for the farmer, his concern for the
city worker was even greater. The wretchedness of the New York slums
was daily under his eye, and his honest heart was troubled at what he
saw. That he should have sympathized with the emerging labor movement
was inevitable; his conscience dictated his stand, but his eager mind
drove him to intelligent inquiry and vigorous support. He was the first
American of wide reputation and influence to give serious consideration
to the effects on the working class of the industrial revolution with
its gospel of exploitation. The exploitation of natural resources
was well enough; but the exploitation of human life was a different
matter. A material prosperity based on social injustice, a civilization
founded on slavery, he would have none of. That this great matter of
slavery was inadequately understood and too narrowly interpreted by the
Abolitionists, he was early convinced. He agreed with William Grayson
and the southern apologists, that slavery existed in New York as well
as in Charleston. “The worker of the Nineteenth Century,” he said in
_The Emancipation of Labor_, “stands a sad and care-worn man”; in
America as well as in Europe he is falling into “that train of thought
which is beginning to encircle the globe, and of which the burden may
be freely rendered thus--‘_Why should those by whose toil ALL comforts
and luxuries are produced or made available enjoy so scanty a share
of them?_’” If Theodore Parker could have lived a few years longer he
must have shared Greeley’s concern; but amongst the Abolitionists only
Wendell Phillips joined with him in espousing the cause of the working
class. Others held aloof. When appealed to in the middle-seventies to
aid the labor movement, William Lloyd Garrison denied the existence of
wage-slavery in America, and indignantly declined to take part in the
proletarian agitation.[431]
Greeley’s views would be reckoned advanced even today; before the
Civil War they were regarded as incendiary, calculated to awaken class
prejudice in a country where, as all patriotic Americans knew, classes
did not exist. What, for example, could simple-minded Abolitionists
make of a letter he wrote declining to attend an anti-slavery
convention in Cincinnati in 1845?
You will readily understand that, if I regard your enterprise with
less absorbing interest than you do, it is not that I deem Slavery
a less but a greater evil. If I am less troubled concerning the
Slavery prevalent in Charleston and New-Orleans, it is because
I see so much Slavery in New-York, which appears to claim my
first efforts.... [I would not] undertake to say that the Slavery
of the South is not more hideous in kind and degree than that
which prevails at the North. The fact that it is more flagrant
and palpable renders opposition to it comparatively easy and its
speedy downfall certain. But how can I devote myself to a crusade
against distant servitude, when I discern its essence pervading my
immediate community and neighborhood?
_I understand by Slavery, that condition in which one human being
exists mainly as a convenience for other human beings_--in which
the time, the exertions, the faculties of a part of the Human
Family are made to subserve, not their own development, physical,
intellectual, and moral, but the comfort, advantage, or caprices of
others.... In short, wherever service is rendered from one human
being to another ... where the relation ... is one not of affection
and reciprocal good offices, but of authority, social ascendency
and power over subsistence on the one hand, and of necessity,
servility, and degradation on the other--there, in my view, is
Slavery. (“Slavery at Home,” in _Hints toward Reforms_.)
Here is a definition that may well be considered Utopian; but however
transcendental his general conception, Greeley was far too practical to
pursue abstractions. Having diagnosed the common disease that infects
all modern civilization, he was willing to use remedies that came to
hand. Before 1845 he opposed labor legislation, on the ground that the
evil was social; but later he supported the movement to limit the legal
working day by statute. More and more, however, he came to believe
that any lasting betterment must come from effective organization of
the workers; that the salvation of labor lay in its own hands; and the
great end towards which he looked was coöperation. The stumbling-block
that stood in the way of coöperative effort was the common distrust and
suspicion that poisoned the minds of working men; until they emptied
their hearts of that evil, the path that labor must follow would be
flinty and its life meager and hard.
An incorrigible idealist, clearly, was this Yankee plebeian whom Cooper
believed a vulgarian, Godkin held in contempt, and Bryant turned his
back on and would not speak to--a strange, child-like figure, with
his round moon-face, eyes blinking through spectacles and a fringe
of whiskers that invited the pencil of the cartoonist--yet carrying
the sorrows of the world in his heart and vexing his soul with all
the problems of society; an idealist who in the most sordid place in
America, and after years of fruitless experiment, could still stand
before his fellow Americans and thus sum up his social philosophy--“the
avocations of Life, and the usages and structure of Society, the
relations of Power to Humility, of Wealth to Poverty, of served to
servant, must all be fused in the crucible of Human Brotherhood, and
whatever abides not the test, rejected” (_Hints toward Reforms_, p.
400). In this faith--foolish it may be accounted by practical men, and
futile, but certainly not mean, not ignoble--Horace Greeley lived and
worked; to it he gave such strength and powers as were his, and he died
at sixty-one of a broken heart. He foolishly wished to be President,
but the American electorate that read his paper refused its votes, and
his hopes were destroyed by the careless many who were untroubled about
industrial pigstys.
III • Herman Melville • Pessimist
Set down beside the austere Bryant and the plebeian Greeley, Herman
Melville seems grotesquely out of company; and yet such proximities may
suggest, better perhaps than words, an explanation of the futility of
his dreams and the irony of the bitter penance of his days. Lifelong
he was lacerated by the coldly moral in his environment, and harassed
by the crudely practical; and without forcing the comparison, one may
feel that Bryant and Greeley embodied in nobler form the twin forces
that seized upon his bold and rich nature, and bound it to the rocks to
be fed on by eagles. Like Jacob he wrestled all night with an angel,
yet got no blessing from the touched thigh. Instead, his free spirit
was tormented and his adventurous heart seared with fire. Far more
truly than of De Quincey might one say of Melville: _Eccovi_, this
little child has been in hell! All the powers of darkness fought over
him, all the devils plagued him. They drove him down into the gloom of
his tormented soul, and if they did not conquer, they left him maimed
and stricken. The golden dreams of transcendental faith, that buoyed
up Emerson and gave hope to Thoreau, turned to ashes in his mouth;
the white gleams of mysticism that now and then lighted up his path
died out and left him in darkness. Life could not meet the demands he
made on it, certainly not life in America in the eighteen-fifties; the
malady lay deeper than Greeley thought--it lay in the futility of life
itself; and so after pursuing his vain dreams to the ends of the seas,
the rebellious transcendentalist withdrew within himself while awaiting
annihilation. There is no other tragedy in American letters comparable
to the tragedy of Herman Melville. Bryant’s melancholy is only the
gentle pensiveness of twilight compared to the midnight of his
pessimism. Hawthorne’s gloom is no more than the skeptical questioning
of life by a nature that knew no fierce storms; Poe’s is only the
atrabilious wretchedness of a dipsomaniac.
In the presence of a nature so tempestuous and fiercely honest, it
is a rash critic who will dogmatize. There is no simple clue to his
mystery, no common pass-key to unlock his mind. Raymond Weaver in
his brilliantly creative study has perhaps done all that the critic
can to light up the darkness, and later commentators can only follow
in his footsteps. In so far as a simple explanation may suffice, the
biographer finds it in certain frustrations that curdled the milk of
his romance and turned it sour. Like Mark Twain in later years, he
recoiled savagely from the smug conventions of society; but when he
spoke out his views--instead of discreetly locking them up in his
safe--and found himself fiercely assailed for unorthodoxy, he bade the
world go to the devil and would have nothing more to do with its praise
or blame. A proud sensitive nature, he took the world’s contumely _au
tragique_, and suffered it to mortify him. Or perhaps he was more
like James Branch Cabell than Mark Twain. An arch romantic, he vainly
sought to erect his romantic dreams as a defense against reality, and
suffered disaster. In love with the ideal, and pursuing it in a wild
adventure into the South Seas--his magic realm of Poictesme--yet “not
so much bound to any haven ahead as rushing from all havens astern,”
he found there only disenchantment. Seeking his satisfactions in love
of mother and wife, he came upon utter disillusion. The austerely prim
and coldly correct Maria Gansevoort, to whom his boyish heart yielded
itself passionately, was clearly no woman to satisfy his need of
intelligent sympathy, and he fled moodily from the pale negations of
a stifling environment. Even the finely loyal Elizabeth Shaw whom he
married seems only to have completed his disillusion, and he withdrew
into his study, and falling into “Plato’s honied head,” like Tashtego
into the whale’s head, “sweetly,” or wretchedly, “perished there.” It
is the plague of the idealizing mind that is forever comparing a wife
in her morning kimono with the Helen of his dreams. It is the curse of
possession that plays havoc with romance; and because Melville’s dreams
were passionately beautiful, because he made heavy demands on life, his
disillusion was bitter. And so like Felix Kennaston in Cabell’s _Cream
of the Jest_, and like Shelley in _Epipsychidion_, Melville fashioned
his dream-figure to love. The elusive figure of Yillah in _Mardi_,
whom he loves and loses and seeks, in a madly grotesque and satirical
pursuit through all the civilizations of his land of Poictesme, is so
suggestive of Cabell’s _Domnei_, that it perhaps may be accounted the
latter’s prototype.
Remembering the mingled strains of Melville’s ancestry, the critic
is tempted to discover in his New England blood the source of his
transcendental visions. Yet the influence is not easy to trace. Half
Dutch and half Yankee, he certainly got his vigorous physique and hot
temper from the former. His maternal grandfather, Major General Peter
Gansevoort, was a huge bulk of a man who achieved high distinction in
the Revolutionary War, and whose traditional prowess filled the boy’s
heart with pride. His mother, Maria Gansevoort, whom the son closely
resembled in physique, was crossed in blood with that of the Van