Main currents in American thought An interpretation of American literature from the beginnings to 1920
former a victim of constitutional pliability. A sensuous egotism that
grows and consumes. Geary alone survives--the egoist who drives forward
ruthlessly. A study of the slow, long descent--a chain of circumstances
that finally binds him hand and foot. His props knocked away one by
one--partly by fate, partly by himself: his father, the girl whom he
loves, his concern for respectable opinion, his art, his money. The
conclusion intensely dramatic--more so than the romance of _McTeague_.
The comment of Garland on _McTeague_ applies equally to _Vandover_:
“What avail is this study of sad lives? for it does not even lead to a
notion of social betterment.” His interest is “not that of the ethical
teacher.”
“The Octopus”
_McTeague_ and _Vandover_ are of the city and its sordid evil ways.
They are studies in psychology. _The Octopus_ is of the great
California valleys and the evils that have come into the farm life
with the railroad. It is a study in economics--the first of a long
series of such studies. One can easily see how the theme caught the
imagination of Norris, how his mind felt the relief from the narrow
world and sordid wretchedness of _Vandover_. A certain magnificence
in Norris responded to the epic breadth of the valleys--they fired
his imagination--the vast sweep and power of nature: the rich soil,
the brilliant sun that lays its palpitating heat upon the land, the
quick response in flowers and fruit. The land is eager to produce;
its fruitfulness is overpowering. There is an epic sweep of life and
reproduction here; and this epic of the soil is linked with the
tragedy wrought by the Southern Pacific--the economic machinery of
man’s making. The facts were well known and they took hold of Norris’s
imagination. His sympathy is aroused and yet instead of attacking the
railroad he weaves it into his deterministic philosophy.
_Theme._ Ostensibly the wheat. Norris planned a huge trilogy of its
growing (_The Octopus_), marketing (_The Pit_), consumption (_The
Wolf_--never written). In reality, the impotence of unimportant
individuals in the struggle with things as they are. In _The Octopus_
the individual is dwarfed by the vast spaces, he is crumpled and
despoiled by the railroad. The flock of sheep destroyed by the train is
only a symbol of the men and women of the valley, under the wheels of
modern industrialism.
_Action._ A huge canvas with crowding figures and abundant action.
“The canvas swarms with actualities--plowing, planting, harvesting,
sheep-herding, merry-making, rabbit-killing, love, labor, birth,
death”--all keyed high and swept into a palpitating background. A
“strongly interwrought group of episodes,” that fall into certain
series of developments too:
1. The atrophy of Magnus Derrick, which might well be a story in itself.
2. The development of Annixter, “out of an absolute, yet not gross,
materiality,” through the love of Hilma Tree; and then their final
annihilation.
3. A host of background characters--supernumeraries--that give a sense
of epic sweep.
_The Note of Romance._ The riot of color, of life, arouse the latent
romance of his nature. He cannot remain detached but projects himself
into the story in the person of Vanamee. He returns to the use of the
symbol as in _McTeague_--the wheat. He allows his villain to perish
melodramatically. How much more convincing is the figure of Charlie
Geary setting Vandover to work than S. Behrman in the hold of the
vessel.
In the end he abandons the amoral attitude. After proclaiming the
doctrine of determinism--that the railroads are the masters--not the
puppets of men--he takes refuge in a moral order. In the large balance,
the wheat remains, rectifying wrong--saving other lives to make good
what it here destroys. “The larger view always and through all shams,
all wickednesses, discovers the Truth that will, in the end, prevail,
and all things, surely, inevitably, resistlessly, work together for
good.”[809] Nevertheless in contemplating the injustice done by the
railroads, Norris neither demands nor expects relief.
_The Octopus_ exemplifies Norris’ theory of broad-scale work. It “draws
conclusions from a whole congeries of forces, social development, race
impulses.” It “devotes itself not to the study of men but of man.”
Sidney Lanier[810]
An original nature. Rejects both the genteel tradition and the ideals
of the rising middle class. An artist to whom life means beauty.
He revivifies nature--is almost pagan in his adoration of the beauty
of the sun and water. A half-personification of the sun-myth. He is
essentially religious. To Longfellow and Tennyson nature is pretty
embroidery; to Emerson it is a dwelling-place of the oversoul; to
Lanier it is an object of adoration. See “The Marshes of Glynn.”
He attacks industrialism--the first of the poets to cry out against
it as a deadly blight on life and civilization. See “Corn,” “The
Symphony,” “The Jacquerie.”
He seeks a new religion, recognizing a quantitative element.
The Incomparable Mr. Cabell[811]
The successive volumes of James Branch Cabell have provided the
tribe of critical Jeffries with a rich vein of diversion. They have
recognized no closed season in their full-lunged pursuit of the
strange heirs of Mr. Cabell’s invention, and such Homeric absurdities
of comment have been flung at him, that he is in a fair way to become
our classic example of the fatuousness of contemporary estimates. As
whimsical as Bernard Shaw, as provocative as Chesterton, he is more
incomprehensible than either to all readers who do not choose to like
what they have not always liked. Professing to be a romancer, and
defending the glory of romance with inimitable witchery of phrase,
he writes no romance that lovers of convention can understand. The
lovely fabrics of his tales of Poictesme are all shimmer and sheen,
woven of magic and veiling mysteries, instead of the correct taffeta
and grosgrain; and the brilliant stuff of his tales of gallantry is
fashioned of wit and poetry, instead of the customary wigs and sword
play. Those to whom romance suggests _When Knighthood Was in Flower_,
will find only obscurities and coarseness in _Figures of Earth_
(1921) and _Jurgen_ (1919, _enl._ ed. 1921); and those who delight
in the stage rufflings of _Monsieur Beaucaire_, will discover only a
libertine in _The Cords of Vanity_ (1909, rev. ed. 1920). And if the
reader boggles at such tales what can he hope to make of that strange,
ironical whimsy, _The Cream of the Jest_ (1917, rev. ed. 1922)? One
needs to walk warily in dealing with Mr. Cabell, or the jest of which
he is such a master will turn sardonically upon the critic. In all
his thinking vague hinterlands lie behind the commonplace, cryptic
meanings lurk behind the obvious; and the credulous, easy-going reader
finds himself puzzled, and at last floundering quite hopelessly in a
land of bogs and marsh-lights. And yet was ever another writer born
to us Americans so insistent upon being understood? He has elaborated
his views of life and art at length, and repeated them in successive
volumes over nearly a score of years; and finally in what may have
been a mood of sheer disgust at the stupidity of those who buy books,
he reëlaborated his philosophy and wrote it out in good set terms
within the covers of a single volume. _Beyond Life_ is an essay
altogether remarkable for its haunting beauty of phrase, its honest
agnosticism, its brooding irony. It is enough to turn one cynic to
consider that so noble a book should have called forth from a reputable
gentleman, presumably of good taste and sound judgment, the comment
that it “contains cheap and shallow pessimistic observations on human
limitations.”
That _Beyond Life_ (1919), with other of Mr. Cabell’s books, contains
“observations on the limitations of human nature,” is quite obvious;
for Mr. Cabell deals in comedy, and what is to become of comedy if
it shall not observe those limitations and laugh at them? That it is
even pessimistic may likewise be argued with some plausibility; but to
assert that it is cheap and shallow is preposterous. An inquisitive
mind, deeply concerned with ultimate values, cannot be cheap and
shallow. And yet the fault of such widespread misinterpretation may lie
in part at Mr. Cabell’s own doorstep. An inveterate jester, his sallies
often carry implications far beyond the obvious; his strange whimsies
spring from depths of thought and emotion beyond the understanding of
the careless. His attitude towards life is an odd mixture of the modern
and the medieval: there is a medieval simplicity and frankness, a
naïve wonder at the mystery that underlies the common, an incorrigible
idealism; and this medieval attitude is drenched in modern agnosticism.
He passes easily from a broad Chaucerian humor that laughs frankly at
the relations of men and women, to a mystical idealization of those
relations; and the problem of reconciling the humor and the ideal
becomes a serious business with him. He hates the cant and dishonesty
of our _bourgeois_ existence, and he refuses to take seriously the
host of petty concerns that most of us are very serious about. If
he were less the artist he would join the disaffected and turn to
rend this foolish world; but the spirit of comedy saves him and he
contents himself with a jest. But the Cabellian jest uncovers depths
of meditation that reveal the philosopher and the poet. In his own
large meaning of the word Mr. Cabell is an economist. He is greatly
dissatisfied with the “futile body-wasting,” which under the “dynamic
illusion known as common sense” passes for life, and is concerned to
discover what abiding increment a man may get from his body during
its brief existence as an entity. His mind is haunted with a sense of
realities that lie beneath the surface appearances, and that insist on
trickling from his pen in strange comments. It is a careless reader
who is deceived or put off the scent by his whimsical vocabulary, who
insists on conventional meanings for words which Mr. Cabell chooses
to use otherwise than conventional persons use them. Romance and
realism--words with which he plays constantly and upon which he hangs
his philosophy--do not signify the spurious romance of childish minds,
or the shoddy realism of practical minds. If one must insist upon
translating his vocabulary into ordinary terms, let us understand that
to Mr. Cabell romance and realism mean idealism and conventionalism;
and to the profound distinction between these two attitudes towards
life, he dedicates his work.
I have called Mr. Cabell a poet, and the justification lies in his
persistent idealization of life in terms of beauty. At his birth he was
endowed by an unkind fate with imagination. Now imagination may be a
very pretty and amiable gift, highly useful for gilding one’s egoism,
putting honey in thistles, proving itself practical by arraying life in
gay robes in order that it may seem an altogether lovely and desirable
mistress; or it may prove a decidedly parlous faculty to play with.
It can summon bogies, and terrors that are vaster and more real than
bogies. A brooding imagination can work havoc with one’s complacency.
When Carlyle was in a mood to enjoy his nerves he would let his
imagination range beyond the comfortable confines of convention, to
consider the universe and the position of man therein--the black flow
of time and the terrifying immensity of background against which man
is set; and he would come back to dinner with Jane Welsh Carlyle with
a sick stomach and an ill temper. It was not very gallant, but it was
very natural to a man unnerved by what he had contemplated. Considered
with open eyes reality is too overpowering for weak man, and because
he could not relieve the tension with a jest, Carlyle’s imagination