Ink and America
INK AND AMERICA A COMMEMORATION like that of the Calvert jtTL landing in Maryland, while carrying the memory back to a time when our land was young, is also an earnest reminder of how rapidly we...
...Scoff at Puritanism though they may, their ancestors were Puritans...
...By it alone, of course, could the Puritan explain the destiny of men...
...But there is—and it is perennially salutary to remember it—another American past...
...It was the Roman legionary who taught the barbarian how to make war...
...When we are told that Puritanism is a sham, we may answer that we have long known it for a heresy...
...Without old Boston in the background, they would not now be blase...
...Now the most tremendous event in the history of America is the fact that New England was able to nationalize its ideal...
...We are the most solidly moral people in the world, but we take no pleasure in our morality and seek to escape from it imaginatively whenever there is a chance...
...The old ideal, you see, never existed...
...It lived on as a kind of immanent law—as that to which man must attune himself in order to realize the fulness of existence...
...and for the great majority of us religious experience is something just as hard, standardized, and unsatisfying as cash...
...it is particularly marked in the creative pleasure of letters...
...Today we are witnessing its repudiation...
...But all art is of its nature religious pleasure—the result of attachments, of awestruck parting embraces with ideals...
...And to each and every form of erotic insanity, our reply can be what it has always been—the laughter of heroes...
...INK AND AMERICA A COMMEMORATION like that of the Calvert jtTL landing in Maryland, while carrying the memory back to a time when our land was young, is also an earnest reminder of how rapidly we have grown old...
...Morality is really somewhat stupid unless it is the discipline of religion...
...We may find it hard to name...
...And from his day to ours the same morbidness of a decayed ideal has attached itself to the naturalistic movement...
...There only was a present made out of the past, under circumstances which assured permanence...
...Admittedly, this naturalism is sometimes at least honest...
...that laughter is the fife of victory and not the shriek of hopelessness—these things have been held sacred in America for 300 years and more...
...And in New England 590 THE COMMONWEAL April 7, 1926 alone was an American tradition localized and rooted in the earth...
...There is in all good literature no book which exudes the solid comfort of a bank-account...
...And so that is probably why we, upon whom morality rests like the dead weight of gentility, run so impetuously to the wild lands of fantastic wrong...
...But they have never ruled because they were never localized...
...It may be easier to grasp theoretically than to put into practice...
...that the universe is a garment God made for His holiday, and not a snare or an illusion...
...Whenever he spoke of woman, it was as if he were discussing a plaster Priscilla whom he could not stomach...
...That man lives to expand courageously his vision of reality...
...Like a branch of the same ideal stream, the Anglican South has beautified the better moments of its career...
...Even when, by the time of Emerson, the old theological conceptions had faded, righteousness itself could not be shaken from its throne...
...The roots of tradition, however, are always so necessary and so stalwart that rebellion against it must accept the weapons of the tyrant...
...Much of various kinds could be added to complete the summary...
...Nobody ever wrote wisely of life if he took it for granted any more than a man has ever loved well who treated his sweetheart as if she were already a dowager...
...The reasons are many—ennui, racial difference, the rebellion of suppressed emotion...
...or to an eagerness to stake brandnew decisions on fifty-year-old abstractions...
...We are now trailing truth...
...For, after all, the great moods of Christendom have been the only strong, abiding impulses of the artistic and meditative life of the race...
...Who can attribute pulsing energy to wry sophistication which is at the same time appalling gullibility...
...And the present naturalistic debacle of American writing is so futile and so wrong precisely because it is so puritanical...
...The vastness of the continent which we inhabit, the speed with which throngs of nomadic settlers in town and country tossed aside their ill-associated memories and habits of mind, and the natural trend of historical fortune have had their way...
...If we recall for an attentive moment the history of the New England experiment—its uncompromising individualism barred only by the devil, its shudder at even the dream of beauty, its attempt to make Man out of man—we cannot help being struck by the peculiar emphasis which it placed upon righteousness...
...the Mississippi is only a muddy river without the shades of De Soto and Marquette...
...Let us take one example: James Gibbons Huneker, whose purple prose virtually began the movement, was the discoverer of degenerate Paris...
...but it is never much younger than the old, old men of Paris...
...Yes, there is a much heralded naturalism which, finding root in a comparatively small group of volumes which took it for granted that you and I, as persons of some cultivation, would not be interested in anything more ancient than their paganism, has spilled over into the hoppers of the commercialists...
...Nothing is so dangerous or so important nationally as the corruption of the mysticism of the elite...
...Emerson was mystical in quite the same way as Jonathan Edwards had been, and simply made the transcendental more transcendental...
...That occupied the whole of the upper world, arrayed awefully in a gaunt positive and a harrowing negative...
...Rheumatic age has its way with us in culture and economics...
...to a conscience awkwardly guilty when it has a fling, or shies down an alley behind a pair of trim ankles...
...and it would be magnificent when complete...
...Recently a clever essayist discovered a cowboy, a very wise and reflective cowboy, who upon hearing the melancholy tale of Emma Bovary, declared he had known many women like that...
...We cannot even conceive of it as a gratuitous joy...
...Sherwood Anderson and Ludwig Lewisohn, discussing love, are so morbid because the love they have repudiated was so pure—and so unreal...
...You cannot think of California without recalling Junipero Serra...
...The delicate scent of them was flung everywhere, but no one could tell where the flowers grew...
...That was, to speak sedately, its sole transcendental possession...
...The manhood of Lee, the art of Poe, the lyrical reflectiveness of Tabb, the charity of Joel Chandler Harris, even the sobbing of Paul Dunbar— these things are as inconceivably a part of New England as they are inconceivable apart from the United States...
...The one common thought which has unified this past is the sacramental view of life—a treasured inheritance whose lustre no differences of temperament or dogma could dim...
...If someone bids us uphold the truth, we shall show him that we have fought for it on many a field...
...He called upon his friends, as it were, to see that the smoke in which the gods had gone up was still the gods...
...Nothing is so consistently marked in everything Huneker wrote as a kind of malodorous, frightened concern with morals...
...Rousseau could begin the French revolution because he had found a style as fresh and convincing as that with which Saint Bernard had converted France...
...Righteousness was his bugbear, his Banquo—the thing he never managed to shake off and which he came to hate with a kind of obsession...
...The Puritan's righteousness gradually but surely became the first coinage of the American mind...
...Dimly seen and only partially coordinated though it may be, this past is as real and vigorous as any other part of the national story...
...And yet—it is a point worth noting—the "sad young men" have really cashed an American inheritance...
...It was a sham, a fake...
...But from the time when Spanish padres and Jesuit martyrs first hungered for the spirit of the mighty continent flung out prodigally before them, the soil upon which we live has been dedicated to its great adventurous pursuit...
...Willingly or otherwise, most of us have been persuaded to accept Boston...
...The power of what we can only term Christendom has struggled, won and lost upon almost every hill we know by name...
...We say most tremendous, because a nation's mysticism is its spiritual heartbeatno people awakes to anything during its groping life excepting to its dreams...
...And so it goes on...
...And so, when we today find ourselves standing apart from the naturalist and his origins, why should we not take root deeply in this past, our past, instead of tinkering feebly with an antiquated platform in which we have never actually believed...
Vol. 3 • April 1926 • No. 22
