American Masterpieces

AMERICAN RENAISSANCE--F. O. Mathiessen--Oxford ($5).

Between 1850 and 1855, five Americans published seven books which made that half-decade the most explosive in American cultural history. The men: Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville, Whitman. The books: Representative Men, The Scarlet Letter, The House of the Seven Gables, Moby Dick, Pierre, Walden, Leaves of Grass. "You might search all the rest of American literature without being able to collect a group of books equal to these in imaginative vitality."

So says Francis Otto Matthiessen, an Associate Professor of History and Literature at Harvard. His American Renaissance is a study of these books and men. The result of ten years' work, it weighs

2 lbs., 9 1/2 oz., runs to 656 pages, contains some 300,000 words, each of which was put there with evident care. It attends to its business with the strict energy a good boxer would use in cutting down a bigger man. Its business: "To follow these books through their implications . . . to assess them in relations to one another and to the drift of our literature since, and, so far as possible, to evaluate them in accordance with the enduring requirements for great art." One of its five subjects inevitably emerges as the greatest writer the U.S. has yet produced. Matthiessen does not pick him in so many words, but a reader can.

Emerson is Matthiessen's toughest assignment "because of his inveterate habit of stating things in opposites." He all but worshiped Plato's ability to reconcile fact and abstraction, spent his life in a ceaseless effort to do likewise. That effort made him what he said of Goethe: "The cow from which the rest drew their milk." His conceptions of "the infinitude of the private man," of the equality of all souls, of content as above expression (to the point of windy disregard for expression), of the poet as seer or prophet, of the intuitive moment as final knowledge, of all things as symbols--these (and a luminous excitement over democracy) were the stock-in-brain of all Transcendentalists, but it was Emerson who articulated them first.

He never wrote a "masterpiece"--"the sentence was his unit"--but his theory of expression "was that on which Thoreau built, to which Whitman gave extension, and to which Hawthorne and Melville were indebted by being forced to react against its philosophical assumptions." Thoreau had Emerson's Nature solid underfoot to start his life on. In an analysis of Walden's quietly magnificent form, Teacher Matthiessen passes Thoreau on Coleridge's test of "the organic principle" --that form must arise out of the properties of the material--and names him one of the ancestors of modern functionalism.

Suffering and loneliness were Hawthorne's whole school. He had no more patience with Transcendentalism than with Phrenology (which Poe and Whitman swallowed whole), even less with Transcendental optimism for America. Like most of the sensitive men of his time, he saw "significance" in common things.

Sometimes they had the full vitalizing power of real symbols; sometimes, clumsily, he tried to kick meanings into them, as when he jotted down: "Meditations about the main gaspipe of a great city --if the supply were to be stopped, what would happen? . . . It might be made emblematical of something." He got his meanings, his characters and their actions most perfectly synchronized in The Scar let Letter. In Seven Gables, as Matthiessen takes pleasure in showing, he worked out a thorough and frightening economic-spirit ual image of America, only to foozle it at the end.

Matthiessen makes out a thorough case for Hawthorne as a creator of genuine tragedies; but seems to exaggerate in crediting him with "a penetration no less deep than Dostoevski's into the mysteries of suffering." By far the most exciting pages of American Renaissance are those devoted to Herman Melville, "the American with the richest natural gifts as a writer." Melville had the good luck to reach the age of 25 bitterly experienced as a sailor, and virtually uneducated. He then sat down to such a ravenous use of his mind as few men can have equalled.

He could not stomach Emerson's innocent blandness towards evil: "Enough of this Plato who talks thro' his nose!" His own intuition was the antithesis of Emerson's: "Though in many of its aspects this visible world seems formed in love, the invisible spheres were formed in fright." He was more excited by Hawthorne's "great power of blackness," his "short, quick probings at the very axis of reality." Between Hawthorne and Shakespeare, Melville's genius took on a heat that flared the thin edges of insanity and that only utter exhaustion could ever quiet. Moby Dick was its Dionysian profusion; Pierre -"about the most desperate [book] in our literature"--its scalding, berserk phase.

In Moby Dick, Melville was less concerned with individual sin than with "titanic, uncontrollable forces which seem to swamp man altogether." Matthiessen makes clear his prodigious ability to manage--or to make one beast of--so rampant a tandem of allegory, symbol and fact as the white whale. He points out Ahab's complete fatalism (another violent reaction against Emerson), nominates Ahab as a "symbolical . . . American hero"--"a fearful symbol of the self-enclosed individualism that, carried to its furthest extreme, brings disaster both upon itself and upon the group of which it is part. . .

an ominous glimpse of what was to result when the Emersonian will to virtue became in less innocent natures the will to power and conquest." He also makes it abundantly clear that Melville was no mere whirlwind of tortured metaphysics but one of the most conscious democrats of his time.

After Melville, great Walt Whitman seems unfairly naive and flabby. Matthiessen observes that he saved himself from the bathetic role of an Every-Man-His-Own-Messiah only by his genuine warmth towards all other men. Though he worked at it more bravely than any other, he never created popular language: the one Whitman poem to seep through to the proletariat of the grade schools is in rocking-horse ballad meter, O Captain! My Captain! His poetry has been less influential in our time than that of his "polar opposite," the Jesuit Gerard Manley Hopkins.

As for the literary descendants of Melville, there are enthusiasts like Waldo Frank and there is one man of genius, Hart Crane. Matthiessen makes nothing of him. But he does quote from Crane, as a chapter head, lines which magnificently carry the voices of both poets, and design for them a common epitaph: Then in the circuit calm of one vast coil, Its lashings charmed and malice reconciled . . . High in the azure steeps Monody shall not wake the mariner.

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