The Dyers Hand and Other Essays

of her eggs becomes an emblem of charity, the camel-sparrow an emblem of justice, the jerboa-rat an emblem of true free­dom as contrasted with the false freedom of the conqueror- tyrant—and sometimes, as in the beast fable, the behavior of animals is presented as a moral paradigm. Occasionally, as in "Elephants," the moral is direct, but, as a rule, the reader has to perceive it for himself.

The "Pangolin," written during the war, is a longish poem —nine stanzas of eleven lines each—but it is not until the end of the seventh stanza that a direct likeness between the pangolin and man is drawn:

in fighting, mechanicked like the pangolin.

On the one hand, the pangolin is an enchanting animal; on the other, it is a great honor to be created a human being. But the one way in which men can physically resemble pangolins is by putting on armor and this should not have to be necessary. The pangolin's armor is an adaptation which secures his survival, for he is an ant-eater; as creatures go, he is unpugnacious and unaggressive. But man wears armor because he is an aggressive creature full of hatred for and fear of his own kind. The moral: men ought to be gentle-natured like pangolins but, if they were, they would cease to look like pangolins, and the pangolin could not be an emblem.

Miss Moore's poems are an example of a kind of art which is not as common as it should be; they delight, not only be­cause they are intelligent, sensitive and beautifully written, but also because they convince the reader that they have been written by someone who is personally good. Questioned about the relation between art and morals, Miss Moore herself has said:

Must a man be good to write good poems? The vil­lains in Shakespeare are not illiterate, are they? But rectitude has a ring that is implicative, I would say. And with no integrity, a man is not likely to write the kind of book I read.

PART SIX

Americana

THE AMERICAN SCENE

America where there is the little old ramshackle victoria in the south,

where cigars are smoked on the street in the north; where there are no proof­readers, no silk-worms, no digressions; the wild man's land; grassless linksless, language-

less country in which letters are written not in Spanish, not in Greek, not in Latin, not

in shorthand, hut in plain American which cats and dogs can readl

marianne moore

Two of James' virtues, his self-knowledge, his awareness of just what he could and could not do, and his critical literary- sense, his respect for the inalienable right of every subject to its own form and treatment, are nowhere more conspicuous than in The American Scene.

Of all possible subjects, travel is the most difficult for an artist, as it is the easiest for a journalist. For the latter, the interesting event is the new, the extraordinary, the comic, the shocking, and all that the peripatetic journalist requires is a flair for being on the spot where and when such events happen —the rest is merely passive typewriter thumping: meaning, relation, importance, are not his quarry. The artist, on the other hand, is deprived of his most treasured liberty, the freedom to invent; successfully to extract importance from his­torical personal events without ever departing from them, free only to select and never to modify or to add, calls for imagina­tion of a very high order.

Few writers have had less journalistic talent than James, and this is his defect, for the supreme masters have one trait in common with the childish scribbling mass, the vulgar curi­osity of a police-court reporter. One can easily imagine Stendhal or Tolstoi or Dostoievski becoming involved in a barroom fight, but James, never. I have read somewhere a story that once, when James was visiting a French friend, the latter's mistress, unobserved, filled his top hat with cham­pagne, but I do not believe it because, try as I will, I simply cannot conceive what James did and said when he put his hat on.