The Dyers Hand and Other Essays

manifestations" and to this one might add another, Pitch. If undefinable, the difference is, however, immediately recog­nizable by the ear, even in verse where the formal conventions are the same.

He must have had a father and a mother— In fact I've heard him say so—and a dog, As a boy should, I venture; and the dog, Most likely, was the only man who knew him. A dog, for all I know, is what he needs As much as anything right here today, To counsel him about his disillusions, Old aches, and parturitions of what's coming— A dog of orders, an emeritus, To wag his tail at him when he comes home, And then to put his paws up on his knees And say, Tor God's sake, what's it all about?' (e. a. robinson, "Ben Jonson Entertains a Man from Stratford.")

Whatever this may owe to Browning, the fingering is quite different and un-British. Again, how American in rhythm as well as in sensibility is this stanza by Robert Frost:

But no, I was out for stars: I would not come in. I meant not even if asked, And I hadn't been.

("Come In.")

Until quite recendy an English writer, like one of any European country, could presuppose two conditions, a nature which was mythologized, humanized, on the whole friendly, and a human society which had become in time, whatever succession of invasions it may have suffered in the past, in race and religion more or less homogeneous and in which most people lived and died in the locality where they were born.

Christianity might have deprived Aphrodite, Apollo, the local genius, of their divinity but as figures for the forces of nature, as a mode of thinking about the creation, they re­mained valid for poets and their readers alike. Descartes might reduce the nonhuman universe to a mechanism but the feel­ings of Europeans about the sun and moon, the cycle of the seasons, the local landscape remained unchanged. Words­worth might discard the mythological terminology but the kind of relation between nature and man which he described was the same personal one. Even when nineteenth-century biology began to trouble men's minds with the thought that the universe might be without moral values, their immediate experience was still of a friendly and lovable nature. Whatever their doubts and convictions about the purpose and significance of the universe as a whole, Tennyson's Lincolnshire or Hardy's Dorset were places where they felt completely at home, land­scapes with faces of their own which a human being could recognize and trust.

But in America, neither the size nor the condition nor the climate of the continent encourages such intimacy. It is an unforgettable experience for anyone born on the other side of the Atlantic to take a plane journey by night across the United States. Looking down he will see the lights of some town like a last outpost in a darkness stretching for hours ahead, and realize that, even if there is no longer an actual frontier, this is still a continent only partially setded and developed, where human activity seems a tiny thing in com­parison to the magnitude of the earth, and the equality of men not some dogma of politics or jurisprudence but a self- evident fact. He will behold a wild nature, compared with which the landscapes of Salvator Rosa are as cosy as Arcadia and which cannot possibly be thought of in human or personal terms. If Henry Adams could write:

When Adams was a boy in Boston, the best chemist in the place had probably never heard of Venus except by way of scandal, or of the Virgin except as idolatry. . . . The force of the Virgin was still felt at Lourdes, and seemed to be as potent as X-rays; but in America neither Venus nor Virgin ever had value as force—at most as sentiment. No American had ever been truly afraid of either

the reason for this was not simply that the Mayflower carried iconophobic dissenters but also that the nature which Amer­icans, even in New England, had every reason to fear could not possibly be imagined as a mother. A white whale whom man can neither understand nor be understood by, whom only a madman like Gabriel can worship, the only relation­ship with whom is a combat to the death by which a man's courage and skill are tested and judged, or the great buck who answers the poet's prayer for "someone else additional to him" in "The Most of It" are more apt symbols. Thoreau, who certainly tried his best to become intimate with nature, had to confess

I walk in nature still alone

And know no one, Discern no lineament nor feature

Of any creature. Though all the firmament

Is o'er me bent, Yet still I miss the grace Of an intelligent and kindred face. I still must seek the friend Who does with nature blend, Who is the person in her mask, He is the man I ask. . . .

Many poets in the Old World have become disgusted with human civilization but what the earth would be like if the race became extinct they cannot imagine; an American like Robinson Jeffers can quite easily, for he has seen with his own eyes country as yet untouched by history.