On Hating the Provinces

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On Hating the Provinces Carl Van Doren [End Page 185] From A Roving Critic, "Nooks and Fringes" Emerson lived in Concord and took villages for granted, as natural microcosms in any one of which a sage might study the world. Whitman lived in Manhattan and sent his imagination on strong flights over the entire body of his land, and to the remotest regions, neither denying nor rejecting whatever signs of life he saw. Lincoln in Springfield, whitherto by no means all the philosophies had come and little enough of culture in any composition, mastered not only an incomparable wisdom but an incomparable style. To no one of these men could it have been quite understandable that a second or third generation after them would begin to display among certain of its intellectual leaders that restless and intense hatred of the provinces which marks, for example, the critics of Paris and the professors of Berlin. Yet something of precisely this sort has come to pass. Voice after voice is added to the regiments of criticism being raised against suburban Philistia and the villatic bourgeoisie. That is to say, a reaction is commencing against the frontier which has had so large a hand in making us. It is no longer a natural device to put critical sagacity in the mouth of a rural sage. When Lowell created Hosea Biglow he did so with the brash originality of a young man who was taking venturesome shots at his age; no young American of Lowell's scholarship would think a second time of such a device today. Josh Billings and Artemus Ward to all but a few have come to seem "old stuff." Even Mr. Dooley is not a crossroads loafer but a native son of the city streets. In return for a long course of ridicule from rustic philosophers a new order of philosophes is striking back. We need not wonder, perhaps, that the riposte is often acrimonious; the weight of all this village ridicule has often been heavy. We need not feel too much distressed at the look of snobbishness which some of the critics of our frontier somewhat too continually wear; nothing ought to be so easy to forgive as a zeal for enlightenment. It is important to remember, however, that there is a point of vantage a little above this particular critical melee from which the battle appears less crucial than it doubtless appears to those who wage it. That point of vantage is the artist's, at least so far as the artist is concerned with the reproduction of life without the Puritan's anxiety to make it—or to make it out—the kind of life he thinks it ought to be. The moralist condemns the "bad" people and the wit condemns the dull; but these are phases of argument. With argument the dramatist or novelist is much less concerned. His task is first [End Page 186] of all a representation of what he finds, and his obligation ends—though he may decide to do more—when he has represented it. At his lowest level he yields himself wholly to the manners of his society and sets them forth with implied approbation, as if they were the laws of God. At a higher level, he turns violently against its prejudices and assails them as if they were the sins of Satan. But there is a level higher still, from which, as he looks upon his community, he sees it as men and women involved in the exercises of life, and he makes his record of them without either uncritical admiration or vexed recrimination. Those novelists and dramatists who now hate our provinces most are nearly all dissatisfied men lately escaped from stodginess and devoted to getting their revenges. In this fashion the heretic, while his wounds smart, lashes back at the doctrines which oppressed him. But the truly emancipated spirit no longer has time for recrimination or revenge. He goes, as artist, about his proper business, accepting stupidity as his material as well as intelligence, vice as well as virtue, gentleness as well as cruelty. In every community, he knows, all the types and tendencies of...