Pyle's Sweet, Thin, Clear Tune: The Garden Behind the Moon

Abstract

Pyle's Sweet, Thin, Clear Tune:The Garden Behind the Moon Perry Nodelman (bio) Hans Krout had a fiddle, and he could play you a tune so sweet and thin and clear that it would make your throat fill up with happiness to listen to him. At about the same time that England's Tennyson and the Rossettis were indulging in moony-eyed nostalgia for a Middle Ages that vacillated between brooding opera and creamy romance, the American Howard Pyle was writing about, and illustrating, a Middle Ages of his own invention, a sort of fourteenth century YMCA picnic where good children could safely dream, drowsed with the fumes of Lysol. Shortly after Pyle's death, Henry Mills Alden wrote in Harper's that Pyle's work was "a fresh revival of the romantic. But, though it occupied the field of wonder, it had no Rossetti-like transfiguration and exaltation, no vagueness. Without any loss of wonder his meanings were plain."1 Robert Lawson enthusiastically confirms the freshness of Pyle's Europe: Here were castles, not moss-hung but lived-in, spacious, clean, . . . . Here were towers, not buried in ivy and watery moonlight, but soaring breathlessly into clear and sparkling skies . . . no dreary weeping willows these, nor moss-hung churchyard relics. These trees were vigorous, alive . . . . No wonder that this land and these people of Howard Pyle's seemed like a childhood vision of the Promised Land come true.2 Pyle did not actually visit Europe until many years after he'd written numerous books about the European past; he did indeed invent a medieval Europe that was peculiarly nineteenth century, and peculiarly American—and the stories he told of the exuberant, muscular men with the tastes and interests of ten-year-old boys who inhabited it made it peculiarly charming. In the midst of all this brightly lit and wonderfully energetic adventure, one book stands out. Pyle's Garden Behind the Moon seems to be as dreamy, as vague, and as mystical as Men of Iron and The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood are plain and practical—as "sweet and thin and clear" as Pyle's other books are loud and boisterous. Pyle's young son died while he was on a trip to Jamaica, before The Garden Behind the Moon was written; Pyle dedicated the book "to the Little Boy in the Moon Garden," and as the book suggests, the Moon Garden is the heavenly dwelling of those who die young. Perhaps that explains why The Garden Behind the Moon is so different from Pyle's other works, which hardly ever penetrate the clean surface of the delightfully unsubtle world they describe; The Garden struggles seriously with hard and highly emotional issues, ideas of death and salvation that might well come to be important to a grieving father. Not surprisingly, those who dislike Pyle's work admire the sweet, thin, clear tune of The Garden Behind the Moon. John Rowe Townsend, who seriously misses the point when he dismisses Pyle's majestically inventive pseudo-archaisms for being untrue to the real Medieval facts, says, "To my mind, his writing is at its best in his fantasy The Garden Behind the Moon . . . , a sad and often moving allegory which is strongly reminiscent of George MacDonald."3 Also not surprising, given its difference from the rest of Pyle's work, is the neglect of The Garden; the book has been out of print for many decades. It doesn't deserve to be neglected. Despite those reminiscences of George MacDonald—and they are obvious reminiscences—nobody but Howard Pyle could have written The Garden Behind the Moon. Townsend says the book "does not have MacDonald's imaginative force;" he's right: it doesn't. It has Pyle's imaginative force. It is a pecularly Pylean version of MacDonald-land—the sort of mystical fantasy only a proclaimed Swedenborgian who had been born a common-sense Quaker could write. George MacDonald's fantasies stand somewhere near the start of the line of stories that led eventually to Tolkien's tales of Middle-earth and C.S. Lewis's Narnia—stories that combine the matter of fairy tales with the content of Christianity...