James Hearst, American Literature, and the Revolutionary Spirit

Automated transcription through YouTube Video Auto-Caption 

I want you all to remember what Carl Sandberg said. He said, "No matter how important you are, you can always get the measles."

Well, I know why I'm here. I'm here to talk and you know why you're here. You're here to listen. Now, let's just hope we come out the same time. 

I suppose criticism really is a kind of a national sport. We play it almost unconsciously every day as we pass judgment. We criticize Jerry's manners, Susan's feet, father's clothes, the way my wife drives the car. I think we think we are being helpful. We're trying to improve our friends. We're do-gooders and we want our friends and relatives to improve their ways and often the ways that they have that we don't like are ways that we have ourselves. There are ways and often the ways that they have that we don't like are ways that we have ourselves. So we're really criticizing ourselves when we do them. But um I want to talk about criticism in a in a specialized sense in the sense of uh understanding and appreciating the arts and especially this part of literature. I want it to be an informative talk and helpful the critic as teacher or as expert a person disciplined to the investigation and the explication of literature and what literature is all about. and why it means anything to us. And to show the role and to define our need for criticism and the critic in our national life, I'd like to make a few general observations and then narrow my focus down to one important of our American culture. I said that we really believe in are the invisible things. It's all very well to want autos and refrigerators and air conditioners and the drive-in culture, but when it comes right down to it, the purpose for a living is something else or we would we would be smothered by things. Let me quote from a critic what I mean. He said, "Literature is a beautiful and orderly expression of human activity. It deals with people and shows us our heroism, our cruelty, gentleness, stupidity, frailty, selfishness, magnanimity, blundering grace. It does specific things. It teaches us to look for symbols and images in our actions and characters. It reveals patterns of life, develops, taste, expands what we see, reminds us of our common lot. Now, I think that's good. remind us of our stories. The gatekeeper said, "This gate was made only for you." It is the invisible thing that we really believe in love, in hostility, in pleasure, in terror, the promise of our country. And we need the critic's help, I think, to guide us through the swamps of racism, decay, prejudice, bias, the shoddy, and the cheat. and to tell us if our values are only those of a white middle class affluent society. And what about the other worlds? The world of the submerged, the inarticulate, and that other, the foreigner, the outcast, the creep. Perhaps here the critic can help us keep in balance and open our eyes to things. Perhaps here the critic can help us keep in balance and open our eyes to things the way they are. Now, this sounds like a little digression, but it'll come out all right in the end. I assure you, it's never been a disgrace to be beaten when you've done what you can do. It's never been a disgrace to be beaten when you've done what you can do. I think it's a trying that counts. It's a matter of playing for keeps. It has to matter to you. It has to matter terribly to you what you do. if you're going to get some satisfaction from life and to stand up to it. I don't care if you're writing a poem or baking bread or having a love affair. What I'm saying is you just can't play at it and give it a lick and a promise. It may be only a temporary thing, but you've got to make the most of it. Make it give you something as a stay against confusion. We were speaking the other day of an author, a woman writer, a French woman who was complaining bitterly about growing old. Well, philosophically, we have to accept the predicament of man. But we are born to die, but we don't have to like it. And we don't have to just sit there and be composed as though somebody's putting white lies over us. Is you a bone? We'll break the bone and suck the marrow out of it. Sometimes when I'm contemplating my novel, I think of death as a true officer who's dragging me off while I dig in my heels and yell at the top of my voice. Now, it's this turning back. It's this resistance of the human spirit to everything that is shoddy and cheap and secondhand and to our enemies such as illness and poverty and to slavery and despair and extinction that make our best poem and music and sculpture and painting. It makes them a kind of a triumphant cry as if man said I can't say the last word but I can say the most significant and when he has said it then the critics should point this out to us. Then why do we need critics to show us what it is? Literature isn't life, is it? We can read it and come off scot-free, can't we? Can we? What does literature show us that makes it risky and even more suspect than ever and increases our awareness? Give us a key to the box that has both our treasures and our skeletons in it. Is this the reason for the timidity about books? Our people are so afraid if they burn books, censor books, hide books from readers. Not long ago, even so respectable a classic as Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter was banned by the school board. And this is a book where sins publish and the good people win out. I'll bet in that town there's a drugstore that has for sale girly magazines with a smuttiest kind and nobody complains about it. I'd like to quote from a book called I'd like to quote from a book called Captain Newman, MD. In this book, Captain Newman is a psychiatric in Army Hospital. His assistant, Lieutenant Alderson, is neither a psychiatrist nor a psychologist, but he's terribly impressed by the good work that the that Captain Newman does and have been through the hell of combat and privation. And so the lieutenant says, and I quote, I came to see that every man is subject to fantasies so obscene men so yearning so mendacious drive so destructive that to mention them shakes the gates which we have erected against the barbarian within. Nothing in nature, not the wonders of the firmament, nor the enigmas of the atom, are half so strange as man's unconscious. That hidden heating sea of primordial impulse in which the most confounding contradictions live side by side, side by side, that insatiable hunger for love, that boundless rage to kill. Not Xanadu, for all its measureless caverns produces such a stupefying landscape. Well, there you have it. That's why serious literature is dangerous. It shows us that's why serious literature is dangerous. It shows us ourselves and sometimes we can't bear to look at it. 

Can the critic help us? I think he can. I think by explicating and making plain the meaning of the work of art, we are given a chance to prepare ourselves for the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune which we are going to have come to us both within and without. We're still trying to become human beings and to act like human beings. And when Robert Frost said the roads less traveled by made all the difference, well, we agreed. When Donnie said, "I was lost in a dark wood." We know what it was like. We know all too well. How intentions can be twisted and perverted and how injustice can be inflicted by circumstances. And confronted with these human predicaments, the critic can show us that the meaning of life is sometimes meaningless and the best endeavors absurd. And once we understand ourselves and our relationship, we are twice armed against the blows which will surely come to us. Here's an old folk story. Destiny came to an island that had three inhabitants and she said, "What would you do if I told you that tomorrow this island would be completely inundated?" And the first man said, "I would eat and drink and make love all night long." And the second man said, "I would make a sacrifice and pray to God all night." And the third man said, I would try to assemble our wisest try to assemble our wisest men and try to live learn to live underwater.

Now the critic can knock on our door and say, "I have investigated the implications both psychological and historical of this story. Those empty places in the human heart, those empty places that the doctor doesn't seem to cure with his pills and his surgeries. But let me show you how one man triumphed over the failures of his society by writing a book called Walden. Or how hereditary corruption eats into the sound flesh of America in the movie called The Godfather. Or what monsters are like that you fear by showing you John Gardner's book on Grenville. So that after we have failed to find safety in carousing or in prayer, we can at last learn to live underwater. I have learned from criticism how to understand how to relate fully to the meaning and the form and the importance of a work of art. Why without the help of scholarly criticism, I'd still be wandering around in the first 100 pages of James Joyce's Ulyses. And who but an acute and sensitive critic will tell us that Heart Train's poem North Labrador is not about North Labrador at all. So tell us that Heart Train's poem North Labrador is not about North Labrador at all. It's about the loneliness and the bleakness of the human spirit.

There's always been criticism that America lacks a sense of purpose. Somebody said that if Washington waited for the national will, he'd still be crossing the Delaware. And what seems new is that the leaders we have now seem to think they must follow the country and not lead it. But we no longer have that margin of error that we had in the past. And I think our young people feel this. Maybe a few honest debates with ourselves and with our young people would help bring about a more directive and well-shaped national purpose. Obviously and well-shaped national purpose. Obviously, we can't be everywhere all the time. Maybe we need Emerson's advice when he said, "America, catch thy breath. Correct. Correct thyself. Maybe we need plain talk between generations. Our response seems unequal to our challenges. Maybe we're in one of those neurotic fixations of history where the policies are divorced from reality. The first sentence of the Declaration of Independence says, "We hold these truths to be self-evident." Perhaps we should reexamine those truths and see if we still hold them and ask our young people to help us. We were founded on a lot of spunk and spirit and free methods. I think we have a lot of it left. Now this opens up a path for me and it leads me and I hope it'll lead you all unsuspecting and innocent of my designs I use into an open field where I can preach. I'm going to play the critic. I'm going to investigate and show what meaning has for me of one of the invisible values that I said we believed in. were coming as a bicentennial of what we might call patriotism, love of country and to mention some of the people who have expressed this belief and how they did it. A critic if he is honest and I'll lay my honesty on the line here may do two things at least. He may praise what needs to be praised and he may be harsh and accusing about failures especially about failures to live up to promises. We could write a whole book about this effort, but I haven't got the time to do it, and you haven't got the patience to listen to it. Now, we hold these truths to be self-evident. Get back to that. And as a critic, I shall say that I want to talk to you a few minutes about a red thread that can be seen running through the shining fabric. few minutes about a red thread that can be seen running through the shining fabric of American literature from the earlier colonial days to our present day. I've called this red thread a revolutionary spirit to identify it identify it as a peculiarly American attitude which you can find manifest in almost any part of our life in almost any part of our existence as a nation. Of course, it would be presumptuous to claim the revolutionary spirit as something distinctly American. I'm afraid history would not bear us out there. The revolutionary spirit was a ripe and going concern when Moses led the Hebrew children out of Egypt. It's the birthright of all peoples and it crosses the boundaries of all nations. In a simple historical definition, it might be said to be the firm man which leans existence. It is a young person's imagine about carrying the past around on his shoulders. And smart as the Americans are, we cannot claim it for our own invention. But I should like American characteristic as it developed in our country and I thought we might see some evidence of this. For myself, I like to identify the revolutionary spirit with the term social consciousness. And if I tend to use the term interchangeably, you will I hope consider it not so much an eccentricity as an attempt to make plain the meaning of our discussion. Because in the United States, the term revolutionary spirit means more than the Boston Tea Party or Concord or Bunk Bunker Hill. Well, they are surely part of it. It means more than Jefferson's Bill of Rights, more than Tom Payne's caustic phrase, tyranny like hell naively conquered. More than Abraham Lincoln's government of the people, by the people, and for the people. It is these. And it is more than these. It is an attitude. It is a philosophy and like a signpost it has directed us down the road of our national destiny post it has directed us down the road of our national destiny. From early childhood we are familiar with the terms liberty and freedom. We sing them in our songs. We read them in our books and all of our lives we support them. But always we recognize that these are the foundation stones of our house. They were quarried and shaped and fitted by the revolutionary spirit. What made the United States unique was its fate in people instead of in systems and traditions or in kings and high-ranking ecclesiastics. As Wal Whitman summed it up, "How dare you place anything before a man?" You may not believe it, but that was a courageous belief and one that is dangerous to all system established systems of slavery and exploitation. As opposed to Calvinism, there's a faith that human nature is fundamentally good, that the individual should be given every opportunity for growth and development elect and the chosen few of Jonathan Edwards. And this spirit and this faith like this electric current has led the lamps of human decency and progress all the avenues of our national life. It was this revolutionary doctrine of natural rights that forever destroyed in this country the sanction for the divide that forever destroyed in this country the sanction for the divine right of kings and substitute for an absolutist theocracy a democratic church and a democratic state. This doctrine further stated there was a duty of the citizen of all citizens to seek further social justice to create institutions that both social and political that would encourage the good in men and save them from the viciousness of the established order is conceived by the supposedly clerical and hereditary masters. Well, you can substitute for the phrase clerical and hereditary masters anything you want to. You can say robber barons. You can say monopolies and cartels. You can say economic royalist. You can say bureaucrat. You can say the Pentagon. The revolt the Pentagon. The revolutionary spirit fights against whatever darkens man's heart and binds his hand. We're probably the only great country to be built from the ground up on such a faith. We really ought to pray great country to be built from the ground up on such a faith. We really ought to pray every night our thanks that Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson and Franklin and Payne and Jefferson arrived at the right place at the right time. But this won't lead us into smugness and self-righteousness. There's still room in our country, I think, for good works. I need only mention the black problem. I know people from the south don't care to be instructed by their northern neighbors, and I don't blame them. There's nothing more obnoxious than the professional reformer who points his finger but not in charity and understanding. But I do wish to make one observation. I think history is running on the side of the black. Fate is running in his favor. Whether he wills it or not, he too will ultimately be molded spirit of this country. And it seems to me, and I mean to more be more critical than I have to be, that the same thing is true of our attempts to conquer or at least win the struggle in in Southeastern Asia. History is running on the side of those people, too. They will ultimately have their own form of government, whatever it's going to be.

I haven't said much yet about literature, which is the expression of a nation's life. I said we could find evidence of the revolutionary spirit in the literature of the United States. And that ought to be true if our national faith is what we have seen it to be. And I guess it is true. The first poet and one of the few I'm going to consider is a man named Philip Renault. He was the most important literary figure in America during and just after the colonial period. During and just after the colonial period. I haven't just picked him to illustrate a thesis. He really was the most widely read and the most creative writer of his day. As a friend of Adams and Hamilton and Washington, he served as a color sergeant in the army and his poems were widely read and they gradated the cause. He was a born rebel and a thoroughgoing democrat and he shared with Payne and Franklin trust and belief in the common man. Later when some of the Federalist leaders advocated a return to a hereditary aristocracy and believe it or not some of them tried to persuade Washington that we needed a king for no turn on Hamilton and Adams and allied himself with Jefferson he published a newspaper called the national gazette in which to make public his views on of the federalist proposal for a title nobility and a monarchy. He heaped ridicule on them and he answered them their abuse in kind with interest and Jefferson wrote his paper has saved our constitution. Now that statement may have been biased by a friendship but it does show some of the influence that Fernol wielded. It was always the same cause he fought for. Whether it was the British Fernol wielded. It was always the same cause he fought for. Whether it was the British he was fighting or the federalists, he was faithful to the rights of man. It was an age of high feeling and scurless journalism and Fernol gave and took some good blows. I think he was at his best when he was kneeling the British, though his satire tended to be a little broad.

The United States was an actual experiment in government where men would have freedom both for themselves and for their posterity. The justly famous bill of rights was the answer of these men to the tyranny of the old world. It was a new world and a brave attempt and the post-revolutionary men and women went to work on it. Many of them, as you know from your history, had been the objects of bitter religious persecution and the old world and the new. It is not surprisal

and theological bias. They had not yet made the acquaintance of the philosophy of economic determinism. But they wrestle with great grandchildren today are fighting off the last blows of a dying capitalism. I wish to emphasize that the same freedom they were protecting because the phrases used were moral and of theological nature does not change the contest. They wanted then what we want today but they said it in a different way than we do. I'm going to read you a poem by Emerson who is one of our great poets and philosophers. I once called Emerson a celestial deacon because of his propensity for instructing his readers gently but firmly in matters of grace. His poems are sometimes kind of rhyme sermons. But I've always been glad to be a member of his congregation. This poem is called him. It was sung April 19th, 1836 at the completion of the conquered monument to the soldiers killed in the battle of the revolutionary war by the rude bridge that arched the flood their flag to April's breeze unfurled. Here once the embattled farmers the f long s in silence slept like the conqueror silence sleeps and time that ruined bridges slept down the dark stream at seawward creek on this green bank by this soft stone reset the day our boat is thrown that memory may their dead redeem when like our sires our sons are gone spirit that made those heroes dare to die or leave their children free time and nature gently spare the stone we raise to them and thee. Now I know that's the Emerson of the school readers. It's also Emerson in the true poetic vein. What we're concerned with right now is the reverence expressed in the poem for the spirit of freedom which had given the economies for the spirit of freedom which had given the economies the courage and the strength to free themselves. It gives a sense of dignity and purpose to men who for righteousness sake killed and were killed in that most shameful of human institutions war. Though even institutions war though even Emerson could write out of his mystic vision in his poem Brahma, "If the red slayer thinks he slaves or the slain thinks he is slain, they know not well the subtle ways I keep and pass and turn again." meaning that all life is part of the oversoul. And how dare a man thinks he can extinguish or pervert that which is not his that comes from God. And most of the New England tribe lived in the same tangy climate of opinion. Emerson's friend Thoro said that if civil law contradicted moral law, a man was bound by his conscience to disobey man-made laws. And just to prove what he meant, he went to jail for not paying his taxes. And he said they were being used to further the cause of war and slavery. And when Emerson went to visit him in his cell, he asked Henry, "Why are you here?" And why are you not here? Certainly were men of vision and conviction. The revolutionary spirit is a spirit of daring and courage. You have to have courage and self-confidence to try new roads, to achieve new goals, to cross frontiers, and there are always plenty of timid and determined people to oppose you. But that's the way progress is made. That's the way civilization advances that little inch every hundred years or so. We are lucky, you and I, that we live in a country where the spirit is so firmly bred in our bones. Our greatest achievement was to set up a government of free men that rested on the consent of the governed. It was Jefferson, I think, who said we ought to test that today by having a revolution every 20 years. It seems to me that one no one has a better opportunity to exemplify the revolutionary spirit than the teacher and the critic. In fact, if you had not been in some degree motivated by this spirit, you wouldn't be handled the status quo and you're all on your way somewhere. It's an obvious statement and often made that wherever you go now to whatever community you go to, you will be a you will stand for the free and unlimited expression of facts, of knowledge, and of truth. You will be on the side of freedom, of tolerance, of human decency and understanding. You will be opposed to ignorance and bigotry and prejudice. You know it won't be easy, and so do I. Many times, no doubt, you'll have to trim your sails to fit the pattern of the community or the convention of society. Well, we all have had to do that. Democracy is built on a system of compromise. But the thing is to persist and eventually make your small addition to that inch of progress. Remember, you will find worshippers of the status quo wherever you go on school boards or city councils or among legislators. And if you can't convert them, pray to outlive them.

You know that the spirit which motivates you is indestructible. History is partly fate but is also made by men and women too. In our country was made by men and women dedicated because of freedom and democracy. And this is a tradition. Lord Actton once said history is a record of man's struggle for freedom. I've tried to explain that our literature is still an example of this struggle. has become part of our bone and blood as if we ate it every morning with our wiggies. And it is from this point of view that we make our evaluation. And it seems to me that is with evaluation that criticism is concerned. The invisible things that we spoke about need to be scrutinized with a magnifying glass of criticism to separate the genuine from the counterfeit. Let me tell you a few stories. after Oppenheimer had finished his work on the atomic bomb and two of them had been explored in Japan. He was walking with a friend bomb and two of them had been explored in Japan. He was walking with a friend one day along a path in the woods and he saw a little frog of the side of his path and he picked it up and put it in his pocket. And after he had gone on a dozen or so steps, he turned around and after he'd gone on a dozen or so steps, he turned around and walked back and put the frog down exactly where he'd left it, where he found it. and his friend said, 'What are you doing? And Oppenheimer said, "I think for one man I have tampered enough with my country." So what he was saying was he was making a critical statement there. The harmony of the situation had been disturbed when he picked up that little frog. He took it back hoping to restore that harmony uh as it was when he first found it. And the other story I want to tell you is about a man who was riding in the smoker of a train. middle-aged, thin, hollow-eyed, half asleep, his head lolling back on the edge of his seat. The conductor was out of his pocket that he'll buy a ticket. And the conductor said, "Where too?" And the man said, "Wherever it is." Now, have we lost such faith in ourselves and our ideals? Have we lost our direction that our direction that we're willing to buy a ticket to wherever it is? Or do we still care for our world as a place to live in harmony with nature and our fellow human beings and all creatures both great and small? Perhaps it is a business of criticism to sort our values and say this one ring the sound and this one sounds flat.

In Shakespeare's tragic comedy or tragic play, MacBeth, Macbeth's freshman victories over the king's enemies comes upon three witches on the heath. They prophesy that he will be the king hereafter. And here begins his descent into murder and destruction. Now, this is all plain to the reader. He doesn't need any help here. He feels the malignancy of the witches and the ominous forecast. Help here. He feels the malignancy of the witches and the ominous forecast. But does he know that the power of the scene also lies in a symbolic relationship with modern science? Does modern science? And here's where the perceptive critic steps in and shows us that these old croons are truly evil. They are the exteriorized portions of ourselves, projections of our own subconscious, illusions of a future which we try to impose on reality to satisfy our egos. And here the critic can bring Shakespeare into the modern world where we the readers have our own phantoms to deal with, whether we call them witches or technology. The tragedy was only a nightmare buried in Macbeth's subconscious until he left the witches out to show him how to control his future. Who are we? All the long periods of evolution have tried we have tried to become human beings and we're st still trying to become human beings. The ape is still in our heart. Yet we yearn after transcendent moral leadership furnished by our great leaders Christ, Buddha, Confucious. We continue that we can finally become what we are. And here we must take care for Emerson said long ago, be careful what you want, young man, or you will surely get it. Perhaps the critic can point out the values of the things we want to help us make the right decision. And if we lie in bed at night sometimes or wait and say like an owl, who am I? Perhaps a critic can come to our rescue and help us by saying as Thomas Carlile did, man's unhappiness comes from his greatness. It is because there is the infinite in him. And so if some materialistic technologist says to you, you're nothing but carbon and calcium and iron or phosphorus. That you can answer, I live here and I have the infinite in me and I am the one who goes hungry and thirsty and I am the one who goes hungry and thirsty and loves and weeps and laughs. I tell you another story and then I'm through. A small boy said to his side, "I've seen God." So the uncle said to his sister, the boy's mother, "What does he mean?" And she said, "I explained to him that God made the sun and the moon, the stars, and the earth." So the scientist said, "Well, we can walk up and down and look at the sun or the moon, but we have to stay on the earth." And the little boy said, "Where did God get all the dirt?" And the uncle said, "Out of a dark hat in a closet called night. That's where we come from, too." And the little boy said, "But how do we get to see him?" And his uncle said gently, "We will go and look all about for this is good to do, but most we will look inside for that and where we die." And I think it is there mostly that he was very close. Now there is a good critic, the uncle, a simple answer to ease the confusion in the child's mind. And this may be our who will show us the path out of our confusion. Sometimes these days I feel like the one-eyed philosopher who said that with one eye he saw more of the world than he wanted to and he threw away his philosophy books and he began to read mystery stories because he said mystery stories seem more like real life for in mystery stories violence is common place and murder is a necessity. And here's where I feel the intelligent criticism could remind us of our heritage and show us again the true meaning of the revolutionary spirit. Thank you. You've been very patient.