THE CULT OF EXPERIENCE
417
development of their normal, intellectual, and affective natures–
though in Poe's case there is no need to put any stress on his moral
character. And the curious thing is that whatever faults their work
shows are reversed
in
later American literature, the weaknesses of
which are not to be traced to poverty of experience but to an in–
ability to encompass it on a significant level.
The dilemma that confronted these early writers chiefly mani–
fests itself in their frequent failure to integrate the inner and outer
elements of their world so that they might stand witness for each
other by way of the organic linkage of object and symbol, act and
meaning. For that is the linkage of art without which its structure
cannot stand. Lawrence thought that
Moby Dick
is profound
beyond
human feeling-which in a sense says as much against the
book as for it. Its further defects are dispersion, a divided mind:
its
real and transcendental elements do not fully interpenetrate, the
creative tension between them is more fortuitous than organic. In
The
Scarlet Letter
as in a few of his shorter fictions, and to a lesser
degree in
The Blithedale Romance,
Hawthorne was able to achieve
an
imaginative order that otherwise eluded him. A good deal of his
writing, despite his gift for precise observation, consists of phan–
tasy unsupported by the conviction of reality.
Many changes had to take place in America before its spir–
itual and material levels could fuse in a work of art in a more
or less satisfactory manner. Whitman was already in the position
to
vivify his democratic ethos by an appeal to the physical features
of the country, such as the grandeur and variety of its geography,
and
to the infinite detail of common lives and occupations. And
James too,' though sometimes forced to resort to makeshift situa–
tions, was on the whole successful in setting up a lively and sig–
nificant exchange between the monil and empiric elements of his
subject-matter. Though he was, in a sense, implicitly bound all his
life by the morality of Hawthorne, James none ihe less perceived
what the guilt-tossed psyche of the author of
The Marble Faun
prevented him from seeing-that it is not the man trusting himself
to experience but the one fleeing from it who suffers the "beast in
the jungle" to rend him.
The transcendentalist movement is peculiar in that it expresses
the native tradition of inexperience in its particulars and the revo–
lutionary urge to experience in its generalities. (Perhaps that is
