THE DARK LADY
365
ist, but simply in the sense of debating its pros and cons, of exam–
ining its good and evil, its promise and threat.
This preparatory scrutiny of experience constitutes his real
subject, which is obscured by his creative means of allegoric con–
struction and lavish employment of fantasy. His subject and the
method he adopted to give it fictional form are incongruously
related, but it was the only method available to him in his situa–
tion and, despite its faults, it permitted the growth of a novelistic
embryo in each of his romances. That which is most actual in his
work is comprised in these embryos; the
rest~oming
under the
head of "romance"-is composed by his Gothic machinery and fed
by the ceaseless pullulations of the sin-dogma. Knowingly or not,
he indicated his own practice in remarking: "Realities keep in the
rear, and put forward an advance-guard of show and humbug."
But the split in his emotional and intellectual nature pre–
vented him from ever resolving the conflict of value and impulse
implicit in his subject. All he could do is reproduce his predica–
ment within his creations. On the one hand he thought it desirable
"to live throughout the whole range of one's faculties and sensi–
bilities" and, on the other, to play the part of a spiritualized Paul
Pry
"hovering invisible around men and women, witnessing their
deeds, searching into their hearts, borrowing brightness from their
felicity and shade from their sorrow,
and retaining no emotion
peculiar to himself."
In other words, he wanted the impossible–
to enjoy the warmth and vitality of experience without exposing
himself to its perils. His entire heritage predisposed him to regard
a welcoming and self-offering attitude to experience as the equiva–
lent of a state of sin; and though he was inclined to doubt the
justice and validity of this cruelly schematic equation, its sway
over him nevertheless told in the end.
It
barred him from any
patent commitment to that program of personal liberation which
his successors in the American creative line were later to adopt
and elaborate into peculiarly indigenous forms of literary art. Is
experience identical with sin?-and if so, is sin the doom of man
or his salvation? To these queries he provided no clear rejoinder,
but his bent was to say one thing on the surface of his work, on
the level of its manifest content, while saying something else in its
depths, in its latent meanings. He tried to serve at once the old and
the new gods, and in the main it is within the active play of this
