NOVEl AND AMERICA
59
baffled march toward perfection in a sweet, sunlit, orderly world.
Just such a vision, however modified by circumstance, moved
the Deist intellectuals who founded America, especially
that
Thomas Jefferson to whom C. B. Brown, himself a follower of
the
philosophes,
proffered his gothic novel.
Insofar as America is legendary, a fact of the imagination
as well as one of history, it has been shaped by the ideals of the
Age of Reason. To be sure, the European mind had dreamed for
centuries before the Enlightenment of an absolute West: At–
lantis, Ultima Thule, the Western Isles-a place of refuge be–
yond the seas, to which the hero retreats to await rebirth, a
source of new life in the direction of the setting sun which seems
to
stand for death. Dante, however, on the very brink of an age
which was to turn the dream into the actualities of exploration,
had prophetically sent to destruction in the West, Ulysses, the
archetypal explorer. The direction of
his
westward journey
through the great sea is identified with the sinister left hand;
and Ulysses himself comes to stand for man's refusal to accept
the simple limits of traditional duty: "not the sweetness of hav–
ing a son, nor the pious claim of an old father, nor the licit love
that should have made Penelope rejoice could quench in me the
burning to become familiar with the vice of men and men's
valor." It is a fitting enough epigraph to represent that lust for
experience which made America. There is, indeed, something
blasphemous in the very act by which America was established,
a gesture of defiance that began with the symbolic breaching of
the pillars of Hercules, long considered the divine
signs
of limit.
To be sure, the poets of later Catholicism made an effort to
recast the dream of America in terms viable for their Counter–
Reformation imaginations, to forge a myth that would subserve
new political exigencies. It was not accident, they boasted,
that
the discoverer of America (sponsored by those most Catholic
defenders of the Faith) had been called Cristoforo Colombo;
''the Christ-bearing dove." Had he not carried orthodoxy into a
