BOOKS
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to contend not only with the sterilities of the script-writer but also
with a sterilizing force in the materials themselves.
On the face of it the western story offers hope and courage
and endurance, some troubles and some failure, but overall an
immense success. Though this may sound like rather a cornucopia
for the artist, the fact is that the annals
oj
triumph, especially of
triumph that is mostly over things, are not easily conducive to
greatness except perhaps in an epic mode that is not congenial to
our habits of feeling; unless an artist couid manage a heroic ampli–
tude that would encompass all the erosion and waste inseparable
from triumph, such annals are most likely to lead only to shallow
waters beset by the dangers of self-congratulation. There is an ex–
cess of triumph. One is tempted to say, indeed, that western ma–
terials are simply defective in the tragic component, that they are
too
exclusi~ely
a melodrama of victory.
This needs qualification. To postulate an absence of the tragic
in the western saga does not mean that one forgets the disasters of
the last century. Those who are at all aware of the West will think
quickly of such names as Custer, Donner, Sutter, and Whitman,
and perhaps even of the unheroic end of Meriwether Lewis; or of
fire and quake and the Mountain Meadows massacre. But there
has been no major regional disaster, no all-encompassing tension
and destruction and fight for physical and moral survival: no Civil
War. Here, men have been extraordinarily lucky; they have not
had to face the bitter enveloping crises that flow out of their own
natures, out of conflicting passions, out of rifts in personality and
struggles for power. It is these experiences of tragic cast that re–
veal depths and permit others to feel these depths; it is the pres–
ence of tragic splits that can break stereotypes, for stereotypes are
the patterns of surface life from which true anguish is excluded.
Without tragic suffering, stereotypes hang on more tenaciously.
If
he is to do mature work, the artist must have the "right
feeling" for his material. What I have been getting at is that some
kinds of material encourage right feeling more than others.
If
the
material does not of itself encourage the deeper penetration of
human personality, the artist will have to have the larger soul, the
greater transforming power. He will have to be more than a
script-writer, though he need not be great, to move beyond the
