Riddle of America, The - Waldorf Research Institute

It would seem as though I were about to say that the Americans areunworldly, spiritual natures like the Hindu initiates for whom the Earthis but an illusion or like the saints engrossed only in intangibles (“I countnothing my own save my harp”; “here on earth have we no abiding placealbeit we seek one to come”). No, for them concrete things concretely exist,so solidly that these things do not exhale a deep emotion nor invite it.How seldom in American literature—outside of Europeanizing epigenouswriters like Washington Irving—does one find such effusions as “Dear Tree,beneath which so often I played as a child,” or “Newburgh, rising in gloriousserenity above the lordly Hudson, would that once again I could treadthy steep streets. …” Americans do not readily animate things; their tirelessanimation is active elsewhere, in the future.This is the disconnection from place; the disconnection from time isno less radical. Now let us search through great pages of Moby Dick for theliterary and stylistic reflections of these characteristics.The Melville of Moby Dick, a most widely admired work in Americanliterature, is a notably interesting example for our study. Melville wasnot only writing within the tradition of English literature, he was writingvery bookishly and stylishly indeed. No doubt he was conscious that thevogue for his books was beginning to be greater in England than in America(Moby Dick was first published in London). Under the mounting emotionof composition Melville’s “Americanism” erupted in spite of himself. It canbe seen progressively manifesting itself. The first eleven pages of the novelare the worst kind of “English English”—that is to say, the English of thecontemporary New York literary cliques. There are many pages in MobyDick which betray the insecurity of a writer thirty-one years old who haslaunched upon a mighty subject; but the page from which I am about toquote is completely successful, and its success has been achieved throughthe presence within it of elements inherent in the new nation’s adventure.The following pages will appear to some to be an excursion into thatFrench pedagogical practice called the “explication de texte.” It is not; thereis no space here for those patient ramifications, nor is it my aim to explorethis passage in and for itself. Yet I often regret the ready disparagement expressedby so many American educators of a method which seems to me toarise from the never failing French respect for métier. One of our professorsin discussing it said to me that “a flower under a microscope ceases to be aflower”—a view which belongs rather to Thoreau’s ecstasy-before-natureview than to Goethe’s awe-before-nature. I have always felt—again withGoethe—that works of art are also works of nature and, like the works of195