Ballads and Blast-Furnaces

Notes on Industry, Folk-lore, Criticism and Poetry

EDMUND WILSON, JR.

MR. CHARLES RUMFORD WALKER, in Steel (Atlantic Monthly Press), has written, on a smaller scale, a sort of Three Soldiers of the steel industry. That is, Mr. Walker has put on record what it actually feels like to work in a blast-furnace, just as Mr. Dos Passos has put on record what it actually feels like to serve in the army. Mr. Walker's book is not a novel but a condensation of his diary; but it has much of the exhilaration of adventure and vivid appreciation of life inevitable to the personal experiences of a sensitive and intelligent man. The extraordinary thing is to find a man of this sort who knows anything about working in steel mills—and a man—what is most extraordinary of all—who has no ax to grind. Documents connected with the steel industry have a way of being violently embittered; what we usually get are the campaign utterances of the partisans in the industrial war. But what Mr. Walker gives us is a simple description of what life seems like to the man who makes the steel. His theory does not go much further than the conclusion that twelve hours is too long to work.

The steel mills seem to me, in some ways, the most imposing monuments of American civilization. In the cages of those gigantic machines that seem forever pounding to get free, in the presence of those thunderous furnaces which squat hugely like giants at stool, voiding from intestines wrapped about their bellies their excretion of molten gold, throwing off in their explosive spray of fire, pyrotechnics of fluid steel and pouring on the thin yellow of the sun a whiteness that seems to shrivel the very daylight—one is abashed as one sometimes is in museums when confronted with Babylonian gods, as if man had really succeeded in transcending himself and producing a master to dominate him. Here, more than perhaps anywhere else in the modern world, do we feel the impression which so much worried Henry Adams—that man is no longer driving the machines but is being driven by them. The officials in the offices are serving them like the Hunkies feeding them ore. They seem the core and the power-house of the race—the incarnation of the god which it worships. Read this description of its high-priests and draw your conclusions about the cult.

Mr. Weaver and J. Whitcomb Riley

MR. JOHN V. A. WEAVER is the legitimate successor of James Whitcomb Riley. I don't know why his dialect verse should be thought a novelty. His really interesting difference from his Hoosier predecessors lies not in his use of a slightly different vernacular but in his more sophisticated point of view. For Riley, life is comfortable and homely— at worst, a source of tender regret. For Weaver it is inescapably painful—in spite of his sentimentality, he is a pessimist. His new book of poems called Finders, (Knopf), supplies additional proof of this. It does, to be sure, contain things as sugary and banal as the worst of the Hoosier school; but on the other hand it is tinctured with a bitterness which would have given Riley the creeps. The themes of Mr. Weaver's little domestic tragedies are in the spirit of Sherwood Anderson and Dreiser and his fickle youths and flappers belong plainly to the generation of Edna Millay. It is in this last mood of love's swiftness and tragedy that he seems to me most poignant and most successful. Two or three of the poems in this book— the dialect ones, not the "straight" ones —represent his best work in this kind. When he drops the vernacular, unfortunately, he is likely to become amateurish.

The American Ballad

THE real folk poetry of the vernacular appears in American Ballads and Songs (Scribner's), edited by Louise Pound. Professor Pound has here done admirably for America what Professor Child in English and Scottish Popular Ballads did for Great Britain. But what this collection makes us wish for is someone to do an American Percy's Reliques— for Professor Pound—though she ranges widely from the early American versions of Lord Randall and The Two Sisters to My Mother Was a Lady and The Baggage Coach Ahead—confines herself rigorously to such authentic folk-songs as have depended on oral transmission for their survival, excluding, for example, the vaudeville—and much finer—version of Casey Jones and admitting only the bare original ballad, which is almost devoid of wit and color. Frankie and Johnnie, the best of all American ballads, is omitted, I suppose, on grounds of obscenity—though a very little expurgation would make it easily printable. In the majority of cases, too, Professor Pound seems to have got her versions from Western, instead of Eastern sources; and I get the impression that, except, of course, in the case of cow-boy and other ballads which have originated in the West, the East might have furnished her with much more accurate and picturesque versions. The version which she prints, for example, of Up Spoke the Captain of Our Gallant Ship sounds like only a debased form of the fine mermaid song which I have always heard in the East. It may be, of course, however, that Professor Pound has good reasons of scholarship for believing hers to be the earliest version.

In any case, this volume makes one eager for a widely representative collection of American popular songs, including not only authentic folk ballads but also examples of all the classes which Professor Pound excludes—the Negro Blues, the bawdy western ballads ascribed to Eugene Field, the old nonsense songs preserved by college glee clubs and the most popular and enduring of the songs originally launched by vaudeville and musical comedy.

Mr. Boyd and Professor Sherman

AS for criticism, Mr. Ernest Boyd's new edition—which is also a new and expanded version—of his encyclopaedia of modern Irish literature, Ireland's Literary Renaissance (Knopf), is a valuable work of reference. Though Mr. Boyd has little color, wit or movement, his judgments are extraordinarily just and his chapter on Joyce and Ulysses is one of the only intelligent things yet written on the subject.

It is a great pity that Professor Stuart Sherman has not Mr. Boyd's enormous European background. His pamphlet on Sinclair Lewis (Harcourt) is a curious example of his liberal enthusiasms, his swift and vigorous writing and his cultural deficiencies. He begins by ascribing, with a strange lack of historical sense, Byron's lines in Don Juan about "man's love is of man's life a thing apart—'Tis woman's whole existence" to a period and a poet who could never have come within a thousand miles of producing them—the Victorian Age and Robert Browning; and goes on to draw a comparison between Main Street and Madame Bovary so unfavorable to the latter that we are shocked to realize that Professor Sherman is not even aware of a difference in kind between the twobooks—that Flaubert, in obedience to an aesthetic ideal, was trying primarily to create something beautiful, whereas Lewis, in obedience to a resentment, was drawing an indictment against certain phases of a society.

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Kenneth Macgowan's Continental Stagecraft (Harcourt) is an able piece of reporting. It contains a good deal of information and makes a serious attempt to explain the theory of the new movement in the theatre. There is much talk nowadays about Expressionism but very little effort to define it and to understand what function it is supposed to perform. Mr. Macgowan has written what I suppose is the first at all adequate discussion in English of the new theories in their relation to the drama and Mr. Robert Edmond Jones has illustrated it with sketches of modem German settings which I should think, if it be true, as reported, that the modem German stage excells in ingenuity rather than taste, very much surpass the originals in beauty.