SOURCE: Clough, Wilson O. “A Native Metaphor Is Born.” In The Necessary Earth: Nature and Solitude in American Literature, pp. 77‐87. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1964.

[In the following excerpt, Clough examines the western frontier of the United States as a metaphor that has been assimilated into the American psyche and has influenced American literature.]

The title of this section, “Frontiers of Thought,” was no haphazard choice. It was suggested, indeed, by one of many available passages from the writings of Henry Thoreau, in this case his A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, begun around 1839 and published a decade later. Thoreau wrote:

The frontiers are not east or west, north or south; but wherever a man fronts a fact … there is an unsettled wilderness … between him and the setting sun, or farther still, between him and it. Let him build himself a loghouse with the bark on where he is, fronting IT, and wage there an old French War for seven or seventy years, with Indians and Rangers, or whatever else may come between him and the reality, and save his scalp if he can.¹

Thoreau was a great insister on reality and the original self‐experience, which alone legitimately demands expression, and the italics are his. Here, with typical Thorovian emphasis and imagery, drawn from the concreteness of man in the wilderness, Thoreau challenges his neighbors to come to grips with reality in the realm of human thought even as their compatriots were being compelled on literal frontiers to confront the hazards and the solitudes of their isolated log huts. The frontier experience, in short, has been absorbed into the imagination of a writer and his total possible public, and has yielded up a new kind of figure, simile and metaphor. The frontier, in the mind of America, is on its way to becoming the natural symbol for resolution, courage, the confrontation of hard realities from which there is no convenient escape, the courage of the individual fighter who can rely on none other for his salvation. A native metaphor is born.

That this metaphor may carry Puritan overtones becomes evident quickly in Thoreau, at least with the ethical corollaries of resisting temptations to ease, accepting no substitute for a personal participation in the drama of salvation, and confronting one's fate directly and without intermediate illusions. Thus Thoreau can make use of an ancient New England law that “every settler who deserted a town for fear of the Indians, should forfeit all his rights therein” to point the parallel for those who “may desert the fertile frontier territories of truth and justice, which are the State's best lands, for fear of far more insignificant foes.”² So are symbols born, blends, it may be, of new experience and past inheritance, each seeking fresh expression. But it is the new which has furnished the livelier element.

The frontier thus by degrees becomes a thematic metaphor, ready for use. Were these quotations isolated examples only, they might be dismissed as the play of an eccentric. But Thoreau knew his countrymen, and appealed always in his writing to their readiness for his argument and his meaning. He selected his figures and metaphors with care, within the common store of experience, so that all might comprehend him.

How far‐reaching was this metaphor of the American frontier? How far did it penetrate into the psychology of a people, and to what extent could it influence the writings of a rising literature? These are queries which we must examine in more detail. But let us consider for a moment the nature of metaphor.

“Man,” wrote Emerson in Nature, “is an analogist, and studies relations in all things.” Emerson himself often strained such relations beyond reason, in his search for what he called “correspondences between natural and spiritual facts.” One might say that he did not fully perceive the pitfalls within his own observation, or the subtle temptations that hover about reliance on the analogy. Yet Emerson was not without his own shrewdness in such matters, as witness a remark in “The Poet”:

Here is the difference betwixt the poet and the mystic, that the last nails a symbol to one sense, which was a true sense for a moment, but soon becomes old and false. For all symbols are fluxional; all language is vehicular and transitive, and is good, as ferries and horses are, for conveyance, not as farms and houses are, for homestead. Mysticism consists in the mistake of an accidental and individual symbol for a universal one.

Emerson's advice to the mystic is “Let us have a little algebra”; that is, let us recognize the nature of a symbol as an x to aid us toward the larger solution. The symbol, says Emerson, can become “too stark and solid, and … at last nothing but an excess of the organ of language.”³ Thoreau, as is usual, goes more bluntly and directly to the matter, saying in Walden, “We are in danger of forgetting the language which all things and events speak without metaphor, which alone is copious and standard.”⁴ These writers exhibit thus a certain consistency in their approach to metaphors; and if they appear to draw often on the similes of nature, it is, as Thoreau says, that “these things speak without metaphor,” directly. Long later we shall find a major American poet, Wallace Stevens, echoing Thoreau here.

A metaphor, an analogy, makes its appeal insofar as it yields intellectual and emotional satisfaction, adds illumination to an idea, or provides the illusion of a convincing argument. Yet a metaphor, as Emerson, to his credit, was striving to say in Nature, does not begin in myth but in natural fact. One of its feet must be planted on the soil of daily experience, even if the other, to borrow the overheated words of an orator pursuing liberty, point triumphantly to the skies. Every metaphor risks its absurdity, even madness.

For a metaphor begins either in something concrete, the sum of repeated experience, which has suggested the leap into the abstraction of a generalization; or it arises from the gropings of some previously evolved abstraction, some rarefied concept, which feels the necessity for support and so grasps at the illumination of a comparison with the concrete, something within the repetitions of experience. In either case, the concrete has given sinews to the metaphor. Thus far the metaphor may be useful, and there is no need to scorn its contribution. The illusory element, the danger, the madness, enters when the abstracted portion is assumed to be proved, to be more valid than the concrete base, or when the metaphor begins to breed its own litter of analogies and new metaphors, each farther removed from the corrections of experience. For experience always awaits in the wings to prompt the correctives and to restore sanity.

The successful metaphor tends to become bolder and to feed upon its own success. Once accepted as a useful illumination, it may swell by monstrous degrees, insisting on a life apart or on a total loyalty to its supposed finality, and without regard to the ensuing inconsistencies and the sacrifice of judgment. Nations have risen and fallen around the gigantism of a metaphor which may have begun in an obvious need for heroism, unity, or action, but which has ended in the madness of denying all that would restrain its exaggeration. Men are “classified” on the analogy of plants and animals; nations are frozen into the stereotypes of bears, bulls, cocks, and apes; the complexities of international relations are reduced to the metaphor of a football field with “gains” and victories. A swastika provokes to paranoic unity and the color red to schizoid confusions of loyalties. What may have originated in the natural resistance of man or of men to being enslaved or defeated slides by degrees into the myth of a unique virtue and prowess, a legend of eternal rightness and invincibility, the protection of a special deity, and the madness of a mission to impose oneself or one's national will upon others—and Nemesis stirs at last to prepare the final act. Fortunately, however, metaphors and analogies, being our daily fare, are as often used but lightly, picked up and tossed aside as their flicker of usefulness is exhausted. By their very number they serve to counteract one another; and the common sense of man retains an instinctive humor in its awareness of their limitations.

Inevitably the frontier emerged as a favored American metaphor, embedded as it was in two or three centuries of history, and thus the most available of symbols for courage, self‐reliance, survival against odds, and the individual on his own. Our past had demanded energy and resolution commensurate with great mountains and rivers and expansive plains. If in time that frontier would be traversed and reduced in area, or for the majority would pass beyond the day of personal experience and melt into legend, the symbol would nevertheless remain, to proliferate in imaginative corollaries.

The frontiersman himself was, indeed, “ahistorical” and uninvolved in the historical past. This is but a statement of fact, an inevitable fact, and not the theme for a lecture on his limitations and crudities. He could scarcely be frontiersman and parlor philosopher at the same time. His philosophy was developed out of his experience, and hence valued resolution and readiness to act above subtleties in argument. Being uncouth and out of his element in an urban setting, he took his revenge by magnifying his own virtues. But these are considerations not germane at the moment to our query, which is how his virtues might find a counterpart in the more literate part of America. Translate them, that is, into the terms of an Emerson, Thoreau, or Whitman, and we become at once aware that they suggest precisely what they, in fact, became, the symbols of an assertion of individuality and self‐reliance in more metaphysical terms, but terms rooted still in experience. In the ancient dichotomy between thinkers, that of traditional “values” versus the ahistorical right to begin over with a new evaluation forced by new experience, the American would be on the side of the experiential, the pragmatic, the open horizons of the explorer. Further, a native literature must be born of wrestling with the direct and native experience as against a literature derivative merely from the past. There may be, that is, as much of Edwards, Franklin, and the Concord farms in Emerson as of Schiller and Plotinus, more in Thoreau of Johnny Appleseed than of Buddha or Calvin.⁵

Emerson, for all his library bookishness—and who has found convincing “sources” for Emerson?—insisted with his whole antinomian inheritance that education was the power of fact over words, of nature and the native experience over convention. Far from saying, “I owe my all to Plato or Plotinus,” or “I shall seek out a German idealist and become a disciple,” Emerson urged the American scholar to set himself up as a contrast to “the book‐learned class, who value books, as such; not as related to nature and the human constitution.” Surely, then, a considerable portion of the American effort, between roughly 1820 and 1860, to create a native literature had to be devoted to an exploration of its own resources, the implications of its own experience and knowledge, whose concrete base was a common possession.

Obviously it will not do to ignore the steady stream of cultural influences from Europe from the time of the first settlements, the importation of books and men, the Renaissance pattern of education in the colleges, the easily available evidence that the colonies were European colonies still, and long remained so in the growing centers on the Atlantic coast. Nevertheless, the other side likewise imposes its evidence upon us: the rising awareness of a new way of viewing life, the consciousness of a new kind of man and society, fruits of a new experience. “The nervous, rocky West,” wrote Emerson in 1844, “is intruding a new and continental element into the national mind, and we shall yet have an American genius.”⁶ There it was in one sentence. And in the Democratic Review of 1842 we may read: “Probably no other civilized nation has at any period … so completely thrown off its allegiance to the past … ; the whole essay of our national life and legislation has been a prolonged protest against the dominion of antiquity in every form whatsoever.”⁷ Protest against the tyranny of the past, the search for a native voice, these are the concomitants of the new experience and the new awareness.

At an even earlier date, before Emerson and Thoreau, before Melville's “strike through the mask,” and Whitman's “Song of Myself,” Alexis de Tocqueville, visiting America around 1831 to 1832, made much of the American preference for individual experience and its mistrust of ready‐made systems. His Book II opens with a list of major American tendencies: to evade system and habit, to accept tradition only as information, to seek the reason of things for and in oneself, to strike through form to substance, in sum, to exhibit the dominant trait of appealing each problem “to the individual effort of his own understanding.”⁸

We should keep these characteristics in mind when we approach any study of our mid‐period, the first true flowering of American literature before the war that rent the states and muffled the optimism of the new republic. American scholarship increasingly seeks some national pattern within our fluid history, and numerous excellent studies have greatly augmented our understanding. In the hands of some lesser writers, beginners in the search, there has been a tendency to lean heavily on the solemn word “myth,” or to use it loosely and in the wrong direction, as if myth preceded the hard facts of living or as if the average pragmatic man sought by his experience to substantiate some hoary myth. Where do these myth seekers assume myths to have originated in the first place? The Mayans built pyramids without knowledge of Egyptian labors—and even if they had not, where did the Egyptians get their knowledge?—precisely because the first sheepherder who piled up stones on some lonely height could not without mortar erect a vertical tower. And if one discovers upon a hilltop in the west a primitive throne erected by some Navajo herdsman out of the natural slabs that lie about, with back and sides high and impressive and the whole facing the east, he needs no myth of ancient sun worship to recognize that the prevailing winds are from the west and the shelter a pragmatic convenience.

When one reads that the settlement of the Ohio‐Mississippi basin was all but spawned by “the myth of the Garden of Eden,” he need not lose his head. The fact is that to one nurtured on the rocky hillsides of New England, the promise of soil ten feet deep without rocks was heartening news to weary muscles and tightened purses. And if the emigrant, trying to convey back home the grateful note of a new promise, made use of a familiar vocabulary in phrases like “garden of Eden,” and “paradise,” he but drew on his limited resources without thought of Jungian overtones, even as the original phrase no doubt recorded some similar transfer to a fertile river basin. The terms are very old and very familiar; one recalls old John of Gaunt's dying speech in Richard II and his tribute to England: “this other Eden, demi‐paradise … the envy of less happier lands.”

Other youthful writers manage to convey a tone of rebuke to the frontiersman because he somehow failed to remember the Promethean myth and its lesson of punishment for self‐assertion over humbleness and pride in accomplishment. Is this some curious sublimation of the exhorting impulse disguising itself behind a Greek myth? The Promethean legend carried in America the Shelleyean overtones of revolt against the static past. The fact is, however, that the frontiersman's very exaggeration and assertiveness was but proof of the necessity of a self‐image of hardihood, courage, and resourcefulness as a bulwark against the severity of his experience and the limitations of his powers in the face of raw nature. His boasting, like that in all primitive literature, whether by Homer or Beowulf, is but a product of his major concern, survival against odds. In America it served, too, as a warning to the weak and faint‐hearted to stay at home, nursing their timidities. Would these moralizers have had the pioneer grow sick with apprehension and turn back to the older, more familiar refuges, built for him by bolder men? Whatever its hidden symbolism, Captain Ahab's language of encouragement to his crew to persist in courage had also its practical counterpart on a thousand raw frontiers.

Perhaps we need, when considering the impact of the American frontier on a native literature, a new theory of books, comparable to Emerson's view in “The American Scholar.” Do books precede and determine history; or are they, rather, thrown off like fruits from the tree to celebrate the seasonal changes in the climate of opinion and event, and so return to earth to fertilize the next growths? Do metaphors arise apart from experience, or do they but record the searing impact of experience to suggest to the emergent mind the parallels for an order sought? Whether books instigate history or record it, or do both, they do provide convenient clues to the progress of history. In either case, they also permit the query to take the form of how and why they come into being.

Human experience, within any given space and period of time, tends to crystallize into habits both physical and mental, which in turn become traditions, and, their origins being gradually lost or obscured, are treated as legend, myth, belief, assumptions unexamined. Society, relaxing in the illusion of permanence and stability, celebrates the whole complex by means of “history,” the appeal to a peculiar destiny in events leading to the stable moment, even by a credo of rightness, of inevitability that brooks no questioning. The books which summarize these happy eras, even as Dante spoke for an age and Locke justified a fait accompli, are valued as “proofs” of that rightness, that destiny.

But few things in history prove to be eternal. Some new shock introduces new strains, new queries, new obstacles to relaxation; the least that can happen is some new readjustment, some loss of the past; and the worst may be the rise of superheated passions, factions, and civil wars in which the old is destroyed or vitally changed even if the pretended victors have defended the old.

Herein a book may synthesize the elements of the struggle on one side or another, may permit of some pause for reflection, or may hasten action. But it is still a product of factors long at work, so that it never can be seen as sole determinant in the events that follow. And what, after all, tests its validity or lack of validity but the subsequent record of experience? Yet experience is no static thing; it too shifts with setting and time and pressures. The lesson would seem to favor flexibility, and even the consultation of experience as at least a reinforcement of abstract philosophizing, a saving grace amid the crumbling temples to the past.

At any rate, the American past by the mid‐1830's was fully two centuries old; and whether the new nation was a product of selective forces from the European social, economic, and religious unrest, or of the impact of new freedoms and opportunities upon these selected émigrés, something new was emerging, “a fact new to the world,” De Tocqueville surmised, “a fact that the imagination strives in vain to grasp.”⁹ It was this new fact that American writers must wrestle with, sooner or later, in their own and not in borrowed terms. It was this new fact that they cultivated in pride and expanded by metaphor and simile into the rudiments of a philosophy for the individual and his inherent meaning.

Notes

1. All quotations from Thoreau are from Writings of Henry Thoreau, hereafter referred to as Writings. The above passage is from A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, hereafter referred to as A Week, Writings, I, 401.

2. Ibid., I, 143.

3. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The Poet,” Works, III, 37.

4. Thoreau, Walden, Writings, II, 174.

5. “The three sources [of Transcendentalism],” says a handbook (R. W. Horton and H. W. Edwards, Backgrounds of American Literary Thought, p. 112), “… are neo‐Platonism, German idealist philosophy, and certain Eastern mystical writings.” Granted that the parallels and the links exist, is there to be no mention of a native impulse? Are these true “sources,” pertinent for comparison, or evidences of American eclecticism? Or were they stimulants to a native restlessness with the old Puritan‐European orthodoxy, no longer viable in the American setting—a suggestion, perhaps, that by analogy, the native experience might be examined for its own grain of a unique significance?

6. Emerson, “The Young American,” Works, I, 349.

7. Quoted by R. W. B. Lewis, The American Adam, p. 159.

8. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, ed. Phillips Bradley, II, 3‐4.

9. Ibid., I, 452.

Bibliography

Primary Sources

Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Works. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1883.

Thoreau, Henry David. Writings of Henry Thoreau. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1893.

Tocqueville, Alexis de. Democracy in America. Edited by Phillips Bradley. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. (Vintage Books), 1954.

Secondary Sources

Horton, R. W., and H. W. Edwards. Backgrounds of American Literary Thought. New York: Appleton‐Century‐Crofts, Inc., 1952.

Lewis, R. W. B. The American Adam. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955.