In the face of industrialization and the enhghtened selfinterestnpreached by philosophes, utilitarians, and liberalncapitalists, the Romantic poets sought refuge in the landscapesnof nature and the human heart. They discovered thenquaintness of common people—Wordsworth in his ballads,nScott in his antiquarian Scottish novels, and a wholenmovement of English and European writers who celebratednthe Folk.nAs the century wore on, urbanization, specialization,nand market forces pushed back the natural frontiers. Burke’snsophisters and economists were organizing Britain, France,nand Bismarckian Germany into bureaucratic states. Poetsnwithdrew een further into themselves and took refuge onnParnassus with Gautier, Leconte de Lisle, Matthew Arnold,nand John Ruskin. The ultimate flight was the Wagnerianndelusion—shared by Mallarme and the symbolists^thatnpoetry itself could redeem the world. Wagner’s Ring andnParsifal and Mallarme’s impossible Livre were only thenmost grandiose efforts to cast a spell that would save Europenfrom itselfnThe saddest chapter was written by the English decadentsn— Ernest Dowson, Lionel Johnson, Arthur Symons, OscarnWilde, and (for a time) Yeats. Each one of them wasntalented and dedicated to his craft, but all of them (exceptnYeats) succeeded in destroying themselves, willfully, per-nersely, pathetically: Dowson with drink and prostitutes hencompared to Nlrs. Browning, Wilde with overeating andnicious homosexual lovers, and Johnson (Lionel) “by fallingnfrom a high stool in a pub,” as Ezra Pound described it.nPound, of all people, got it all right in his “Mauberly”—thendecadents, the philistines, “the dead art of poetrv,” the warn(First World):nThere died a myriad.nAnd of the best, among them,nFor an old bitch gone in the teeth.nFor a botched civilization . . .nFor two gross of broken statues.nFor a few thousand battered books.nThe Lonely AmericannThe frontier has shaped the Americannidentity from the very beginning.nPuritans preached against thenwilderness as the devil’s chosennland and the Indians as a race ofnSatanists. Such diverse spirits asnFrederick Jackson Turner and JohnnCrowe Ransom saw the frontier indiidualismnas the defining force ofnour history. Unlike Ransom, Turnernrecognized, to some extent, thenmigration of community life towardsnthe West—an insight developedninto an intelligent essay bynREVISIONSnRobert V. Hine in Community onnthe American Frontier: Separate hutnNot Alone (Norman, OK: Universitynof Oklahoma Press), now back innprint.nHine has patched together a setnof memoirs, diaries, and narrativesninto a sociological quilt whose patternnwas laid out by Robert Nisbet.nIn mining camps, on the trail, innfarmhouses, the frontier settlersnconstantiy made efforts to escapentheir Hobbesian anarchy and reconstructnsome semblance of community.nWithout women and children,nit never seemed to work, andnnnGreat literature (and Pound’s “Mauberly” is a great poem,nunlike the Cantos) is always reactionary. Not sometimes ornoften but always, without exception because, whatever elsenthey do, the most serious writers force us to measurenourselves and our accomplishments by standards highernthan what, to borrow again from Pound, “the age demanded.”nThe sources for those standards are limited; they derivenfrom those occasional moments or decades, centuries even,nwhen the transcendent seems to have broken into theneveryday—like streams of sunlight through the sooty raftersnof an old cabin. “The custom of the greater ones” is anliterally inaccurate translation of the Latin phrase forntradition {mos maiorum), but it gets the point across. Therenwere giants once, and a mature artist will strive to matchntheir best work.nProgress, as every artist knows, is nothing more than thenprice we pay for our failure. It may be necessary, evenndesirable, but it is an indication of our inability to sustainnthe burden of the past. We have to grow and change (or elsenwe should not be alive), but better men would not sonquickly squander their inheritance. Progressive art is thenproduct of children and the feebleminded, the dull andnselfish primitives who think theirs is the best of all possiblenworlds to live in. If the primitives wear silk or own ancomputer, it makes no difference. Anyone who celebratesntomorrow as the dawn of Utopia (one thinks immediately ofnthe futurists) is a hopeless savage who has nothing to tell us,nunless we really need to be congratulated for being “not likenother men.”nWhat the best of modern art teaches us, especially thenpoets, is what we most need to hear. It is a message asnsimple as Dirty fiarry’s “A man’s got to know his limitations.”nBaudelaire, Pound (at his best), Eliot, Yeats, Frost,n-and Jeffers all teach us at least that much, and if we cannlearn nothing more by vvrestiing with their puzzling,nsometimes grotesque productions, we shall not have wastednour time.n—Thomas Flemingneven saddled with dependents,nWestern men were often too selfseekingnto maintain the bonds ofncommunal life: Shane, Pale Rider,nand Josey Wales are not far fromnreality. Admirers of Mr. Eastwoodnwill remember that, in the end,nJosey Wales “the outlaw” finds annew family and communal life tonreplace what the war had destroyed.nIt is this quest for community, tonborrow Nisbet’s phrase, which definesnthe frontier experience andncontinues to outline the contours ofnlife in suburban America.nOCTOBER 1986/25n