A Christian Humanist: Thornton Wilder

A CHRISTIAN HUMANIST: THORNTON WILDER E. K. BROWN F OUR years ago last October there appeared in the New Republic a review-article the tone of which shows itself in the title-Wilder, Prophet of the Genteel Christ. In it Mr. Michael Gold, with that blend of pontifical authority and street-urchin's abuse which the Marxist critics affect, charged Mr. Thornton Wilder with being "the Emily Post of culture," the preacher of tea new parlor Christianity," and the author of "little lavender tragedies." Mr. Wilder resembled Henry James, he resembled Proust, he was "the diluted and veritable Anatole France"-this last an achievement which suggests black magic. Mr. Wilder was at home in Paris and Rome; he liked museums and culture. He did not appreciate the interest of writing about "Babbitt ... and Anita Loos's blonde." There was no mention in his novels of "coalminers ," "the chil~-slaves of the beet fields," or "the murder of Ella May and her songs." In short, Mr. Wilder was a fugitive from the American scene, executing a "masterly retreat in time and $pace." He began by writing a novel about a little cosmopolitan group in Rome, all of whom were nostalgic for the past. ,He then retreated to an imaginary world given a local habitation in . eighteenth-century Peru; and thence took a longer swoop to one of the isles of Greece as it was before the birth of Christ. Such a choice of subjects seemed to Mr. Gold cowardly and irresponsible. The function of an American novelist in the twentieth century was to mirror the class-struggle and to do so in such a way as cleverly to reflect a nimbus over the heads of the proletariat and the Communist 356 A CHRISTIAN HUMANIST: THORNTON WILDER party. Mr. Wilder's unconcern with this function was so complete that Mr. Gold despaired of his case; still he would utter a closing challenge: "Let Mr. Wilder write a book about modern America. We predict it will reveal all his fundamental silliness and superficiality, now hidden under a Greek chlamys." · , The book has been written. Mr. Wilder kept his counsel for four years and then, in Heaven's My Destination ,* he produced his image of contemporary America. This would be a significant novel even if it did not reveal a development in method. _ The accuracy of its realism, the pungency of its social criticism, have startled the editors of the New Republic. Still, the book takes on its full richness of meaning only when it is seen in relation to Mr. 'Vilder's earlier noveis, a relation as surprising indeed as it would be to find an unpublished novel on the Jameson Raid or, the life of Barnum among the manuscripts of Henry James. ' It is impossible to read certain pages of Mr. Wilder's first novel The Cabala (1926) without thinking of Henry James. Mr. Wilder is not, however, an authentic disciple of James (or of Proust). Between Mr. Wilder and the authentic disciples of James there is a' radical difference. Mrs.- Wharton and Miss Sedgwick and even so modern a novelist as Mr. Louis Bromfield write as aristocrats, with sharp social as well as aesthetic sensibilities, who have found 'in Europe a society and an atmosphere which is a congenial refuge from the rising tide of American vulgarity ; but Mr. Wilder writes not as an aristocrat, but as an artist and scholar, appreciating aristocratic society, delighting in the atmosphere of exquisite civilization, but always aware that he must look farther to satisfy his -desire for moral force and fineness, hUlnane learning, *Thornton Wilder, Heaven's My Destination, Musson Book Company. 357 . THE. UNIVERSITY OF T9RONTO QUARTERLY , profound but cautious religious feeling. The erudition and the devoutness which his books disclose place him far from the psychological and mundane tradition of Henry James. . .In The Cabala, Mr. Wilder has revealed himself most explicitly. Amid the grayness of contemporary life the five principal members of the group whose intrigues have earned for it in Rome the name of cabala, represent five ages of high and intense civilization. In Miss Grier the New York of the brown-stone age lived on in its deEcate...