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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The American Mind, by Bliss Perry
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The American Mind
+       The E. T. Earl Lectures
+
+Author: Bliss Perry
+
+Release Date: September 10, 2009 [EBook #29952]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE AMERICAN MIND ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Diane Monico, and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net
+
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+
+
+THE AMERICAN MIND
+
+_The E. T. Earl Lectures_
+
+1912
+
+
+
+
+By the Same Author
+
+
+The American Mind
+Park-Street Papers
+John Greenleaf Whittier: A Memoir
+Walt Whitman
+The Amateur Spirit
+A Study of Prose Fiction
+The Powers at Play
+The Plated City
+Salem Kittredge and Other Stories
+The Broughton House
+
+
+
+
+The American Mind
+
+By Bliss Perry
+
+[Illustration: The Riverside Press]
+
+Boston and New York
+
+Houghton Mifflin Company
+
+1912
+
+
+
+
+COPYRIGHT, 1912, BY BLISS PERRY
+
+ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
+
+_Published October 1912_
+
+
+
+
+TO
+
+WALTER MORRIS HART
+
+
+
+
+Preface
+
+
+_The material for this book was delivered as the E. T. Earl Lectures
+for 1912 at the Pacific Theological Seminary, Berkeley, California, and
+I wish to take this opportunity to express to the President and Faculty
+of that institution my appreciation of their generous hospitality._
+
+_The lectures were also given at the Lowell Institute, Boston, the
+Brooklyn Institute, and elsewhere, under the title "American Traits in
+American Literature." In revising them for publication a briefer title
+has seemed desirable, and I have therefore availed myself of
+Jefferson's phrase "The American Mind," as suggesting, more accurately
+perhaps than the original title, the real theme of discussion._
+
+                              B. P.
+
+CAMBRIDGE, 1912.
+
+
+
+
+Contents
+
+
+I.   RACE, NATION, AND BOOK              3
+
+II.  THE AMERICAN MIND                  47
+
+III. AMERICAN IDEALISM                  86
+
+IV.  ROMANCE AND REACTION              128
+
+V.   HUMOR AND SATIRE                  166
+
+VI.  INDIVIDUALISM AND FELLOWSHIP      209
+
+
+
+
+THE AMERICAN MIND
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+Race, Nation, and Book
+
+
+Many years ago, as a student in a foreign university, I remember
+attacking, with the complacency of youth, a German history of the
+English drama, in six volumes. I lost courage long before the author
+reached the age of Elizabeth, but I still recall the subject of the
+opening chapter: it was devoted to the physical geography of Great
+Britain. Writing, as the good German professor did, in the triumphant
+hour of Taine's theory as to the significance of place, period, and
+environment in determining the character of any literary production,
+what could be more logical than to begin at the beginning? Have not the
+chalk cliffs guarding the southern coast of England, have not the
+fatness of the midland counties and the soft rainy climate of a North
+Atlantic island, and the proud, tenacious, self-assertive folk that are
+bred there, all left their trace upon _A Midsummer Night's Dream_, and
+_Every Man in his Humour_ and _She Stoops to Conquer_? Undoubtedly.
+Latitude and longitude, soil and rainfall and food-supply, racial
+origins and crossings, political and social and economic conditions,
+must assuredly leave their marks upon the mental and artistic
+productiveness of a people and upon the personality of individual
+writers.
+
+Taine, who delighted to point out all this, and whose _English
+Literature_ remains a monument of the defects as well as of the
+advantages of his method, was of course not the inventor of the
+climatic theory. It is older than Aristotle, who discusses it in his
+treatise on _Politics_. It was a topic of interest to the scholars of
+the Renaissance. Englishmen of the seventeenth century, with an unction
+of pseudo-science added to their natural patriotism, discovered in the
+English climate one of the reasons of England's greatness. Thomas
+Sprat, writing in 1667 on the History of the Royal Society, waxes bold
+and asserts: "If there can be a true character given of the Universal
+Temper of any Nation under Heaven, then certainly this must be ascribed
+to our countrymen, that they have commonly an unaffected sincerity,
+that they love to deliver their minds with a sound simplicity, that
+they have the middle qualities between the reserved, subtle southern
+and the rough, unhewn northern people, that they are not extremely
+prone to speak, that they are more concerned what others will think of
+the strength than of the fineness of what they say, and that a
+universal modesty possesses them. These qualities are so conspicuous
+and proper to the soil that we often hear them objected to us by some
+of our neighbor Satyrists in more disgraceful expressions.... Even the
+position of our climate, the air, the influence of the heaven, the
+composition of the English blood, as well as the embraces of the Ocean,
+seem to join with the labours of the _Royal Society_ to render our
+country a Land of Experimental Knowledge."
+
+The excellent Sprat was the friend and executor of the poet Cowley, who
+has in the Preface to his _Poems_ a charming passage about the relation
+of literature to the external circumstances in which it is written.
+
+"If _wit_ be such a _Plant_ that it scarce receives heat enough to keep
+it alive even in the _summer_ of our cold _Clymate_, how can it choose
+but wither in a long and a sharp _winter_? a warlike, various and a
+tragical age is best to write _of_, but worst to write _in_." And he
+adds this, concerning his own art of poetry: "There is nothing that
+requires so much serenity and chearfulness of _spirit_; it must not be
+either overwhelmed with the cares of _Life_, or overcast with the
+_Clouds_ of _Melancholy_ and _Sorrow_, or shaken and disturbed with the
+storms of injurious _Fortune_; it must, like the _Halcyon_, have fair
+weather to breed in. The Soul must be filled with bright and delightful
+_Idaeas_, when it undertakes to communicate delight to others, which is
+the main end of _Poesie_. One may see through the stile of _Ovid de
+Trist._, the humbled and dejected condition of _Spirit_ with which he
+wrote it; there scarce remains any footstep of that _Genius_, _Quem nec
+Jovis ira, nec ignes_, etc. The _cold_ of the country has strucken
+through all his faculties, and benummed the very _feet_ of his
+_Verses_."
+
+Madame de Staël's _Germany_, one of the most famous of the "national
+character" books, begins with a description of the German landscape.
+But though nobody, from Ovid in exile down to Madame de Staël,
+questions the general significance of place, time, and circumstances as
+affecting the nature of a literary product, when we come to the exact
+and as it were mathematical demonstration of the precise workings of
+these physical influences, our generation is distinctly more cautious
+than were the literary critics of forty years ago. Indeed, it is a
+hundred years since Fisher Ames, ridiculing the theory that climate
+acts directly upon literary products, said wittily of Greece: "The figs
+are as fine as ever, but where are the Pindars?" The theory of race, in
+particular, has been sharply questioned by the experts. "Saxon" and
+"Norman," for example, no longer seem to us such simple terms as
+sufficed for the purpose of Scott's _Ivanhoe_ or of Thierry's _Norman
+Conquest_, a book inspired by Scott's romance. The late Professor
+Freeman, with characteristic bluntness, remarked of the latter book:
+"Thierry says at the end of his work that there are no longer either
+Normans or Saxons except in history.... But in Thierry's sense of the
+word, it would be truer to say that there never were 'Normans' or
+'Saxons' anywhere, save in the pages of romances like his own."
+
+There is a brutal directness about this verdict upon a rival historian
+which we shall probably persist in calling "Saxon"; but it is no worse
+than the criticisms of Matthew Arnold's essay on "The Celtic Spirit"
+made to-day by university professors who happen to know Old Irish at
+first hand, and consequently consider Arnold's opinion on Celtic
+matters to be hopelessly amateurish.
+
+The wiser scepticism of our day concerning all hard-and-fast racial
+distinctions has been admirably summed up by Josiah Royce. "A race
+psychology," he declares, "is still a science for the future to
+discover.... We do not scientifically know what the true racial
+varieties of mental type really are. No doubt there are such varieties.
+The judgment day, or the science of the future, may demonstrate what
+they are. We are at present very ignorant regarding the whole matter."
+
+Nowhere have the extravagances of the application of racial theories to
+intellectual products been more pronounced than in the fields of art
+and literature. Audiences listen to a waltz which the programme
+declares to be an adaptation of a Hungarian folk-song, and though they
+may be more ignorant of Hungary than Shakespeare was of Bohemia, they
+have no hesitation in exclaiming: "How truly Hungarian this is!" Or,
+it may be, how truly "Japanese" is this vase which was made in
+Japan--perhaps for the American market; or how intensely "Russian" is
+this melancholy tale by Turgenieff. This prompt deduction of racial
+qualities from works of art which themselves give the critic all the
+information he possesses about the races in question,--or, in other
+words, the enthusiastic assertion that a thing is like itself,--is one
+of the familiar notes of amateur criticism. It is travelling in a
+circle, and the corregiosity of Corregio is the next station.
+
+Blood tells, no doubt, and a masterpiece usually betrays some token of
+the place and hour of its birth. A knowledge of the condition of
+political parties in Athens in 416 B.C. adds immensely to the enjoyment
+of the readers of Aristophanes; the fun becomes funnier and the daring
+even more splendid than before. Molière's training as an actor does
+affect the dramaturgic quality of his comedies. All this is
+demonstrable, and to the prevalent consciousness of it our generation
+is deeply indebted to Taine and his pupils. But before displaying
+dogmatically the inevitable brandings of racial and national traits on
+a national literature, before pointing to this and that unmistakable
+evidence of local or temporal influence on the form or spirit of a
+masterpiece, we are now inclined to make some distinct reservations.
+These reservations are not without bearing upon our own literature in
+America.
+
+There are, for instance, certain artists who seem to escape the
+influences of the time-spirit. The most familiar example is that of
+Keats. He can no doubt be assigned to the George the Fourth period by a
+critical examination of his vocabulary, but the characteristic
+political and social movements of that epoch in England left him almost
+untouched. Edgar Allan Poe might have written some of his tales in the
+seventeenth century or in the twentieth; he might, like Robert Louis
+Stevenson, have written in Samoa rather than in the Baltimore,
+Philadelphia, or New York of his day; his description of the Ragged
+Mountains of Virginia, within very sight of the university which he
+attended, was borrowed, in the good old convenient fashion, from
+Macaulay; in fact, it requires something of Poe's own ingenuity to find
+in Poe, who is one of the indubitable assets of American literature,
+anything distinctly American.
+
+Wholly aside from such spiritual insulation of the single writer,
+there is the obvious fact that none of the arts, not even literature,
+and not all of them together, can furnish a wholly adequate
+representation of racial or national characteristics. It is well known
+to-day that the so-called "classic" examples of Greek art, most of
+which were brought to light and discoursed upon by critics from two to
+four centuries ago, represent but a single phase of Greek feeling; and
+that the Greeks, even in what we choose to call their most
+characteristic period, had a distinctly "romantic" tendency which their
+more recently discovered plastic art betrays. But even if we had all
+the lost statues, plays, poems, and orations, all the Greek paintings
+about which we know so little, and the Greek music about which we know
+still less, does anybody suppose that this wealth of artistic
+expression would furnish a wholly satisfactory notion of the racial and
+psychological traits of the Greek people?
+
+One may go even further. Does a truly national art exist anywhere,--an
+art, that is to say, which conveys a trustworthy and adequate
+expression of the national temper as a whole? We have but to reflect
+upon the European and American judgments, during the last thirty
+years, concerning the representative quality of the art of Japan, and
+to observe how many of those facile generalizations about the Japanese
+character, deduced from vases and prints and enamel, were smashed to
+pieces by the Russo-Japanese War. This may illustrate the blunders of
+foreign criticism, perhaps, rather than any inadequacy in the racially
+representative character of Japanese art. But it is impossible that
+critics, and artists themselves, should not err, in the conscious
+endeavor to pronounce upon the infinitely complex materials with which
+they are called upon to deal. We must confess that the expression of
+racial and national characteristics, by means of only one art, such as
+literature, or by all the arts together, is at best imperfect, and is
+always likely to be misleading unless corroborated by other evidence.
+
+For it is to be remembered that in literature, as in the other fields
+of artistic activity, we are dealing with the question of form; of
+securing a concrete and pleasurable embodiment of certain emotions. It
+may well happen that literature not merely fails to give an adequate
+report of the racial or national or personal emotions felt during a
+given epoch, but that it fails to report these emotions at all. Not
+only the "old, unhappy, far-off" things of racial experience, but the
+new and delight-giving experiences of the hour, may lack their poet.
+Widespread moods of public elation or wistfulness or depression have
+passed without leaving a shadow upon the mirror of art. There was no
+one to hold the mirror or even to fashion it. No note of Renaissance
+criticism, whether in Italy, France, or England, is more striking, and
+in a way more touching, than the universal feeling that in the
+rediscovery of the classics men had found at last the "terms of art,"
+the rules and methods of a game which they had long wished to be
+playing. Englishmen and Frenchmen of the sixteenth century will not
+allow that their powers are less virile, their emotions less eager,
+than those of the Greeks and Romans. Only, lacking the very terms of
+art, they had not been able to arrive at fit expression; the soul had
+found no body wherewith to clothe itself into beauty. As they avowed in
+all simplicity, they needed schoolmasters; the discipline of Aristotle
+and Horace and Virgil; a body of critical doctrine, to teach them how
+to express the France and England or Italy of their day, and thus give
+permanence to their fleeting vision of the world. Naïve as may have
+been the Renaissance expression of this need of formal training, blind
+as it frequently was to the beauty which we recognize in the
+undisciplined vernacular literatures of mediæval Europe, those groping
+scholars were essentially right. No one can paint or compose by nature.
+One must slowly master an art of expression.
+
+Now through long periods of time, and over many vast stretches of
+territory, as our own American writing abundantly witnesses, the whole
+formal side of expression may be neglected. "Literature," in its
+narrower sense, may not exist. In that restricted and higher meaning of
+the term, literature has always been uncommon enough, even in Athens or
+Florence. It demands not merely personal distinction or power, not
+merely some uncommon height or depth or breadth of capacity and
+insight, but a purely artistic training, which in the very nature of
+the case is rare. Millions of Russians, perhaps, have felt about the
+general problems of life much as Turgenieff felt, but they lacked the
+sheer literary art with which the _Notes of a Sportsman_ was written.
+Thousands of frontier lawyers and politicians shared Lincoln's hard
+and varied and admirable training in the mastery of speech, but in his
+hands alone was the weapon wrought to such perfection of temper and
+weight and edge that he spoke and wrote literature without knowing it.
+
+Such considerations belong, I am aware, to the accepted
+commonplaces,--perhaps to what William James used to call "the
+unprofitable delineation of the obvious." Everybody recognizes that
+literary gifts imply an exceptionally rich development of general human
+capacities, together with a professional aptitude and training of which
+but few men are capable. There is but one lumberman in camp who can
+play the fiddle, though the whole camp can dance. Thus the great book,
+we are forever saying, is truly representative of myriads of minds in a
+certain degree of culture, although but one man could have written it.
+The writing member of a family is often the one who acquires notoriety
+and a bank account, but he is likely to have candid friends who admit,
+though not always in his presence, that, aside from this one
+professional gift and practice, he is not intellectually or emotionally
+or spiritually superior to his brothers and sisters. Waldo Emerson
+thought himself the intellectual inferior of his brother Charles; and
+good observers loved to maintain that John Holmes was wittier than
+Oliver Wendell, and Ezekiel Webster a better lawyer than Daniel.
+
+Applied to the literary history of a race, this principle is
+suggestive. We must be slow to affirm that, because certain ideas and
+feelings did not attain, in this or that age or place, to purely
+literary expression, they were therefore not in existence. The men and
+women of the colonial period in our own country, for instance, have
+been pretty uniformly declared to have been deficient in the sense of
+beauty. What is the evidence? It is mostly negative. They produced no
+poetry, fiction, painting, sculpture, or music worthy of the name. They
+were predominantly Puritan, and the whole world has been informed that
+English Puritanism was hostile to Art. They were preoccupied with
+material and moral concerns. Even if they had remained in England,
+Professor Trent affirms, these contemporaries of Milton and Bunyan
+would have produced no art or literature. Now it is quite true that for
+nearly two hundred years after the date of the first settlement of the
+American colonists, opportunities for cultivating the arts did not
+exist. But that the sense of beauty was wholly atrophied, I, for one,
+do not believe. The passionate eagerness with which the forefathers
+absorbed the noblest of all poetry and prose in the pages of their one
+book, the Bible; the unwearied curiosity and care with which those
+farmers and fishermen and woodsmen read the signs of the sky; their awe
+of the dark wilderness and their familiar traffic with the great deep;
+the silences of lonely places; the opulence of primeval meadows by the
+clear streams; the English flowers that were made to bloom again in
+farmhouse windows and along garden walks; the inner visions, more
+lovely still, of duty and of moral law; the spirit of sacrifice; the
+daily walk with God, whether by green pastures of the spirit or through
+ways that were dark and terrible;--is there in all this no discipline
+of the soul in moral beauty, and no training of the eye to perceive the
+exquisite harmonies of the visible earth? It is true that the Puritans
+had no professional men of letters; it is true that doctrinal sermons
+provided their chief intellectual sustenance; true that their lives
+were stern, and that many of the softer emotions were repressed. But
+beauty may still be traced in the fragments of their recorded speech,
+in their diaries and letters and phrases of devotion. You will search
+the eighteenth century of old England in vain for such ecstasies of
+wonder at the glorious beauty of the universe as were penned by
+Jonathan Edwards in his youthful _Diary_. There is every presumption,
+from what we know of the two men, that Whittier's father and
+grandfather were peculiarly sensitive to the emotions of home and
+neighborhood and domesticity which their gifted descendant--too
+physically frail to be absorbed in the rude labor of the farm--has
+embodied in _Snow-Bound_. The Quaker poet knew that he surpassed his
+forefathers in facility in verse-making, but he would have been amused
+(as his _Margaret Smith's Journal_ proves) at the notion that his
+ancestors were without a sense of beauty or that they lacked
+responsiveness to the chords of fireside sentiment. He was simply the
+only Whittier, except his sister Elizabeth, who had ever found leisure,
+as old-fashioned correspondents used to say, "to take his pen in hand."
+This leisure developed in him the sense--latent no doubt in his
+ancestors--of the beauty of words, and the excitement of rhythm.
+Emerson's _Journal_ in the eighteen-thirties glows with a Dionysiac
+rapture over what he calls "delicious days"; but did the seven
+generations of clergymen from whom Emerson descended have no delicious
+and haughty and tender days that passed unrecorded? Formal literature
+perpetuates and glorifies many aspects of individual and national
+experience; but how much eludes it wholly, or is told, if at all, in
+broken syllables, in Pentecostal tongues that seem to be our own and
+yet are unutterably strange!
+
+To confess thus that literature, in the proper sense of the word,
+represents but a narrow segment of personal or racial experience, is
+very far from a denial of the genuineness and the significance of the
+affirmations which literature makes. We recognize instinctively that
+Whittier's _Snow-Bound_ is a truthful report, not merely of a certain
+farmhouse kitchen in East Haverhill, Massachusetts, during the early
+nineteenth century, but of a mode of thinking and feeling which is
+widely diffused wherever the Anglo-Saxon race has wandered. Perhaps
+_Snow-Bound_ lacks a certain universality of suggestiveness which
+belongs to a still more famous poem, _The Cotter's Saturday Night_ of
+Burns, but both of these portrayals of rustic simplicity and peace owe
+their celebrity to their truly representative character. They are
+evidence furnished by a single art, as to a certain mode and coloring
+of human existence; but every corroboration of that evidence heightens
+our admiration for the artistic sincerity and insight of the poet. To
+draw an illustration from a more splendid epoch, let us remind
+ourselves that the literature of the "spacious times of great
+Elizabeth"--a period of strong national excitement, and one deeply
+representative of the very noblest and most permanent traits of English
+national character--was produced within startlingly few years and in a
+local territory extremely limited. The very language in which that
+literature is clothed was spoken only by the court, by a couple of
+counties, and at the two universities. Its prose and verse were frankly
+experimental. It is true that such was the emotional ferment of the
+score of years preceding the Armada, that great captains and voyagers
+who scarcely wrote a line were hailed as kings of the realm of
+imagination, and that Puttenham, in phrases which that generation
+could not have found extravagant, inscribes his book on Poetry to Queen
+Elizabeth as the "most excellent Poet" of the age. Well, the glorified
+political images may grow dim or tawdry with time, but the poetry has
+endured, and it is everywhere felt to be a truly national, a deeply
+racial product. Its time and place and hour were all local; but the
+Canadian and the American, the South African and Australasian
+Englishman feels that that Elizabethan poetry is his poetry still.
+
+When we pass, therefore, as we must shortly do, to the consideration of
+this and that literary product of America, and to the scrutiny of the
+really representative character of our books, we must bear in mind that
+the questions concerning the race, the place, the hour, the
+man,--questions so familiar to modern criticism,--remain valid and
+indeed essential; but that in applying them to American writing there
+are certain allowances, qualifications, adjustments of the scale of
+values, which are no less important to an intelligent perception of the
+quality of our literature. This task is less simple than the critical
+assessment of a typical German or French or Scandinavian writer, where
+the strain of blood is unmixed, the continuity of literary tradition
+unbroken, the precise impact of historical and personal influences more
+easy to estimate. I open, for example, any one of half a dozen French
+studies of Balzac. Here is a many-sided man, a multifarious writer, a
+personality that makes ridiculous the merely formal pigeon-holing and
+labelling processes of professional criticism. And yet with what
+perfect precision of method and certainty of touch do Le Breton, for
+example, or Brunetière, in their books on Balzac, proceed to indicate
+those impulses of race and period and environment which affected the
+character of Balzac's novels! The fact that he was born in Tours in
+1799 results in the inevitable and inevitably expert paragraphs about
+Gallic blood, and the physical exuberance of the Touraine surroundings
+of his youth, and the post-revolutionary tendency to disillusion and
+analysis. And so with Balzac's education, his removal to Paris in the
+Restoration period, his ventures in business and his affairs of love,
+his admiration for Shakespeare and for Fenimore Cooper; his mingled
+Romanticism and Realism; his Titanism and his childishness; his
+stupendous outline for the Human Comedy; and his scarcely less
+astounding actual achievement. All this is discussed by his biographers
+with the professional dexterity of critics trained intellectually in
+the Latin traditions and instinctively aware of the claims of race,
+biographers familiar with every page of French history, and profoundly
+interested, like their readers, in every aspect of French life. Alas,
+we may say, in despairing admiration of such workmanship, "they order
+these things better in France." And they do; but racial unity, and long
+lines of national literary tradition, make these things easier to order
+than they are with us. The intellectual distinction of American
+critical biographies like Lounsbury's _Cooper_ or Woodberry's
+_Hawthorne_ is all the more notable because we possess such a slender
+body of truly critical doctrine native to our own soil; because our
+national literary tradition as to available material and methods is
+hardly formed; because the very word "American" has a less precise
+connotation than the word "New Zealander."
+
+Let us suppose, for instance, that like Professor Woodberry a few years
+ago, we were asked to furnish a critical study of Hawthorne. The author
+of _The Scarlet Letter_ is one of the most justly famous of American
+writers. But precisely what national traits are to be discovered in
+this eminent fellow-countryman of ours? We turn, like loyal disciples
+of Taine and Sainte-Beuve, to his ancestral stock. We find that it is
+English as far back as it can be traced; as purely English as the
+ancestry of Dickens or Thackeray, and more purely English than the
+ancestry of Browning or Burke or His Majesty George the Fifth. Was
+Hawthorne, then, simply an Englishman living in America? He himself did
+not think so,--as his _English Note-Books_ abundantly prove. But just
+what subtle racial differentiation had been at work, since William
+Hawthorne migrated to Massachusetts with Winthrop in 1630? Here we
+face, unless I am mistaken, that troublesome but fascinating question
+of Physical Geography. Climate, soil, food, occupation, religious or
+moral preoccupation, social environment, Salem witchcraft and Salem
+seafaring had all laid their invisible hands upon the physical and
+intellectual endowment of the child born in 1804. Does this make
+Nathaniel Hawthorne merely an "Englishman with a difference," as Mr.
+Kipling, born in India, is an "Englishman with a difference"?
+Hawthorne would have smiled, or, more probably, he would have sworn, at
+such a question. He considered himself an American Democrat; in fact a
+_contra mundum_ Democrat, for good or for ill. Is it, then, a political
+theory, first put into full operation in this country a scant
+generation before Hawthorne's birth, which made him un-English? We must
+walk warily here. Our Canadian neighbors of English stock have much the
+same climate, soil, occupations, and preoccupations as the inhabitants
+of the northern territory of the United States. They have much the same
+courts, churches, and legislatures. They read the same books and
+magazines. They even prefer baseball to cricket. They are loyal
+adherents of a monarchy, but they are precisely as free, as
+self-governing, and--in the social sense of the word--as
+"democratic"--in spite of the absence of a republican form of
+government--as the citizens of that "land of the free and home of the
+brave" which lies to the south of them. Yet Canadian literature, one
+may venture to affirm, has remained to this hour a "colonial"
+literature, or, if one prefers the phrase, a literature of "Greater
+Britain." Was Hawthorne possibly right in his instinct that politics
+did make a difference, and that in writing _The Marble Faun_,--the
+scene of which is laid in Rome,--or _The House of the Seven
+Gables_,--which is a story of Salem,--he was consistently engaged in
+producing, not "colonial" or "Greater-British" but distinctly American
+literature? We need not answer this question prematurely, if we wish to
+reserve our judgment, but it is assuredly one of the questions which
+the biographers and critics of our men of letters must ultimately face
+and answer.
+
+Furthermore, the student of literature produced in the United States of
+America must face other questions almost as complicated as this of
+race. In fact, when we choose Hawthorne as a typical case in which to
+observe the American refashioning of the English temper into something
+not English, we are selecting a very simple problem compared with the
+complexities which have resulted from the mingling of various European
+stocks upon American soil. But take, for the moment, the mere obvious
+matter of expanse of territory. We are obliged to reckon, not with a
+compact province such as those in which many Old World literatures
+have been produced, but with what our grandfathers considered a
+"boundless continent." This vast national domain was long ago
+"organized" for political purposes: but so far as literature is
+concerned it remains unorganized to-day. We have, as has been
+constantly observed, no literary capital, like London or Paris, to
+serve as the seat of centralized authority; no code of literary
+procedure and conduct; no "lawgivers of Parnassus"; no supreme court of
+letters, whose judgments are recognized and obeyed. American public
+opinion asserts itself with singular unanimity and promptness in the
+field of politics. In literary matters we remain in the stage of
+anarchic individualism, liable to be stampeded from time to time by
+mob-excitement over a popular novel or moralistic tract, and then
+disintegrating, as before, into an incoherent mass of individually
+intelligent readers.
+
+The reader who has some personal acquaintance with the variations of
+type in different sections of this immense territory of ours finds his
+curiosity constantly stimulated by the presence of sectional and local
+characteristics. There are sharply cut provincial peculiarities, of
+course, in Great Britain and in Germany, in Italy and Spain, and in
+all of the countries a corresponding "regional" literature has been
+developed. Our provincial variations of accent and vocabulary, in
+passing from North to South or East to West, are less striking, on the
+whole, than the dialectical differences found in the various English
+counties. But our general uniformity of grammar and the comparatively
+slight variations in spoken accent cover an extraordinary variety of
+local and sectional modes of thinking and feeling. The reader of
+American short stories and lyrics must constantly ask himself: Is this
+truth to local type consistent with the main trend of American
+production? Is this merely a bit of Virginia or Texas or California, or
+does it, while remaining no less Southern or Western in its local
+coloring, suggest also the ampler light, the wide generous air of the
+United States of America?
+
+The observer of this relationship between local and national types will
+find some American communities where all the speech or habitual thought
+is of the future. Foreigners usually consider such communities the most
+typically "American," as doubtless they are; but there are other
+sections, still more faithfully exploited by local writers, where the
+mood is wistful and habitually regards the past. America, too, like the
+Old World,--and in New England more than elsewhere,--has her note of
+decadence, of disillusion, of autumnal brightness and transiency. Some
+sections of the country, and notably the slave-holding states in the
+forty years preceding the Civil War, have suffered widespread
+intellectual blight. The best talent of the South, for a generation,
+went into politics, in the passionately loyal endeavor to prop up a
+doomed economic and social system; and the loss to the intellectual
+life of the country cannot be reckoned. Over vast sections of our
+prosperous and intelligent people of the Mississippi Basin to-day the
+very genius of commonplaceness seems to hover. Take the great State of
+Iowa, with its well-to-do and homogeneous population, its fortunate
+absence of perplexing city-problems, its general air of prosperity and
+content. It is a typical state of the most typically American portion
+of the country; but it breeds no books. Yet in Indiana, another state
+of the same general conditions as to population and prosperity, and
+only one generation further removed than Iowa from primitive pioneer
+conditions, books are produced at a rate which provokes a universal
+American smile. I do not affirm that the literary critic is bound to
+answer all such local puzzles as this. But he is bound at least to
+reflect upon them, and to demand of every local literary product
+throughout this varied expanse of states: Is the root of the
+"All-American" plant growing here, or is it not?
+
+Furthermore, the critic must pursue this investigation of national
+traits in our writing, not only over a wide and variegated territory,
+but through a very considerable sweep of time. American literature is
+often described as "callow," as the revelation of "national
+inexperience," and in other similar terms. It is true that we had no
+professional men of letters before Irving and that the blossoming time
+of the notable New England group of writers did not come until nearly
+the middle of the nineteenth century. But we have had time enough,
+after all, to show what we wish to be and what we are. There have been
+European books about America ever since the days of Columbus; it is
+three hundred years since the first books were written in America.
+Modern English prose, the language of journalism, of science, of social
+intercourse, came into being only in the early eighteenth century, in
+the age of Queen Anne. But Cotton Mather's _Magnalia_, a vast book
+dealing with the past history of New England, was printed in 1702, only
+a year later than Defoe's _True-Born Englishman_. For more than two
+centuries the development of English speech and English writing on this
+side of the Atlantic has kept measurable pace--now slower, now
+swifter--with the speech of the mother country. When we recall the
+scanty term of years within which was produced the literature of the
+age of Elizabeth, it seems like special pleading to insist that America
+has not yet had time to learn or recite her bookish lessons.
+
+This is not saying that we have had a continuous or adequate
+development, either of the intellectual life, or of literary
+expression. There are certain periods of strong intellectual movement,
+of heightened emotion, alike in the colonial epoch and since the
+adoption of our present form of government, in which it is natural to
+search for revelations of those qualities which we now feel to be
+essential to our national character. Certain epochs of our history, in
+other words, have been peculiarly "American," and have furnished the
+most ideal expression of national tendencies.
+
+If asked to select the three periods of our history which in this sense
+have been most significant, most of us, I imagine, would choose the
+first vigorous epoch of New England Puritanism, say from 1630 to 1676;
+then, the epoch of the great Virginians, say from 1766 to 1789; and
+finally the epoch of distinctly national feeling, in which New England
+and the West were leaders, between 1830 and 1865. Those three
+generations have been the most notable in the three hundred years since
+the permanent settlements began. Each of them has revealed, in a noble
+fashion, the political, ethical, and emotional traits of our people;
+and although the first two of the three periods concerned themselves
+but little with literary expression of the deep-lying characteristics
+of our stock, the expression is not lacking. Thomas Hooker's sermon on
+the "Foundation of Political Authority," John Winthrop's grave advice
+on the "Nature of Liberty," Jefferson's "Declaration," Webster's "Reply
+to Hayne," Lincoln's "Inaugurals," are all fundamentally American.
+They are political in their immediate purpose, but, like the speeches
+of Edmund Burke, they are no less literature because they are concerned
+with the common needs and the common destiny. Hooker and Winthrop wrote
+before our formal national existence began; Jefferson, at the hour of
+the nation's birth; and Lincoln, in the day of its sharpest trial. Yet,
+though separated from one another by long intervals of time, the
+representative figures of the three epochs, English in blood and
+American in feeling, are not so unlike as one might think. A thorough
+grasp of our literature thus requires--and in scarcely less a degree
+than the mastery of one of the literatures of Europe--a survey of a
+long period, the search below the baffling or contradictory surface of
+national experience for the main drift of that experience, and the
+selection of the writers, of one generation after another, who have
+given the most fit and permanent and personalized expression to the
+underlying forces of the national life.
+
+There is another preliminary word which needs no less to be said. It
+concerns the question of international influences upon national
+literature. Our own generation has been taught by many events that no
+race or country can any longer live "to itself." Internationalism is in
+the very atmosphere: and not merely as regards politics in the narrowed
+sense, but with reference to questions of economics, sociology, art,
+and letters. The period of international isolation of the United
+States, we are rather too fond of saying, closed with the
+Spanish-American War. It would be nearer the truth to say that so far
+as the things of the mind and the spirit are concerned, there has never
+been any absolute isolation. The Middle West, from the days of Jackson
+to Lincoln, that raw West described by Dickens and Mrs. Trollope, comes
+nearer isolation than any other place or time. The period of the most
+eloquent assertions of American independence in artistic and literary
+matters was the epoch of New England Transcendentalism, which was
+itself singularly cosmopolitan in its literary appetites. The letters
+and journals of Emerson, Whitman, and Thoreau show the strong European
+meat on which these men fed, just before their robust declarations of
+our self-sufficiency. But there is no real self-sufficiency, and
+Emerson and Whitman themselves, in other moods, have written most
+suggestive passages upon our European inheritances and affiliations.
+
+The fortunes of the early New England colonies, in fact, were followed
+by Protestant Europe with the keen solicitude and affection of kinsmen.
+Oliver Cromwell signs his letter to John Cotton in 1651, "Your
+affectionate friend to serve you." The settlements were regarded as
+outposts of European ideas. Their Calvinism, so cheaply derided and so
+superficially understood, even to-day, was the intellectual platform of
+that portion of Europe which was mentally and morally awake to the vast
+issues involved in individual responsibility and self-government.
+Contemporary European democracy is hardly yet aware that Calvin's
+_Institutes_ is one of its great charters. Continental Protestantism of
+the seventeenth century, like the militant Republicanism of the English
+Commonwealth, thus perused with fraternal interest the letters from
+Massachusetts Bay. And if Europe watched America in those days, it was
+no less true that America was watching Europe. Towards the end of the
+century, Cotton Mather, "prostrate in the dust" before the Lord, as
+his newly published _Diary_ tells us, is wrestling "on the behalf of
+whole nations." He receives a "strong Persuasion that very overturning
+Dispensations of Heaven will quickly befal the French Empire"; he
+"lifts up his Cries for a mighty and speedy Revolution" there. "I
+spread before the Lord the Condition of His Church abroad ...
+especially in Great Britain and in France. And I prayed that the poor
+Vaudois may not be ruined by the Peace now made between France and
+Savoy. I prayed likewise for further Mortifications upon the Turkish
+Empire." Here surely was one colonial who was trying, in Cecil Rhodes's
+words, to "think continentally!"
+
+Furthermore, the leaders of those early colonies were in large measure
+university men, disciplined in the classics, fit representatives of
+European culture. It has been reckoned that between the years 1630 and
+1690 there were in New England as many graduates of Cambridge and
+Oxford as could be found in any population of similar size in the
+mother country. At one time during those years there was in
+Massachusetts and Connecticut alone a Cambridge graduate for every two
+hundred and fifty inhabitants. Like the exiled Greeks in Matthew
+Arnold's poem, they "undid their corded bales"--of learning, it is
+true, rather than of merchandise--upon these strange and inhospitable
+shores: and the traditions of Greek and Hebrew and Latin scholarship
+were maintained with no loss of continuity. To the lover of letters
+there will always be something fine in the thought of that narrow
+seaboard fringe of faith in the classics, widening slowly as the
+wilderness gave way, making its invisible road up the rivers, across
+the mountains, into the great interior basin, and only after the Civil
+War finding an enduring home in the magnificent state universities of
+the West. Lovers of Greek and Roman literature may perhaps always feel
+themselves pilgrims and exiles in this vast industrial democracy of
+ours, but they have at least secured for us, and that from the very
+first day of the colonies, some of the best fruitage of
+internationalism. For that matter, what was, and is, that one Book--to
+the eyes of the Protestant seventeenth century infallible and
+inexpressively sacred--but the most potent and universal commerce of
+ideas and spirit, passing from the Orient, through Greek and Roman
+civilization, into the mind and heart of Western Europe and America?
+
+    "Oh, East is East, and West is West,
+    And never the twain shall meet,"
+
+declares a confident poet of to-day. But East and West met long ago in
+the matchless phrases translated from Hebrew and Greek and Latin into
+the English Bible; and the heart of the East there answers to the heart
+of the West as in water face answereth to face. That the colonizing
+Englishmen of the seventeenth century were Hebrews in spiritual
+culture, and heirs of Greece and Rome without ceasing to be Anglo-Saxon
+in blood, is one of the marvels of the history of civilization, and it
+is one of the basal facts in the intellectual life of the United States
+of to-day.
+
+Yet that life, as I have already hinted, is not so simple in its terms
+as it might be if we had to reckon merely with the men of a single
+stock, albeit with imaginations quickened by contact with an Oriental
+religion, and minds disciplined, directly or indirectly, by the methods
+and the literatures which the Revival of Learning imposed upon modern
+Europe. American formal culture is, and has been, from the beginning,
+predominantly English. Yet it has been colored by the influences of
+other strains of race, and by alien intellectual traditions. Such
+international influences as have reached us through German and
+Scandinavian, Celtic and Italian, Russian and Jewish immigration, are
+well marked in certain localities, although their traces may be
+difficult to follow in the main trend of American writing. The presence
+of Negro, Irishman, Jew, and German, has affected our popular humor and
+satire, and is everywhere to be marked in the vocabulary and tone of
+our newspapers. The cosmopolitan character of the population of such
+cities as New York and Chicago strikes every foreign observer. Each one
+of the manifold races now transplanted here and in process of
+Americanization has for a while its own newspapers and churches and
+social life carried on in a foreign dialect. But this stage of
+evolution passes swiftly. The assimilative forces of American schools,
+industry, commerce, politics, are too strong for the foreign immigrant
+to resist. The Italian or Greek fruit pedler soon prefers to talk
+English, and his children can be made to talk nothing else. This
+extraordinary amalgamating power of English culture explains, no
+doubt, why German and Scandinavian immigration--to take examples from
+two of the most intelligent and educated races that have contributed to
+the up-building of the country--have left so little trace, as yet, upon
+our more permanent literature.
+
+But blood will have its say sooner or later. No one knows how
+profoundly the strong mentality of the Jew, already evident enough in
+the fields of manufacturing and finance, will mould the intellectual
+life of the United States. The mere presence, to say nothing of the
+rapid absorption, of these millions upon millions of aliens, as the
+children of the Puritans regard them, is a constant evidence of the
+subtle ways in which internationalism is playing its part in the
+fashioning of the American temper. The moulding hand of the German
+university has been laid upon our higher institutions of learning for
+seventy years, although no one can demonstrate in set terms whether the
+influence of Goethe, read now by three generations of American scholars
+and studied by millions of youth in the schools, has left any real mark
+upon our literature. Abraham Lincoln, in his store-keeping days, used
+to sit under a tree outside the grocery store of Lincoln and Berry,
+reading Voltaire. One would like to think that he then and there
+assimilated something of the incomparable lucidity of style of the
+great Frenchman. But Voltaire's influence upon Lincoln's style cannot
+be proved, any more than Rousseau's direct influence upon Jefferson.
+Tolstoï and Ibsen have, indeed, left unmistakable traces upon American
+imaginative writing during the last quarter of a century. Frank Norris
+was indebted to Zola for the scheme of that uncompleted trilogy, the
+prose epic of the Wheat; and Owen Wister has revealed a not uncommon
+experience of our younger writing men in confessing that the impulse
+toward writing his Western stories came to him after reading the
+delightful pages of a French romancer. But all this tells us merely
+what we knew well enough before: that from colonial days to the present
+hour the Atlantic has been no insuperable barrier between the thought
+of Europe and the mind of America; that no one race bears aloft all the
+torches of intellectual progress; and that a really vital writer of any
+country finds a home in the spiritual life of every other country, even
+though it may be difficult to find his name in the local directory.
+
+Finally, we must bear in mind that purely literary evidence as to the
+existence of certain national traits needs corroboration from many
+non-literary sources. If it is dangerous to judge modern Japan by the
+characteristics of a piece of pottery, it is only less misleading to
+select half a dozen excellent New England writers of fifty years ago as
+sole witnesses to the qualities of contemporary America. We must
+broaden the range of evidence. The historians of American literature
+must ultimately reckon with all those sources of mental and emotional
+quickening which have yielded to our pioneer people a substitute for
+purely literary pleasures: they must do justice to the immense mass of
+letters, diaries, sermons, editorials, speeches, which have served as
+the grammar and phrase-book of national feeling. A history of our
+literature must be flexible enough, as I have said elsewhere, to
+include "the social and economic and geographical background of
+American life; the zest of the explorer, the humor of the pioneer; the
+passion of old political battles; the yearning after spiritual truth
+and social readjustment; the baffled quest of beauty. Such a history
+must be broad enough for the _Federalist_ and for Webster's oratory,
+for Beecher's sermons and Greeley's editorials, and the Lincoln-Douglas
+debates. It must picture the daily existence of our citizens from the
+beginning; their working ideas, their phrases and shibboleths and all
+their idols of the forum and the cave. It should portray the misspelled
+ideals of a profoundly idealistic people who have been usually immersed
+in material things."
+
+Our most characteristic American writing, as must be pointed out again
+and again, is not the self-conscious literary performance of a Poe or a
+Hawthorne. It is civic writing; a citizen literature, produced, like
+the _Federalist_, and Garrison's editorials and Grant's _Memoirs_,
+without any stylistic consciousness whatever; a sort of writing which
+has been incidental to the accomplishment of some political, social, or
+moral purpose, and which scarcely regards itself as literature at all.
+The supreme example of it is the "Gettysburg Address." Homeliness,
+simplicity, directness, preoccupation with moral issues, have here been
+but the instrument of beauty; phrase and thought and feeling have a
+noble fitness to the national theme. "Nothing of Europe here," we may
+instinctively exclaim, and yet the profounder lesson of this citizen
+literature of ours is in the universality of the fundamental questions
+which our literature presents. The "Gettysburg Address" would not
+to-day have a secure fame in Europe if it spoke nothing to the ear and
+the heart of Europe. And this brings us back to our main theme.
+Lincoln, like Franklin, like many another lesser master of our citizen
+literature, is a typical American. In the writing produced by such men,
+there cannot but be a revelation of American characteristics. We are
+now to attempt an analysis of these national traits, as they have been
+expressed by our representative writers.
+
+Simple as the problem seems, when thus stated, its adequate performance
+calls for a constant sensitiveness to the conditions prevalent, during
+a long period, in English and Continental society and literature. The
+most rudimentary biographical sketch of such eminent contemporary
+American authors as Mr. Henry James and Mr. Howells shows that Europe
+is an essential factor in the intellectual life and in the artistic
+procedure of these writers. Yet in their racial and national
+relationships they are indubitably American. In their local variations
+from type they demand from the critic an understanding of the culture
+of the Ohio Valley, and of Boston and New York. The analysis of the
+mingled racial, psychological, social, and professional traits in these
+masters of contemporary American fiction presents to the critic a
+problem as fascinating as, and I think more complex than, a
+corresponding study of Meredith or Hardy, of Daudet or D'Annunzio. In
+the three hundred years that have elapsed since Englishmen who were
+trained under Queen Elizabeth settled at Jamestown, Virginia, we have
+bred upon this soil many a master of speech. They have been men of
+varied gifts: now of clear intelligence, now of commanding power; men
+of rugged simplicity and of tantalizing subtlety; poets, novelists,
+orators, essayists, and publicists, who have interpreted the soul of
+America to the mind of the world. Our task is to exhibit the essential
+Americanism of these spokesmen of ours, to point out the traits which
+make them most truly representative of the instincts of the tongue-tied
+millions who work and plan and pass from sight without the gift and
+art of utterance; to find, in short, among the books which are
+recognized as constituting our American literature, some vital and
+illuminating illustrations of our national characteristics. For a truly
+"American" book--like an American national game, or an American
+city--is that which reveals, consciously or unconsciously, the American
+mind.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+The American Mind
+
+
+The origin of the phrase, "the American mind," was political. Shortly
+after the middle of the eighteenth century, there began to be a
+distinctly American way of regarding the debatable question of British
+Imperial control. During the period of the Stamp Act agitation our
+colonial-bred politicians and statesmen made the discovery that there
+was a mode of thinking and feeling which was native--or had by that
+time become a second nature--to all the colonists. Jefferson, for
+example, employs those resonant and useful words "the American mind" to
+indicate that throughout the American colonies an essential unity of
+opinion had been developed as regards the chief political question of
+the day.
+
+It is one of the most striking characteristics of the present United
+States that this instinct of political unity should have endured,
+triumphing over every temporary motive of division. The inhabitants of
+the United States belong to a single political type. There is scarcely
+a news-stand in any country of Continental Europe where one may not
+purchase a newspaper openly or secretly opposed to the government,--not
+merely attacking an unpopular administration or minister or ruler,--but
+desiring and plotting the overthrow of the entire political system of
+the country. It is very difficult to find such a newspaper anywhere in
+the United States. I myself have never seen one. The opening sentence
+of President Butler's admirable little book, _The American as He Is_,
+originally delivered as lectures before the University of Copenhagen,
+runs as follows:
+
+    "The most impressive fact in American life is the substantial
+    unity of view in regard to the fundamental questions of
+    government and of conduct among a population so large,
+    distributed over an area so wide, recruited from sources so
+    many and so diverse, living under conditions so widely
+    different."
+
+But the American type of mind is evident in many other fields than that
+of politics. The stimulating book from which I have just quoted,
+attempts in its closing paragraph, after touching upon the more salient
+features of our national activity, to define the typical American in
+these words:--
+
+    "The typical American is he who, whether rich or poor,
+    whether dwelling in the North, South, East, or West, whether
+    scholar, professional man, merchant, manufacturer, farmer, or
+    skilled worker for wages, lives the life of a good citizen
+    and good neighbor; who believes loyally and with all his
+    heart in his country's institutions, and in the underlying
+    principles on which these institutions are built; who directs
+    both his private and his public life by sound principles; who
+    cherishes high ideals; and who aims to train his children for
+    a useful life and for their country's service."
+
+This modest and sensible statement indicates the existence of a
+national point of view. We have developed in the course of time, as a
+result of certain racial inheritances and historic experiences, a
+national "temper" or "ethos"; a more or less settled way of considering
+intellectual, moral, and social problems; in short, a peculiarly
+national attitude toward the universal human questions.
+
+In a narrower sense, "the American mind" may mean the characteristics
+of the American intelligence, as it has been studied by Mr. Bryce, De
+Tocqueville, and other trained observers of our methods of thinking. It
+may mean the specific achievements of the American intelligence in
+fields like science and scholarship and history. In all these
+particular departments of intellectual activity the methods and the
+results of American workers have recently received expert and by no
+means uniformly favorable assessment from investigators upon both sides
+of the Atlantic. But the observer of literary processes and productions
+must necessarily take a somewhat broader survey of national tendencies.
+He must study what Nathaniel Hawthorne, with the instinct of a romance
+writer, preferred to call the "heart" as distinguished from the mere
+intellect. He must watch the moral and social and imaginative impulses
+of the individual; the desire for beauty; the hunger for
+self-expression; the conscious as well as the unconscious revelation of
+personality; and he must bring all this into relation--if he can, and
+knowing that the finer secrets are sure to elude him!--with the
+age-long impulses of the race and with the mysterious tides of feeling
+that flood or ebb with the changing fortunes of the nation.
+
+One way to begin to understand the typical American is to take a look
+at him in Europe. It does not require a professional beggar or a
+licensed guide to identify him. Not that the American in Europe need
+recall in any particular the familiar pictorial caricature of "Uncle
+Sam." He need not bear any outward resemblances to such stage types as
+that presented in "The Man From Home." He need not even suggest, by
+peculiarities of speech or manner, that he has escaped from the pages
+of those novels of international observation in which Mr. James and Mr.
+Howells long ago attained an unmatched artistry. Our "American Abroad,"
+at the present hour, may be studied without the aid of any literary
+recollections whatever. There he is, with his wife and daughters, and
+one may stare at him with all the frankness of a compatriot. He is
+obviously well-to-do,--else he would not be there at all,--and the wife
+and daughters seem very well-to-do indeed. He is kindly;
+considerate--sometimes effusively considerate--of his fellow
+travellers; patient with the ladies of his family, who in turn are
+noticeably patient with him. He is genial--very willing to talk with
+polyglot headwaiters and chauffeurs; in fact the wife and daughters are
+also practised conversationalists, although their most loyal admirers
+must admit that their voices _are_ a trifle sharp or flat. These ladies
+are more widely read than "papa." He has not had much leisure for
+Ruskin and Symonds and Ferrero. His lack of historical training limits
+his curiosity concerning certain phases of his European surroundings;
+but he uses his eyes well upon such general objects as trains,
+hotel-service, and Englishmen. In spite of his habitual geniality, he
+is rather critical of foreign ways, although this is partly due to his
+lack of acquaintance with them. Intellectually, he is really more
+modest and self-distrustful than his conversation or perhaps his
+general bearing would imply; in fact, his wife and daughters,
+emboldened very likely by the training of their women's clubs, have a
+more commendable daring in assaulting new intellectual positions.
+
+Yet the American does not lack quickness, either of wits or emotion.
+His humor and sentiment make him an entertaining companion. Even when
+his spirits run low, his patriotism is sure to mount in proportion, and
+he can always tell you with enthusiasm in just how many days he expects
+to be back again in what he calls "God's country."
+
+This, or something like this, is the "American" whom the European
+regards with curiosity, contempt, admiration, or envy, as the case may
+be, but who is incontestably modifying Western Europe, even if he is
+not, as many journalists and globe-trotters are fond of asserting,
+"Americanizing" the world. Interesting as it is to glance at him
+against that European background which adds picturesqueness to his
+qualities, the "Man from Home" is still more interesting in his native
+habitat. There he has been visited by hundreds of curious and observant
+foreigners, who have left on record a whole literature of bewildered
+and bewildering, irritating and flattering and amusing testimony
+concerning the Americans. Settlers like Crèvecoeur in the glowing dawn
+of the Republic, poets like Tom Moore, novelists like Charles
+Dickens,--other novelists like Mr. Arnold Bennett,--professional
+travellers like Captain Basil Hall, students of contemporary sociology
+like Paul Bourget and Mr. H. G. Wells, French journalists, German
+professors, Italian admirers of Colonel Roosevelt, political theorists
+like De Tocqueville, profound and friendly observers like Mr. Bryce,
+have had, and will continue to have, their say.
+
+The reader who tries to take all this testimony at its face value, and
+to reconcile its contradictions, will be a candidate for the insane
+asylum. Yet the testimony is too amusing to be neglected and some of it
+is far too important to be ignored. Mr. John Graham Brooks, after long
+familiarity with these foreign opinions of America, has gathered some
+of the most representative of them into a delightful and stimulating
+volume entitled _As Others See Us_. There one may find examples of what
+the foreigner has seen, or imagined he has seen, during his sojourn in
+America, and what he has said about it afterwards. Mr. Brooks is too
+charitable to our visitors to quote the most fantastic and highly
+colored of their observations; but what remains is sufficiently
+bizarre.
+
+The real service of such a volume is to train us in discounting the
+remarks made about us in a particular period like the
+eighteen-thirties, or from observations made in a special place, like
+Newport, or under special circumstances, like a Bishop's private car.
+It helps us to make allowances for the inevitable angle of nationality,
+the equally inevitable personal equation. A recent ambitious book on
+America, by a Washington journalist of long residence here, although of
+foreign birth, declares that "the chief trait of the American people is
+the love of gain and the desire of wealth acquired through commerce."
+That is the opinion of an expert observer, who has had extraordinary
+chances for seeing precisely what he has seen. I think it,
+notwithstanding, a preposterous opinion, fully as preposterous as
+Professor Muensterberg's notion that America has latterly grown more
+monarchical in its tendencies,--but I must remember that, in my own
+case, as in that of the journalist under consideration, there are
+allowances to be made for race, and training, and natural idiosyncracy
+of vision.
+
+The native American, it may be well to remember, is something of an
+observer himself. If his observations upon the characteristics of his
+countrymen are less piquant than the foreigner's, it is chiefly
+because the American writes, upon the whole, less incisively than he
+talks. But incisive native writing about American traits is not
+lacking. If a missionary, say in South Africa, has read the New York
+_Nation_ every week for the past forty years, he has had an
+extraordinary "moving picture" of American tendencies, as interpreted
+by independent, trenchant, and high-minded criticism. That a file of
+the _Nation_ will convey precisely the same impression of American
+tendencies as a file of the _Sun_, for instance, or the _Boston Evening
+Transcript_, is not to be affirmed. The humor of the London _Punch_ and
+the New York _Life_ does not differ more radically than the aspects of
+American civilization as viewed by two rival journals in Newspaper Row.
+The complexity of the material now collected and presented in daily
+journalism is so great that adequate editorial interpretation is
+obviously impossible. All the more insistently does this heterogeneous
+picture of American life demand the impartial interpretation of the
+historian, the imaginative transcription of the novelist. Humorist and
+moralist, preacher and mob orator and social essayist, shop-talk and
+talk over the tea-cup or over the pipe, and the far more illuminating
+instruction of events, are fashioning day by day the infinitely
+delicate processes of our national self-assessment. Scholars like Mr.
+Henry Adams or Mr. James Ford Rhodes will explain to us American life
+as it was during the administrations of Jefferson or in the
+eighteen-fifties. Professor Turner will expound the significance of the
+frontier in American history. Mr. Henry James will portray with
+unrivalled psychological insight the Europeanized American of the
+eighteen-seventies and eighties. Literary critics like Professor
+Wendell or Professor Trent will deduce from our literature itself
+evidence concerning this or that national quality; and all this mass of
+American expert testimony, itself a result and a proof of national
+self-awareness and self-respect, must be put into the scales to
+balance, to confirm, or to outweigh the reports furnished by
+foreigners.
+
+I do not pretend to be able, like an expert accountant, to draw up a
+balance-sheet of national qualities, to credit or debit the American
+character with this or that precise quantity of excellence or defect.
+But having turned the pages of many books about the United States, and
+listened to many conversations about its inhabitants in many states of
+the Union, I venture to collect a brief list of the qualities which
+have been assigned to us, together with a few, but not, I trust, too
+many, of our admitted national defects.
+
+Like that excellent German who wrote the History of the English Drama
+in six volumes, I begin with Physical Geography. The differentiation of
+the physical characteristics of our branch of the English race is
+admittedly due, in part, to climate. In spite of the immense range of
+climatic variations as one passes from New England to New Orleans, from
+the Mississippi Valley to the high plains of the Far West, or from the
+rainy Oregon belt southward to San Diego, the settlers of English stock
+find a prevalent atmospheric condition, as a result of which they
+begin, in a generation or two, to change in physique. They grow thinner
+and more nervous, they "lean forward," as has been admirably said of
+them, while the Englishman "leans back"; they are less heavy and less
+steady; their voices are higher, sharper; their athletes get more
+easily "on edge"; they respond, in short, to an excessively
+stimulating climate. An old-fashioned sea-captain put it all into a
+sentence when he said that he could drink a bottle of wine with his
+dinner in Liverpool and only a half a bottle in New York. Explain the
+cause as we may, the fact seems to be that the body of John Bull
+changes, in the United States, into the body of Uncle Sam.
+
+There are mental differences no less pronounced. No adjective has been
+more frequently applied to the Anglo-Saxon than the word "dull." The
+American mind has been accused of ignorance, superficiality, levity,
+commonplaceness, and dozens of other defects, but "dulness" is not one
+of them. "Smartness," rather, is the preferred epithet of derogation;
+or, to rise a little in the scale of valuation, it is the word
+"cleverness," used with that lurking contempt for cleverness which is
+truly English and which long survived in the dialect of New England,
+where the village ne'er-do-well or Jack-of-all-trades used to be
+pronounced a "clever" fellow. The variety of employments to which the
+American pioneers were obliged to betake themselves has done something,
+no doubt, to produce a national versatility, a quick assimilation of
+new methods and notions, a ready adaptability to novel emergencies. An
+invaluable pioneer trait is curiosity; the settler in a new country,
+like Moses in the wilderness of Arabia, must "turn aside to see"; he
+must look into things, learn to read signs,--or else the Indians or
+frost or freshet will soon put an end to his pioneering. That curiosity
+concerning strangers which so much irritated Dickens and Mrs. Trollope
+was natural to the children of Western emigrants to whom the difference
+between Sioux and Pawnee had once meant life or death. "What's your
+business, stranger, in these parts?" was an instinctive, because it had
+once been a vital, question. That it degenerates into mere
+inquisitiveness is true enough; just as the "acuteness," the
+"awareness," essential to the existence of one generation becomes only
+"cuteness," the typical tin-pedler's habit of mind, in the generation
+following.
+
+American inexperience, the national rawness and unsophistication which
+has impressed so many observers, has likewise its double significance
+when viewed historically. We have exhibited, no doubt, the
+amateurishness and recklessness which spring from relative isolation,
+from ignorance as to how they manage elsewhere this particular sort of
+thing,--the conservation of forests, let us say, or the government of
+colonial dependencies. National smugness and conceit, the impatience
+crystallized in the phrase, "What have we got to do with abroad?" have
+jarred upon the nerves of many cultivated Americans. But it is no less
+true that a nation of pioneers and settlers, like the isolated
+individual, learns certain rough-and-ready Robinson Crusoe ways of
+getting things done. A California mining-camp is sure to establish law
+and order in due time, though never, perhaps, a law and order quite
+according to Blackstone. In the most trying crises of American
+political history, it was not, after all, a question of profiting by
+European experience. Washington and Lincoln, in their sorest struggles,
+had nothing to do with "abroad"; the problem had first to be thought
+through, and then fought through, in American and not in European
+terms. Not a half-dozen Englishmen understood the bearings of the
+Kansas-Nebraska Bill, or, if they did, we were little the wiser. We had
+to wait until a slow-minded frontier lawyer mastered it in all its
+implications, and then patiently explained it to the farmers of
+Illinois, to the United States, and to the world.
+
+It is true that the unsophisticated mode of procedure may turn out to
+be sheer folly,--a "sixteen to one" triumph of provincial barbarism.
+But sometimes it is the secret of freshness and of force. Your
+cross-country runner scorns the highway, but that is because he has
+confidence in his legs and loins, and he likes to take the fences.
+Fenimore Cooper, when he began to write stories, knew nothing about the
+art of novel-making as practised in Europe, but he possessed something
+infinitely better for him, namely, instinct, and he took the right road
+to the climax of a narrative as unerringly as the homing bee follows
+its viewless trail.
+
+No one can be unaware how easily this superb American confidence may
+turn to over-confidence, to sheer recklessness. We love to run past the
+signals, in our railroading and in our thinking. Emerson will "plunge"
+on a new idea as serenely as any stock-gambler ever "plunged" in Wall
+Street, and a pretty school-teacher will tell you that she has become
+an advocate of the "New Thought" as complacently as an old financier
+will boast of having bought Calumet and Hecla when it was selling at
+25. (Perhaps the school-teacher may get as good a bargain. I cannot
+say.) Upon the whole, Americans back individual guesswork and pay
+cheerfully when they lose. A great many of them, as it happens, have
+guessed right. Even those who continue to guess wrong, like Colonel
+Sellers, have the indefeasible romantic appetite for guessing again.
+The American temperament and the chances of American history have
+brought constant temptation to speculation, and plenty of our people
+prefer to gamble upon what they love to call a "proposition," rather
+than to go to the bottom of the facts. They would rather speculate than
+know.
+
+Doubtless there are purely physical causes that have encouraged this
+mental attitude, such as the apparently inexhaustible resources of a
+newly opened country, the consciousness of youthful energy, the feeling
+that any very radical mistake in pitching camp to-day can easily be
+rectified when we pitch camp to-morrow. The habit of exaggeration
+which was so particularly annoying to English visitors in the middle
+of the last century--annoying even to Charles Dickens, who was himself
+something of an expert in exuberance--is a physical and moral no less
+than a mental quality. That monstrous braggadocio which Dickens
+properly satirized in _Martin Chuzzlewit_ was partly, of course, the
+product of provincial ignorance. Doubtless there were, and there are
+still, plenty of Pograms who are convinced that Henry Clay and Daniel
+Webster overtop all the intellectual giants of the Old World. But that
+youthful bragging, and perhaps some of the later bragging as well, has
+its social side. It is a perverted idealism. It springs from group
+loyalty, from sectional fidelity. The settlement of "Eden" may be
+precisely what Dickens drew it: a miasmatic mud-hole. Yet we who are
+interested in the new town do not intend, as the popular phrase has it,
+"to give ourselves away." We back our own "proposition," so that to
+this day Chicago cannot tell the truth to St. Louis, nor Harvard to
+Yale. Braggadocio thus gets glorified through its rootage in loyalty;
+and likewise extravagance--surely one of the worst of American mental
+vices--is often based upon a romantic confidence in individual opinion
+or in the righteousness of some specific cause. Convince a blue-blooded
+American like Wendell Phillips that the abolition of slavery is right,
+and, straightway, words and even facts become to him mere weapons in a
+splendid warfare. His statements grow rhetorical, reckless, virulent.
+Proof seems to him, as it did to the contemporary Transcendentalist
+philosophers, an impertinence. The sole question is, "Are you on the
+Lord's side?" i.e., on the side of Wendell Phillips.
+
+Excuse as we may the faults of a gifted combatant in a moral crisis
+like the abolition controversy, the fact remains that the intellectual
+dangers of the oratorical temperament are typically American. What is
+commonly called our "Fourth of July" period has indeed passed away. It
+has few apologists, perhaps fewer than it really deserves. It is
+possible to regret the disappearance of that old-fashioned assertion of
+patriotism and pride, and to question whether historical pageants and a
+"noiseless Fourth" will develop any better citizens than the fathers
+were. But on the purely intellectual side, the influence of that
+spread-eagle oratory was disastrous. Throughout wide-extended regions
+of the country, and particularly in the South and West, the "orator"
+grew to be, in the popular mind, the normal representative of
+intellectual ability. Words, rather than things, climbed into the
+saddle. Popular assemblies were taught the vocabulary and the logic of
+passion, rather than of sober, lucid reasoning. The "stump" grew more
+potent than school-house and church and bench; and it taught its
+reckless and passionate ways to more than one generation. The
+intellectual leaders of the newer South have more than once suffered
+ostracism for protesting against this glorification of mere oratory.
+But it is not the South alone that has suffered. Wherever a mob can
+gather, there are still the dangers of the old demagogic vocabulary and
+rhetoric. The mob state of mind is lurking still in the excitable
+American temperament.
+
+The intellectual temptations of that temperament are revealed no less
+in our popular journalism. This journalism, it is needless to say, is
+extremely able, but it is reckless to the last degree. The
+extravagance of its head-lines and the over-statements of its news
+columns are direct sources of profit, since they increase the
+circulation and it is circulation which wins advertising space. I think
+it is fair to say that the American people, as a whole, like precisely
+the sort of journalism which they get. The tastes of the dwellers in
+cities control, more and more, the character of our newspapers. The
+journals of New York, Chicago, and San Francisco are steadily gaining
+in circulation, in resourcefulness, and in public spirit, but they are,
+for the most part, unscrupulous in attack, sophistical, and passionate.
+They outvie the popular pulpit in sentimentality. They play with fire.
+
+The note of exaggeration which is heard in American oratory and
+journalism is struck again in the popular magazines. Their campaign of
+"exposure," during the last decade, has been careless of individual and
+corporate rights and reputations. Even the magazine sketches and short
+stories are keyed up to a hysteric pitch. So universally is this
+characteristic national tension displayed in our periodical literature
+that no one is much surprised to read in his morning paper that some
+one has called the President of the United States a liar,--or that some
+one has been called a liar by the President of the United States.
+
+For an explanation of these defects, shall we fall back upon a
+convenient maxim of De Tocqueville's and admit with him that "a
+democracy is unsuited to meditation"? We are forced to do so. But then
+comes the inevitable second thought that a democracy must needs have
+other things than meditation to attend to. Athenian and Florentine and
+Versailles types of political despotism have all proved highly
+favorable to the lucubrations of philosophers and men of letters who
+enjoyed the despot's approbation. For that matter, no scheme of life
+was ever better suited to meditation than an Indian reservation in the
+eighteen-seventies, with a Great Father in Washington to furnish
+blankets, flour, and tobacco. Yet that is not quite the American ideal
+of existence, and it even failed to produce the peaceable fruits of
+meditation in the Indian himself.
+
+One may freely admit the shortcomings of the American intelligence; the
+"commonness of mind and tone" which Mr. Bryce believes to be
+inseparable from the presence of such masses of men associated under
+modern democratic government; the frivolity and extravagance which
+represent the gasconading of the romantic temper in face of the grey
+practicalities of everyday routine; the provincial boastfulness and bad
+taste which have resulted from intellectual isolation; the lack, in
+short, of a code, whether for thought or speech or behavior. And
+nevertheless, one's instinctive Americanism replies, May it not be
+better, after all, to have gone without a code for a while, to have
+lacked that orderly and methodized and socialized European
+intelligence, and to have had the glorious sense of bringing things to
+pass in spite of it? There is just one thing that would have been fatal
+to our democracy. It is the feeling expressed in La Bruyère's famous
+book: "Everything has been said, everything has been written,
+everything has been done." Here in America everything was to do; we
+were forced to conjugate our verbs in the future tense. No doubt our
+existence has been, in some respects, one of barbarism, but it has been
+the barbarism of life and not of death. A rawboned baby sprawling on
+the mud floor of a Kentucky log cabin is a more hopeful spectacle than
+a wholly civilized funeral.
+
+"Perhaps it is," rejoins the European critic, somewhat impatiently,
+"but you are confusing the issue. We find certain grave defects in the
+American mind, defects which, if you had not had what Thomas Carlyle
+called 'a great deal of land for a very few people,' would long ago
+have involved you in disaster. You admit the mental defects, but you
+promptly shift the question to one of moral qualities, of practical
+energy, of subduing your wilderness, and so forth. You have too often
+absented yourself from the wedding banquet, from the European symposium
+of wit and philosophy, from the polished and orderly and delightful
+play and interplay of civilized mind,--and your excuse is the old one:
+that you are trying your yoke of oxen and cannot come. We charge you
+with intellectual sins, and you enter the plea of moral preoccupation.
+If you will permit personal examples, you Americans have made ere now
+your national heroes out of men whose reasoning powers remained those
+of a college sophomore, who were unable to state an opponent's position
+with fairness, who lacked wholly the judicial quality, who were
+vainglorious and extravagant, who had, in short, the mind of an
+exuberant barbarian; but you instantly forget their intellectual
+defects in the presence of their abounding physical and moral energy,
+their freedom from any taint of personal corruption, their whole-souled
+desire and effort for the public good. Were not such heroes, impossible
+as they would have been in any other civilized country, perfectly
+illuminative of your national state of mind?"
+
+For one, I confess that I do not know what reply to make to my
+imaginary European critic. I suspect that he is right. At any rate, we
+stand here at the fork of the road. If we do not wish to linger any
+longer over a catalogue of intellectual sins, let us turn frankly to
+our moral preoccupations, comforting ourselves, if we like, as we
+abandon the field of purely intellectual rivalry with Europe, in the
+reflection that it is the muddle-headed Anglo-Saxon, after all, who is
+the dominant force in the modern world.
+
+The moral temper of the American people has been analyzed no less
+frequently than their mental traits. Foreign and native observers are
+alike agreed in their recognition of the extraordinary American
+energy. The sheer power of the American bodily machine, driven by the
+American will, is magnificent. It is often driven too hard, and with
+reckless disregard of anything save immediate results. It wears out
+more quickly than the bodily machine of the Englishman. It is typical
+that the best distance runners of Great Britain usually beat ours,
+while we beat them in the sprints. Our public men are frequently--as
+the athletes say--"all in" at sixty. Their energy is exhausted at just
+the time that many an English statesman begins his best public service.
+But after making every allowance for wasteful excess, for the restless
+and impatient consumption of nervous forces which nature intended that
+we should hold in reserve, the fact remains that American history has
+demonstrated the existence of a dynamic national energy, physical and
+moral, which is still unabated. Immigration has turned hitherward the
+feet of millions upon millions of young men from the hardiest stocks of
+Europe. They replenish the slackening streams of vigor. When the
+northern New Englander cannot make a living on the old farm, the French
+Canadian takes it off his hands, and not only improves the farm, but
+raises big crops of boys. So with Italians, Swedes, Germans, Irish,
+Jews, and Portuguese, and all the rest. We are a nation of immigrants,
+a digging, hewing, building, breeding, bettering race, of mixed blood
+and varying creeds, but of fundamental faith in the wages of going on;
+a race compounded of materials crude but potent; raw, but with blood
+that is red and bones that are big; a race that is accomplishing its
+vital tasks, and, little by little, transmuting brute forces and
+material energies into the finer play of mind and spirit.
+
+From the very beginning, the American people have been characterized by
+idealism. It was the inner light of Pilgrim and Quaker colonists; it
+gleams no less in the faces of the children of Russian Jew immigrants
+to-day. American irreverence has been noted by many a foreign critic,
+but there are certain subjects in whose presence our reckless or
+cynical speech is hushed. Compared with current Continental humor, our
+characteristic American humor is peculiarly reverent. The purity of
+woman and the reality of religion are not considered topics for
+jocosity. Cleanness of body and of mind are held by our young men to be
+not only desirable but attainable virtues. There is among us, in
+comparison with France or Germany, a defective reverence for the State
+as such; and a positive irreverence towards the laws of the
+Commonwealth, and towards the occupants of high political positions.
+Mayor, Judge, Governor, Senator, or even President, may be the butt of
+such indecorous ridicule as shocks or disgusts the foreigner; but
+nevertheless the personal joke stops short of certain topics which
+Puritan tradition disapproves. The United States is properly called a
+Christian nation, not merely because the Supreme Court has so affirmed
+it, but because the phrase "a Christian nation" expresses the
+historical form which the religious idealism of the country has made
+its own. The Bible is still considered, by the mass of the people, a
+sacred book; oaths in courts of law, oaths of persons elected to great
+office, are administered upon it. American faith in education, as all
+the world knows, has from the beginning gone hand in hand with faith in
+religion; the school-house was almost as sacred a symbol as the
+meeting-house; and the munificence of American private benefactions to
+the cause of education furnishes to-day one of the most striking
+instances of idealism in the history of civilization.
+
+The ideal passions of patriotism, of liberty, of loyalty to home and
+section, of humanitarian and missionary effort, have all burned with a
+clear flame in the United States. The optimism which lies so deeply
+embedded in the American character is one phase of the national mind.
+Charles Eliot Norton once said to me, with his dry humor, that there
+was an infallible test of the American authorship of any anonymous
+article or essay: "Does it contain the phrase 'After all, we need not
+despair'? If it does, it was written by an American." In spite of all
+that is said about the practicality of the American, his love of gain
+and his absorption in material interests, those who really know him are
+aware how habitually he confronts his practical tasks in a spirit of
+romantic enthusiasm. He marches downtown to his prosaic day's job and
+calls it "playing the game"; to work as hard as he can is to "get into
+the game," and to work as long as he can is to "stay in the game"; he
+loves to win fully as much as the Jew and he hates to lose fully as
+much as the Englishman, but losing or winning, he carries into his
+business activity the mood of the idealist.
+
+It is easy to think of all this as self-deception as the emotional
+effusiveness of the American temperament; but to refuse to see its
+idealism is to mistake fundamentally the character of the American man.
+No doubt he does deceive himself often as to his real motives: he is a
+mystic and a bargain-hunter by turns. Divided aims, confused ideals,
+have struggled for the mastery among us, ever since Challon's _Voyage_,
+in 1606, announced that the purpose of the first colonists to Virginia
+was "both to seek to convert the savages, as also to seek out what
+benefits or commodities might be had in those parts." How that
+"both"--"as also" keeps echoing in American history: "both" to
+christianize the Negro and work him at a profit, "both" duty and
+advantage in retaining the Philippines; "both" international good will
+and increased armaments; "both" Sunday morning precepts and Monday
+morning practice; "both" horns of a dilemma; "both God and mammon"; did
+ever a nation possess a more marvellous water-tight compartment method
+of believing and honoring opposites! But in all this unconscious
+hypocrisy the American is perhaps not worse--though he may be more
+absurd!--than other men.
+
+Another aspect of the American mind is found in our radicalism. "To be
+an American," it has been declared, "is to be a radical." That
+statement needs qualification. Intellectually the American is inclined
+to radical views; he is willing to push certain social theories very
+far; he will found a new religion, a new philosophy, a new socialistic
+community, at the slightest notice or provocation; but he has at bottom
+a fund of moral and political conservatism. Thomas Jefferson, one of
+the greatest of our radical idealists, had a good deal of the English
+squire in him after all. Jeffersonianism endures, not merely because it
+is a radical theory of human nature, but because it expresses certain
+facts of human nature. The American mind looks forward, not back; but
+in practical details of land, taxes, and governmental machinery we are
+instinctively cautious of change. The State of Connecticut knows that
+her constitution is ill adapted to the present conditions of her
+population, but the difficulty is to persuade the rural legislators to
+amend it. Yet everybody admits that amendment will come "some day."
+This admission is a characteristic note of American feeling; and every
+now and then come what we call "uplift" movements, when radicalism is
+in the very air, and a thousand good "causes" take fresh vigor.
+
+One such period was in the New England of the eighteen-forties. We are
+moving in a similar--only this time a national--current of radicalism,
+to-day. But a change in the weather or the crops has before now turned
+many of our citizens from radicalism into conservatism. There is, in
+fact, conservatism in our blood and radicalism in our brains, and now
+one and now the other rules. Very typical of American radicalism is
+that story of the old sea-captain who was ignorant, as was supposed, of
+the science of navigation, and who cheerfully defended himself by
+saying that he could work his vessel down to Boston Light without
+knowing any navigation, and after that he could go where he "dum
+pleased." I suspect the old fellow pulled his sextant and chronometer
+out of his chest as soon as he really needed them. American radicalism
+is not always as innocent of the world's experience as it looks. In
+fact, one of the most interesting phases of this twentieth century
+"uplift" movement is its respect and even glorification of expert
+opinion. A German expert in city-planning electrifies an audience of
+Chicago club-women by talking to them about drains, ash-carts, and
+flower-beds. A hundred other experts, in sanitation, hygiene,
+chemistry, conservation of natural resources, government by commission,
+tariffs, arbitration treaties, are talking quite as busily; and they
+have the attention of a national audience that is listening with
+genuine modesty, and with a real desire to refashion American life on
+wiser and nobler plans. In this national forward movement in which we
+are living, radicalism has shown its beneficent aspect of constructive
+idealism.
+
+No catalogue of American qualities and defects can exclude the trait of
+individualism. We exalt character over institutions, says Mr. Brownell;
+we like our institutions because they suit us, and not because we
+admire institutions. "Produce great persons," declares Walt Whitman,
+"the rest follows." Whether the rest follows or not, there can be no
+question that Americans, from the beginning, have laid singular stress
+upon personal qualities. The religion and philosophy of the Puritans
+were in this respect at one with the gospel of the frontier. It was the
+principle of "every man for himself"; solitary confrontation of his
+God, solitary struggle with the wilderness. "He that will not work,"
+declared John Smith after that first disastrous winter at Jamestown,
+"neither let him eat." The pioneer must clear his own land, harvest his
+own crops, defend his own fireside; his temporal and eternal salvation
+were strictly his own affair. He asked, and expected, no aid from the
+community; he could at most "change works" in time of harvest, with a
+neighbor, if he had one. It was the sternest school of self-reliance,
+from babyhood to the grave, that human society is ever likely to
+witness. It bred heroes and cranks and hermits; its glories and its
+eccentricities are written in the pages of Emerson, Thoreau, and
+Whitman; they are written more permanently still in the instinctive
+American faith in individual manhood. Our democracy idolizes a few
+individuals; it ignores their defective training, or, it may be, their
+defective culture; it likes to think of an Andrew Jackson who was a
+"lawyer, judge, planter, merchant, general, and politician," before he
+became President; it asks only that the man shall not change his
+individual character in passing from one occupation or position to
+another; in fact, it is amused and proud to think of Grant hauling
+cordwood to market, of Lincoln keeping store or Roosevelt rounding-up
+cattle. The one essential question was put by Hawthorne into the mouth
+of Holgrave in the _House of the Seven Gables_. Holgrave had been by
+turns a schoolmaster, clerk in a store, editor, pedler, lecturer on
+Mesmerism, and daguerreotypist, but "amid all these personal
+vicissitudes," says Hawthorne, "he had never lost his identity.... He
+had never violated the innermost man, but had carried his conscience
+along with him." There speaks the local accent of Puritanism, but the
+voice insisting upon the moral integrity of the individual is the
+undertone of America.
+
+Finally, and surely not the least notable of American traits, is public
+spirit. Triumphant individualism checks itself, or is rudely checked
+in spite of itself, by considerations of the general good. How often
+have French critics confessed, with humiliation, that in spite of the
+superior socialization of the French intelligence, France has yet to
+learn from America the art and habit of devoting individual fortunes to
+the good of the community. Our American literature, as has been already
+pointed out, is characteristically a citizen literature, responsive to
+the civic note, the production of men who, like the writers of the
+_Federalist_, applied a vigorous practical intelligence, a robust
+common sense, to questions affecting the interest of everybody. The
+spirit of fair play in our free democracy has led Americans to ask not
+merely what is right and just for one, the individual, but what are
+righteousness and justice and fair play for all. Democracy, as embodied
+in such a leader as Lincoln, has meant Fellowship. Nothing finer can be
+said of a representative American than to say of him, as Mr. Norton
+said of Mr. Lowell, that he had a "most public soul."
+
+No one can present such a catalogue of American qualities as I have
+attempted without realizing how much escapes his classification.
+Conscious criticism and assessment of national characteristics is
+essential to an understanding of them; but one feels somehow that the
+net is not holding. The analysis of English racial inheritances, as
+modified by historical conditions, yields much, no doubt; but what are
+we to say of such magnificent embodiments of the American spirit as are
+revealed in the Swiss immigrant Agassiz, the German exile Carl Schurz,
+the native-born mulatto Booker Washington? The Americanism of
+representative Americans is something which must be felt; it is to be
+reached by imaginative perception and sympathy, no less than by the
+process of formal analysis. It would puzzle the experts in racial
+tendencies to find arithmetically the common denominator of such
+American figures as Franklin, Washington, Jackson, Webster, Lee,
+Lincoln, Emerson, and "Mark Twain"; yet the countrymen of those typical
+Americans instinctively recognize in them a sort of largeness,
+genuineness, naturalness, kindliness, humor, effectiveness, idealism,
+which are indubitably and fundamentally American.
+
+There are certain sentiments of which we ourselves are conscious,
+though we can scarcely translate them into words, and these vaguely
+felt emotions of admiration, of effort, of fellowship and social faith
+are the invisible America. Take, for a single example, the national
+admiration for what we call a "self-made" man: here is a boy selling
+candy and newspapers on a Michigan Central train; he makes up his mind
+to be a lawyer; in twelve years from that day he is general counsel for
+the Michigan Central road; he enters the Senate of the United States
+and becomes one of its leading figures. The instinctive flush of
+sympathy and pride with which Americans listen to such a story is far
+more deeply based than any vulgar admiration for money-making
+abilities. No one cares whether such a man is rich or poor. He has
+vindicated anew the possibilities of manhood under American conditions
+of opportunity; the miracle of our faith has in him come true once
+more.
+
+No one can understand America with his brains. It is too big, too
+puzzling. It tempts, and it deceives. But many an illiterate immigrant
+has felt the true America in his pulses before he ever crossed the
+Atlantic. The descendant of the Pilgrims still remains ignorant of our
+national life if he does not respond to its glorious zest, its
+throbbing energy, its forward urge, its uncomprehending belief in the
+future, its sense of the fresh and mighty world just beyond to-day's
+horizon. Whitman's "Pioneers, O Pioneers" is one of the truest of
+American poems because it beats with the pulse of this onward movement,
+because it is full of this laughing and conquering fellowship and of
+undefeated faith.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+American Idealism
+
+
+Our endeavor to state the general characteristics of the American mind
+has already given us some indication of what Americans really care for.
+The things or the qualities which they like, the objects of their
+conscious or unconscious striving, are their ideals. "There is what I
+call the American idea," said Theodore Parker in the Anti-Slavery
+Convention of 1850. "This idea demands, as the proximate organization
+thereof, a democracy--that is, a government of all the people, by all
+the people, for all the people; of course, a government on the
+principle of eternal justice, the unchanging law of God; for shortness'
+sake, I will call it the idea of Freedom." That is one of a thousand
+definitions of American idealism. Books devoted to the "Spirit of
+America"--like the volume by Henry van Dyke which bears that very
+title--give a programme of national accomplishments and aspirations.
+But our immediate task is more specific. It is to point out how
+adequately this idealistic side of the national temperament has been
+expressed in American writing. Has our literature kept equal pace with
+our thinking and feeling?
+
+We do not need, in attempting to answer this question, any definition
+of idealism, in its philosophical or in its more purely literary sense.
+There are certain fundamental human sentiments which lift men above
+brutes, Frenchmen above "frog-eaters," and Englishmen above
+"shop-keepers." These ennobling sentiments or ideals, while universal
+in their essential nature, assume in each civilized nation a somewhat
+specific coloring. The national literature reveals the myriad shades
+and hues of private and public feeling, and the more truthful this
+literary record, the more delicate and noble become the harmonies of
+local and national thought or emotion with the universal instincts and
+passions of mankind. On the other hand, when the literature of Spain,
+for instance, or of Italy, fails, within a given period, in range and
+depth of human interest, we are compelled to believe either that the
+Spain or Italy of that age was wanting in the nobler ideals, or that
+it lacked literary interpretation.
+
+In the case of America we are confronted by a similar dilemma. Since
+the beginning of the seventeenth century this country has been, in a
+peculiar sense, the home of idealism; but our literature has remained
+through long periods thin and provincial, barren in cosmopolitan
+significance; and the hard fact faces us to-day that only three or four
+of our writers have aroused any strong interest in the cultivated
+readers of continental Europe. Evidently, then, either the torch of
+American idealism does not burn as brightly as we think, or else our
+writers, with but few exceptions, have not hitherto possessed the
+height and reach and grasp to hold up the torch so that the world could
+see it. Let us look first at the flame, and then at the torch-bearers.
+
+Readers of Carlyle have often been touched by the humility with which
+that disinherited child of Calvinism speaks of Goethe's doctrine of the
+"Three Reverences," as set forth in _Wilhelm Meister_. Again and again,
+in his correspondence and his essays, does Carlyle recur to that
+teaching of the threefold Reverence: Reverence for what is above us,
+for what is around us and for what is under us; that is to say, the
+ethnic religion which frees us from debasing fear, the philosophical
+religion which unites us with our comrades, and the Christian religion
+which recognizes humility and poverty and suffering as divine.
+
+"To which of these religions do you specially adhere?" inquired
+Wilhelm.
+
+"To all the three," replied the sages; "for in their union they produce
+what may properly be called the true Religion. Out of those three
+Reverences springs the highest Reverence, Reverence for Oneself."
+
+An admirable symbolism, surely; vaguer, no doubt, than the old symbols
+which Carlyle had learned in the Kirk at Ecclefechan, but less vague,
+in turn, than that doctrine of reverence for the Oversoul, which was
+soon to be taught at Concord.
+
+As one meditates upon the idealism of the first colonists in America,
+one is tempted to ask what their "reverences" were. Toward what
+tangible symbols of the invisible did their eyes instinctively turn?
+
+For New England, at least, the answer is relatively simple. One form
+of it is contained in John Adams's well-known prescription for
+Virginia, as recorded in his _Diary_ for July 21, 1786. "Major
+Langbourne dined with us again. He was lamenting the difference of
+character between Virginia and New England. I offered to give him a
+receipt for making a New England in Virginia. He desired it; and I
+recommended to him town-meetings, training-days, town-schools, and
+ministers."
+
+The "ministers," it will be noticed, come last on the Adams list. But
+the order of precedence is unimportant.
+
+Here are four symbols, or, if you like, "reverences." Might not the
+Virginia planters, loyal to their own specific symbol of the
+"gentleman,"--no unworthy ideal, surely; one that had been glorified in
+European literature ever since Castiligione wrote his _Courtier_, and
+one that had been transplanted from England to Virginia as soon as Sir
+Walter Raleigh's men set foot on the soil which took its name from the
+Virgin Queen,--might not the Virginia gentlemen have pondered to their
+profit over the blunt suggestion of the Massachusetts commoner? No
+doubt; and yet how much picturesqueness and nobility--and tragedy,
+too--we should have missed, if our history had not been full of these
+varying symbols, clashing ideals, different Reverences!
+
+One Reverence, at least, was common to the Englishman of Virginia and
+to the Englishman of Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay. They were joint
+heirs of the Reformation, children of that waxing and puissant England
+which was a nation of one book, the Bible; a book whose phrases color
+alike the _Faerie Queen_ of Spenser and the essays of Francis Bacon; a
+book rich beyond all others in human experience; full of poetry,
+history, drama; the test of conduct; the manual of devotion; and above
+all, and blinding all other considerations by the very splendor of the
+thought, a book believed to be the veritable Word of the unseen God.
+For these colonists in the wilderness, as for the Protestant Europe
+which they had left irrevocably behind them, the Bible was the plainest
+of all symbols of idealism: it was the first of the "Reverences."
+
+The Church was a symbol likewise, but to the greater portion of
+colonial America the Church meant chiefly the tangible band of
+militant believers within the limits of a certain township or parish,
+rather than the mystical Bride of Christ. Except in Maryland and
+Virginia, whither the older forms of Church worship were early
+transplanted, there was scanty reverence for the Establishment. There
+was neither clergyman nor minister on board the Mayflower. In Rufus
+Choate's oration on the Pilgrims before the New England Society of New
+York in 1843, occurred the famous sentence about "a church without a
+bishop and a state without a King"; to which Dr. Wainwright, rector of
+St. John's, replied wittily at the dinner following the oration that
+there "can be no church without a bishop." This is perhaps a question
+for experts; but Thomas Hooker, Thomas Shepard, and John Cotton would
+have sided with Rufus Choate. The awe which had once been paid to the
+Establishment was transferred, in the seventeenth-century New England,
+to the minister. The minister imposed himself upon the popular
+imagination, partly through sheer force of personal ascendency, and
+partly as a symbol of the theocracy,--the actual governing of the
+Commonwealth by the laws and spirit of the sterner Scriptures. The
+minister dwelt apart as upon an awful Sinai. It was no mere romantic
+fancy of Hawthorne that shadowed his countenance with a black veil. The
+church organization, too,--though it may have lacked its bishop,--had a
+despotic power over its communicants; to be cast out of its fellowship
+involved social and political consequences comparable to those
+following excommunication by the Church of Rome. Hawthorne and Whittier
+and Longfellow--all of them sound antiquarians, though none of them in
+sympathy with the theology of Puritanism--have described in fit terms
+the bareness of the New England meeting-house. What intellectual
+severity and strain was there; what prodigality of learning; what
+blazing intensity of devotion; what pathos of women's patience, and of
+children, prematurely old, stretched upon the rack of insoluble
+problems! What dramas of the soul were played through to the end in
+those barn-like buildings, where the musket, perhaps, stood in the
+corner of the pew! "How aweful is this place!" must have been murmured
+by the lips of all; though there were many who have added, "This is the
+gate of Heaven."
+
+The gentler side of colonial religion is winningly portrayed in
+Whittier's _Pennsylvania Pilgrim_ and in his imaginary journal of
+Margaret Smith. There were sunnier slopes, warmer exposures for the
+ripening of the human spirit, in the Southern colonies. Even in New
+England there was sporadic revolt from the beginning. The number of
+non-church-members increased rapidly after 1700; Franklin as a youth in
+Boston admired Cotton Mather's ability, but he did not go to church,
+"Sunday being my studying day." Doubtless there were always humorous
+sceptics like Mrs. Stowe's delightful Sam Lawson in _Oldtown Folks_.
+Lawson's comment on Parson Simpson's service epitomizes two centuries
+of New England thinking. "Wal," said Sam, "Parson Simpson's a smart
+man; but I tell ye, it's kind o' discouragin'. Why, he said our state
+and condition by natur was just like this. We was clear down in a well
+fifty feet deep, and the sides all round nothin' but glare ice; but we
+was under immediate obligations to get out, 'cause we was free,
+voluntary agents. But nobody ever had got out, and nobody would, unless
+the Lord reached down and took 'em. And whether he would or not nobody
+could tell; it was all sovereignty. He said there wan't one in a
+hundred, not one in a thousand,--not one in ten thousand,--that would
+be saved. Lordy massy, says I to myself, ef that's so they're any of
+'em welcome to my chance. _And so I kind o' ris up and come out._"
+
+Mrs. Stowe's novel is fairly representative of a great mass of
+derivative literature which draws its materials from the meeting-house
+period of American history. But the direct literature of that period
+has passed almost wholly into oblivion. Jonathan Edwards had one of the
+finest minds of his century; no European standard of comparison is too
+high for him; he belongs with Pascal, with Augustine, if you like, with
+Dante. But his great treatises written in the Stockbridge woods are
+known only to a few technical students of philosophy. One terrible
+sermon, preached at Enfield in 1741, is still read by the curious; but
+scarcely anybody knows of the ineffable tenderness, dignity, and pathos
+of his farewell sermon to his flock at Northampton: and the Yale
+Library possesses nearly twelve hundred of Edwards's sermons which have
+never been printed at all. Nor does anybody, save here and there an
+antiquarian, read Shepard and Hooker and Mayhew. And yet these
+preachers and their successors furnished the emotional equivalents of
+great prose and verse to generations of men. "That is poetry," says
+Professor Saintsbury (in a dangerous latitudinarianism, perhaps!),
+"which gives the reader the feeling of poetry." Here we touch one of
+the fundamental characteristics of our national state of mind, in its
+relation to literature. We are careless of form and type, yet we crave
+the emotional stimulus. Milton, greatest of Puritan poets, was read and
+quoted all too seldom in the Puritan colonies, and yet those colonists
+were no strangers to the emotions of sublimity and awe and beauty. They
+found them in the meeting-house instead of in a book; precisely as, in
+a later day, millions of Americans experienced what was for them the
+emotional equivalent of poetry in the sermons of Henry Ward Beecher and
+Phillips Brooks. French pulpit oratory of the seventeenth century wins
+recognition as a distinct type of literature; its great practitioners,
+like Massillon, Bourdaloue, Bossuet, are appraised in all the histories
+of the national literature and in books devoted to the evolution of
+literary species. In the American colonies the great preachers
+performed the functions of men of letters without knowing it. They have
+been treated with too scant respect in the histories of American
+literature. It is one of the penalties of Protestantism that the
+audiences, after a while, outgrow the preacher. The development of the
+historic sense, of criticism, of science, makes an impassable gulf
+between Jonathan Edwards and the American churches of the twentieth
+century. A sense of profound changes in theology has left our
+contemporaries indifferent to the literature in which the old theology
+was clothed.
+
+There is one department of American literary production, of which
+Bossuet's famous sermon on Queen Henrietta Maria of England may serve
+to remind us, which illustrates significantly the national idealism. I
+mean the commemorative oration. The addresses upon the Pilgrim Fathers
+by such orators as Everett, Webster, and Choate; the countless orations
+before such organizations as the New England Society of New York and
+the Phi Beta Kappa; the papers read before historical and patriotic
+societies; the birthday and centenary discourses upon national figures
+like Washington or Lincoln, have all performed, and are still
+performing, an inestimable service in stimulating popular loyalty to
+the idealism of the fathers. As literature, most of this production is
+derivative: we listen to eloquence about the Puritans, but we do not
+read the Puritans; the description of Arthur Dimmesdale's election
+sermon in _The Scarlet Letter_, moving as it may be, tempts no one to
+open the stout collections of election sermons in the libraries. Yet
+the original literature of mediæval chivalry is known only to a few
+scholars: Tennyson's _Idylls_ outsell the _Mabinogion_ and Malory. The
+actual world of literature is always shop-worn; a world chiefly of
+second-hand books, of warmed-over emotions and it is not surprising
+that many listeners to orations about Lincoln do not personally emulate
+Lincoln, and that many of the most enthusiastic dealers in the
+sentiment of the ancestral meeting-house do not themselves attend
+church.
+
+The other ingredients of John Adams's ideal Commonwealth are no less
+significant of our national disposition. Take the school-house. It was
+planted in the wilderness for the training of boys and girls and for a
+future "godly and learned ministry." The record of American education
+is a long story of idealism which has touched literature at every turn.
+The "red school-house" on the hill-top or at the cross-roads, the
+"log-colleges" in forgotten hamlets, the universities founded by great
+states, are all a record of the American faith--which has sometimes
+been called a fetich--in education. In its origin, it was a part of the
+essential programme of Calvinism to make a man able to judge for
+himself upon the most momentous questions; a programme, too, of that
+political democracy which lay embedded in the tenets of Calvinism, a
+democracy which believes and must continue to believe that an educated
+electorate can safeguard its own interests and train up its own
+leaders. The poetry of the American school-house was written long ago
+by Whittier, in describing Joshua Coffin's school under the big elm on
+the cross-road in East Haverhill; its humor and pathos and drama have
+been portrayed by innumerable story-writers and essayists. Mrs. Martha
+Baker Dunn's charming sketches, entitled "Cicero in Maine" and "Virgil
+in Maine," indicate the idealism once taught in the old rural
+academies,--and it is taught there still. City men will stop wistfully
+on the street, in the first week of September, to watch the boys and
+girls go trudging off to their first day of school; men who believe in
+nothing else at least believe in that! And school and college and
+university remain, as in the beginning, the first garden-ground and the
+last refuge of literature.
+
+That "town-meeting" which John Adams thought Virginia might do well to
+adopt has likewise become a symbol of American idealism. Together with
+the training-day, it represented the rights and duties and privileges
+of free men; the machinery of self-government. It was democracy, rather
+than "representative" government, under its purest aspect. Sentiments
+of responsibility to the town, the political unit, and to the
+Commonwealth, the group of units, were bred there. Likewise, it was a
+training-school for sententious speech and weighty action; its roots,
+as historians love to demonstrate, run back very far; and though the
+modern drift to cities has made its machinery ineffective in the larger
+communities, it remains a perpetual spring or feeding stream to the
+broader currents of our national life. Without an understanding of the
+town-meeting and its equivalents, our political literature loses much
+of its significance. Like the school-house and meeting-house, it has
+become glorified by our men of letters. John Fiske and other historians
+have celebrated it in some of the most brilliant pages of our political
+writing; and that citizen literature, so deeply characteristic of us,
+found in the plain, forthright, and public-spirited tone of
+town-meeting discussions its keynote. The spectacular debates of our
+national history, the dramatic contests in the great arena of the
+Senate Chamber, the discussions before huge popular audiences in the
+West, have maintained the civic point of view, have developed and
+dignified and enriched the prose style first employed by American
+freemen in deciding their local affairs in the presence of their
+neighbors. "I am a part of this people," said Lincoln proudly in one of
+his famous debates of 1858; "I was raised just a little east of here";
+and this nearness to the audience, this directness and simplicity and
+genuineness of our best political literature, its homely persuasiveness
+and force, is an inheritance of the town-meeting.
+
+Bible and meeting-house, school-house and town-meeting, thus illustrate
+concretely the responsiveness of the American character to idealistic
+impulses. They are external symbols of a certain state of mind. It may
+indeed be urged that they are primarily signs of a moral and social or
+institutional trend, and are therefore non-literary evidence of
+American idealism. Nevertheless, institutional as they may be deemed,
+they lie close to that poetry of daily duty in which our literature has
+not been poor. They are fundamentally related to that attitude of mind,
+that habitual temper of the spirit, which has produced, in all
+countries of settled use and wont, the literature of idealism.
+Brunetière said of Flaubert's most famous woman character that poor
+Emma Bovary, the prey and the victim of Romantic desires, was after all
+much like the rest of us except that she lacked the intelligence to
+perceive the charm and poetry of the daily task. We have already
+touched upon the purely romantic side of American energy and of
+American imagination, and we must shortly look more closely still at
+those impulses of daring, those moods of heightened feeling, that
+intensified individualism, the quest of strangeness and terror and
+wild beauty, which characterize our romantic writing. But this
+romanticism is, as it were, a segment of the larger circle of idealism.
+It is idealism accentuated by certain factors, driven to
+self-expression by the passions of scorn or of desire; it exceeds, in
+one way or another, the normal range of experience and emotion. Our
+romantic American literature is doubtless our greatest. And yet some of
+the most characteristic tendencies of American writing are to be found
+in the poetry of daily experience, in the quiet accustomed light that
+falls upon one's own doorway and garden, in the immemorial charm of
+going forth to one's labor and returning in the evening,--poetry old as
+the world.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Let us see how this glow of idealism touches some of the more intimate
+aspects of human experience. "Out of the three Reverences," says
+Wilhelm Meister, "springs the highest Reverence, Reverence for
+Oneself." Open the pages of Hawthorne. Moving wholly within the
+framework of established institutions, with no desire to shatter the
+existing scheme of social order, choosing as its heroes men of the
+meeting-house, town-meeting, and training-day, how intensely
+nevertheless does the imagination of this fiction-writer illuminate the
+Body and the Soul!
+
+Take first the Body. The inheritance of English Puritanism may be
+traced throughout our American writing, in its reverence for physical
+purity. The result is something unique in literary history. Continental
+critics, while recognizing the intellectual and artistic powers
+revealed in _The Scarlet Letter_, have seldom realized the awfulness,
+to the Puritan mind, of the very thought of an adulterous minister.
+That a priest in southern Europe should break his vows is indeed
+scandalous; but the sin is regarded as a failure of the natural man to
+keep a vow requiring supernatural grace for its fulfilment; it may be
+that the priest had no vocation for his sacred office; he is unfrocked,
+punished, forgotten, yet a certain mantle of human charity still covers
+his offence. But in the Puritan scheme (and _The Scarlet Letter_, save
+for that one treacherous, warm human moment in the woodland where "all
+was spoken," lies wholly within the set framework of Puritanism) there
+is no forgiveness for a sin of the flesh. There is only Law, Law
+stretching on into infinitude until the mind shudders at it. Hawthorne
+knew his Protestant New England through and through. _The Scarlet
+Letter_ is the most striking example in our national literature of that
+idealization of physical purity, but hundreds of other romances and
+poems, less morbid if less great, assert in unmistakable terms the same
+moral conviction, the same ideal.
+
+Yet, in spite of its theme, there was never a less adulterous novel
+than this book which plays so artistically with the letter A. The body
+is branded, is consumed, is at last, perhaps, transfigured by the
+intense rays of light emitted from the suffering soul.
+
+    "The soul is form and doth the body make."
+
+In this intense preoccupation with the Soul, Hawthorne's romance is in
+unison with the more mystical and spiritual utterances of Catholicism
+as well as of Protestantism. It was in part a resultant of that early
+American isolation which contributed so effectively to the artistic
+setting of _The Scarlet Letter_. But in his doctrine of spiritual
+integrity, in the agonized utterance, "Be true--be true!" as well as
+in his reverence for purity of the body, our greatest romancer was
+typical of the imaginative literature of his countrymen. The restless
+artistic experiments of Poe presented the human body in many a ghastly
+and terrifying aspect of illness and decay, and distorted by all
+passions save one. His imagination was singularly sexless. Pathological
+students have pointed out the relation between this characteristic of
+Poe's writing, and his known tendencies toward opium-eating,
+alcoholism, and tuberculosis. But no such explanation is at hand to
+elucidate the absence of sexual passion from the novels of the
+masculine-minded Fenimore Cooper. One may say, indeed, that Cooper's
+novels, like Scott's, lack intensity of spiritual vision; that their
+tone is consonant with the views of a sound Church of England parson in
+the eighteenth century; and that the absence of physical passion, like
+the absence of purely spiritual insight, betrays a certain defect in
+Cooper's imaginative grasp and depth. But it is better criticism, after
+all, to remember that these three pioneers in American fiction-writing
+were composing for an audience in which Puritan traditions or tastes
+were predominant. Not one of the three men but would have instantly
+sacrificed an artistic effect, legitimate in the eyes of Fielding or
+Goethe or Balzac, rather than--in the phrase so often satirized--"bring
+a blush to the cheek of innocence." In other words, the presence of a
+specific audience, accustomed to certain Anglo-Saxon and Puritanic
+restraint of topic and of speech, has from the beginning of our
+imaginative literature coöperated with the instinct of our writers.
+That Victorian reticence which is so plainly seen even in such
+full-bodied writers as Dickens or Thackeray--a reticence which men like
+Mr. Bernard Shaw and Mr. Galsworthy and Mr. Wells think so hypocritical
+and dangerous to society and which they have certainly done their
+utmost to abolish--has hitherto dominated our American writing. The
+contemporary influence of great Continental writers to whom reticence
+is unknown, combined with the influence of a contemporary opera and
+drama to which reticence would be unprofitable, are now assaulting this
+dominant convention. Very possibly it is doomed. But it is only within
+recent years that its rule has been questioned.
+
+One result of it may, I think, be fairly admitted. While very few
+writers of eminence, after all, in any country, wish to bring a "blush
+to the cheek of innocence," they naturally wish, as Thackeray put it in
+one of the best-known of his utterances, to be permitted to depict a
+man to the utmost of their power. American literary conventions, like
+English conventions, have now and again laid a restraining and
+compelling hand upon the legitimate exercise of this artistic instinct;
+and this fact has coöperated with many social, ethical, and perhaps
+physiological causes to produce a thinness or bloodlessness in our
+books. They are graceful, pleasing, but pale, like one of those cool
+whitish uncertain skies of an American spring. They lack "body," like
+certain wines. It is not often that we can produce a real Burgundy. We
+have had many distinguished fiction-writers, but none with the physical
+gusto of a Fielding, a Smollett, or even a Dickens, who, idealist and
+romanticist as he was, and Victorian as were his artistic preferences,
+has this animal life which tingles upon every page. We must confess
+that there is a certain quality of American idealism which is covertly
+suspicious or openly hostile to the glories of bodily sensation.
+Emerson's thin high shoulders peep up reproachfully above the desk;
+Lanier is playing his reproachful flute; Longfellow reads Frémont's
+Rocky Mountain experiences while lying abed, and sighs "But, ah, the
+discomforts!"; Irving's _Astoria_, superb as were the possibilities of
+its physical background, tastes like parlor exploration. Even Dana's
+_Before the Mast_ and Parkman's _Oregon Trail_, transcripts of robust
+actual experience, and admirable books, reveal a sort of physical
+paleness compared with Turgenieff's _Notes of a Sportsman_ and
+Tolstoï's _Sketches_ of Sebastopol and the Crimea. They are Harvard
+undergraduate writing, after all!
+
+These facts illustrate anew that standing temptation of the critic of
+American literature to palliate literary shortcomings by the plea that
+we possess certain admirable non-literary qualities. The dominant
+idealism of the nation has levied, or seemed to levy, a certain tax
+upon our writing. Some instincts, natural to the full-blooded utterance
+of Continental literature, have been starved or eliminated here. Very
+well. The characteristic American retort to this assertion would be:
+Better our long record and habit of idealism than a few masterpieces
+more or less. As a people, we have cheerfully accepted the Puritan
+restraint of speech, we have respected the shamefaced conventions of
+decent and social utterance. Like the men and women described in
+Locker-Lampson's verses, Americans
+
+        "eat, and drink, and scheme, and plod,--
+    They go to church on Sunday;
+    And many are afraid of God--
+    And more of Mrs. Grundy."
+
+Now Mrs. Grundy is assuredly not the most desirable of literary
+divinities, but the student of classical literature can easily think of
+other divinities, celebrated in exquisite Greek and Roman verse, who
+are distinctly less desirable still.
+
+"Not passion, but sentiment," said Hawthorne, in a familiar passage of
+criticism of his own _Twice-Told Tales_. How often must the student of
+American literature echo that half-melancholy but just verdict, as he
+surveys the transition from the spiritual intensity of a few of our
+earlier writers to the sentimental qualities which have brought popular
+recognition to the many. Take the word "soul" itself. Calvinism
+shadowed and darkened the meaning, perhaps, and yet its spiritual
+passion made the word "soul" sublime. The reaction against Calvinism
+has made religion more human, natural, and possibly more Christlike,
+but "soul" has lost the thrilling solemnity with which Edwards
+pronounced the word. Emerson and Hawthorne, far as they had escaped
+from the bonds of their ancestral religion, still utter the word "soul"
+with awe. But in the popular sermon and hymn and story of our
+day,--with their search after the sympathetic and the sentimental,
+after what is called in magazine slang "heart-interest,"--the word has
+lost both its intellectual distinction and its literary magic. It will
+regain neither until it is pronounced once more with spiritual passion.
+
+But in literature, as in other things, we must take what we can get.
+The great mass of our American writing is sentimental, because it has
+been produced by, and for, an excessively sentimental people. The poems
+in Stedman's carefully chosen _Anthology_, the prose and verse in the
+two volume Stedman-Hutchinson collection of American Literature, the
+Library of Southern Literature, and similar sectional anthologies, the
+school Readers and Speakers,--particularly in the half-century between
+1830 and 1880,--our newspapers and magazines,--particularly the
+so-called "yellow" newspapers and the illustrated magazines typified by
+_Harper's Monthly_,--are all fairly dripping with sentiment. American
+oratory is notoriously the most sentimental oratory of the civilized
+world. The _Congressional Record_ still presents such specimens of
+sentiment--delivered or given leave to be printed, it is true, for
+"home consumption" rather than to affect the course of legislation--as
+are inexplicable to an Englishman or a Frenchman or an Italian.
+
+Immigrants as we all are, and migratory as we have ever been,--so much
+so that one rarely meets an American who was born in the house built by
+his grandfather,--we cling with peculiar fondness to the sentiment of
+"Home." The best-known American poem, for decades, was Samuel
+Woodworth's "Old Oaken Bucket," the favorite popular song was Stephen
+Foster's "My Old Kentucky Home," the favorite play was Denman
+Thompson's "Old Homestead." Without that appealing word "mother" the
+American melodrama would be robbed of its fifth act. Without pictures
+of "the child" the illustrated magazines would go into bankruptcy. No
+country has witnessed such a production of periodicals and books for
+boys and girls: France and Germany imitate in vain _The Youth's
+Companion_ and _St. Nicholas_, as they did the stories of "Oliver
+Optic" and _Little Women_ and _Little Lord Fauntleroy_.
+
+The sentimental attitude towards women and children, which is one of
+the most typical aspects of American idealism, is constantly
+illustrated in our short stories. Bret Harte, disciple of Dickens as he
+was, and Romantic as was his fashion of dressing up his miners and
+gamblers, was accurately faithful to the American feeling towards the
+"kid" and the "woman." "Tennessee's Partner," "The Luck of Roaring
+Camp," "Christmas at Sandy Bar," are obvious examples. Owen Wister's
+stories are equally faithful and admirable in this matter. The American
+girl still does astonishing things in international novels, as she has
+continued to do since the eighteen-sixties, but they are astonishing
+mainly to the European eye and against the conventionalized European
+background. She does the same things at home, and neither she nor her
+mother sees why she should not, so universal among us is the chivalrous
+interpretation of actions and situations which amaze the European
+observer. The popular American literature which recognizes and
+encourages this position of the "young girl" in our social structure is
+a literature primarily of sentiment. The note of passion--in the
+European sense of that word--jars and shatters it. The imported
+"problem-play," written for an adult public in Paris or London,
+introduces social facts and intellectual elements almost wholly alien
+to the experience of American matinée audiences. Disillusioned
+historians of our literature have instanced this unsophistication as a
+proof of our national inexperience; yet it is often a sort of radiant
+and triumphant unsophistication which does not lose its innocence in
+parting with its ignorance.
+
+That sentimental idealization of classes, whether peasant, bourgeois,
+or aristocratic, which has long been a feature of Continental and
+English poetry and fiction, is practically absent from American
+literature. Whatever the future may bring, there have hitherto been no
+fixed classes in American society. Webster was guilty of no
+exaggeration when he declared that the whole North was made up of
+laborers, and Lincoln spoke in the same terms in his well-known
+sentences about "hired laborers": "twenty-five years ago I was a hired
+laborer." The relative uniformity of economic and social conditions,
+which prevailed until toward the close of the nineteenth century, made,
+no doubt, for the happiness of the greatest number, but it failed,
+naturally, to afford that picturesqueness of class contrast and to
+stimulate that sentiment of class distinction, in which European
+literature is so rich.
+
+Very interesting, in the light of contemporary economic conditions, is
+the effort made by American poets in the middle of the last century to
+glorify labor. They were not so much idealizing a particular laboring
+class, as endeavoring, in Whitman's words, "To teach the average man
+the glory of his walk and trade." Whitman himself sketched the American
+workman in almost every attitude which appealed to his own sense of the
+picturesque and heroic. But years before _Leaves of Grass_ was
+published, Whittier had celebrated in his _Songs of Labor_ the
+glorified images of lumberman and drover, shoemaker and fisherman. Lucy
+Larcom and the authors of _The Lowell Offering_ portrayed the fine
+idealism of the young women--of the best American stock--who went
+enthusiastically to work in the cotton-mills of Lowell and Lawrence, or
+who bound shoes by their own firesides on the Essex County farms. That
+glow of enthusiasm for labor was chiefly moral, but it was poetical as
+well. The changes which have come over the economic and social life of
+America are nowhere more sharply indicated than in that very valley of
+the Merrimac where, sixty and seventy years ago, one could "hear
+America singing." There are few who are singing to-day in the
+cotton-mills; the operators, instead of girls from the hill-farms, are
+Greeks, Lithuanians, Armenians, Italians. Whittier's drovers have gone
+forever; the lumbermen and deep-sea fishermen have grown fewer, and the
+men who still swing the axes and haul the frozen cod-lines are mostly
+aliens. The pride that once broke into singing has turned harsh and
+silent. "Labor" looms vast upon the future political and social
+horizon, but the songs of labor have lost the lyric note. They have
+turned into the dramas and tragedies of labor, as portrayed with the
+swift and fierce insistence of the short story, illustrated by the
+Kodak. In the great agricultural sections of the West and South the
+old bucolic sentiment still survives,--that simple joy of seeing the
+"frost upon the pumpkin" and "the fodder in the stock" which Mr. James
+Whitcomb Riley has sung with such charming fidelity to the type. But
+even on the Western farms toil has grown less manual. It is more a
+matter of expert handling of machinery. Reaping and binding may still
+have their poet, but he needs to be a Kipling rather than a Burns.
+
+Our literature, then, reveals few traces of idealization of a class,
+and but little idealization of trades or callings. Neither class nor
+calling presents anything permanent to the American imagination, or
+stands for anything ultimate in American experience. On the other hand,
+our writing is rich in local sentiment and sectional loyalty. The short
+story, which has seized so greedily the more dramatic aspects of
+American energy, has been equally true to the quiet background of rural
+scenery and familiar ways. American idealism, as shown in the
+transformation of the lesser loyalties of home and countryside into the
+larger loyalties of state and section, and the absorption of these, in
+turn, into the emotions of nationalism, is particularly illustrated in
+our political verse. A striking example of the imaginative
+visualization of the political units of a state is the spirited
+roll-call of the counties in Whittier's "Massachusetts to Virginia."
+But the burden of that fine poem, after all, is the essential unity of
+Massachusetts as a sovereign state, girding herself to repel the attack
+of another sovereign state, Virginia. Now the evolution of our
+political history, both local and national, has tended steadily, for
+half a century, to the obliteration, for purposes of the imagination,
+of county lines within state lines. At the last Republican state
+convention held in Massachusetts, there were no county banners
+displayed, for the first time in half a century. Many a city-dweller
+to-day cannot tell in what county he is living unless he has happened
+to make a transfer of real estate. State lines themselves are fading
+away. The federal idea has triumphed. Doubtless the majority of the
+fellow citizens of John Randolph of Roanoke were all the more proud of
+him because the poet could say of him, in writing an admiring and
+mournful epitaph:--
+
+    "Beyond Virginia's border line
+     His patriotism perished."
+
+The great collections of Civil War verse, which are lying almost
+unread in the libraries, are store-houses of this ancient state pride
+and jealousy, which was absorbed so fatally into the larger sectional
+antagonism. "Maryland, my Maryland" gave place to "Dixie," just as
+Whittier's "Massachusetts to Virginia" was forgotten when marching men
+began to sing "John Brown's Body" and "The Battle Hymn of the
+Republic." The literature of sectionalism still lingers in its more
+lovable aspect in the verse and fiction which still celebrates the
+fairer side of the civilization of the Old South: its ideals of
+chivalry and local loyalty, its gracious women and gallant men. Our
+literature needs to cultivate this provincial affection for the past,
+as an offset to the barren uniformity which the federal scheme allows.
+But the ultimate imaginative victory, like the actual political victory
+of the Civil War, is with the thought and feeling of Nationalism. It is
+foreshadowed in that passionate lyric cry of Lowell, which sums up so
+much and, like all true passion, anticipates so much:--
+
+    "O Beautiful! my Country!"
+
+The literary record of American idealism thus illustrates how deeply
+the conception of Nationalism has affected the imagination of our
+countrymen. The literary record of the American conception of liberty
+runs further back. Some historians have allowed themselves to think
+that the American notion of liberty is essentially declamatory, a sort
+of futile echo of Patrick Henry's "Give me Liberty or give me Death";
+and not only declamatory, but hopelessly theoretical and abstract. They
+grant that it was a trumpet-note, no doubt, for agitators against the
+Stamp Act, and for pamphleteers like Thomas Paine; that it may have
+been a torch for lighting dark and weary ways in the Revolutionary War;
+but they believe it likewise to be a torch which gleams with the fire
+caught from France and which was passed back to France in turn when her
+own great bonfire was ready for lighting. The facts, however, are
+inconsistent with this picturesque theory of contemporary reactionists.
+It is true that the word "liberty" has been full of temptation for
+generations of American orators, that it has become an idol of the
+forum, and often a source of heat rather than of light. But to treat
+American Liberty as if she habitually wore the red cap is to nourish a
+Francophobia as absurd as Edmund Burke's. The sober truth is that the
+American working theory of Liberty is singularly like St. Paul's. "Ye
+have been called unto liberty; only use not liberty for an occasion to
+the flesh." A few sentences from John Winthrop, written in 1645, are
+significant: "There is a twofold liberty, natural ... and civil or
+federal. The first is common to man with beasts and other creatures. By
+this, man, as he stands in relation to man simply, hath liberty to do
+what he lists; it is a liberty to evil as well as to good. This liberty
+is incompatible and inconsistent with authority.... The other kind of
+liberty I call civil or federal, it may also be termed moral.... This
+liberty is the proper end and object of authority, and cannot subsist
+without it; and it is a liberty to that only which is good, just, and
+honest. This liberty you are to stand for, with the hazard (not only of
+your goods, but) of your lives, if need be.... This liberty is
+maintained and exercised in a way of subjection to authority; it is of
+the same kind of liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free."
+
+There speaks the governor, the man of affairs, the typical citizen of
+the future republic. The liberty to do as one pleases is a dream of
+the Renaissance; but out of dreamland it does not work. Nobody, even in
+revolutionary France, imagines that it will work. Jefferson, who is
+popularly supposed to derive his notion of liberty from French
+theorists, is to all practical purposes nearer to John Winthrop than he
+is to Rousseau. The splendid phrases of his "Declaration" are sometimes
+characterized as abstractions. They are really generalizations from
+past political experience. An arbitrary king, assuming a liberty to do
+as he liked, had encroached upon the long-standing customs and
+authority of the colonists. Jefferson, at the bidding of the
+Continental Congress, served notice of the royal trespass, and
+incidentally produced (as Lincoln said) a "standard maxim for free
+society."
+
+It is true, no doubt, that the word "liberty" became in Jefferson's
+day, and later, a mere partisan or national shibboleth, standing for no
+reality, degraded to a catchword, a symbol of antagonism to Great
+Britain. In the political debates and the impressive prose and verse of
+the anti-slavery struggle, the word became once more charged with vital
+meaning; it glowed under the heat and pressure of an idea. Towards the
+end of the nineteenth century it went temporarily out of fashion. The
+late Colonel Higginson, an ideal type of what Europeans call an "1848"
+man, attended at the close of the century some sessions of the American
+Historical Association. In his own address, at the closing dinner, he
+remarked that there was one word for which he had listened in vain
+during the reading of the papers by the younger men. It was the word
+"liberty." One of the younger school retorted promptly that since we
+had the thing liberty, we had no need to glorify the word. But Colonel
+Higginson, stanch adherent as he was of the "good old cause," was not
+convinced. Like many another lover of American letters, he thought that
+William Vaughn Moody's "Ode in Time of Hesitation" deserved a place by
+the side of Lowell's "Commemoration Ode," and that when the ultimate
+day of reckoning comes for the whole muddled Imperialistic business,
+the standard of reckoning must be "liberty" as Winthrop and Jefferson
+and Lincoln and Lowell and Vaughn Moody understood the word.
+
+In the mean time we must confess that the history of our literature,
+with a few noble exceptions, shows a surprising defect in the passion
+for freedom. Tennyson's famous lines about "Freedom broadening slowly
+down from precedent to precedent" are perfectly American in their
+conservative tone; while it is Englishmen like Byron and Landor and
+Shelley and Swinburne who have written the most magnificent republican
+poetry. The "land of the free" turns to the monarchic mother country,
+after all, for the glow and thunder and splendor of the poetry of
+freedom. It is one of the most curious phenomena in the history of
+literature. Shall we enter the preoccupation plea once more? Enjoying
+the thing liberty, have we been therefore less concerned with the idea?
+Or is it simply another illustration of the defective passion of
+American literature?
+
+Yet there is one phase of political loyalty which has been cherished by
+the imagination of Americans, and which has inspired noteworthy oratory
+and noble political prose. It is the sentiment of Union. In one sense,
+of course, this dates back to the period of Franklin's _bon mot_ about
+our all hanging together, or hanging separately. It is found in
+Hamilton's pamphlets, in Paine's _Crisis_, in the _Federalist_, in
+Washington's "Farewell Address." It is peculiarly associated with the
+name and fame of Daniel Webster, and, to a less degree, with the career
+of Henry Clay. In the stress of the debate over slavery, many a
+Northerner with abolitionist convictions, like the majority of
+Southerners with slave-holding convictions, forgot the splendid
+peroration of Webster's "Reply to Hayne" and were willing to "let the
+Union go." But in the four tragic and heroic years that followed the
+firing upon the American flag at Fort Sumter the sentiment of Union was
+made sacred by such sacrifices as the patriotic imagination of a Clay
+or a Webster had never dreamed. A new literature resulted. A lofty
+ideal of indissoluble Union was preached in pulpits, pleaded for in
+editorials, sung in lyrics, and woven into the web of fiction. Edward
+Everett Hale's _Man Without a Country_ became one of the most
+poignantly moving of American stories. In Walt Whitman's _Drum-Taps_
+and his later poems, the "Union of these States" became transfigured
+with mystical significance: no longer a mere political compact,
+dissoluble at will, but a spiritual entity, a new incarnation of the
+soul of man.
+
+We must deal later with that American instinct of fellowship which
+Whitman believed to have been finally cemented by the Civil War, and
+which has such import for the future of our democracy. There are
+likewise communal loyalties, glowing with the new idealism which has
+come with the twentieth century: ethical, municipal, industrial, and
+artistic movements which are full of promise for the higher life of the
+country, but which have not yet had time to express themselves
+adequately in literature. There are stirrings of racial loyalty among
+this and that element of our composite population,--as for instance
+among the gifted younger generation of American Jews,--a racial loyalty
+not antagonistic to the American current of ideas, but rather in full
+unison with it. Internationalism itself furnishes motives for the
+activity of the noblest imaginations, and the true literature of
+internationalism has hardly yet begun. It is in the play and
+counterplay of these new forces that the American literature of the
+twentieth century must measure itself. Communal feelings novel to
+Americans bred under the accepted individualism will doubtless assert
+themselves in our prose and verse. But it is to be remembered that the
+best writing thus far produced on American soil has been a result of
+the old conditions: of the old "Reverences"; of the pioneer training of
+mind and body; of the slow tempering of the American spirit into an
+obstinate idealism. We do not know what course the ship may take in the
+future, but
+
+    "We know what Master laid thy keel,
+    What Workman wrought thy ribs of steel,
+    Who made each mast and sail and rope,
+    What anvil rang, what hammers beat,
+    In what a forge and what a heat
+    Were shaped the anchors of thy hope!"
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+Romance and Reaction
+
+
+The characteristic attitude of the American mind, as we have seen, is
+one of idealism. We may now venture to draw a smaller circle within
+that larger circle of idealistic impulses, and to label the smaller
+circle "romance." Here, too, as with the word "idealism," although we
+are to make abundant use of literary illustrations of national
+tendencies, we have no need of a severely technical definition of
+terms. When we say, "Tom is an idealist" and "Lorenzo is a romantic
+fellow," we convey at least one tolerably clear distinction between Tom
+and Lorenzo. The idealist has a certain characteristic habit of mind or
+inclination of spirit. When confronted by experience, he reacts in a
+certain way. In his individual and social impulses, in the travail of
+his soul, or in his commerce with his neighbors and the world, he
+behaves in a more or less well-defined fashion. The romanticist, when
+confronted by the same objects and experiences, exhibits another type
+of behavior. Lorenzo, though he be Tom's brother, is a different
+fellow; he is--in the opinion of his friends, at least--a rather more
+peculiar person, a creature of more varying moods, of heightened
+feelings, of stranger ways. Like Tom, he is a person of sentiment, but
+his sentiment attaches itself, not so much to everyday aspects of
+experience, as to that which is unusual or terrifying, lovely or far
+away; he possesses, or would like to possess, bodily or spiritual
+daring. He has the adventurous heart. He is of those who love to go
+down to the sea in ships and do business in great waters. Lorenzo the
+romanticist is made of no finer clay than Tom the idealist, but his
+nerves are differently tuned. Your deep-sea fisherman, after all, is
+only a fisherman at bottom. That is to say, he too is an idealist, but
+he wants to catch different species of fish from those which drop into
+the basket of the landsman. Precisely what he covets, perhaps he does
+not know. I was once foolish enough to ask an old Alsatian soldier who
+was patiently holding his rod over a most unpromising canal near
+Strassburg, what kind of fish he was fishing for. "All kinds," was his
+rebuking answer, and I took off my hat to the veteran romanticist.
+
+The words "romance" and "romanticism" have been repeated to the ears of
+our generation with wearisome iteration. Not the least of the good luck
+of Wordsworth and Coleridge lay in the fact that they scarcely knew
+that they were "romanticists." Middle-aged readers of the present day
+may congratulate themselves that in their youth they read Wordsworth
+and Coleridge simply because it was Wordsworth and Coleridge and not
+documents illustrating the history of the romantic movement. But the
+rising generation is sophisticated. For better or worse it has been
+taught to distinguish between the word "romance" on the one side, and
+the word "romanticism" on the other. "Romantic" is a useful but
+overworked adjective which attaches itself indiscriminately to both
+"romance" and "romanticism." Professor Vaughan, for example, and a
+hundred other writers, have pointed out that in the narrower and more
+usual sense, the words "romance" and "romanticism" point to a love of
+vivid coloring and strongly marked contrasts; to a craving for the
+unfamiliar, the marvellous, and the supernatural. In the wider and
+less definite sense, they signify a revolt from the purely intellectual
+view of man's nature; a recognition of the instincts and the passions,
+a vague intimation of sympathy between man and the world around
+him,--in one word, the sense of mystery. The narrower and the broader
+meanings pass into one another by imperceptible shades. They are
+affected by the well-known historic conditions for romantic feeling in
+the different European countries. The common factor, of course, is the
+man with the romantic world set in his heart. It is Gautier with his
+love of color, Victor Hugo enraptured with the sound of words, Heine
+with his self-destroying romantic irony, Novalis with his blue flower,
+and Maeterlinck with his _Blue Bird_.
+
+But these romantic men of letters, writing in epochs of romanticism,
+are by no means the only children of romance. Sir Humphrey Gilbert and
+Sir Walter Raleigh were as truly followers of "the gleam" as were
+Spenser or Marlowe. The spirit of romance is found wherever and
+whenever men say to themselves, as Don Quixote's niece said of her
+uncle, that "they wish better bread than is made of wheat," or when
+they look within their own hearts, and assert, as the poet Young said
+in 1759, long before the English romantic movement had begun, "there is
+more in the spirit of man than mere prose-reason can fathom."
+
+We are familiar, perhaps too remorsefully familiar, with the fact that
+romance is likely to run a certain course in the individual and then to
+disappear. Looking back upon it afterward, it resembles the upward and
+downward zigzag of a fever chart. It has in fact often been described
+as a measles, a disease of which no one can be particularly proud,
+although he may have no reason to blush for it. Southey said that he
+was no more ashamed of having been a republican than of having been a
+boy. Well, people catch Byronism, and get over it, much as Southey got
+over his republicanism. In fact Byron himself lived long enough--though
+he died at thirty-six--to outgrow his purely "Byronic" phase, and to
+smile at it as knowingly as we do. Coleridge's blossoming period as a
+romantic poet was tragically brief. Keats and Shelley had the good
+fortune to die in the fulness of their romantic glory. They did not
+outlive their own poetic sense of the wonder and mystery of the world.
+Yet many an old poet like Tennyson and Browning has preserved his
+romance to the end. Tennyson dies at eighty-three with the full
+moonlight streaming through the oriel window upon his bed, and with his
+fingers clasping Shakespeare's _Cymbeline_.
+
+With most of us commonplace persons, however, a reaction from the
+romantic is almost inevitable. The romantic temperament cannot long
+keep the pitch. Poe could indeed do it, although he hovered at times
+near the border of insanity. Hawthorne went for relief to his profane
+sea-captains and the carnal-minded superannuated employees of the Salem
+Custom House. "The weary weight of all this unintelligible world"
+presses too hard on most of those who stop to think about it. The
+simplest way of relief is to shrug one's shoulders and let the weight
+go. That is to say, we cease being poets, we are no longer the children
+of romance, although we may remain idealists. Perhaps it is external
+events that change, rather than we ourselves. The restoration of the
+Bourbons, the Revolutions of 1830 and 1848, make and unmake romantics.
+Often society catches up with the romanticist; he is no longer a
+soldier of revolt; he has become a "respectable." Or, while remaining a
+poet, he shifts his attention to some more familiar segment of the
+idealistic circle. He sings about his wife instead of the wife of
+somebody else. Like Wordsworth, he takes for his theme a Mary
+Hutchinson instead of the unknown and hauntingly alluring figure of
+Lucy. To put it differently, the high light, the mysterious color of
+dawn or sunset disappears from his picture of human life. Or, the high
+light may be diffused in a more tranquil radiance over the whole
+surface of experience. Such an artist may remain a true painter or
+poet, but he is not a romantic poet or painter any longer. He has, like
+the aging Emerson, taken in sail; the god Terminus has said to him, "no
+more."
+
+One must of course admit that the typical romanticist has often been
+characterized by certain intellectual and moral weaknesses. But the
+great romance men, like Edmund Spenser, for example, may not possess
+these weaknesses at all. Robert Louis Stevenson was passionately in
+love with the romantic in life and with romanticism in literature; but
+it did not make him eccentric, weak, or empty. His instinct for
+enduring romance was so admirably fine that it brought strength to the
+sinews of his mind, light and air and fire to his soul. Among the
+writers of our own day, it is Mr. Kipling who has written some of the
+keenest satire upon romantic foibles, while never ceasing to salute his
+real mistress, the true romance.
+
+    "Who wast, or yet the Lights were set,
+      A whisper in the void,
+    Who shalt be sung through planets young
+      When this is clean destroyed."
+
+What are the causes of American romance, the circumstances and
+qualities that have produced the romantic element in American life and
+character? Precisely as with the individual artist or man of letters,
+we touch first of all upon certain temperamental inclinations. It is a
+question again of the national mind, of the differentiation of the race
+under new climatic and physical conditions. We have to reckon with the
+headiness and excitability of youth. It was young men who emigrated
+hither, just as in the eighteen-sixties it was young men who filled the
+Northern and the Southern armies. The first generations of American
+immigration were made up chiefly of vigorous, imaginative, and daring
+youth. The incapables came later. It is, I think, safe to assert that
+the colonists of English stock, even as late as 1790,--when more than
+ninety per cent of the population of America had in their veins the
+blood of the British Isles,--were more responsive to romantic impulses
+than their English cousins. For that matter, an Irishman or a Welshman
+is more romantic than an Englishman to-day.
+
+From the very beginning of the American settlements, likewise, there
+were evidences of the weaker, the over-excitable side of the romantic
+temper. There were volatile men like Morton of Merrymount; there were
+queer women like Anne Hutchinson, admirable woman as she was; among the
+wives of the colonists there were plenty of Emily Dickinsons in the
+germ. Among the men, there were schemes that came to nothing. There
+were prototypes of Colonel Sellers; a temperamental tendency toward
+that recklessness and extravagance which later historical conditions
+stimulated and confirmed. The more completely one studies the history
+of our forefathers on American soil, the more deeply does one become
+conscious of the prevailing atmosphere of emotionalism.
+
+Furthermore, as one examines the historic conditions under which the
+spirit of American romance has been preserved and heightened from time
+to time, one becomes aware that although ours is rather a romance of
+wonder than of beauty, the spirit of beauty is also to be found. The
+first fervors of the romance of discovery were childlike in their
+eagerness. Hakluyt's _Voyages_, John Smith's _True Relation of
+Virginia_, Thomas Morton's _New England's Canaan_, all appeal to the
+sense of the marvellous.
+
+Listen to Morton's description of Cape Ann. I can never read it without
+thinking of Botticelli's picture of Spring, so naïvely does this
+picturesque rascal suffuse his landscape with the feeling for beauty:--
+
+     "In the Moneth of June, Anno Salutis 1622, it was my chaunce
+     to arrive in the parts of New England with 30. Servants, and
+     provision of all sorts fit for a plantation: and whiles our
+     howses were building, I did indeavour to take a survey of
+     the Country: The more I looked, the more I liked it. And
+     when I had more seriously considered of the bewty of the
+     place, with all her faire indowments, I did not thinke that
+     in all the knowne world it could be paralel'd, for so many
+     goodly groves of trees, dainty fine round rising hillucks,
+     delicate faire large plaines, sweete cristall fountaines,
+     and cleare running streames that twine in fine meanders
+     through the meads, making so sweete a murmering noise to
+     heare as would even lull the sences with delight a sleepe,
+     so pleasantly doe they glide upon the pebble stones, jetting
+     most jocundly where they doe meete and hand in hand runne
+     downe to Neptunes Court, to pay the yearely tribute which
+     they owe to him as soveraigne Lord of all the springs.
+     Contained within the volume of the Land, Fowles in
+     abundance, Fish in multitude; and discovered, besides,
+     Millions of Turtledoves on the greene boughes, which sate
+     pecking of the full ripe pleasant grapes that were supported
+     by the lusty trees, whose fruitful loade did cause the armes
+     to bend: while here and there dispersed, you might see
+     Lillies and the Daphnean-tree: which made the Land to mee
+     seeme paradice: for in mine eie t'was Natures Masterpeece;
+     Her cheifest Magazine of all where lives her store: if this
+     Land be not rich, then is the whole world poore."
+
+This is the Morton who, a few years later, settled at Merrymount. Let
+me condense the story of his settlement, from the narrative of the
+stout-hearted Governor William Bradford's _History of Plymouth
+Plantation_:--
+
+    "And Morton became lord of misrule, and maintained (as it
+    were) a schoole of Athisme. And after they had gott some good
+    into their hands, and gott much by trading with the Indeans,
+    they spent it as vainly, in quaffing & drinking both wine &
+    strong waters in great exsess, and, as some reported 10£.
+    worth in a morning. They allso set up a May-pole, drinking
+    and dancing aboute it many days togeather, inviting the
+    Indean women, for their consorts, dancing and frisking
+    togither, (like so many fairies, or furies rather,) and worse
+    practises. As if they had anew revived & celebrated the
+    feasts of the Roman Goddes Flora, or the beasly practieses of
+    the madd Bacchinalians. Morton likewise (to shew his poetrie)
+    composed sundry rimes & verses, some tending to
+    lasciviousnes, and others to the detraction & scandall of
+    some persons, which he affixed to this idle or idoll
+    May-polle. They chainged allso the name of their place, and
+    in stead of calling it Mounte Wollaston, they call it
+    Merie-mounte, as if this joylity would have lasted ever."
+
+But it did not last long. Bradford and other leaders of the plantations
+"agreed by mutual consent" to "suppress Morton and his consorts." "In a
+friendly and neighborly way" they admonished him. "Insolently he
+persisted." "Upon which they saw there was no way but to take him by
+force." "So they mutually resolved to proceed," and sent Captain
+Standish to summon him to yield. But, says Bradford, Morton and some of
+his crew came out, not to yield, but to shoot; all of them rather
+drunk; Morton himself, with a carbine almost half filled with powder
+and shot, had thought to have shot Captain Standish, "_but he stepped
+to him and put by his piece and took him_."
+
+It is not too fanciful to say that with those stern words of Governor
+Bradford the English Renaissance came to an end. The dream of a lawless
+liberty which has been dreamed and dreamed out so many times in the
+history of the world was over, for many a day. It was only a hundred
+years earlier that Rabelais had written over the doors of his ideal
+abbey, the motto "Do what thou wilt." It is true that Rabelais proposed
+to admit to his Abbey of Thélème only such men and women as were
+virtuously inclined. We do not know how many persons would have been
+able and willing to go into residence there. At any rate, two hundred
+years went by in New England after the fall of Morton before any
+notable spirit dared to cherish once more the old Renaissance ideal. At
+last, in Emerson's doctrine that all things are lawful because Nature
+is good and human nature is divine, we have a curious parallel to the
+doctrine of Rabelais. It was the old romance of human will under a new
+form and voiced in new accents. Yet in due time the hard facts of human
+nature reasserted themselves and put this romantic transcendentalism
+by, even as the implacable Myles Standish put by that heavily loaded
+fowling-piece of the drunken Morton.
+
+But men believed in miracles in the first century of colonization, and
+they will continue at intervals to believe in them until human nature
+is no more. The marvellous happenings recorded in Cotton Mather's
+_Magnalia_ no longer excite us to any "suspension of disbelief." We
+doubt the story of Pocahontas. The fresh romantic enthusiasm of a
+settler like Crèvecoeur seems curiously juvenile to-day, as does the
+romantic curiosity of Chateaubriand concerning the Mississippi and the
+Choctaws, or the zeal of Wordsworth and Coleridge over their dream of a
+"panti-Socratic" community in the unknown valley of the
+musically-sounding Susquehanna. Inexperience is a perpetual feeder of
+the springs of romance. John Wesley, it will be remembered, went out to
+the colony of Georgia full of enthusiasm for converting the Indians;
+but as he naïvely remarks in his _Journal_, he "neither found or heard
+of any Indians on the continent of America, who had the least desire of
+being instructed." The sense of fact, in other words, supervenes, and
+the glory disappears from the face of romance. The humor of Mark
+Twain's _Innocents Abroad_ turns largely upon this sense of remorseless
+fact confronting romantic inexperience.
+
+American history, however, has been marked by certain great romantic
+passions that seem endowed with indestructible vitality. The romance of
+discovery, the fascination of the forest and sea, the sense of danger
+and mystery once aroused by the very word "redskin," have all moulded
+and will continue to mould the national imagination. How completely
+the romance of discovery may be fused with the glow of humanitarian
+and religious enthusiasm has been shown once for all in the brilliant
+pages of Parkman's story of the Jesuit missions in Canada. Pictorial
+romance can scarcely go further than this. In the crisis of
+Chateaubriand's picturesque and passionate tale of the American
+wilderness, no one can escape the thrilling, haunting sound of the bell
+from the Jesuit chapel, as it tolls in the night and storm that were
+fatal to the happiness of Atala. One scarcely need say that the romance
+of missions has never faded from the American mind. I have known a
+sober New England deacon aged eighty-five, who disliked to die because
+he thought he should miss the monthly excitement of reading the
+_Missionary Herald_. The deacon's eyes, like the eyes of many an old
+sea-captain in Salem or Newburyport, were literally upon the ends of
+the earth. No one can reckon how many starved souls, deprived of normal
+outlet for human feeling, have found in this passionate curiosity and
+concern for the souls of black and yellow men and women in the
+antipodes, a constant source of beneficent excitement.
+
+Nor is there any diminution of interest in the mere romance of
+adventure, in the stories of hunter and trapper, the journals of Lewis
+and Clarke, the narratives of Boone and Crockett. In writing his superb
+romances of the Northern Lakes, the prairie and the sea, Fenimore
+Cooper had merely to bring to an artistic focus sentiments that lay
+deep in the souls of the great mass of his American readers. Students
+of our social life have pointed out again and again how deeply our
+national temperament has been affected by the existence, during nearly
+three hundred years, of an alien aboriginal race forever lurking upon
+the borders of our civilization. "Playing Indian" has been immensely
+significant, not merely in stimulating the outdoor activity of
+generations of American boys, but in teaching them the perennial
+importance of certain pioneer qualities of observation,
+resourcefulness, courage, and endurance which date from the time when
+the Indians were a daily and nightly menace. Even when the Indian has
+been succeeded by the cowboy, the spirit of romance still lingers,--as
+any collection of cowboy ballads will abundantly prove. And when the
+cowboys pass, and the real-estate dealers take possession of the
+field, one is tempted to say that romance flourishes more than ever.
+
+In short, things are what we make them at the moment, what we believe
+them to be. In my grandfather's youth the West was in the neighborhood
+of Port Byron, New York, and when he journeyed thither from
+Massachusetts in the eighteen-twenties, the glory of adventure enfolded
+him as completely as the boys of the preceding generation had been
+glorified in the War of the Revolution, or the boys of the next
+generation when they went gold-seeking in California in 1849. The West,
+in short, means simply the retreating horizon, the beckoning finger of
+opportunity. Like Boston, it has been not a place, but a "state of
+mind."
+
+    "We must go, go, go away from here,
+    On the other side the world we're overdue."
+
+That is the song which sings itself forever in the heart of youth.
+Champlain and Cartier heard it in the sixteenth century, Bradford no
+less than Morton in the seventeenth. Some Eldorado has always been
+calling to the more adventurous spirits upon American soil. The
+passion of the forty-niner neither began nor ended with the discovery
+of gold in California. It is within us. It transmutes the harsh or
+drab-colored everyday routine into tissue of fairyland. It makes our
+"winning of the West" a magnificent national epic. It changes to-day
+the black belt of Texas, or the wheat-fields of Dakota, into pots of
+gold that lie at the end of rainbows, only that the pot of gold is
+actually there. The human hunger of it all, the gorgeous dream-like
+quality of it all, the boundlessness of the vast American spaces, the
+sense of forest and prairie and sky, are all inexplicably blended with
+our notion of the ideal America. Henry James once tried to explain the
+difference between Turgenieff and a typical French novelist by saying
+that the back door of the Russian's imagination was always open upon
+the endless Russian steppe. No one can understand the spirit of
+American romance if he is not conscious of this ever-present hinterland
+in which our spirits have, from the beginning, taken refuge and found
+solace.
+
+We have already noticed, in the chapter on idealism, how swiftly the
+American imagination modifies the prosaic facts of everyday
+experience. The idealistic glamour which falls upon the day's work
+changes easily, in the more emotional temperaments, and at times,
+indeed, in all of us, into the fervor of true romance. Then, the
+prosaic buying and selling becomes the "game." A combination of buyers
+and sellers becomes the "system." The place where these buyers and
+sellers most do congregate and concentrate becomes "Wall Street"--a
+sort of anthropomorphic monster which seems to buy and sell the bodies
+and souls of men. Seen half a continent away, through the mists of
+ignorance and prejudice and partisan passion, "Wall Street" has loomed
+like some vast Gibraltar. To the broker's clerk who earns his weekly
+salary in that street, the Nebraska notion of "Wall Street" is too
+grotesque for discussion.
+
+How easily every phase of American business life may take on the hues
+of romance is illustrated by the history of our railroads. No wonder
+that Bret Harte wrote a poem about the meeting of the eastward and
+westward facing engines when the two sections of the Union Pacific
+Railroad at last drew near each other on the interminable plains and
+the two engines could talk. Of course what they said was poetry. There
+was a time when even the Erie Canal was poetic. The Panama Canal
+to-day, in the eyes of most Americans, is something other than a mere
+feat of engineering. We are doing more than making "the dirt fly." The
+canal represents victory over hostile forces, conquest of unwilling
+Nature, achievement of what had long been deemed impossible, the making
+not of a ditch, but of History.
+
+So with all that American zest for camping, fishing, sailing, racing,
+which lies deep in the Anglo-Saxon, and which succeeds to the more
+primitive era of actual struggle against savage beasts or treacherous
+men or mysterious forests. It is at once an outlet and a nursery for
+romantic emotion. The out-of-doors movement which began with Thoreau's
+hut on Walden Pond, and which has gone on broadening and deepening to
+this hour, implies far more than mere variation from routine. It
+furnishes, indeed, a healthful escape from the terrific pressure of
+modern social and commercial exigencies. Yet its more important
+function is to provide for grown-ups a chance to "play Indian" too.
+
+But outdoors and indoors, after all, lie in the heart and mind, rather
+than in the realm of actual experience. The romantic imagination
+insists upon taking its holiday, whether the man who possesses it gets
+his holiday or not. I have never known a more truly romantic figure
+than a certain tin-pedler in Connecticut who, in response to the
+question, "Do you do a good business?" made this perfectly Stevensonian
+reply: "Well, I make a living selling crockery and tinware, but my
+_business_ is the propagation of truth."
+
+This wandering idealist may serve to remind us again of the difference
+between romance and romanticism. The true romance is of the spirit.
+Romanticism shifts and changes with external fortunes, with altering
+emotions, with the alternate play of light and shade over the vast
+landscape of human experience. The typical romanticist, as we have
+seen, is a man of moods. It is only a Poe who can keep the pitch
+through the whole concert of experience. But the deeper romance of the
+spirit is oblivious of these changes of external fortune, this rising
+or falling of the emotional temperature. The moral life of America
+furnishes striking illustrations of the steadfastness with which
+certain moral causes have been kept, as it were, in the focus of
+intense feeling. Poetry, undefeated and unwavering poetry, has
+transfigured such practical propaganda as the abolition of slavery, the
+emancipation of woman, the fight against the liquor traffic, the
+emancipation of the individual from the clutches of economic and
+commercial despotism. Men like Colonel Thomas Wentworth Higginson,
+women like Julia Ward Howe, fought for these causes throughout their
+lives. Colonel Higginson's attitude towards women was not merely
+chivalric (for one may be chivalrous without any marked predisposition
+to romance), but nobly romantic also. James Russell Lowell, poet as he
+was, outlived that particular phase of romantic moral reform which he
+had been taught by Maria White. But in other men and women bred in that
+old New England of the eighteen-forties, the moral fervor knew no
+restraint. Garrison, although in many respects a most unromantic
+personality, was engaged in a task which gave him all the inspiration
+of romance. A romantic "atmosphere," fully as highly colored as any of
+the romantic atmospheres that we are accustomed to mark in literature,
+surrounded as with a luminous mist the figures of the New England
+transcendentalists. They, too, as Heine said of himself, were soldiers.
+They felt themselves enlisted for a long but ultimately victorious
+campaign. They were willing to pardon, in their comrades and in
+themselves, those imaginative excesses which resemble the physical
+excesses of a soldier's camp. Transcendentalism was thus a militant
+philosophy and religion, with both a destructively critical and a
+positively constructive creed. Channing, Parker, Alcott, Margaret
+Fuller, were warrior-priests, poets and prophets of a gallant campaign
+against inherited darkness and bigotry, and for the light.
+
+The atmosphere of that score of years in New England was now
+superheated, now rarefied, thin, and cold; but it was never quite the
+normal atmosphere of every day. On the purely literary side, it is
+needless to say, these men and women sought inspiration in Coleridge
+and Carlyle and other English and German romanticists. In fact, the
+most enduring literature of New England between 1830 and 1865 was
+distinctly a romantic literature. It was rooted, however, not so much
+in those swift changes of historic condition, those startling
+liberations of the human spirit which gave inspiration to the
+romanticism of the Continent, as it was in the deep and vital fervor
+with which these New Englanders envisaged the problems of the moral
+life.
+
+Other illustrations of the American capacity for romance lie equally
+close at hand. Take, for instance, the stout volume in which Mr. Burton
+Stevenson has collected the _Poems of American History_. Here are
+nearly seven hundred pages of closely printed patriotic verse. While
+Stedman's _Anthology_ reveals no doubt national aspirations and
+national sentiment, as well as the emotional fervor of individuals, Mr.
+Stevenson's collection has the advantage of focussing this national
+feeling upon specific events. Stedman's _Anthology_ is an enduring
+document of American idealism, touching in the sincerity of its poetic
+moods, pathetic in its long lists of men and women who are known by one
+poem only, or who have never, for one reason or another, fulfilled
+their poetic promise. The thousand poems which it contains are more
+striking, in fact, for their promise than for their performance. They
+are intimations of what American men and women would have liked to do
+or to be. In this sense, it is a precious volume, but it is certainly
+not commensurate, either in passion or in artistic perfection, with the
+forces of that American life which it tries to interpret. Indeed, Mr.
+Stedman, after finishing his task of compilation, remarked to more than
+one of his friends that what this country needed was some "adult male
+verse."
+
+The _Poems of American History_ collected by Mr. Stevenson are at least
+vigorous and concrete. One aspect of our history which especially lends
+itself to Mr. Stevenson's purpose is the romance which attaches itself
+to war. It is scarcely necessary to say nowadays that all wars, even
+the noblest, have had their sordid, grimy, selfish, bestial aspect; and
+that the intelligence and conscience of our modern world are more and
+more engaged in the task of making future wars impossible. But the
+slightest acquaintance with American history reveals the immense
+reservoir of romantic emotion which has been drawn upon in our national
+struggles. War, of course, is an immemorial source of romantic feeling.
+William James's notable essay on "A Moral Substitute for War"
+endeavored to prove that our modern economic and social life, if
+properly organized, would give abundant outlet and satisfaction to
+those romantic impulses which formerly found their sole gratification
+in battle. Many of us believe that he was right; but for the moment we
+must look backward and not forward. We must remember the stern if rude
+poetry inspired by our Revolutionary struggle, the romantic halo that
+falls upon the youthful figure of Nathan Hale, the baleful light that
+touches the pale face of Benedict Arnold, the romance of the Bennington
+fight to the followers of Stark and Ethan Allen, the serene voice of
+the "little captain," John Paul Jones:--"We have not struck, we have
+just begun our part of the fighting." The colors of romance still drape
+the Chesapeake and the Shannon, Tecumseh and Tippecanoe. The hunters of
+Kentucky, the explorers of the Yellowstone and the Columbia, the
+emigrants who left their bones along the old Santa Fé Trail, are our
+Homeric men.
+
+The Mexican War affords pertinent illustration, not only of romance,
+but of reaction. The earlier phases of the Texan struggle for
+independence have much of the daring, the splendid rashness, the
+glorious and tragic catastrophes of the great romantic adventures of
+the Old World. It is not the Texans only who still "remember the
+Alamo," but when those brilliant and dramatic adventures of border
+warfare became drawn into the larger struggle for the extension of
+slavery, the poetic reaction began. The physical and moral pretence of
+warfare, the cheap splendors of epaulets and feathers, shrivelled at
+the single touch of the satire of the _Biglow Papers_. Lowell, writing
+at that moment with the instinct and fervor of a prophet, brought the
+whole vainglorious business back to the simple issue of right and
+wrong:
+
+    "'Taint your eppyletts an' feathers
+      Make the thing a grain more right;
+    'Taint afollerin' your bell-wethers
+      Will excuse ye in His sight;
+    Ef you take a sword an' dror it,
+      An' go stick a feller thru,
+    Guv'ment aint to answer for it,
+      God'll send the bill to you."
+
+But far more interesting is the revelation of the American capacity for
+romance which was made possible by the war between the States.
+Stevenson's _Poems of American History_ and Stedman's _Anthology_ give
+abundant illustration of almost every aspect of that epical struggle.
+The South was in a romantic mood from the very beginning. The North
+drifted into it after Sumter. I have already said that no one can
+examine a collection of Civil War verse without being profoundly moved
+by its evidence of American idealism. In specific phases of the
+struggle, in connection with certain battle-fields and certain leaders
+of both North and South, this idealism is heightened into pure romance,
+so that even our novelists feel that they can give no adequate picture
+of the war without using the colors of poetry. Most critics, no doubt,
+agree in feeling that we are still too near to that epoch-making crisis
+of our national existence to do it any justice in the terms of
+literature. Perhaps we must wait for the perfected romance of the years
+1861-65, until the men and the events of that struggle are as remote as
+the heroes of Greece and Troy. Certainly no one can pass a final
+judgment upon the verse occasioned by recent struggles in arms. Any one
+who has studied the English poetry inspired by the South-African War
+will be painfully conscious of the emotional and moral complexity of
+all such issues, of the bitter injustice which poets, as well as other
+men, render to one another, of the impossibility of transmuting into
+the pure gold of romance the emotions originating in the stock market,
+in race-hatred, and in national vainglory.
+
+We have lingered too long, perhaps, over these various evidences of the
+romantic temper of America. We must now glance at the forces of
+reaction, the recoil to fact. What is it which contradicts, inhibits,
+or negatives the romantic tendency? Among other forces, there is
+certainly humor. Humor and romance often go hand in hand, but humor is
+commonly fatal to romanticism. There is satire, which rebukes both
+romanticism and romance, which exposes the fallacies of the one, and
+punctures the exuberance of the other. More effective, perhaps, than
+either humor or satire as an antiseptic against romance, is the
+overmastering sense of fact. This is what Emerson called the instinct
+for the milk in the pan, an instinct which Emerson himself possessed
+extraordinarily on his purely Yankee side, and which a pioneer country
+is forced continually to develop and to recognize. Camping, for
+instance, develops both the romantic sense and the fact sense. Supper
+must be cooked, even at Walden Pond. There must be hewers of wood and
+drawers of water, and the dishes ought to be washed.
+
+On a higher plane, also, than this mere sense of physical necessity,
+there are forces limiting the influence of romance. Schiller put it all
+into one famous line:--
+
+    "Und was uns alle bändigt, das Gemeine."
+
+Or listen to Keats:--
+
+    "'T is best to remain aloof from people, and like their good
+    parts, without being eternally troubled with the dull process
+    of their everyday lives.... All I can say is that standing at
+    Charing Cross, and looking East, West, North and South, I can
+    see nothing but dullness."
+
+And Henry James, describing New York in his book, _The American Scene_,
+speaks of "the overwhelming preponderance of the unmitigated
+'business-man' face ... the consummate monotonous commonness of the
+pushing male crowd, moving in its dense mass--with the confusion
+carried to chaos for any intelligence, any perception; a welter of
+objects and sounds in which relief, detachment, dignity, meaning,
+perished utterly and lost all rights ... the universal _will to
+move_--to move, move, move, as an end in itself, an appetite at any
+price."
+
+One need not be a poet like Keats or an inveterate psychologist like
+Henry James, in order to become aware how the commonplaceness of the
+world rests like a fog upon the mind and heart. No one goes to his
+day's work and comes home again without a consciousness of contact with
+an unspiritual atmosphere, or incompletely spiritualized forces, not
+merely with indifference, to what Emerson would term "the over-soul,"
+but with a lack of any faith in the things which are unseen. Take those
+very forces which have limited the influence of Emerson throughout the
+United States; they illustrate the universal forces which clip the
+wings of romance. The obstacles in the path of Emerson's influence are
+not merely the religious and denominational differences which Dr.
+George A. Gordon portrayed in a notable article at the time of the
+Emerson Centenary. The real obstacles are more serious. It is true
+that Dr. Park of Andover, Dr. Bushnell of Hartford, and Dr. Hodge of
+Princeton, could say in Emerson's lifetime: "We know a better, a more
+Scriptural and certificated road toward the very things which Emerson
+is seeking for. We do not grant that we are less idealistic than he. We
+think him a dangerous guide, following wandering fires. It is better to
+journey safely with us."
+
+But I have known at least two livery-stable keepers and many college
+professors who would unite in saying: "Hodge and Park and Bushnell and
+Emerson are all following after something that does not exist. One is
+not much more mistaken than the others. We can get along perfectly well
+in our business without any of those ideas at all. Let us stick to the
+milk in the pan, the horse in the stall, the documents which you will
+find in the library."
+
+There exists, in other words, in all classes of American society
+to-day, just as there existed during the Revolution, during the
+transcendental movement, or the Civil War, an immense mass of
+unspiritualized, unvitalized American manhood and womanhood. No
+literature comes from it and no religion, though there is much human
+kindness, much material progress, and some indestructible residuum of
+that idealism which lifts man above the brute.
+
+Yet the curious and the endlessly fascinating thing about these forces
+of reaction is that they themselves shift and change. We have seen that
+external romance depending upon strangeness of scene, novelty of
+adventure, rich atmospheric distance of space or time, disappears with
+the changes of civilization. The farm expands over the wolf's den, the
+Indian becomes a blacksmith, but do the gross and material instincts
+ultimately triumph? He would be a hardy prophet who should venture to
+assert it. We must reckon always with the swing of the human pendulum,
+with the reaction against reaction. Here, for example, during the last
+decade, has been book after book written about the reaction against
+democracy. All over the world, it is asserted, there are unmistakable
+signs that democracy will not practically work in the face of the
+modern tasks to which the world has set itself. One reads these books,
+one persuades himself that the hour for democracy is passing, and then
+one goes out on the street and buys a morning newspaper and discovers
+that democracy has scored again. So is it with the experience of the
+individual. You may fancy that the romance of the seas passes, for you,
+with the passing of the square-sailed ship. If Mr. Kipling's poetry
+cannot rouse you from that mood of reaction, walk down to the end of
+the pier to-morrow and watch the ocean liner come up the harbor. If
+there is no romance there, you do not know romance when you see it!
+
+Take the case of the farmer; his prosaic life is the butt of the
+newspaper paragraphers from one end of the country to the other. But
+does romance disappear from the farm with machinery and scientific
+agriculture? There are farmers who follow Luther Burbank's experiments
+with plants, with all the fascination which used to attach to alchemy
+and astrology. The farmer has no longer Indians to fight or a
+wilderness to subdue, but the soils of his farm are analyzed at his
+state university by men who live in the daily atmosphere of the romance
+of science, and who say, as a professor in the University of Chicago
+said once, that "a flower is so wonderful that if you knew what was
+going on within its cell-structure, you would be afraid to stay alone
+with it in the dark."
+
+The reaction from romance, therefore, real as it is, and dead weight as
+it lies upon the soul of the nation, often breeds the very forces which
+destroy it. In other words, the reaction against one type of romance
+produces inevitably another type of romance, other aspects of wonder,
+terror, and beauty. Following the romance of adventure comes, after
+never so deep a trough in the sea, the romance of science, like the
+crest of another wave; and then comes what we call, for lack of a
+better word, the psychological romance, the old mystery and strangeness
+of the human soul, Æschylus and Job, as Victor Hugo says, in the poor
+crawfish gatherer on the rocks of Brittany.
+
+We must remember that we are endeavoring to measure great spaces and to
+take account of the "amplitude of time." The individual "fact-man," as
+Coleridge called him, remains perhaps a fact-man to the end, just as
+the dreamer may remain a dreamer. But no single generation is
+compounded all of fact or all of dream. Longfellow felt, no doubt, that
+there was an ideal United States, which Dickens did not discover
+during that first visit of 1842; he would have set the Cambridge which
+he knew over against the Cincinnati viewed by Mrs. Trollope; he would
+have asserted that the homes characterized by refinement, by
+cultivation, by pure and simple sentiment, made up the true America.
+But even among Longfellow's own contemporaries there was Whitman, who
+felt that the true America was something very different from that
+exquisitely tempered ideal of Longfellow. There was Thoreau, who, over
+in Concord, had been pushing forward the frontier of the mind and
+senses, who had opened his back-yard gate, as it were, upon the
+boundless and mysterious territory of Nature. There was Emerson, who
+was preaching an intellectual independence of the Old World which
+should correspond to the political and social independence of the
+Western Hemisphere. There was Parkman, whose hatred of philanthropy,
+whose lack of spirituality, is a striking illustration of the rebound
+of New England idealism against itself, of the reaction into stoicism.
+What different worlds these men lived in, and yet they were all
+inhabitants, so to speak, of the same parish; most of them met often
+around the same table! The lesson of their variety of experience and
+differences of gifts as workmen in that great palace of literature
+which is so variously built, is that no action and reaction in the
+imaginative world is ever final. Least of all do these actions and
+reactions affect the fortunes of true romance. The born dreamer may
+fall from one dream into another, but he still murmurs, in the famous
+line of William Ellery Channing,--
+
+     "If my bark sinks, 't is to another sea."
+
+No line in our literature is more truly American,--unless it be that
+other splendid metaphor, by David Wasson, which says the same thing in
+other words:--
+
+    "Life's gift outruns my fancies far,
+       And drowns the dream
+       In larger stream,
+     As morning drinks the morning-star."
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+Humor and Satire
+
+
+A distinguished professor in the Harvard Divinity School once began a
+lecture on Comedy by saying that the study of the comic had made him
+realize for the first time that a joke was one of the most solemn
+things in the world. The analysis of humor is no easy matter. It is
+hard to say which is the more dreary: an essay on humor illustrated by
+a series of jokes, or an exposition of humor in the technical terms of
+philosophy. No subject has been more constantly discussed. But it
+remains difficult to decide what humor is. It is easier to declare what
+seemed humorous to our ancestors, or what seems humorous to us to-day.
+For humor is a shifting thing. The well-known collections of the
+writings of American humorists surprise us by their revelation of the
+changes in public taste. Humor--or the sense of humor--alters while we
+are watching. What seemed a good joke to us yesterday seems but a poor
+joke to-day. And yet it is the same joke! What is true of the
+individual is all the more true of the national sense of humor. This
+vast series of kaleidoscopic changes which we call America; has it
+produced a humor of its own?
+
+Let us avoid for the moment the treacherous territory of definitions.
+Let us, rather, take one concrete example: a pair of men, a knight and
+his squire, who for three hundred years have ridden together down the
+broad highway of the world's imagination. Everybody sees that Don
+Quixote and Sancho Panza are humorous. Define them as you
+will--idealist and realist, knight and commoner, dreamer and
+proverb-maker--these figures represent to all the world two poles of
+human experience. A Frenchman once said that all of us are Don Quixotes
+on one day and Sancho Panzas on the next. Humor springs from this
+contrast. It is the electric flash between the two poles of experience.
+
+Most philosophers who have meditated upon the nature of the comic point
+out that it is closely allied with the tragic. Flaubert once compared
+our human idealism to the flight of a swallow; at one moment it is
+soaring toward the sunset, at the next moment some one shoots it and it
+tumbles into the mud with blood upon its glistening wings. The sudden
+poignant contrast between light, space, freedom, and the wounded
+bleeding bird in the mud, is of the very essence of tragedy. But
+something like that is always happening in comedy. There is the same
+element of incongruity, without the tragic consequence. It is only the
+humorist who sees things truly because he sees both the greatness and
+the littleness of mortals; but even he may not know whether to laugh or
+to cry at what he sees. Those collisions and contrasts out of which the
+stuff of tragedy is woven, such as the clash between the higher and
+lower nature of a man, between his past and his present, between one's
+duties to himself and to his family or the state, between, in a word,
+his character and his situation, are all illustrated in comedy as
+completely as in tragedy. The countryman in the city, the city man in
+the country, is in a comic situation. Here is a coward named Falstaff,
+and Shakespeare puts him into battle. Here is a vain person, and
+Malvolio is imprisoned and twitted by a clown. Here is an ignoramus,
+and Dogberry is placed on the judge's bench. These contrasts might,
+indeed, be tragic enough, but they are actually comic. Such characters
+are not ruled by fate but by a sportive chance. The gods connive at
+them. They are ruled, like tragic characters, by necessity and
+blindness; but the blindness, instead of leading to tragic ruin, leads
+only to being caught as in some harmless game of blind-man's-buff.
+There is retribution, but Falstaff is only pinched by the fairies.
+Comedy of intrigue and comedy of character lead to no real catastrophe.
+The end of it on the stage is not death but matrimony; and "home well
+pleased we go."
+
+A thousand definitions of humor lay stress upon this element of
+incongruity. Hazlitt begins his illuminating lectures on the Comic
+Writers by declaring, "Man is the only animal that laughs or weeps; for
+he is the only animal that is struck with the difference between what
+things are and what they ought to be." James Russell Lowell took the
+same ground. "Humor," he said once, "lies in the contrast of two ideas.
+It is the universal disenchanter. It is the sense of comic
+contradiction which arises from the perpetual comment which the
+understanding makes upon the impressions received through the
+imagination." If that sentence seems too abstract, all we need do is to
+think of Sancho Panza, the man of understanding, talking about Don
+Quixote, the man of imagination.
+
+We must not multiply quotations, but it is impossible not to remember
+the distinction made by Carlyle in writing about Richter. "True humor,"
+says Carlyle, "springs not more from the head than from the heart. It
+is not contempt; its essence is love." In other words, not merely the
+great humorists of the world's literature--Cervantes, Rabelais,
+Fielding, Thackeray, Dickens--but the writers of comic paragraphs for
+to-morrow's newspaper, all regard our human incongruities with a sort
+of affection. The comic spirit is essentially a social spirit. The
+great figures of tragedy are solitary. The immortal figures of comedy
+belong to a social group.
+
+No recent discussion of humor is more illuminating and more directly
+applicable to the conditions of American life than that of the
+contemporary French philosopher Bergson. Bergson insists throughout
+his brilliant little book on _Laughter_ that laughter is a social
+function. Life demands elasticity. Hence whatever is stiff, automatic,
+machine-like, excites a smile. We laugh when a person gives us the
+impression of being a thing,--a sort of mechanical toy. Every
+inadaptation of the individual to society is potentially comic. Thus
+laughter becomes a social initiation. It is a kind of hazing which we
+visit upon one another. But we do not isolate the comic personage as we
+do the solitary, tragic figure. The comic personage is usually a type;
+he is one of an absurd group; he is a miser, a pedant, a pretentious
+person, a doctor or a lawyer in whom the professional traits have
+become automatic so that he thinks more of his professional behavior
+than he does of human health and human justice. Of all these separatist
+tendencies, laughter is the great corrective. When the individual
+becomes set in his ways, obstinate, preoccupied, automatic, the rest of
+us laugh him out of it if we can. Of course all that we are thinking
+about at the moment is his ridiculousness. But nevertheless, by
+laughing we become the saviors of society.
+
+No one, I think, can help observing that this conception of humor as
+incongruity is particularly applicable to a new country. On the new
+soil and under the new sky, in new social groupings, all the
+fundamental contrasts and absurdities of our human society assume a new
+value. We see them under a fresh light. They are differently focussed.
+The broad humors of the camp, its swift and picturesque play of light
+and shade, its farce and caricature no less than its atmosphere of
+comradeship, of sentiment, and of daring, are all transferred to the
+humor of the newly settled country. The very word "humor" once meant
+singularity of character, "some extravagant habit, passion, or
+affection," says Dryden, "particular to some one person." Every newly
+opened country encourages, for a while, this oddness and incongruity of
+individual character. It fosters it, and at the same moment it laughs
+at it. It decides that such characters are "humorous." As the social
+conditions of such a country change, the old pioneer instinct for
+humor, and the pioneer forms of humor, may endure, though the actual
+frontier may have moved far westward.
+
+There is another conception of humor scarcely less famous than the
+notion of incongruity. It is the conception associated with the name of
+the English philosopher Hobbes, who thought that humor turned upon a
+sense of superiority. "The passion of laughter," said Hobbes, "is
+nothing else but sudden glory arising from some sudden conception of
+some eminency in ourselves by comparison with the inferiority of
+others, or with our own formerly." Too cynical a view, declare many
+critics, but they usually end by admitting that there is a good deal in
+it after all. I am inclined to think that Hobbes's famous definition is
+more applicable to wit than it is to humor. Wit is more purely
+intellectual than humor. It rejoices in its little triumphs. It
+requires, as has been remarked, a good head, while humor takes a good
+heart, and fun good spirits. If you take Carlyle literally when he says
+that humor is love, you cannot wholly share Hobbes's conviction that
+laughter turns upon a sense of superiority, and yet surely we all
+experience a sense of kindly amusement which turns upon the fact that
+we, the initiated, are superior, for the moment, to the unlucky person
+who is just having his turn in being hazed. It may be the play of
+intellect or the coarser play of animal spirits. One might venture to
+make a distinction between the low comedy of the Latin races and the
+low comedy of the Germanic races by pointing out that the superiority
+in the Latin comedy usually turns upon quicker wits, whereas the
+superiority in the Germanic farce is likely to turn upon stouter
+muscles. But whether it be a play of wits or of actual cudgelling, the
+element of superiority and inferiority is almost always there.
+
+I remember that some German, I dare say in a forgotten lecture-room,
+once illustrated the humor of superiority in this way. A company of
+strolling players sets up its tent in a country village. On the front
+seat is a peasant, laughing at the antics of the clown. The peasant
+flatters himself that he sees through those practical jokes on the
+stage; the clown ought to have seen that he was about to be tripped up,
+but he was too stupid. But the peasant saw that it was coming all the
+time. He laughs accordingly. Just behind the peasant sits the village
+shopkeeper. He has watched stage clowns many a time and he laughs, not
+at the humor of the farce, but at the naïve laughter of the peasant in
+front of him. He, the shopkeeper, is superior to such broad and obvious
+humor as that. Behind the shopkeeper sits the schoolmaster. The
+schoolmaster is a pedant; he has probably lectured to his boys on the
+theory of humor, and he smiles in turn at the smile of superiority on
+the face of the shopkeeper. Well, peeping in at the door of the tent is
+a man of the world, who glances at the clown, then at the peasant, then
+at the shopkeeper, then at the schoolmaster, each one of whom is
+laughing at the others, and the man of the world laughs at them all!
+
+Let us take an even simpler illustration. We all know the comfortable
+sense of proprietorship which we experience after a few days' sojourn
+at a summer hotel. We know our place at the table; we call the head
+waiter by his first name; we are not even afraid of the clerk. Now into
+this hotel, where we sit throned in conscious superiority, comes a new
+arrival. He has not yet learned the exits and entrances. He starts for
+the kitchen door inadvertently when he should be headed for the
+drawing-room. We smile at him. Why? Precisely because that was what we
+did on the morning of our own arrival. We have been initiated, and it
+is now his turn.
+
+If it is true that a newly settled country offers endless opportunities
+for the humor which turns upon incongruity, it is also true that the
+new country offers countless occasions for the humor which turns upon
+the sudden glory of superiority. The backwoodsman is amusing to the man
+of the settlements, and the backwoodsman, in turn, gets his full share
+of amusement out of watching the "tenderfoot" in the woods. It is
+simply the case of the old resident versus the newcomer. The
+superiority need be in no sense a cruel or taunting superiority,
+although it often happens to be so. The humor of the pioneers is not
+very delicately polished. The joke of the frontier tavern or grocery
+store is not always adapted to a drawing-room audience, but it turns in
+a surprisingly large number of instances upon exactly the same
+intellectual or social superiority which gives point to the _bon mots_
+of the most cultivated and artificial society in the world.
+
+The humor arising from incongruity, then, and the humor arising from a
+sense of superiority, are both of them social in their nature. No less
+social, surely, is the function of satire. It is possible that satire
+may be decaying, that it is becoming, if it has not already become, a
+mere splendid or odious tradition. But let us call it a great tradition
+and, upon the whole, a splendid one. Even when debased to purely party
+or personal uses, the verse satire of a Dryden retains its magnificent
+resonance; "the ring," says Saintsbury, "as of a great bronze coin
+thrown down on marble." The malignant couplets of an Alexander Pope
+still gleam like malevolent jewels through the dust of two hundred
+years. The cynicism, the misanthropy, the mere adolescent badness of
+Byron are powerless to clip the wings of the wide-ranging, far-darting
+wit and humor and irony of _Don Juan_. The homely Yankee dialect, the
+provinciality, the "gnarly" flavor of the _Biglow Papers_ do not
+prevent our finding in that pungent and resplendent satire the powers
+of Lowell at full play; and, what is more than that, the epitome of the
+American spirit in a moral crisis.
+
+I take the names of those four satirists, Dryden, Pope, Byron, and
+Lowell, quite at random; but they serve to illustrate a significant
+principle; namely, that great satire becomes ennobled as it touches
+communal, not merely individual interests, as it voices social and not
+merely individual ideals. Those four modern satirists were steeped in
+the nationalistic political poetry of the Old Testament. They were
+familiar with its war anthems, dirges, and prophecies, its concern for
+the prosperity and adversity, the sin and the punishment, of a people.
+Here the writers of the Golden Age of English satire found their
+vocabulary and phrase-book, their grammar of politics and history,
+their models of good and evil kings; and in that Biblical school of
+political poetry, which has affected our literature from the
+Reformation down to Mr. Kipling, there has always been a class in
+satire! The satirical portraits, satirical lyrics, satirical parables
+of the Old Testament prophets are only less noteworthy than their
+audacity in striking high and hard. Their foes were the all-powerful:
+Babylon and Assyria and Egypt loom vast and terrible upon the canvases
+of Isaiah and Ezekiel; and poets of a later time have learned there the
+secrets of social and political idealism, and the signs of national
+doom.
+
+There are two familiar types of satire associated with the names of
+Horace and Juvenal. Both types are abundantly illustrated in English
+and American literature. When you meet a bore or a hypocrite or a plain
+rascal, is it better to chastise him with laughter or to flay him with
+shining fury? I shall take both horns of the dilemma and assert that
+both methods are admirable and socially useful. The minor English and
+American poets of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were never
+weary of speaking of satire as a terrific weapon which they were forced
+to wield as saviors of society. But whether they belonged to the urbane
+school of Horace, or to the severely moralistic school of Juvenal, they
+soon found themselves falling into one or the other of two modes of
+writing. They addressed either the little audience or the big audience,
+and they modified their styles accordingly. The great satirists of the
+Renaissance, for example, like More, Erasmus, and Rabelais, wrote
+simply for the persons who were qualified to understand them. More and
+Erasmus wrote their immortal satires in Latin. By so doing they
+addressed themselves to cultivated Europe. They ran no risk of being
+misunderstood by persons for whom the joke was not intended. All
+readers of Latin were like members of one club. Of course membership
+was restricted to the learned, but had not Horace talked about being
+content with a few readers, and was not Voltaire coming by and by with
+the advice to try for the "little public"?
+
+The typical wit of the eighteenth century, whether in London, Paris, or
+in Franklin's printing-shop in Philadelphia, had, of course, abandoned
+Latin. But it still addressed itself to the "little public," to the
+persons who were qualified to understand. The circulation of the
+_Spectator_, which represents so perfectly the wit, humor, and satire
+of the early eighteenth century in England, was only about ten thousand
+copies. This limited audience smiled at the urbane delicate touches of
+Mr. Steele and Mr. Addison. They understood the allusions. The fable
+concerned them and not the outsiders. It was something like Oliver
+Wendell Holmes reading his witty and satirical couplets to an audience
+of Harvard alumni. The jokes are in the vernacular, but in a vernacular
+as spoken in a certain social medium. It is all very delightful.
+
+But there is a very different kind of audience gathering all this while
+outside the Harvard gates. These two publics for the humorist we may
+call the invited and the uninvited; the inner circle and the outer
+circle: first, those who have tickets for the garden party, and who
+stroll over the lawn, decorously gowned and properly coated, conversing
+with one another in the accepted social accents and employing the
+recognized social adjectives; and second, the crowd outside the
+gates,--curious, satirical, good-natured in the main, straightforward
+of speech and quick to applaud a ready wit or a humor-loving eye or a
+telling phrase spoken straight from the heart of the mob.
+
+Will an author choose to address the selected guests or the casual
+crowd? Either way lies fame, if one does it well. Your uninvited men
+find themselves talking to the uninvited crowd. Before they know it
+they are famous too. They are fashioning another manner of speech.
+Defoe is there, with his saucy ballads selling triumphantly under his
+very pillory; with his _True-Born Englishman_ puncturing forever the
+fiction of the honorable ancestry of the English aristocracy; with his
+_Crusoe_ and _Moll Flanders_, written, as Lamb said long afterwards,
+for the servant-maid and the sailor. Swift is there, with his terrific
+_Drapier's Letters_, anonymous, aimed at the uneducated, with cold fury
+bludgeoning a government into obedience; with his _Gulliver's Travels_,
+so transparent upon the surface that a child reads the book with
+delight and remains happily ignorant that it is a satire upon humanity.
+And then, into the London of Defoe and Swift, and into the very centre
+of the middle-class mob, steps, in 1724, the bland Benjamin Franklin in
+search of a style "smooth, clear, and short," and for half a century,
+with consummate skill, shapes that style to his audience. His young
+friend Thomas Paine takes the style and touches it with passion, until
+he becomes the perfect pamphleteer, and his _Crisis_ is worth as much
+to our Revolution--men said--as the sword of Washington. After another
+generation the gaunt Lincoln, speaking that same plain prose of Defoe,
+Swift, Franklin, and Paine,--Lincoln who began his first Douglas
+debate, not like his cultivated opponent with the conventional "Ladies
+and Gentlemen," but with the ominously intimate, "My Fellow
+Citizens,"--Lincoln is saying, "I am not master of language; I have not
+a fine education; I am not capable of entering into a disquisition upon
+dialectics, as I believe you call it; but I do not believe the
+language I employed bears any such construction as Judge Douglas puts
+upon it. But I don't care about a quibble in regard to words. I know
+what I meant, and _I will not leave this crowd in doubt_, if I can
+explain it to them, what I really meant in the use of that paragraph."
+
+"_I will not leave this crowd in doubt_"; that is the final accent of
+our spoken prose, the prose addressed to one's fellow citizens, to the
+great public. This is the prose spoken in the humor and satire of
+Dickens. Dressed in a queer dialect, and put into satirical verse, it
+is the language of the _Biglow Papers_. Uttered with the accent of a
+Chicago Irishman, it is the prose admired by millions of the countrymen
+of "Mr. Dooley."
+
+Satire written to the "little public" tends toward the social type;
+that written to the "great public" to the political type. It is obvious
+that just as a newly settled country offers constant opportunity for
+the humor of incongruity and the humor arising from a sense of
+superiority, it likewise affords a daily stimulus to the use of satire.
+That moralizing Puritan strain of censure which lost none of its
+harshness in crossing the Atlantic Ocean found full play in the
+colonial satire of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. As the
+topics for satire grew wider and more political in their scope, the
+audiences increased. To-day the very oldest issues of the common life
+of that queer "political animal" named man are discussed by our popular
+newspaper satirists in the presence of a democratic audience that
+stretches from the Atlantic to the Pacific.
+
+Is there, then, a distinctly American type of humor and satire? I think
+it would be difficult to prove that our composite American nationality
+has developed a mode of humor and satire which is racially different
+from the humor and satire of the Old World. All racial lines in
+literature are extremely difficult to draw. If you attempt to analyze
+English humor, you find that it is mostly Scotch or Irish. If you put
+Scotch and Irish humor under the microscope, you discover that most of
+the best Scotch and Irish jokes are as old as the Greeks and the
+Egyptians. You pick up a copy of _Fliegende Blätter_ and you get keen
+amusement from its revelation of German humor. But how much of this
+humor, after all, is either essentially universal in its scope or else
+a matter of mere stage-setting and machinery? Without the Prussian
+lieutenant the _Fliegende Blätter_ would lose half its point; nor can
+one imagine a _Punch_ without a picture of the English policeman. The
+lieutenant and the policeman, however, are a part of the accepted
+social furniture of the two countries. They belong to the decorative
+background of the social drama. They heighten the effectiveness of
+local humor, but it may be questioned whether they afford any evidence
+of genuine racial differentiation as to the sense of the comic.
+
+What one can abundantly prove, however, is that the United States
+afford a new national field for certain types of humor and satire. Our
+English friends are never weary of writing magazine articles about
+Yankee humor, in which they explain the peculiarities of the American
+joke with a dogmatism which has sometimes been thought to prove that
+there is such a thing as national lack of humor, whether there be such
+a thing as national humor or not. One such article, I remember,
+endeavored to prove that the exaggeration often found in American
+humor was due to the vastness of the American continent. Our geography,
+that is to say, is too much for the Yankee brain. Mr. Birrell, an
+expert judge of humor, surely, thinks that the characteristic of
+American humor lies in its habit of speaking of something hideous in a
+tone of levity. Many Englishmen, in fact, have been as much impressed
+with this minimizing trick of American humor as with the converse trick
+of magnifying. Upon the Continent the characteristic trait of American
+humor has often been thought to be its exuberance of phrase. Many
+shrewd judges of our newspaper humor have pointed out that one of its
+most favorite methods is the suppression of one link in the chain of
+logical reasoning. Such generalizations as these are always
+interesting, although they may not take us very far.
+
+Yet it is clear that certain types of humor and satire have proved to
+be specially adapted to the American soil and climate. Whether or not
+these types are truly indigenous one may hesitate to say, yet it
+remains true that the well-known conditions of American life have
+stimulated certain varieties of humor into such a richness of
+manifestation as the Old World can scarcely show.
+
+Curiously enough, one of the most perfected types of American humor is
+that urbane Horatian variety which has often been held to be the
+exclusive possession of the cultivated and restricted societies of
+older civilization. Yet it is precisely this kind of humor which has
+been the delight of some of the most typical American minds. Benjamin
+Franklin, for example, modelled his style and his sense of the humorous
+on the papers of the _Spectator_. He produced humorous fables and
+apologues, choice little morsels of social and political persiflage,
+which were perfectly suited, not merely to the taste of London in the
+so-called golden age of English satire, but to the tone of the wittiest
+salons of Paris in the age when the old régime went tottering, talking,
+quoting, jesting to its fall. Read Franklin's charming and wise letter
+to Madame Brillon about giving too much for the whistle. It is the
+perfection of well-bred humor: a humor very American, very Franklinian,
+although its theme and tone and phrasing might well have been envied by
+Horace or Voltaire.
+
+The gentle humor of Irving is marked by precisely those traits of
+urbanity and restraint which characterize the parables of Franklin.
+Does not the _Autocrat of the Breakfast Table_ itself presuppose the
+existence of a truly cultivated society? Its tone--"As I was saying
+when I was interrupted"--is the tone of the intimate circle. There was
+so much genuine humanity in the gay little doctor that persons born
+outside the circle of Harvard College and the North Shore and Boston
+felt themselves at once initiated by the touch of his merry wand into a
+humanized, kindly theory of life. The humor of George William Curtis
+had a similarly mellow and ripened quality. It is a curious comment
+upon that theory of Americans which represents us primarily as a
+loud-voiced, assertive, headstrong people, to be thus made aware that
+many of the humorists whom we have loved best are precisely those whose
+writing has been marked by the most delicate restraint, whose theory of
+life has been the most highly urbane and civilized, whose work is
+indistinguishable in tone--though its materials are so different--from
+that of other humorous writers on the other side of the Atlantic. On
+its social side all this is a fresh proof of the extraordinary
+adaptability of the American mind. On the literary side it is one more
+evidence of the national fondness for neatness and perfection of
+workmanship.
+
+But we are something other than a nation of mere lovers and would-be
+imitators of Charles Lamb. The moralistic type of humor, the crack of
+Juvenal's whip, as well as the delicate Horatian playing around the
+heart-strings, has characterized our humor and satire from the
+beginning. At bottom the American is serious. Beneath the surface of
+his jokes there is moral earnestness, there is ethical passion. Take,
+for example, some of the apothegms of "Josh Billings." He failed with
+the public until he took up the trick of misspelling his words. When he
+had once gained his public he sometimes delighted them with sheer
+whimsical incongruity, like this:--
+
+    "There iz 2 things in this life for which we are never fully
+    prepared, and that iz twins."
+
+But more often the tone is really grave. It is only the spelling that
+is queer. The moralizing might be by La Bruyère or La Rochefoucauld.
+Take this:--
+
+    "Life iz short, but it iz long enuff to ruin enny man who
+    wants tew be ruined."
+
+Or this:--
+
+    "When a feller gits a goin doun hill, it dus seem as tho evry
+    thing had bin greased for the okashun." That is what writers
+    of tragedy have been showing, ever since the Greeks!
+
+Or finally, this, which has the perfect tone of the great French
+moralists:--
+
+    "It iz a verry delicate job to forgive a man without lowering
+    him in his own estimashun, and yures too."
+
+See how the moralistic note is struck in the field of political satire.
+It is 1866, and "Petroleum V. Nasby," writing from "Confedrit X Roads,"
+Kentucky, gives Deekin Pogram's views on education. "He didn't bleeve
+in edjucashun, generally speekin. The common people was better off
+without it, ez edjucashun hed a tendency to unsettle their minds. He
+had seen the evil effex ov it in niggers and poor whites. So soon ez a
+nigger masters the spellin book and gits into noosepapers, he becomes
+dissatisfied with his condishin, and hankers after a better cabin and
+more wages. He towunst begins to insist onto ownin land hisself, and
+givin his children edjucashun, and, ez a nigger, for our purposes, aint
+worth a soo markee."
+
+The single phrase, "ez a nigger," spells a whole chapter of American
+history.
+
+That quotation from "Petroleum V. Nasby" serves also to illustrate a
+species of American humor which has been of immense historical
+importance and which has never been more active than it is to-day: the
+humor, namely, of local, provincial, and sectional types. Much of this
+falls under Bergson's conception of humor as social censure. It rebukes
+the extravagance, the rigidity, the unawareness of the individual who
+fails to adapt himself to his social environment. It takes the place,
+in our categories of humor, of those types of class humor and satire in
+which European literature is so rich. The mobility of our population,
+the constant shifting of professions and callings, has prevented our
+developing fixed class types of humor. We have not even the lieutenant
+or the policeman as permanent members of our humorous stock company.
+The policeman of to-day may be mayor or governor to-morrow. The
+lieutenant may go back to his grocery wagon or on to his department
+store. But whenever and wherever such an individual fails to adapt
+himself to his new companions, fails to take on, as it were, the colors
+of his new environment, to speak in the new social accents, to follow
+the recognized patterns of behavior, then the kindly whip of the
+humorist is already cracking round his ears. The humor and satire of
+college undergraduate journalism turns mainly upon the recognized
+ability or inability of different individuals to adapt themselves to
+their changing pigeon-holes in the college organism. A freshman must
+behave like a freshman, or he is laughed at. Yet he must not behave as
+if he were nothing but the automaton of a freshman, or he will be
+laughed at more merrily still.
+
+One of the first discoveries of our earlier humorists was the Down-East
+Yankee. "I'm going to Portland whether or no," says Major Jack Downing,
+telling the story of his boyhood; "I'll see what this world is made of
+yet. So I tackled up the old horse and packed in a load of ax handles
+and a few notions, and mother fried me a few doughnuts ... for I told
+her I didn't know how long I should be gone,"--and off he goes to
+Portland, to see what the world is made of. It is a little like Defoe,
+and a good deal like the young Ulysses, bent upon knowing cities and
+men and upon getting the best of bargains.
+
+Each generation of Americans has known something like that trip to
+Portland. Each generation has had to measure its wits, its resources,
+its manners, against new standards of comparison. At every stage of the
+journey there are mishaps and ridiculous adventures; but everywhere,
+likewise, there is zest, conquest, initiation; the heart of a boy who
+"wants to know"--as the Yankees used to say; or, in more modern
+phrase,--
+
+            "to admire and for to see,
+    For to behold this world so wide."
+
+There is the same romance of adventure in the humor concerning the
+Irishman, the Negro, the Dutchman, the Dago, the farmer. Each in turn
+becomes humorous through failure to adapt himself to the prevalent
+type. A long-bearded Jew is not ridiculous in Russia, but he rapidly
+becomes ridiculous even on the East Side of New York. Underneath all
+this popular humor of the comic supplements one may catch glimpses of
+the great revolving wheels which are crushing the vast majority of our
+population into something like uniformity. It is a process of social
+attrition. The sharp edges of individual behavior get rounded off. The
+individual loses color and picturesqueness, precisely as he casts aside
+the national costume of the land from which he came. His speech, his
+gait, his demeanor, become as nearly as possible like the speech and
+carriage of all his neighbors. If he resists, he is laughed at; and if
+he does not personally heed the laughter, he may be sure that his
+children do. It is the children of our immigrants who catch the sly
+smiles of their school-fellows, who overhear jokes from the newspapers
+and on the street corners, who bring home to their foreign-born fathers
+and mothers the imperious childish demand to make themselves like unto
+everybody else.
+
+A similar social function is performed by that well-known mode of
+American humor which ridicules the inhabitants of certain states. Why
+should New Jersey, for example, be more ridiculous than Delaware? In
+the eyes of the newspaper paragrapher it unquestionably is, just as
+Missouri has more humorous connotations than Kentucky. We may think we
+understand why we smile when a man says that he comes from Kalamazoo
+or Oshkosh, but the smile when he says "Philadelphia" or "Boston" or
+"Brooklyn" is only a trifle more subtle. It is none the less real. Why
+should the suburban dweller of every city be regarded with humorous
+condescension by the man who is compelled to sleep within the city
+limits? No one can say, and yet without that humor of the suburbs the
+comic supplements of American newspapers would be infinitely less
+entertaining,--to the people who enjoy comic supplements.
+
+So it is with the larger divisions of our national life. Yankee,
+Southerner, Westerner, Californian, Texan, each type provokes certain
+connotations of humor when viewed by any of the other types. Each type
+in turn has its note of provinciality when compared with the norm of
+the typical American. It is quite possible to maintain that our
+literature, like our social life, has suffered by this ever-present
+American sense of the ridiculous. Our social consciousness might be far
+more various and richly colored, there might be more true provincial
+independence of speech and custom and imagination if we had not to
+reckon with this ever-present censure of laughter, this fear of
+finding ourselves, our city, our section, out of touch with the
+prevalent tone and temper of the country as a whole. It is one of the
+forfeits we are bound to pay when we play the great absorbing game of
+democracy.
+
+We are now ready to ask once more whether there is a truly national
+type of American humor. Viewed exclusively from the standpoint of
+racial characteristics, we have seen that this question as to a
+national type of humor is difficult to answer. But we have seen with
+equal clearness that the United States has offered a singularly rich
+field for the development of the sense of humor; and furthermore that
+there are certain specialized forms of humor which have flourished
+luxuriantly upon our soil. Our humorists have made the most of their
+native materials. Every pioneer trait of versatility, curiosity,
+shrewdness, has been turned somehow to humorous account. The very
+institutions of democracy, moulding day by day and generation after
+generation the habits and the mental characteristics of millions of
+men, have produced a social atmosphere in which humor is one of the
+most indisputable elements.
+
+I recall a notable essay by Mr. Charles Johnston on the essence of
+American humor in which he applies to the conditions of American life
+one familiar distinction between humor and wit. Wit, he asserts, scores
+off the other man, humor does not. Wit frequently turns upon tribal
+differences, upon tribal vanity. The mordant wit of the Jew, for
+example, from the literature of the Old Testament down to the raillery
+of Heine, has turned largely upon the sense of racial superiority, of
+intellectual and moral differences. But true humor, Mr. Johnston goes
+on to argue, has always a binding, a uniting quality. Thus Huckleberry
+Finn and Jim Hawkins, white man and black man, are afloat together on
+the Mississippi River raft and they are made brethren by the fraternal
+quality of Mark Twain's humor. Thus the levelling quality of Bret
+Harte's humor bridges social and moral chasms. It creates an atmosphere
+of charity and sympathy. In fact, the typical American humor, according
+to the opinion of Mr. Johnston, emphasizes the broad and humane side of
+our common nature. It reveals the common soul. It possesses a
+surplusage of power, of buoyancy and of conquest over circumstances.
+It means at its best a humanizing of our hearts.
+
+Some people will think that all this is too optimistic, but if you are
+not optimistic enough you cannot keep up with the facts. Certain it is
+that the pioneers of American national humor, the creators of what we
+may call the "all-American" type of humor, have possessed precisely the
+qualities which Mr. Johnston has pointed out. They are apparent in the
+productions of Artemus Ward. The present generation vaguely remembers
+Artemus Ward as the man who was willing to send all his wife's
+relatives to the war and who, standing by the tomb of Shakespeare,
+thought it "a success." But no one who turns to the almost forgotten
+pages of that kindly jester can fail to be impressed by his sunny
+quality, by the atmosphere of fraternal affection which glorifies his
+queer spelling and his somewhat threadbare witticisms. Mark Twain, who
+is universally recognized by Europeans as a representative of typical
+American humor, had precisely those qualities of pioneer curiosity,
+swift versatility, absolute democracy, which are characteristic of the
+national temper. His lively accounts of frontier experiences in
+_Roughing It_, his comments upon the old world in _Innocents Abroad_
+and _A Tramp Abroad_, his hatred of pretence and injustice, his scorn
+at sentimentality coupled with his insistence upon the rights of
+sentiment, in a word his persistent idealism, make Mark Twain one of
+the most representative of American writers. Largeness, freedom, human
+sympathy, are revealed upon every page.
+
+It is true that the dangers of American humor are no less in evidence
+there. There is the danger of extravagance, which in Mark Twain's
+earlier writings was carried to lengths of absurdity. There is the old
+danger of the professional humorist of fearing to fail to score his
+point, and so of underscoring it with painful reiteration. Mark Twain
+is frequently grotesque. Sometimes there is evidence of imperfect
+taste, or of bad taste. Sometimes there is actual vulgarity. In his
+earlier books particularly there is revealed that lack of discipline
+which has been such a constant accompaniment of American writing. Yet a
+native of Hannibal, Missouri, trained on a river steamboat and in a
+country printing-office and in mining-camps, can scarcely be expected
+to exhibit the finely balanced critical sense of a Matthew Arnold.
+Mark Twain was often accused in the first years of his international
+reputation of a characteristically American lack of reverence. He is
+often irreverent. But here again the boundaries of his irreverence are
+precisely those which the national instinct itself has drawn. The joke
+stops short of certain topics which the American mind holds sacred. We
+all have our favorite pages in the writings of this versatile and
+richly endowed humorist, but I think no one can read his description of
+the coyote in _Roughing It_, and Huckleberry Finn's account of his
+first visit to the circus, without realizing that in this fresh
+revelation of immemorial human curiosity, this vivid perception of
+incongruity and surprise, this series of lightning-like flashes from
+one pole of experience to the other, we have not only masterpieces of
+world humor, but a revelation of a distinctly American reaction to the
+facts presented by universal experience.
+
+The picturesque personality and the extraordinarily successful career
+of Mark Twain kept him, during the last twenty-five years of his life,
+in the focus of public attention. But no one can read the pages of the
+older American humorists,--or try to recall to mind the names of
+paragraphers who used to write comic matter for this or that
+newspaper,--without realizing how swiftly the dust of oblivion settles
+upon all the makers of mere jokes. It is enough, perhaps, that they
+caused a smile for the moment. Even those humorists who mark epochs in
+the history of American provincial and political satire, like Seba
+Smith with his _Major Jack Downing_, Newell with his _Papers of Orpheus
+C. Kerr_, "Petroleum V. Nasby's" _Letters from the Confedrit X Roads_,
+Shillaber's _Mrs. Partington_--all these have disappeared round the
+turn of the long road.
+
+    "Hans Breitman gife a barty--
+    Vhere ish dot barty now?"
+
+It seems as if the conscious humorists, the professional funny writers,
+had the shortest lease of literary life. They play their little comic
+parts before a well-disposed but restless audience which is already
+impatiently waiting for some other "turn." One of them makes a hit with
+a song or story, just as a draughtsman for a Sunday colored supplement
+makes a hit with his "Mutt and Jeff." For a few months everybody
+smiles and then comes the long oblivion. The more permanent American
+humor has commonly been written by persons who were almost unconscious,
+not indeed of the fact that they were creating humorous characters, but
+unconscious of the effort to provoke a laugh. The smile lasts longer
+than the laugh. Perhaps that is the secret. One smiles as one reads the
+delicate sketches of Miss Jewett. One smiles over the stories of Owen
+Wister and of Thomas Nelson Page. The trouble, possibly, with the
+enduring qualities of the brilliant humorous stories of "O. Henry" was
+that they tempt the reader to laugh too much and to smile too little.
+When one reads the _Legend of Sleepy Hollow_ or _Diedrich
+Knickerbocker's History of New York_, it is always with this gentle
+parting of the lips, this kindly feeling toward the author, his
+characters and the world. A humorous page which produces that effect
+for generation after generation, has the stamp of literature. One may
+doubt whether even the extraordinary fantasies of Mark Twain are more
+successful, judged by the mere vulgar test of concrete results, than
+the delicate humor of Charles Lamb. Our current newspaper and magazine
+humor is in no respect more fascinating than in its suggestion as to
+the permanent effectiveness of its comic qualities. Who could say, when
+he first read Mr. Finley P. Dunne's "Mr. Dooley" sketches, whether this
+was something that a whole nation of readers would instantly and
+instinctively rejoice over, would find a genial revelation of American
+characteristics, would recognize as almost the final word of kindly
+satire upon our overworked, over-excited, over-anxious,
+over-self-conscious generation?
+
+The range of this contemporary newspaper and magazine humor is
+well-nigh universal,--always saving, it is true, certain topics or
+states of mind which the American public cannot regard as topics for
+laughter. With these few exceptions nothing is too high or too low for
+it. The paragraphers joke about the wheel-barrow, the hen, the mule,
+the mother-in-law, the President of the United States. There is no
+ascending or descending scale of importance. Any of the topics can
+raise a laugh. If one examines a collection of American parodies, one
+will find that the happy national talent for fun-making finds full
+scope in the parody and burlesque of the dearest national sentiments.
+But no one minds; everybody believes that the sentiments endure while
+the jokes will pass. The jokes, intended as they are for an immense
+audience, necessarily lack subtlety. They tend to partake of the
+methods of pictorial caricature. Indeed, caricature itself, as Bergson
+has pointed out, emphasizes those "automatic, mechanical-toy" traits of
+character and behavior which isolate the individual and make him ill
+adapted for his function in society. Our verbal wit and humor, no less
+than the pencil of our caricaturists, have this constant note of
+exaggeration. "These violent delights have violent ends." But during
+their brief and laughing existence they serve to normalize society.
+They set up, as it were, a pulpit in the street upon which the comic
+spirit may mount and preach her useful sermon to all comers.
+
+Despite the universality of the objects of contemporary American humor,
+despite, too, its prevalent method of caricature, it remains true that
+its character is, on the whole, clean, easy-going, and kindly. The old
+satire of hatred has lost its force. No one knows why. "Satire has
+grown weak," says Mr. Chesterton, "precisely because belief has grown
+weak." That is one theory. The late Henry D. Lloyd, of Chicago,
+declared in one of his last books: "The world has outgrown the dialect
+and temper of hatred. The style of the imprecatory psalms and the
+denunciating prophets is out of date. No one knows these times if he is
+not conscious of this change." That is another theory. Again, party
+animosities are surely weaker than they were. Caricatures are less
+personally offensive; if you doubt it, look at any of the collections
+of caricatures of Napoleon, or of George the Fourth. Irony is less
+often used by pamphleteers and journalists. It is a delicate rhetorical
+weapon, and journalists who aim at the great public are increasingly
+afraid to use it, lest the readers miss the point. In the editorials in
+the Hearst newspapers, for instance, there is plenty of invective and
+innuendo, but rarely irony: it might not be understood, and the crowd
+must not be left in doubt.
+
+Possibly the old-fashioned satire has disappeared because the game is
+no longer considered worth the candle. To puncture the tire of
+pretence is amusing enough; but it is useless to stick tacks under the
+steam road-roller: the road-roller advances remorselessly and smooths
+down your mischievous little tacks and you too, indifferently. The huge
+interests of politics, trade, progress, override your passionate
+protest. "Shall gravitation cease when you go by?" I do not compare
+Colonel Roosevelt with gravitation, but have all the satirical squibs
+against our famous contemporary, from the "Alone in Cubia" to the
+"Teddy-see," ever cost him, in a dozen years, a dozen votes?
+
+Very likely Mr. Lloyd and Mr. Chesterton are right. We are less
+censorious than our ancestors were. Americans, on the whole, try to
+avoid giving pain through speech. The satirists of the golden age loved
+that cruel exercise of power. Perhaps we take things less seriously
+than they did; undoubtedly our attention is more distracted and
+dissipated. At any rate, the American public finds it easier to forgive
+and forget, than to nurse its wrath to keep it warm. Our characteristic
+humor of understatement, and our equally characteristic humor of
+overstatement, are both likely to be cheery at bottom, though the mere
+wording may be grim enough. No popular saying is more genuinely
+characteristic of American humor than the familiar "Cheer up. The worst
+is yet to come."
+
+Whatever else one may say or leave unsaid about American humor, every
+one realizes that it is a fundamentally necessary reaction from the
+pressure of our modern living. Perhaps it is a handicap. Perhaps we
+joke when we should be praying. Perhaps we make fun when we ought to be
+setting our shoulders to the wheel. But the deeper fact is that most
+American shoulders are set to the wheel too often and too long, and if
+they do not stop for the joke they are done for. I have always
+suspected that Mr. Kipling was thinking of American humor when he wrote
+in his well-known lines on "The American Spirit":--
+
+    "So imperturbable he rules
+      Unkempt, disreputable, vast--
+    And in the teeth of all the schools
+      I--I shall save him at the last."
+
+That is the very secret of the American sense of humor: the conviction
+that something is going to save us at the last. Otherwise there would
+be no joke! It is no accident, surely, that the man who is
+increasingly idolized as the most representative of all Americans, the
+burden-bearer of his people, the man of sorrows and acquainted with
+grief, should be our most inveterate humorist. Let Lincoln have his
+story and his joke, for he had faith in the saving of the nation; and
+while his Cabinet are waiting impatiently to listen to his Proclamation
+of Emancipation, give him another five minutes to read aloud to them
+that new chapter by Artemus Ward.
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+Individualism and Fellowship
+
+
+It would be difficult to find a clearer expression of the old doctrine
+of individualism than is uttered by Carlyle in his London lecture on
+"The Hero as Man of Letters." Listen to the grim child of Calvinism as
+he fires his "Annandale grapeshot" into that sophisticated London
+audience: "Men speak too much about the world.... The world's being
+saved will not save us; nor the world's being lost destroy us. We
+should look to ourselves.... For the saving of the world I will trust
+confidently to the Maker of the world; and look a little to my own
+saving, which I am more competent to!"
+
+Carlyle was never more soundly Puritanic, never more perfectly within
+the lines of the moral traditions of his race than in these injunctions
+to let the world go and to care for the individual soul.
+
+We are familiar with the doctrine on this side of the Atlantic. Here is
+a single phrase from Emerson's _Journal_ of September, 1833, written on
+his voyage home from that memorable visit to Europe where he first made
+Carlyle's acquaintance. "Back again to myself," wrote Emerson, as the
+five-hundred-ton sailing ship beat her way westward for a long month
+across the stormy North Atlantic:--"Back again to myself.--A man
+contains all that is needful to his government within himself. He is
+made a law unto himself. All real good or evil that can befall him must
+be from himself.... The purpose of life seems to be to acquaint a man
+with himself."
+
+In the following August he is writing:--
+
+    "Societies, parties, are only incipient stages, tadpole
+    states of men, as caterpillars are social, but the butterfly
+    not. The true and finished man is ever alone."
+
+On March 23, 1835:--
+
+    "Alone is wisdom. Alone is happiness. Society nowadays makes
+    us low-spirited, hopeless. Alone is Heaven."
+
+And once more:--
+
+    "If Æschylus is that man he is taken for, he has not yet
+    done his office when he has educated the learned of Europe
+    for a thousand years. He is now to approve himself a master
+    of delight to me. If he cannot do that, all his fame shall
+    avail him nothing. I were a fool not to sacrifice a thousand
+    Æschyluses to my intellectual integrity."
+
+These quotations have to do with the personal life. Let me next
+illustrate the individualism of the eighteen-thirties by the attitude
+of two famous individualists toward the prosaic question of paying
+taxes to the State. Carlyle told Emerson that he should pay taxes to
+the House of Hanover just as long as the House of Hanover had the
+physical force to collect them,--and not a day longer.
+
+Henry Thoreau was even more recalcitrant. Let me quote him:--
+
+    "I have paid no poll-tax for six years. I was put into a jail
+    once on this account, for one night; and, as I stood
+    considering the walls of solid stone, two or three feet
+    thick, the door of wood and iron, a foot thick, and the iron
+    grating which strained the light, I could not help being
+    struck with the foolishness of that institution which treated
+    me as if I were mere flesh and blood and bones, to be locked
+    up. I wondered that it should have concluded at length that
+    this was the best use it could put me to, and had never
+    thought to avail itself of my services in some way. I saw
+    that, if there was a wall of stone between me and my
+    townsmen, there was a still more difficult one to climb or
+    break through before they could get to be as free as I was. I
+    did not for a moment feel confined, and the walls seemed a
+    great waste of stone and mortar. I felt as if I alone of all
+    my townsmen had paid my tax. They plainly did not know how to
+    treat me, but behaved like persons who are underbred. In
+    every threat and in every compliment there was a blunder; for
+    they thought that my chief desire was to stand on the other
+    side of that stone wall. I could not but smile to see how
+    industriously they locked the door on my meditations, which
+    followed them out again without let or hindrance, and _they_
+    were really all that was dangerous. As they could not reach
+    me, they had resolved to punish my body; just as boys, if
+    they cannot come at some person against whom they have a
+    spite, will abuse his dog. I saw that the State was
+    half-witted, that it was timid as a lone woman with her
+    silver spoons, and that it did not know its friends from its
+    foes, and I lost all my remaining respect for it, and pitied
+    it."
+
+Here is Thoreau's attitude toward the problems of the inner life. The
+three quotations are from his _Walden_:--
+
+    "Probably I should not consciously and deliberately forsake
+    my particular calling to do the good which society demands of
+    me, to save the universe from annihilation."
+
+    "I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately,
+    to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could
+    not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die,
+    discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what
+    was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice
+    resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live
+    deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily
+    and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to
+    cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a
+    corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved
+    to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of
+    it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were
+    sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a
+    true account of it in my next excursion."
+
+    "It is said that the British Empire is very large and
+    respectable, and that the United States are a first-rate
+    power. We do not believe that a tide rises and falls behind
+    every man which can float the British Empire like a chip, if
+    he should ever harbor it in his mind."
+
+All of these quotations from Emerson and Thoreau are but various modes
+of saying "Let the world go." Everybody knows that in later crises of
+American history, both Thoreau and Emerson forgot their old preaching
+of individualism, or at least merged it in the larger doctrine of
+identification of the individual with the acts and emotions of the
+community. And nevertheless as men of letters they habitually laid
+stress upon the rights and duties of the private person. Upon a hundred
+brilliant pages they preached the gospel that society is in conspiracy
+against the individual manhood of every one of its members.
+
+They had a right to this doctrine. They came by it honestly through
+long lines of ancestral heritage. The republicanism of the seventeenth
+century in the American forests, as well as upon the floor of the
+English House of Commons, had asserted that private persons had the
+right to make and unmake kings. The republican theorists of the
+eighteenth century had insisted that life, liberty, and the pursuit of
+happiness were the birthright of each individual. This doctrine was
+related, of course, to the doctrine of equality. If republicanism
+teaches that "I am as good as others," democracy is forever hinting
+"Others are as good as I." Democracy has been steadily extending the
+notion of rights and duties. The first instinct, perhaps, is to ask
+what is right, just, lawful, for me? Next, what is right, just, lawful
+for my crowd? That is to say, my family, my clan, my race, my country.
+The third instinct bids one ask what is right and just and lawful, not
+merely for me, and for men like me, but for everybody. And when we get
+that third question properly answered, we can afford to close
+school-house and church and court-room, for this world's work will have
+ended.
+
+We have already glanced at various phases of colonial individualism. We
+have had a glimpse of Cotton Mather prostrate upon the dusty floor of
+his study, agonizing now for himself and now for the countries of
+Europe; we have watched Jonathan Edwards in his solitary ecstasies in
+the Northampton and the Stockbridge woods; we have seen Franklin
+preaching his gospel of personal thrift and of getting on in the world.
+Down to the very verge of the Revolution the American pioneer spirit
+was forever urging the individual to fight for his own hand. Each boy
+on the old farms had his own chores to do; each head of a family had to
+plan for himself. The most tragic failure of the individual in those
+days was the poverty or illness which compelled him to "go on the
+town." To be one of the town poor indicated that the individualistic
+battle had been fought and lost. No one ever dreamed, apparently, that
+a time for old-age pensions and honorable retiring funds was coming.
+The feeling against any form of community assistance was like the
+bitter hatred of the workhouse among English laborers of the
+eighteen-forties.
+
+The stress upon purely personal qualities gave picturesqueness, color,
+and vigor to the early life of the United States. Take the persons whom
+Parkman describes in his _Oregon Trail_. They have the perfect
+clearness of outline of the portraits by Walter Scott and the great
+Romantic school of novelists who loved to paint pictures of interesting
+individual men. There is the same stress upon individualistic
+portraiture in Irving's _Astoria_; in the humorous journals of early
+travellers in the Southern States. It is the secret of the curiosity
+with which we observe the gamblers and miners and stage-drivers
+described by Bret Harte. In the rural communities of to-day, in the
+older portions of the country, and in the remoter settlements of the
+West and Southwest, the individual man has a sort of picturesque, and,
+as it were, artistic value, which the life of cities does not allow.
+The gospel of self-reliance and of solitude is not preached more
+effectively by the philosophers of Concord than it is by the
+backwoodsmen, the spies, and the sailors of Fenimore Cooper.
+Individualism as a doctrine of perfection for the private person and
+individualism as a literary creed have thus gone hand in hand. "Produce
+great persons, the rest follows," cried Walt Whitman. He was thinking
+at the moment about American society and politics. But he believed that
+the same law held good in poetry. Once get your great man and let him
+abandon himself to poetry and the great poetry will be the result. It
+was almost precisely the same teaching as in Carlyle's lecture on "The
+Hero as Poet."
+
+Well, it is clear enough nowadays that both Whitman and Carlyle
+underrated the value of discipline. The lack of discipline is the chief
+obstacle to effective individualism. The private person must be well
+trained, or he cannot do his work; and as civilization advances, it
+becomes exceedingly difficult to train the individual without social
+coöperation. A Paul or a Mahomet may discipline his own soul in the
+Desert of Arabia; he may there learn the lessons that may later make
+him a leader of men. But for the average man and indeed for most of the
+exceptional men, the path to effectiveness lies through social and
+professional discipline. Here is where the frontier stage of our
+American life was necessarily weak. We have seen that our ancestors
+gained something, no doubt, from their spirit of unconventionally and
+freedom. But they also lost something through their dislike for
+discipline, their indifference to criticism, their ineradicable
+tendency, whether in business, in diplomacy, in art and letters and
+education, to go "across lots." A certain degree of physical
+orderliness was, indeed, imposed upon our ancestors by the conditions
+of pioneer life. The natural prodigality and recklessness of frontier
+existence was here and there sharply checked. Order is essential in a
+camp, and the thin line of colonies was all camping. A certain instinct
+for order underlay that resourcefulness which impresses every reader of
+our history. Did the colonist need a tool? He learned to make it
+himself. Isolation from the mother country was a stimulus to the
+inventive imagination. Before long they were maintaining public order
+in the same ingenious fashion in which they kept house. Appeals to
+London took too much time. "We send a complaint this year," ran the
+saying, "the next year they send to inquire, the third year the
+ministry is changed." No wonder that resourcefulness bred independent
+action, stimulated the Puritan taste for individualism, and led the way
+to self-government.
+
+Yet who does not know that the inherent instinct for political order
+may be accompanied by mental disorderliness? Even your modern
+Englishman--as the saying goes--"muddles through." The minds of our
+American forefathers were not always lucid. The mysticism of the New
+England Calvinists sometimes bred fanaticism. The practical and the
+theoretical were queerly blended. The essential unorderliness of the
+American mind is admirably illustrated by that "Father of all the
+Yankees," Benjamin Franklin. No student of Franklin's life fails to be
+impressed by its happy casualness, its cheerful flavor of the
+rogue-romance. Gil Blas himself never drifted into and out of an
+adventure with a more offhand and imperturbable adroitness. Franklin
+went through life with the joyous inventiveness of the amateur. He had
+the amateur's enthusiasm, coupled with a clairvoyant penetration into
+technical problems such as few amateurs have possessed. With all of his
+wonderful patience towards other men, Franklin had in the realm of
+scientific experiment something of the typical impatience of the mere
+dabbler. He was inclined to lose interest in the special problem before
+it was worked out. His large, tolerant intelligence was often as
+unorderly as his papers and accounts. He was a wonderful colonial
+Jack-of-all-trades; with a range of suggestion, a resourcefulness, a
+knack of assimilation, a cosmopolitan many-sidedness, which has left us
+perpetually his debtors. Under different surroundings, and disciplined
+by a more severe and orderly training, Franklin might easily have
+developed the very highest order of professional scientific
+achievement. His natural talent for organization of men and
+institutions, his "early projecting public spirit," his sense of the
+lack of formal educational advantages in the colonies, made him the
+founder of the Philadelphia Academy, the successful agitator for public
+libraries. Academicism, even in the narrow sense, owes much to this
+LL.D. of St. Andrews, D.C.L. of Oxford, and intimate associate of
+French academicians. But one smiles a little, after all, to see the
+bland printer in this academic company: he deserves his place there,
+indeed, but he is something more and other than his associates. He is
+the type of youthful, inexhaustible colonial America; reckless of
+precedent, self-taught, splendidly alive; worth, to his day and
+generation, a dozen born academicians; and yet suggesting by his very
+imperfections, that the Americans of a later day, working under
+different conditions, are bound to develop a sort of professional
+skill, of steady, concentrated, ordered intellectual activity, for
+which Franklin possessed the potential capacity rather than the
+opportunity and the desire.
+
+Yet there were latent lines of order, hints and prophecies of a coming
+fellowship, running deep and straight beneath the confused surface of
+the preoccupied colonial consciousness. In another generation we see
+the rude Western democracy asserting itself in the valley of the
+Mississippi. This breed of pioneers, like their fathers on the Atlantic
+coast line, could turn their hands to anything, because they must. "The
+average man," says Mr. Herbert Croly, "without any special bent or
+qualifications, was in the pioneer states the useful man. In that
+country it was sheer waste to spend much energy upon tasks which
+demanded skill, prolonged experience, high technical standards, or
+exclusive devotion.... No special equipment was required. The farmer
+was obliged to be all kinds of a rough mechanic. The business man was
+merchant, manufacturer, and storekeeper. Almost everybody was something
+of a politician. The number of parts which a man of energy played in
+his time was astonishingly large. Andrew Jackson was successively a
+lawyer, judge, planter, merchant, general, politician, and statesman;
+and he played most of these parts with conspicuous success. In such a
+society a man who persisted in one job, and who applied the most
+rigorous and exacting standards to his work, was out of place and
+really inefficient. His finished product did not serve its temporary
+purpose much better than did the current careless and hasty product,
+and his higher standards and peculiar ways constituted an implied
+criticism on the easy methods of his neighbors. He interfered with the
+rough good-fellowship which naturally arises among a group of men who
+submit good naturedly and uncritically to current standards. It is no
+wonder, consequently, that the pioneer Democracy viewed with distrust
+and aversion the man with a special vocation and high standards of
+achievement."
+
+The truth of this comment is apparent to everybody. It explains the
+still lingering popular suspicion of the "academic" type of man. But we
+are likely to forget that back of all that easy versatility and
+reckless variety of effort there was some sound and patient and
+constructive thinking. Lincoln used to describe himself humorously,
+slightingly, as a "mast-fed" lawyer, one who had picked up in the woods
+the scattered acorns of legal lore. It was a true enough description,
+but after all, there were very few college-bred lawyers in the Eighth
+Illinois Circuit or anywhere else who could hold their own, even in a
+purely professional struggle, with that long-armed logician from the
+backwoods.
+
+There was once a "mast-fed" novelist in this country, who scandalously
+slighted his academic opportunities, went to sea, went into the navy,
+went to farming, and then went into novel-writing to amuse himself. He
+cared nothing and knew nothing about conscious literary art; his style
+is diffuse, his syntax the despair of school-teachers, and many of his
+characters are bores. But once let him strike the trail of a story, and
+he follows it like his own Hawkeye; put him on salt water or in the
+wilderness, and he knows rope and paddle, axe and rifle, sea and forest
+and sky; and he knows his road home to the right ending of a story by
+an instinct as sure as an Indian's. Professional novelists like Balzac,
+professional critics like Sainte-Beuve, stand amazed at Fenimore
+Cooper's skill and power. The true engineering and architectural lines
+are there. They were not painfully plotted beforehand, like George
+Eliot's. Cooper took, like Scott, "the easiest path across country,"
+just as a bee-hunter seems to take the easiest path through the woods.
+But the bee-hunter, for all his apparent laziness, never loses sight of
+the air-drawn line, marked by the homing bee; and your _Last of the
+Mohicans_ will be instinctively, inevitably right, while your _Daniel
+Deronda_ will be industriously wrong.
+
+Cooper literally builded better than he knew. Obstinately unacademic in
+his temper and training, he has won the suffrages of the most
+fastidious and academic judges of excellence in his profession. The
+secret is, I suppose, that the lawlessness, the amateurishness, the
+indifference to standards were on the surface,--apparent to
+everybody,--the soundness and rightness of his practice were
+unconscious.
+
+Franklin and Lincoln and Cooper, therefore, may be taken as striking
+examples of individuals trained in the old happy-go-lucky way, and yet
+with marked capacities for socialization, for fellowship. They
+succeeded, even by the vulgar tests of success, in spite of their lack
+of discipline. But for most men the chief obstacle to effective labor
+even as individuals is the lack of thoroughgoing training.
+
+It is scarcely necessary to add that there are vast obstacles in the
+way of individualism as a working theory of society. Carlyle's theory
+of "Hero Worship" has fewer adherents than for half a century. It is
+picturesque,--that conception of a great, sincere man and of a world
+reverencing him and begging to be led by him. But the difficulty is
+that contemporary democracy does not say to the Hero, as Carlyle
+thought it must say, "Govern me! I am mad and miserable, and cannot
+govern myself!"
+
+Democracy says to the Hero, "Thank you very much, but this is our
+affair. Join us, if you like. We shall be glad of your company. But we
+are not looking for governors. We propose to govern ourselves."
+
+Even from the point of view of literature and art,--fields of activity
+where the individual performer has often been felt to be quite
+independent of his audience,--it is quite evident nowadays that the old
+theory of individualism breaks down. Even your lyric poet, who more
+than any other artist stands or sings alone, falls easily into mere
+lyric eccentricity if he is not bound to his fellows by wholesome and
+normal ties. In fact, this lyric eccentricity, weakness, wistfulness,
+is one of the notable defects of American poetry. We have always been
+lacking in the more objective forms of literary art, like epic and
+drama. Poe, and the imitators of Poe, have been regarded too often by
+our people as the normal type of poet. One must not forget the silent
+solitary ecstasies that have gone into the making of enduring lyric
+verse, but our literature proves abundantly how soon sweetness may turn
+to an Emily Dickinson strain of morbidness; how fatally the lovely
+becomes transformed into the queer. The history of the American short
+story furnishes many similar examples. The artistic intensity of a
+Hawthorne, his ethical and moral preoccupations, are all a part of the
+creed of individualistic art. But both Hawthorne and Poe would have
+written,--one dare not say better stories, but at least greater and
+broader and more human stories,--if they had not been forced to walk so
+constantly in solitary pathways. That fellowship in artistic creation
+which has characterized some of the greatest periods of art production
+was something wholly absent from the experience of these gifted and
+lonely men. Even Emerson and Thoreau wrote "whim" over their portals
+more often than any artist has the privilege to write it. Emerson never
+had any thorough training, either in philosophy, theology, or history.
+He admits it upon a dozen smiling pages. Perhaps it adds to his purely
+personal charm, just as Montaigne's confession of his intellectual and
+moral weaknesses heightens our fondness for the Prince of Essayists.
+But the deeper fact is that not only Emerson and Thoreau, Poe and
+Hawthorne, but practically every American writer and artist from the
+beginning has been forced to do his work without the sustaining and
+heartening touch of national fellowship and pride. Emerson himself felt
+the chilling poverty in the intellectual and emotional life of the
+country. He betrays it in this striking passage from his _Journal_,
+about the sculptor Greenough:--
+
+    "What interest has Greenough to make a good statue? Who cares
+    whether it is good? A few prosperous gentlemen and ladies;
+    but the Universal Yankee Nation roaring in the capitol to
+    approve or condemn would make his eye and hand and heart go
+    to a new tune."
+
+Those words were written in 1836, but we are still waiting for that new
+national anthem, sustaining the heart and the voice of the individual
+artist. Yet there are signs that it is coming.
+
+It is obvious that the day for the old individualism has passed.
+Whether one looks at art and literature or at the general activities of
+American society, it is clear that the isolated individual is
+incompetent to carry on his necessary tasks. This is not saying that we
+have outgrown the individual. We shall never outgrow the individual. We
+need for every page of literature and for every adequate performance of
+society more highly perfected individuals. Some one said of Edgar Allan
+Poe that he did not know enough to be a great poet. All around us and
+every day we find individuals who do not know enough for their specific
+job; men who do not love enough, men in whom the power of will is too
+feeble. Such men, as individuals, must know and love and will more
+adequately; and this not merely to perfect their functioning as
+individuals, but to fulfill their obligations to contemporary society.
+A true spiritual democracy will never be reached until highly trained
+individuals are united in the bonds of fraternal feeling. Every
+individual defect in training, defect in aspiration, defect in passion,
+becomes ultimately a defect in society.
+
+Let us turn, then, to those conditions of American society which have
+prepared the way for, and foreshadowed, a more perfect fellowship. We
+shall instantly perceive the relation of these general social
+conditions to the specific performances of our men of letters. We have
+repeatedly noted that our most characteristic literature is what has
+been called a citizen literature. It is the sort of writing which
+springs from a sense of the general needs of the community and which
+has had for its object the safe-guarding or the betterment of the
+community. Aside from a few masterpieces of lyric poetry, and aside
+from the short story as represented by such isolated artists as Poe and
+Hawthorne, our literature as a whole has this civic note. It may be
+detected in the first writings of the colonists. Captain John Smith's
+angry order at Jamestown, "He that will not work neither let him eat,"
+is one of the planks in the platform of democracy. Under the trying and
+depressing conditions of that disastrous settlement at Eden in _Martin
+Chuzzlewit_ it is the quick wits and the brave heart of Mark Tapley
+which prove him superior to his employer. The same sermon is preached
+in Mr. Barrie's play, _The Admirable Crichton_: cast away upon the
+desert island, the butler proves himself a better man than his master.
+This is the motive of a very modern play, but it may be illustrated a
+hundred times in the history of the seventeenth and eighteenth
+centuries in America. The practical experiences of the colonists
+confirmed them in their republican theories. It is true that they held
+to a doctrine of religious and political individualism. But the moment
+these theories were put to work in the wilderness a new order of things
+decreed that this individualism should be modified in the direction of
+fellowship. Calvinism itself, for all of its insistence upon the value
+of the individual soul, taught also the principle of the equality of
+all souls before God. It was thus that the _Institutes_ of Calvin
+became one of the charters of democracy. The democratic drift in the
+writings of Franklin and Jefferson is too well known to need any
+further comment. The triumph of the rebellious colonists of 1776 was a
+triumph of democratic principles; and although a Tory reaction came
+promptly, although Hamiltonianism came to stay as a beneficent check to
+over-radical, populistic theories, the history of the last century and
+a quarter has abundantly shown the vitality and the endurance of
+democratic ideas.
+
+One may fairly say that the decade in which American democracy revealed
+its most ugly and quarrelsome aspect was the decade of the
+eighteen-thirties. That was the decade when Washington Irving and
+Fenimore Cooper came home from long sojourns in Europe. They found
+themselves confronted at once by sensitive, suspicious neighbors who
+hated England and Europe and had a lurking or open hostility towards
+anything that savored of Old World culture. Yet in that very epoch
+when English visitors were passing their most harsh and censorious
+verdict upon American culture, Emerson was writing in his _Journal_
+(June 18, 1834) a singular prophecy to the effect that the evils of
+our democracy, so far as literature was concerned, were to be cured by
+the remedy of more democracy. Is it not striking that he turns away
+from the universities and the traditional culture of New England and
+looks towards the Jacksonism of the new West to create a new and native
+American literature? Here is the passage:--
+
+    "We all lean on England; scarce a verse, a page, a newspaper,
+    but is writ in imitation of English forms; our very manners
+    and conversation are traditional, and sometimes the life
+    seems dying out of all literature, and this enormous paper
+    currency of Words is accepted instead. I suppose the evil may
+    be cured by this rank rabble party, the Jacksonism of the
+    country, heedless of English and of all literature--a stone
+    cut out of the ground without hands;--they may root out the
+    hollow dilettantism of our cultivation in the coarsest way,
+    and the new-born may begin again to frame their own world
+    with greater advantage."
+
+From that raw epoch of the eighteen-thirties on to the Civil War, one
+may constantly detect in American writing the accents of democratic
+radicalism. Partly, no doubt, it was a heritage of the sentiment of the
+French Revolution. "My father," said John Greenleaf Whittier, "really
+believed in the Preamble of the Bill of Rights, which re-affirmed the
+Declaration of Independence." So did the son! Equally clear in the
+writings of those thirty years are echoes of the English radicalism
+which had so much in common with the democratic movement across the
+English Channel. The part which English thinkers and English agitators
+played in securing for America the fruits of her own democratic
+principles has never been adequately acknowledged.
+
+That the outcome of the Civil War meant a triumph of democratic ideas
+as against aristocratic privilege, no one can doubt. There were no
+stancher adherents of the democratic idea than our intellectual
+aristocrats. The best Union editorials at the time of the Civil War,
+says James Ford Rhodes, were written by scholars like Charles Eliot
+Norton and James Russell Lowell. I think it was Lowell who once said,
+in combatting the old aristocratic notion of white man supremacy, that
+no gentleman is willing to accept privileges that are inaccessible to
+other men. This is precisely like the famous sentence of Walt Whitman
+which first arrested the attention of "Golden Rule Jones," the mayor of
+Toledo, and which made him not only a Whitmaniac for the rest of his
+life but one of the most useful of American citizens. The line was, "I
+will accept nothing which all may not have their counterpart of on the
+same terms."
+
+This instinct of fellowship cannot be separated, of course, from the
+older instincts of righteousness and justice. It involves, however,
+more than giving the other man his due. It means feeling towards him as
+towards another "fellow." It involves the sentiment of partnership.
+Historians of early mining life in California have noted the new phase
+of social feeling in the mining-camps which followed upon the change
+from the pan--held and shaken by the solitary miner--to the cradle,
+which required the coöperation of at least two men. It was when the
+cradle came in that the miners first began to say "partner." As the
+cradle gave way to placer mining, larger and larger schemes of
+coöperation came into use. In fact, Professor Royce has pointed out in
+his _History of California_ that the whole lesson of California
+history is precisely the lesson most necessary to be learned by the
+country as a whole, namely, that the phase of individual gain-getting
+and individualistic power always leads to anarchy and reaction, and
+that it becomes necessary, even in the interests of effective
+individualism itself, to recognize the compelling and ultimate
+authority of society.
+
+What went on in California between 1849 and 1852 is precisely typical
+of what is going on everywhere to-day. American men and women are
+learning, as we say, "to get together." It is the distinctly
+twentieth-century programme. We must all learn the art of getting
+together, not merely to conserve the interests of literature and art
+and society, but to preserve the individual himself in his just rights.
+Any one who misunderstands the depth and the scope of the present
+political restlessness which is manifested in every section of the
+country, misunderstands the American instinct for fellowship. It is a
+law of that fellowship that what is right and legitimate for me is
+right and legitimate for the other fellow also. The American mind and
+the American conscience are becoming socialized before our very eyes.
+American art and literature must keep pace with this socialization of
+the intelligence and the conscience, or they will be no longer
+representative of the true America.
+
+Literary illustrations of this spirit of fraternalism lie close at
+hand. They are to be found here and there even in the rebellious,
+well-nigh anarchic, individualism of the Concord men. They are to be
+found throughout the prose and verse of Whittier. No one has preached a
+truer or more effective gospel of fellowship than Longfellow, whose
+poetry has been one of the pervasive influences in American democracy,
+although Longfellow had but little to say about politics and never
+posed in a slouch hat and with his trousers tucked into his boots.
+Fellowship is taught in the _Biglow Papers_ of Lowell and the stories
+of Mrs. Stowe. It is wholly absent from the prose and verse of Poe, and
+it imparts but a feeble warmth to the delicately written pages of
+Hawthorne. But in the books written for the great common audience of
+American men and women, like the novels of Winston Churchill; and in
+the plays which have scored the greatest popular successes, like those
+of Denman Thompson, Bronson Howard, Gillette, Augustus Thomas, the
+doctrine of fellowship is everywhere to be traced. It is in the poems
+of James Whitcomb Riley and of Sam Walter Foss; in the work of hundreds
+of lesser known writers of verse and prose who have echoed Foss's
+sentiment about living in a "house by the side of the road" and being a
+"friend of man."
+
+To many readers the supreme literary example of the gospel of American
+fellowship is to be found in Walt Whitman. One will look long before
+one finds a more consistent or a nobler doctrine of fellowship than is
+chanted in _Leaves of Grass_. It is based upon individualism; the
+strong body and the possessed soul, sure of itself amid the whirling of
+the "quicksand years"; but it sets these strong persons upon the "open
+road" in comradeship; it is the sentiment of comradeship which creates
+the indissoluble union of "these States"; and the States, in turn, in
+spite of every "alarmist," "partialist," or "infidel," are to stretch
+out unsuspicious and friendly hands of fellowship to the whole world.
+Anybody has the right to call _Leaves of Grass_ poor poetry, if he
+pleases; but nobody has the right to deny its magnificent Americanism.
+
+It is not merely in literature that this message of fellowship is
+brought to our generation. Let me quote a few sentences from the recent
+address of George Gray Barnard, the sculptor, in explaining the meaning
+of his marble groups now placed at the entrance to the Capitol of
+Pennsylvania. "I resolved," says Barnard, "that I would build such
+groups as should stand at the entrance to the People's temple ... the
+home of those visions of the ever-widening and broadening brotherhood
+that gives to life its dignity and its meaning. Life is told in terms
+of labor. It is fitting that labor, its triumphs, its message, should
+be told to those who gaze upon a temple of the people. The worker is
+the hope of all the future. The needs of the worker, his problems, his
+hopes, his untold longings, his sacrifices, his triumphs, all of these
+are the field of the art of the future. Slowly we are groping our way
+towards the new brotherhood, and when that day dawns, men will enter a
+world made a paradise by labor. Labor makes us kin. It is for this
+reason that there has been placed at the entrance of this great
+building the message of the Adam and Eve of the future, the message of
+labor and of fraternity."
+
+That there are defects in this gospel and programme of American
+fellowship, every one is aware. If the obstacle to effective
+individualism is lack of discipline, the obstacles to effective
+fellowship are vagueness, crankiness, inefficiency, and the relics of
+primal selfishness. Nobody in our day has preached the tidings of
+universal fellowship more fervidly and powerfully than Tolstoï. Yet
+when one asks the great Russian, "What am I to do as a member of this
+fellowship?" Tolstoï gives but a confused and impractical answer. He
+applies to the complex and contradictory facts of our contemporary
+civilization the highest test and standard known to him: namely, the
+principles of the New Testament. But if you ask him precisely how these
+principles are to be made the working programme of to-morrow, the
+Russian mysticism and fanaticism settle over him like a fog. We pass
+Tolstoïans on the streets of our American cities every day; they have
+the eyes of dreamers, of those who would build, if they could, a new
+Heaven and a new Earth. But they do not know exactly how to go about
+it. Our practical Western minds seize upon some actual plan for
+constructive labor. Miss Jane Addams organizes her settlements in the
+slums; Booker Washington gives his race models of industrial education;
+President Eliot has a theory of university reform and then struggles
+successfully for forty years to put that theory into practice. Compared
+with the concrete performance of such social workers as these, the
+gospel according to Whitman and Tolstoï is bound to seem vague in its
+outlines, and ineffective in its concrete results. That such a gospel
+attracts cranks and eccentrics of all sorts is not to be wondered at.
+They come and go, but the deeper conceptions of fraternalism remain.
+
+A further obstacle to the progress of fellowship lies in selfishness.
+But let us see how even the coarser and rawer and cruder traits of the
+American character may be related to the spirit of common endeavor
+which is slowly transforming our society, and modifying, before our
+eyes, our contemporary art and literature.
+
+"The West," says James Bryce, "is the most American part of America,
+that is to say the part where those features which distinguish America
+from Europe come out in the strongest relief." We have already noted in
+our study of American romance how the call of the West represented for
+a while the escape from reality. The individual, following that
+retreating horizon which we name the West, found an escape from
+convention and from social law. Beyond the Mississippi or beyond the
+Rockies meant to him that "somewheres east of Suez" where the Ten
+Commandments are no longer to be found, where the individual has free
+rein. But by and by comes the inevitable reaction, the return to
+reality. The pioneer sobers down; he finds that "the Ten Commandments
+will not budge"; he sees the need of law and order; he organizes a
+vigilance committee; he impanels a jury, even though the old Spanish
+law does not recognize a jury. The new land settles to its rest. The
+output of the gold mines shrinks into insignificance when compared with
+the cash value of crops of hay and potatoes. The old picturesque
+individualism yields to a new social order, to the conception of the
+rights of the state. The story of the West is thus an epitome of the
+individual human life as well as the history of the United States.
+
+We have been living through a period where the mind of the West has
+seemed to be the typical national mind. We have been indifferent to
+traditions. We have overlooked the defective training of the
+individual, provided he "made good." We have often, as in the free
+silver craze, turned our back upon universal experience. We have been
+recklessly deaf to the teachings of history; we have spoken of the laws
+of literature and art as if they were mere conventions designed to
+oppress the free activity of the artist. Typical utterances of our
+writers are Jack London's "I want to get away from the musty grip of
+the past," and Frank Norris's "I do not want to write literature, I
+want to write life."
+
+The soul of the West, and a good deal of the soul of America, has been
+betrayed in words like those. Not to share this hopefulness of the
+West, its stress upon feeling rather than thinking, its superb
+confidence, is to be ignorant of the constructive forces of the nation.
+The humor of the West, its democracy, its rough kindness, its faith in
+the people, its generous notion of "the square deal for everybody,"
+its elevation of the man above the dollar, are all typical of the
+American way of looking at the world. Typical also, is its social
+solidarity, its swift emotionalism of the masses. It is the Western
+interest in the ethical aspect of social movements that is creating
+some of the moving forces in American society to-day. Experiment
+stations of all kinds flourish on that soil. Chicago newspapers are
+more alive to new ideas than the newspapers of New York or Boston. No
+one can understand the present-day America if he does not understand
+the men and women who live between the Allegheny Mountains and the
+Rocky Mountains. They have worked out, more successfully than the
+composite population of the East, a general theory of the relation of
+the individual to society; in other words, a combination of
+individualism with fellowship.
+
+To draw up an indictment against this typical section of our country is
+to draw up an indictment against our people as a whole. And yet one who
+studies the literature and art produced in the great Mississippi Valley
+will see, I believe, that the needs of the West are the real needs of
+America. Take that commonness of mind and tone, which friendly foreign
+critics, from De Tocqueville to Bryce, have indicated as one of the
+dangers of our democracy. This commonness of mind and tone is often one
+of the penalties of fellowship. It may mean a levelling down instead of
+a levelling up.
+
+Take the tyranny of the majority,--to which Mr. Bryce has devoted one
+of his most suggestive chapters. You begin by recognizing the rights of
+the majority. You end by believing that the majority must be right. You
+cease to struggle against it. In other words, you yield to what Mr.
+Bryce calls "the fatalism of the multitude." The individual has a sense
+of insignificance. It is vain to oppose the general current. It is
+easier to acquiesce and to submit. The sense of personal responsibility
+lessens. What is the use of battling for one's own opinions when one
+can already see that the multitude is on the other side? The greater
+your democratic faith in the ultimate rightness of the multitude, the
+less perhaps your individual power of will. The easier is it for you to
+believe that everything is coming out right, whether you put your
+shoulder to the wheel or not.
+
+The problem of overcoming these evils is nothing less than the problem
+of spiritualizing democracy. There are some of our hero-worshipping
+people who think that that vast result can still be accomplished by
+harking back to some such programme as the "great man" theory of
+Carlyle. Another theory of spiritualizing democracy, no less familiar
+to the student of nineteen-century literature, is what is called "the
+divine average" doctrine of Walt Whitman. The average man is to be
+taught the glory of his walk and trade. Round every head there is to be
+an aureole. "A common wave of thought and joy, lifting mankind again,"
+is to make us forget the old distinction between the individual and the
+social group. We are all to be the sons of the morning.
+
+We must not pause to analyze or to illustrate these two theories.
+Carlyle's theory seems to me to be outworn, and Whitman's theory is
+premature. But it is clear that they both admit that the mass of men
+are as yet incompletely spiritualized, not yet raised to their full
+stature. Unquestionably, our American life is, in European eyes at
+least, monotonously uniform. It is touched with self-complacency. It
+is too intent upon material progress. It confuses bigness with
+greatness. It is unrestful. It is marked by intellectual impatience.
+Our authors are eager to write life rather than literature. But they
+are so eager that they overlook the need of literary discipline. They
+do not learn to write literature and therefore most of them are
+incapable of interpreting life. They escape, perhaps, from "the musty
+grip of the past," but in so doing they refuse to learn the inexorable
+lessons of the past. Hence the fact that our books lack power, that
+they are not commensurate with the living forces of the country. The
+unconscious, moral, and spiritual life of the nation is not back of
+them, making "eye and hand and heart go to a new tune."
+
+If we could have that, we should ask no more, for we believe in the
+nation. I heard a doctor say, the other day, that a man's chief lesson
+was to pull his brain down into his spinal cord; that is to say, to
+make his activities not so much the result of conscious thought and
+volition, as of unconscious, reflex action; to stop thinking and
+willing, and simply _do_ what one has to do. May there not be a hint
+here of the ultimate relation of the individual to the social
+organism; the relation of our literature to our national character?
+There is a period, no doubt, when the individual must painfully
+question himself, test his powers, and acquire the sense of his own
+place in the world. But there also comes a more mature period when he
+takes that place unconsciously, does his work almost without thinking
+about it, as if it were not his work at all. The brain has gone down
+into the spinal cord; the man is functioning as apart of the organism
+of society; he has ceased to question, to plan, to decide; it is
+instinct that does his work for him.
+
+Literature and art, at their noblest, function in that instinctive way.
+They become the unconscious expression of a civilization. A nation
+passes out of its adolescent preoccupation with plans and with
+materials. It learns to do its work, precisely as Goethe bade the
+artist do his task, without talking about it. We, too, shall outgrow in
+time our questioning, our self-analysis, our futile comparison of
+ourselves with other nations, our self-conscious study of our own
+national character. We shall not forget the distinction between "each"
+and "all," but "all" will increasingly be placed at the service of
+"each." With fellowship based upon individualism, and with
+individualism ever leading to fellowship, America will perform its
+vital tasks, and its literature will be the unconscious and beautiful
+utterance of its inner life.
+
+
+THE END.
+
+
+The Riverside Press
+
+CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS
+
+U. S. A.
+
+
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Transcriber's Notes
+
+
+Pages 53, 141: Changed the oe ligature to oe in the name Crèvecoeur:
+  (Settlers like Crèvecoeur), (enthusiasm of a settler like Crèvecoeur)
+
+Page 67: Changed compaign to campaign:
+  (Their compaign of "exposure," during the last decade,)
+
+Page 165: Retained the spaced 't is, to match original line of poetry:
+  ("If my bark sinks, 't is to another sea.")
+
+Page 222: Changed conciousness to consciousness:
+  (the preoccupied colonial conciousness.)
+
+Page 223: Changed explans to explains:
+  (It explans the still lingering popular suspicion)
+
+Page 232: Changed sojurns to sojourns:
+  (Fenimore Cooper came home from long sojurns in Europe.)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The American Mind, by Bliss Perry
+
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+
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The American Mind, by Bliss Perry
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The American Mind
+       The E. T. Earl Lectures
+
+Author: Bliss Perry
+
+Release Date: September 10, 2009 [EBook #29952]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
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+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE AMERICAN MIND ***
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+</pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<h1><span class="smcap">The American Mind</span></h1>
+
+<p class="title"><big><i>The E. T. Earl Lectures</i></big><br /><br />
+
+1912</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<div class="bbox">
+<p class="title"><big>By the Same Author</big></p>
+
+
+
+<ul><li>The American Mind</li>
+<li>Park-Street Papers</li>
+<li>John Greenleaf Whittier: A Memoir</li>
+<li>Walt Whitman</li>
+<li>The Amateur Spirit</li>
+<li>A Study of Prose Fiction</li>
+<li>The Powers at Play</li>
+<li>The Plated City</li>
+<li>Salem Kittredge and Other Stories</li>
+<li>The Broughton House</li>
+</ul></div>
+
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h1>The American Mind</h1>
+
+<p class="title"><big>By Bliss Perry</big></p>
+
+<p class="figcenter" style="width: 153px;">
+<img src="images/image001.png" width="153" height="159" alt="The Riverside Press" title="" />
+</p>
+
+<p class="title">Boston and New York<br />
+
+<big>Houghton Mifflin Company</big><br />
+
+1912</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p class="center"><small>COPYRIGHT, 1912, BY BLISS PERRY</small><br /><br />
+
+<small>ALL RIGHTS RESERVED</small><br /><br />
+
+<i><small>Published October 1912</small></i></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p class="title">TO<br /><br />
+
+<big>WALTER MORRIS HART</big></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="Preface" id="Preface"></a>Preface</h2>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The</span> <i>material for this book was delivered as
+the E. T. Earl Lectures for 1912 at the Pacific
+Theological Seminary, Berkeley, California, and
+I wish to take this opportunity to express to the
+President and Faculty of that institution my appreciation
+of their generous hospitality.</i></p>
+
+<p><i>The lectures were also given at the Lowell
+Institute, Boston, the Brooklyn Institute, and
+elsewhere, under the title "American Traits in
+American Literature." In revising them for publication
+a briefer title has seemed desirable, and
+I have therefore availed myself of Jefferson's
+phrase "The American Mind," as suggesting,
+more accurately perhaps than the original title,
+the real theme of discussion.</i></p>
+
+<p class="author">
+B. P.
+</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap"><small>Cambridge, 1912.</small></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="Contents" id="Contents"></a>Contents</h2>
+
+
+<ol class="toc">
+<li><span class="smcap">Race, Nation, and Book</span>      <span class="tocright"><a href="#Page_3">3</a></span></li>
+
+<li><span class="smcap">The American Mind</span>      <span class="tocright"><a href="#Page_47">47</a></span></li>
+
+<li><span class="smcap">American Idealism</span>      <span class="tocright"><a href="#Page_86">86</a></span></li>
+
+<li><span class="smcap">Romance and Reaction</span>      <span class="tocright"><a href="#Page_128">128</a></span></li>
+
+<li><span class="smcap">Humor and Satire</span>      <span class="tocright"><a href="#Page_166">166</a></span></li>
+
+<li><span class="smcap">Individualism and Fellowship</span>      <span class="tocright"><a href="#Page_209">209</a></span></li>
+</ol>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="THE_AMERICAN_MIND" id="THE_AMERICAN_MIND"></a><big>THE AMERICAN MIND</big></h2>
+
+
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_3" id="Page_3">[Pg 3]</a></span></p><hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="I" id="I"></a>I<br /><br />
+
+Race, Nation, and Book</h2>
+
+
+<p>Many years ago, as a student in a foreign university,
+I remember attacking, with the complacency
+of youth, a German history of the
+English drama, in six volumes. I lost courage
+long before the author reached the age of Elizabeth,
+but I still recall the subject of the opening
+chapter: it was devoted to the physical geography
+of Great Britain. Writing, as the good German
+professor did, in the triumphant hour of Taine's
+theory as to the significance of place, period,
+and environment in determining the character
+of any literary production, what could be more
+logical than to begin at the beginning? Have
+not the chalk cliffs guarding the southern coast
+of England, have not the fatness of the midland
+counties and the soft rainy climate of a North
+Atlantic island, and the proud, tenacious, self-assertive
+folk that are bred there, all left their
+trace upon <i>A Midsummer Night's Dream</i>, and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_4" id="Page_4">[Pg 4]</a></span>
+<i>Every Man in his Humour</i> and <i>She Stoops to Conquer</i>?
+Undoubtedly. Latitude and longitude,
+soil and rainfall and food-supply, racial origins
+and crossings, political and social and economic
+conditions, must assuredly leave their marks
+upon the mental and artistic productiveness of
+a people and upon the personality of individual
+writers.</p>
+
+<p>Taine, who delighted to point out all this, and
+whose <i>English Literature</i> remains a monument
+of the defects as well as of the advantages of
+his method, was of course not the inventor of
+the climatic theory. It is older than Aristotle,
+who discusses it in his treatise on <i>Politics</i>. It
+was a topic of interest to the scholars of the Renaissance.
+Englishmen of the seventeenth century,
+with an unction of pseudo-science added to
+their natural patriotism, discovered in the English
+climate one of the reasons of England's
+greatness. Thomas Sprat, writing in 1667 on
+the History of the Royal Society, waxes bold and
+asserts: "If there can be a true character given
+of the Universal Temper of any Nation under
+Heaven, then certainly this must be ascribed
+to our countrymen, that they have commonly
+an unaffected sincerity, that they love to deliver<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_5" id="Page_5">[Pg 5]</a></span>
+their minds with a sound simplicity, that
+they have the middle qualities between the reserved,
+subtle southern and the rough, unhewn
+northern people, that they are not extremely
+prone to speak, that they are more concerned
+what others will think of the strength than of
+the fineness of what they say, and that a universal
+modesty possesses them. These qualities
+are so conspicuous and proper to the soil that
+we often hear them objected to us by some of
+our neighbor Satyrists in more disgraceful expressions....
+Even the position of our climate,
+the air, the influence of the heaven, the
+composition of the English blood, as well as the
+embraces of the Ocean, seem to join with the
+labours of the <i>Royal Society</i> to render our country
+a Land of Experimental Knowledge."</p>
+
+<p>The excellent Sprat was the friend and executor
+of the poet Cowley, who has in the Preface
+to his <i>Poems</i> a charming passage about the relation
+of literature to the external circumstances
+in which it is written.</p>
+
+<p>"If <i>wit</i> be such a <i>Plant</i> that it scarce receives
+heat enough to keep it alive even in the <i>summer</i>
+of our cold <i>Clymate</i>, how can it choose but wither
+in a long and a sharp <i>winter</i>? a warlike, various<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_6" id="Page_6">[Pg 6]</a></span>
+and a tragical age is best to write <i>of</i>, but worst
+to write <i>in</i>." And he adds this, concerning his
+own art of poetry: "There is nothing that requires
+so much serenity and chearfulness of
+<i>spirit</i>; it must not be either overwhelmed with
+the cares of <i>Life</i>, or overcast with the <i>Clouds</i> of
+<i>Melancholy</i> and <i>Sorrow</i>, or shaken and disturbed
+with the storms of injurious <i>Fortune</i>; it must,
+like the <i>Halcyon</i>, have fair weather to breed in.
+The Soul must be filled with bright and delightful
+<i>Idaeas</i>, when it undertakes to communicate
+delight to others, which is the main end of <i>Poesie</i>.
+One may see through the stile of <i>Ovid de
+Trist.</i>, the humbled and dejected condition of
+<i>Spirit</i> with which he wrote it; there scarce remains
+any footstep of that <i>Genius</i>, <i>Quem nec
+Jovis ira, nec ignes</i>, etc. The <i>cold</i> of the country
+has strucken through all his faculties, and
+benummed the very <i>feet</i> of his <i>Verses</i>."</p>
+
+<p>Madame de Staël's <i>Germany</i>, one of the most
+famous of the "national character" books, begins
+with a description of the German landscape.
+But though nobody, from Ovid in exile down
+to Madame de Staël, questions the general significance
+of place, time, and circumstances as
+affecting the nature of a literary product, when<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_7" id="Page_7">[Pg 7]</a></span>
+we come to the exact and as it were mathematical
+demonstration of the precise workings of
+these physical influences, our generation is distinctly
+more cautious than were the literary critics
+of forty years ago. Indeed, it is a hundred
+years since Fisher Ames, ridiculing the theory
+that climate acts directly upon literary products,
+said wittily of Greece: "The figs are as fine as
+ever, but where are the Pindars?" The theory
+of race, in particular, has been sharply questioned
+by the experts. "Saxon" and "Norman,"
+for example, no longer seem to us such simple
+terms as sufficed for the purpose of Scott's <i>Ivanhoe</i>
+or of Thierry's <i>Norman Conquest</i>, a book
+inspired by Scott's romance. The late Professor
+Freeman, with characteristic bluntness,
+remarked of the latter book: "Thierry says at
+the end of his work that there are no longer either
+Normans or Saxons except in history....
+But in Thierry's sense of the word, it would
+be truer to say that there never were 'Normans'
+or 'Saxons' anywhere, save in the pages
+of romances like his own."</p>
+
+<p>There is a brutal directness about this verdict
+upon a rival historian which we shall probably
+persist in calling "Saxon"; but it is no<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_8" id="Page_8">[Pg 8]</a></span>
+worse than the criticisms of Matthew Arnold's
+essay on "The Celtic Spirit" made to-day by
+university professors who happen to know
+Old Irish at first hand, and consequently consider
+Arnold's opinion on Celtic matters to be
+hopelessly amateurish.</p>
+
+<p>The wiser scepticism of our day concerning
+all hard-and-fast racial distinctions has been admirably
+summed up by Josiah Royce. "A race
+psychology," he declares, "is still a science for
+the future to discover.... We do not scientifically
+know what the true racial varieties of
+mental type really are. No doubt there are such
+varieties. The judgment day, or the science of
+the future, may demonstrate what they are. We
+are at present very ignorant regarding the whole
+matter."</p>
+
+<p>Nowhere have the extravagances of the application
+of racial theories to intellectual products
+been more pronounced than in the fields
+of art and literature. Audiences listen to a waltz
+which the programme declares to be an adaptation
+of a Hungarian folk-song, and though they
+may be more ignorant of Hungary than Shakespeare
+was of Bohemia, they have no hesitation
+in exclaiming: "How truly Hungarian this<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_9" id="Page_9">[Pg 9]</a></span>
+is!" Or, it may be, how truly "Japanese" is
+this vase which was made in Japan&mdash;perhaps
+for the American market; or how intensely
+"Russian" is this melancholy tale by Turgenieff.
+This prompt deduction of racial qualities
+from works of art which themselves give the
+critic all the information he possesses about the
+races in question,&mdash;or, in other words, the enthusiastic
+assertion that a thing is like itself,&mdash;is
+one of the familiar notes of amateur criticism.
+It is travelling in a circle, and the corregiosity
+of Corregio is the next station.</p>
+
+<p>Blood tells, no doubt, and a masterpiece usually
+betrays some token of the place and hour
+of its birth. A knowledge of the condition of
+political parties in Athens in 416 <span class="smcap">B.C.</span> adds immensely
+to the enjoyment of the readers of Aristophanes;
+the fun becomes funnier and the daring
+even more splendid than before. Molière's
+training as an actor does affect the dramaturgic
+quality of his comedies. All this is demonstrable,
+and to the prevalent consciousness of it our
+generation is deeply indebted to Taine and his
+pupils. But before displaying dogmatically the
+inevitable brandings of racial and national traits
+on a national literature, before pointing to this<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_10" id="Page_10">[Pg 10]</a></span>
+and that unmistakable evidence of local or temporal
+influence on the form or spirit of a masterpiece,
+we are now inclined to make some distinct
+reservations. These reservations are not without
+bearing upon our own literature in America.</p>
+
+<p>There are, for instance, certain artists who
+seem to escape the influences of the time-spirit.
+The most familiar example is that of Keats. He
+can no doubt be assigned to the George the
+Fourth period by a critical examination of his
+vocabulary, but the characteristic political and
+social movements of that epoch in England left
+him almost untouched. Edgar Allan Poe might
+have written some of his tales in the seventeenth
+century or in the twentieth; he might, like
+Robert Louis Stevenson, have written in Samoa
+rather than in the Baltimore, Philadelphia, or
+New York of his day; his description of the
+Ragged Mountains of Virginia, within very
+sight of the university which he attended, was
+borrowed, in the good old convenient fashion,
+from Macaulay; in fact, it requires something
+of Poe's own ingenuity to find in Poe, who is
+one of the indubitable assets of American literature,
+anything distinctly American.</p>
+
+<p>Wholly aside from such spiritual insulation<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_11" id="Page_11">[Pg 11]</a></span>
+of the single writer, there is the obvious fact
+that none of the arts, not even literature, and
+not all of them together, can furnish a wholly
+adequate representation of racial or national
+characteristics. It is well known to-day that the
+so-called "classic" examples of Greek art, most
+of which were brought to light and discoursed
+upon by critics from two to four centuries ago,
+represent but a single phase of Greek feeling;
+and that the Greeks, even in what we choose to
+call their most characteristic period, had a distinctly
+"romantic" tendency which their more
+recently discovered plastic art betrays. But even
+if we had all the lost statues, plays, poems, and
+orations, all the Greek paintings about which
+we know so little, and the Greek music about
+which we know still less, does anybody suppose
+that this wealth of artistic expression would furnish
+a wholly satisfactory notion of the racial
+and psychological traits of the Greek people?</p>
+
+<p>One may go even further. Does a truly
+national art exist anywhere,&mdash;an art, that is to
+say, which conveys a trustworthy and adequate
+expression of the national temper as a whole?
+We have but to reflect upon the European and
+American judgments, during the last thirty<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_12" id="Page_12">[Pg 12]</a></span>
+years, concerning the representative quality of
+the art of Japan, and to observe how many of
+those facile generalizations about the Japanese
+character, deduced from vases and prints and
+enamel, were smashed to pieces by the Russo-Japanese
+War. This may illustrate the blunders
+of foreign criticism, perhaps, rather than
+any inadequacy in the racially representative
+character of Japanese art. But it is impossible
+that critics, and artists themselves, should not
+err, in the conscious endeavor to pronounce
+upon the infinitely complex materials with which
+they are called upon to deal. We must confess
+that the expression of racial and national characteristics,
+by means of only one art, such as literature,
+or by all the arts together, is at best imperfect,
+and is always likely to be misleading
+unless corroborated by other evidence.</p>
+
+<p>For it is to be remembered that in literature,
+as in the other fields of artistic activity, we are
+dealing with the question of form; of securing
+a concrete and pleasurable embodiment of certain
+emotions. It may well happen that literature
+not merely fails to give an adequate report
+of the racial or national or personal emotions
+felt during a given epoch, but that it fails to report<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_13" id="Page_13">[Pg 13]</a></span>
+these emotions at all. Not only the "old,
+unhappy, far-off" things of racial experience,
+but the new and delight-giving experiences of
+the hour, may lack their poet. Widespread
+moods of public elation or wistfulness or depression
+have passed without leaving a shadow
+upon the mirror of art. There was no one to
+hold the mirror or even to fashion it. No note
+of Renaissance criticism, whether in Italy,
+France, or England, is more striking, and in a
+way more touching, than the universal feeling
+that in the rediscovery of the classics men had
+found at last the "terms of art," the rules and
+methods of a game which they had long wished
+to be playing. Englishmen and Frenchmen of
+the sixteenth century will not allow that their
+powers are less virile, their emotions less eager,
+than those of the Greeks and Romans. Only,
+lacking the very terms of art, they had not been
+able to arrive at fit expression; the soul had
+found no body wherewith to clothe itself into
+beauty. As they avowed in all simplicity, they
+needed schoolmasters; the discipline of Aristotle
+and Horace and Virgil; a body of critical
+doctrine, to teach them how to express the
+France and England or Italy of their day, and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_14" id="Page_14">[Pg 14]</a></span>
+thus give permanence to their fleeting vision of
+the world. Naïve as may have been the Renaissance
+expression of this need of formal training,
+blind as it frequently was to the beauty which
+we recognize in the undisciplined vernacular literatures
+of mediæval Europe, those groping
+scholars were essentially right. No one can
+paint or compose by nature. One must slowly
+master an art of expression.</p>
+
+<p>Now through long periods of time, and over
+many vast stretches of territory, as our own
+American writing abundantly witnesses, the
+whole formal side of expression may be neglected.
+"Literature," in its narrower sense,
+may not exist. In that restricted and higher
+meaning of the term, literature has always been
+uncommon enough, even in Athens or Florence.
+It demands not merely personal distinction
+or power, not merely some uncommon
+height or depth or breadth of capacity and insight,
+but a purely artistic training, which in the
+very nature of the case is rare. Millions of Russians,
+perhaps, have felt about the general problems
+of life much as Turgenieff felt, but they
+lacked the sheer literary art with which the
+<i>Notes of a Sportsman</i> was written. Thousands of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_15" id="Page_15">[Pg 15]</a></span>
+frontier lawyers and politicians shared Lincoln's
+hard and varied and admirable training in the
+mastery of speech, but in his hands alone was
+the weapon wrought to such perfection of temper
+and weight and edge that he spoke and
+wrote literature without knowing it.</p>
+
+<p>Such considerations belong, I am aware, to
+the accepted commonplaces,&mdash;perhaps to what
+William James used to call "the unprofitable
+delineation of the obvious." Everybody recognizes
+that literary gifts imply an exceptionally
+rich development of general human capacities,
+together with a professional aptitude and training
+of which but few men are capable. There is
+but one lumberman in camp who can play the
+fiddle, though the whole camp can dance. Thus
+the great book, we are forever saying, is truly
+representative of myriads of minds in a certain
+degree of culture, although but one man could
+have written it. The writing member of a family
+is often the one who acquires notoriety and
+a bank account, but he is likely to have candid
+friends who admit, though not always in his
+presence, that, aside from this one professional
+gift and practice, he is not intellectually or emotionally
+or spiritually superior to his brothers<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_16" id="Page_16">[Pg 16]</a></span>
+and sisters. Waldo Emerson thought himself
+the intellectual inferior of his brother
+Charles; and good observers loved to maintain
+that John Holmes was wittier than Oliver
+Wendell, and Ezekiel Webster a better lawyer
+than Daniel.</p>
+
+<p>Applied to the literary history of a race, this
+principle is suggestive. We must be slow to affirm
+that, because certain ideas and feelings did
+not attain, in this or that age or place, to purely
+literary expression, they were therefore not in
+existence. The men and women of the colonial
+period in our own country, for instance, have
+been pretty uniformly declared to have been
+deficient in the sense of beauty. What is the evidence?
+It is mostly negative. They produced
+no poetry, fiction, painting, sculpture, or music
+worthy of the name. They were predominantly
+Puritan, and the whole world has been informed
+that English Puritanism was hostile to Art.
+They were preoccupied with material and moral
+concerns. Even if they had remained in England,
+Professor Trent affirms, these contemporaries
+of Milton and Bunyan would have produced
+no art or literature. Now it is quite true
+that for nearly two hundred years after the date<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_17" id="Page_17">[Pg 17]</a></span>
+of the first settlement of the American colonists,
+opportunities for cultivating the arts did not
+exist. But that the sense of beauty was wholly
+atrophied, I, for one, do not believe. The passionate
+eagerness with which the forefathers absorbed
+the noblest of all poetry and prose in the
+pages of their one book, the Bible; the unwearied
+curiosity and care with which those farmers and
+fishermen and woodsmen read the signs of the
+sky; their awe of the dark wilderness and their
+familiar traffic with the great deep; the silences
+of lonely places; the opulence of primeval
+meadows by the clear streams; the English
+flowers that were made to bloom again in farmhouse
+windows and along garden walks; the
+inner visions, more lovely still, of duty and of
+moral law; the spirit of sacrifice; the daily walk
+with God, whether by green pastures of the
+spirit or through ways that were dark and terrible;&mdash;is
+there in all this no discipline of the
+soul in moral beauty, and no training of the eye
+to perceive the exquisite harmonies of the visible
+earth? It is true that the Puritans had no
+professional men of letters; it is true that doctrinal
+sermons provided their chief intellectual
+sustenance; true that their lives were stern, and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_18" id="Page_18">[Pg 18]</a></span>
+that many of the softer emotions were repressed.
+But beauty may still be traced in the fragments
+of their recorded speech, in their diaries and
+letters and phrases of devotion. You will search
+the eighteenth century of old England in vain
+for such ecstasies of wonder at the glorious
+beauty of the universe as were penned by Jonathan
+Edwards in his youthful <i>Diary</i>. There is
+every presumption, from what we know of the
+two men, that Whittier's father and grandfather
+were peculiarly sensitive to the emotions of
+home and neighborhood and domesticity which
+their gifted descendant&mdash;too physically frail
+to be absorbed in the rude labor of the farm&mdash;has
+embodied in <i>Snow-Bound</i>. The Quaker
+poet knew that he surpassed his forefathers in
+facility in verse-making, but he would have been
+amused (as his <i>Margaret Smith's Journal</i> proves)
+at the notion that his ancestors were without a
+sense of beauty or that they lacked responsiveness
+to the chords of fireside sentiment. He
+was simply the only Whittier, except his sister
+Elizabeth, who had ever found leisure, as old-fashioned
+correspondents used to say, "to take
+his pen in hand." This leisure developed in him
+the sense&mdash;latent no doubt in his ancestors&mdash;of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_19" id="Page_19">[Pg 19]</a></span>
+the beauty of words, and the excitement
+of rhythm. Emerson's <i>Journal</i> in the eighteen-thirties
+glows with a Dionysiac rapture over
+what he calls "delicious days"; but did the
+seven generations of clergymen from whom
+Emerson descended have no delicious and
+haughty and tender days that passed unrecorded?
+Formal literature perpetuates and
+glorifies many aspects of individual and national
+experience; but how much eludes it wholly, or
+is told, if at all, in broken syllables, in Pentecostal
+tongues that seem to be our own and yet
+are unutterably strange!</p>
+
+<p>To confess thus that literature, in the proper
+sense of the word, represents but a narrow segment
+of personal or racial experience, is very
+far from a denial of the genuineness and the
+significance of the affirmations which literature
+makes. We recognize instinctively that Whittier's
+<i>Snow-Bound</i> is a truthful report, not merely
+of a certain farmhouse kitchen in East Haverhill,
+Massachusetts, during the early nineteenth
+century, but of a mode of thinking and feeling
+which is widely diffused wherever the Anglo-Saxon
+race has wandered. Perhaps <i>Snow-Bound</i>
+lacks a certain universality of suggestiveness<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_20" id="Page_20">[Pg 20]</a></span>
+which belongs to a still more famous poem, <i>The
+Cotter's Saturday Night</i> of Burns, but both of
+these portrayals of rustic simplicity and peace
+owe their celebrity to their truly representative
+character. They are evidence furnished by a
+single art, as to a certain mode and coloring of
+human existence; but every corroboration of
+that evidence heightens our admiration for the
+artistic sincerity and insight of the poet. To
+draw an illustration from a more splendid epoch,
+let us remind ourselves that the literature of
+the "spacious times of great Elizabeth"&mdash;a
+period of strong national excitement, and one
+deeply representative of the very noblest and
+most permanent traits of English national character&mdash;was
+produced within startlingly few
+years and in a local territory extremely limited.
+The very language in which that literature is
+clothed was spoken only by the court, by a couple
+of counties, and at the two universities. Its
+prose and verse were frankly experimental. It
+is true that such was the emotional ferment of
+the score of years preceding the Armada, that
+great captains and voyagers who scarcely wrote
+a line were hailed as kings of the realm of imagination,
+and that Puttenham, in phrases which<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_21" id="Page_21">[Pg 21]</a></span>
+that generation could not have found extravagant,
+inscribes his book on Poetry to Queen
+Elizabeth as the "most excellent Poet" of the
+age. Well, the glorified political images may
+grow dim or tawdry with time, but the poetry
+has endured, and it is everywhere felt to be a
+truly national, a deeply racial product. Its time
+and place and hour were all local; but the Canadian
+and the American, the South African
+and Australasian Englishman feels that that
+Elizabethan poetry is his poetry still.</p>
+
+<p>When we pass, therefore, as we must shortly
+do, to the consideration of this and that literary
+product of America, and to the scrutiny of the
+really representative character of our books, we
+must bear in mind that the questions concerning
+the race, the place, the hour, the man,&mdash;questions
+so familiar to modern criticism,&mdash;remain
+valid and indeed essential; but that in applying
+them to American writing there are certain
+allowances, qualifications, adjustments of
+the scale of values, which are no less important
+to an intelligent perception of the quality of our
+literature. This task is less simple than the critical
+assessment of a typical German or French
+or Scandinavian writer, where the strain of blood<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_22" id="Page_22">[Pg 22]</a></span>
+is unmixed, the continuity of literary tradition
+unbroken, the precise impact of historical and
+personal influences more easy to estimate. I
+open, for example, any one of half a dozen
+French studies of Balzac. Here is a many-sided
+man, a multifarious writer, a personality that
+makes ridiculous the merely formal pigeon-holing
+and labelling processes of professional
+criticism. And yet with what perfect precision
+of method and certainty of touch do Le Breton,
+for example, or Brunetière, in their books on
+Balzac, proceed to indicate those impulses of
+race and period and environment which affected
+the character of Balzac's novels! The fact that
+he was born in Tours in 1799 results in the inevitable
+and inevitably expert paragraphs about
+Gallic blood, and the physical exuberance of the
+Touraine surroundings of his youth, and the
+post-revolutionary tendency to disillusion and
+analysis. And so with Balzac's education, his
+removal to Paris in the Restoration period, his
+ventures in business and his affairs of love, his
+admiration for Shakespeare and for Fenimore
+Cooper; his mingled Romanticism and Realism;
+his Titanism and his childishness; his stupendous
+outline for the Human Comedy; and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_23" id="Page_23">[Pg 23]</a></span>
+his scarcely less astounding actual achievement.
+All this is discussed by his biographers with the
+professional dexterity of critics trained intellectually
+in the Latin traditions and instinctively
+aware of the claims of race, biographers familiar
+with every page of French history, and profoundly
+interested, like their readers, in every
+aspect of French life. Alas, we may say, in
+despairing admiration of such workmanship,
+"they order these things better in France."
+And they do; but racial unity, and long lines of
+national literary tradition, make these things
+easier to order than they are with us. The
+intellectual distinction of American critical
+biographies like Lounsbury's <i>Cooper</i> or Woodberry's
+<i>Hawthorne</i> is all the more notable because
+we possess such a slender body of truly
+critical doctrine native to our own soil; because
+our national literary tradition as to available
+material and methods is hardly formed; because
+the very word "American" has a less precise
+connotation than the word "New Zealander."</p>
+
+<p>Let us suppose, for instance, that like Professor
+Woodberry a few years ago, we were
+asked to furnish a critical study of Hawthorne.
+The author of <i>The Scarlet Letter</i> is one of the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_24" id="Page_24">[Pg 24]</a></span>
+most justly famous of American writers. But
+precisely what national traits are to be discovered
+in this eminent fellow-countryman of ours?
+We turn, like loyal disciples of Taine and Sainte-Beuve,
+to his ancestral stock. We find that it
+is English as far back as it can be traced; as
+purely English as the ancestry of Dickens or
+Thackeray, and more purely English than the
+ancestry of Browning or Burke or His Majesty
+George the Fifth. Was Hawthorne, then, simply
+an Englishman living in America? He
+himself did not think so,&mdash;as his <i>English Note-Books</i>
+abundantly prove. But just what subtle
+racial differentiation had been at work, since
+William Hawthorne migrated to Massachusetts
+with Winthrop in 1630? Here we face, unless
+I am mistaken, that troublesome but fascinating
+question of Physical Geography. Climate,
+soil, food, occupation, religious or moral preoccupation,
+social environment, Salem witchcraft
+and Salem seafaring had all laid their invisible
+hands upon the physical and intellectual
+endowment of the child born in 1804. Does
+this make Nathaniel Hawthorne merely an
+"Englishman with a difference," as Mr. Kipling,
+born in India, is an "Englishman with a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_25" id="Page_25">[Pg 25]</a></span>
+difference"? Hawthorne would have smiled,
+or, more probably, he would have sworn, at such
+a question. He considered himself an American
+Democrat; in fact a <i>contra mundum</i> Democrat,
+for good or for ill. Is it, then, a political
+theory, first put into full operation in this
+country a scant generation before Hawthorne's
+birth, which made him un-English? We must
+walk warily here. Our Canadian neighbors of
+English stock have much the same climate, soil,
+occupations, and preoccupations as the inhabitants
+of the northern territory of the United
+States. They have much the same courts,
+churches, and legislatures. They read the same
+books and magazines. They even prefer baseball
+to cricket. They are loyal adherents of a
+monarchy, but they are precisely as free, as self-governing,
+and&mdash;in the social sense of the
+word&mdash;as "democratic"&mdash;in spite of the absence
+of a republican form of government&mdash;as
+the citizens of that "land of the free and home
+of the brave" which lies to the south of them.
+Yet Canadian literature, one may venture to
+affirm, has remained to this hour a "colonial"
+literature, or, if one prefers the phrase, a literature
+of "Greater Britain." Was Hawthorne<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_26" id="Page_26">[Pg 26]</a></span>
+possibly right in his instinct that politics did
+make a difference, and that in writing <i>The
+Marble Faun</i>,&mdash;the scene of which is laid in
+Rome,&mdash;or <i>The House of the Seven Gables</i>,&mdash;which
+is a story of Salem,&mdash;he was consistently
+engaged in producing, not "colonial"
+or "Greater-British" but distinctly American
+literature? We need not answer this question
+prematurely, if we wish to reserve our judgment,
+but it is assuredly one of the questions
+which the biographers and critics of our men
+of letters must ultimately face and answer.</p>
+
+<p>Furthermore, the student of literature produced
+in the United States of America must
+face other questions almost as complicated as
+this of race. In fact, when we choose Hawthorne
+as a typical case in which to observe the American
+refashioning of the English temper into
+something not English, we are selecting a very
+simple problem compared with the complexities
+which have resulted from the mingling of
+various European stocks upon American soil.
+But take, for the moment, the mere obvious
+matter of expanse of territory. We are obliged
+to reckon, not with a compact province such as
+those in which many Old World literatures<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_27" id="Page_27">[Pg 27]</a></span>
+have been produced, but with what our grandfathers
+considered a "boundless continent."
+This vast national domain was long ago "organized"
+for political purposes: but so far as
+literature is concerned it remains unorganized
+to-day. We have, as has been constantly observed,
+no literary capital, like London or Paris,
+to serve as the seat of centralized authority;
+no code of literary procedure and conduct; no
+"lawgivers of Parnassus"; no supreme court of
+letters, whose judgments are recognized and
+obeyed. American public opinion asserts itself
+with singular unanimity and promptness in the
+field of politics. In literary matters we remain
+in the stage of anarchic individualism, liable to
+be stampeded from time to time by mob-excitement
+over a popular novel or moralistic
+tract, and then disintegrating, as before, into
+an incoherent mass of individually intelligent
+readers.</p>
+
+<p>The reader who has some personal acquaintance
+with the variations of type in different sections
+of this immense territory of ours finds his
+curiosity constantly stimulated by the presence
+of sectional and local characteristics. There are
+sharply cut provincial peculiarities, of course,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_28" id="Page_28">[Pg 28]</a></span>
+in Great Britain and in Germany, in Italy and
+Spain, and in all of the countries a corresponding
+"regional" literature has been developed.
+Our provincial variations of accent and vocabulary,
+in passing from North to South or East
+to West, are less striking, on the whole, than
+the dialectical differences found in the various
+English counties. But our general uniformity
+of grammar and the comparatively slight variations
+in spoken accent cover an extraordinary
+variety of local and sectional modes of thinking
+and feeling. The reader of American short
+stories and lyrics must constantly ask himself:
+Is this truth to local type consistent with the
+main trend of American production? Is this
+merely a bit of Virginia or Texas or California,
+or does it, while remaining no less Southern or
+Western in its local coloring, suggest also the
+ampler light, the wide generous air of the United
+States of America?</p>
+
+<p>The observer of this relationship between
+local and national types will find some American
+communities where all the speech or habitual
+thought is of the future. Foreigners usually
+consider such communities the most typically
+"American," as doubtless they are; but there<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_29" id="Page_29">[Pg 29]</a></span>
+are other sections, still more faithfully exploited
+by local writers, where the mood is wistful and
+habitually regards the past. America, too, like
+the Old World,&mdash;and in New England more
+than elsewhere,&mdash;has her note of decadence,
+of disillusion, of autumnal brightness and transiency.
+Some sections of the country, and notably
+the slave-holding states in the forty years
+preceding the Civil War, have suffered widespread
+intellectual blight. The best talent of
+the South, for a generation, went into politics,
+in the passionately loyal endeavor to prop up
+a doomed economic and social system; and the
+loss to the intellectual life of the country cannot
+be reckoned. Over vast sections of our
+prosperous and intelligent people of the Mississippi
+Basin to-day the very genius of commonplaceness
+seems to hover. Take the great
+State of Iowa, with its well-to-do and homogeneous
+population, its fortunate absence of
+perplexing city-problems, its general air of prosperity
+and content. It is a typical state of the
+most typically American portion of the country;
+but it breeds no books. Yet in Indiana, another
+state of the same general conditions as to population
+and prosperity, and only one generation<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_30" id="Page_30">[Pg 30]</a></span>
+further removed than Iowa from primitive pioneer
+conditions, books are produced at a rate
+which provokes a universal American smile.
+I do not affirm that the literary critic is bound
+to answer all such local puzzles as this. But he
+is bound at least to reflect upon them, and to
+demand of every local literary product throughout
+this varied expanse of states: Is the root of
+the "All-American" plant growing here, or is
+it not?</p>
+
+<p>Furthermore, the critic must pursue this investigation
+of national traits in our writing, not
+only over a wide and variegated territory, but
+through a very considerable sweep of time.
+American literature is often described as "callow,"
+as the revelation of "national inexperience,"
+and in other similar terms. It is true that
+we had no professional men of letters before
+Irving and that the blossoming time of the notable
+New England group of writers did not
+come until nearly the middle of the nineteenth
+century. But we have had time enough, after
+all, to show what we wish to be and what we are.
+There have been European books about
+America ever since the days of Columbus; it is
+three hundred years since the first books were<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_31" id="Page_31">[Pg 31]</a></span>
+written in America. Modern English prose,
+the language of journalism, of science, of social
+intercourse, came into being only in the early
+eighteenth century, in the age of Queen Anne.
+But Cotton Mather's <i>Magnalia</i>, a vast book
+dealing with the past history of New England,
+was printed in 1702, only a year later than Defoe's
+<i>True-Born Englishman</i>. For more than two
+centuries the development of English speech
+and English writing on this side of the Atlantic
+has kept measurable pace&mdash;now slower, now
+swifter&mdash;with the speech of the mother country.
+When we recall the scanty term of years within
+which was produced the literature of the age of
+Elizabeth, it seems like special pleading to insist
+that America has not yet had time to learn
+or recite her bookish lessons.</p>
+
+<p>This is not saying that we have had a continuous
+or adequate development, either of
+the intellectual life, or of literary expression.
+There are certain periods of strong intellectual
+movement, of heightened emotion, alike in the
+colonial epoch and since the adoption of our
+present form of government, in which it is natural
+to search for revelations of those qualities
+which we now feel to be essential to our national<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_32" id="Page_32">[Pg 32]</a></span>
+character. Certain epochs of our history, in
+other words, have been peculiarly "American,"
+and have furnished the most ideal expression
+of national tendencies.</p>
+
+<p>If asked to select the three periods of our
+history which in this sense have been most significant,
+most of us, I imagine, would choose
+the first vigorous epoch of New England Puritanism,
+say from 1630 to 1676; then, the epoch
+of the great Virginians, say from 1766 to 1789;
+and finally the epoch of distinctly national feeling,
+in which New England and the West were
+leaders, between 1830 and 1865. Those three
+generations have been the most notable in the
+three hundred years since the permanent settlements
+began. Each of them has revealed, in a
+noble fashion, the political, ethical, and emotional
+traits of our people; and although the
+first two of the three periods concerned themselves
+but little with literary expression of the
+deep-lying characteristics of our stock, the
+expression is not lacking. Thomas Hooker's
+sermon on the "Foundation of Political Authority,"
+John Winthrop's grave advice on the
+"Nature of Liberty," Jefferson's "Declaration,"
+Webster's "Reply to Hayne," Lincoln's<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_33" id="Page_33">[Pg 33]</a></span>
+"Inaugurals," are all fundamentally American.
+They are political in their immediate purpose,
+but, like the speeches of Edmund Burke, they
+are no less literature because they are concerned
+with the common needs and the common destiny.
+Hooker and Winthrop wrote before our
+formal national existence began; Jefferson, at
+the hour of the nation's birth; and Lincoln, in
+the day of its sharpest trial. Yet, though separated
+from one another by long intervals of
+time, the representative figures of the three
+epochs, English in blood and American in feeling,
+are not so unlike as one might think. A
+thorough grasp of our literature thus requires&mdash;and
+in scarcely less a degree than the mastery
+of one of the literatures of Europe&mdash;a survey
+of a long period, the search below the baffling
+or contradictory surface of national experience
+for the main drift of that experience, and the
+selection of the writers, of one generation after
+another, who have given the most fit and permanent
+and personalized expression to the underlying
+forces of the national life.</p>
+
+<p>There is another preliminary word which
+needs no less to be said. It concerns the question
+of international influences upon national<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_34" id="Page_34">[Pg 34]</a></span>
+literature. Our own generation has been taught
+by many events that no race or country can
+any longer live "to itself." Internationalism
+is in the very atmosphere: and not merely as
+regards politics in the narrowed sense, but with
+reference to questions of economics, sociology,
+art, and letters. The period of international isolation
+of the United States, we are rather too
+fond of saying, closed with the Spanish-American
+War. It would be nearer the truth to say
+that so far as the things of the mind and the
+spirit are concerned, there has never been any
+absolute isolation. The Middle West, from
+the days of Jackson to Lincoln, that raw West
+described by Dickens and Mrs. Trollope, comes
+nearer isolation than any other place or time.
+The period of the most eloquent assertions of
+American independence in artistic and literary
+matters was the epoch of New England Transcendentalism,
+which was itself singularly cosmopolitan
+in its literary appetites. The letters
+and journals of Emerson, Whitman, and Thoreau
+show the strong European meat on which
+these men fed, just before their robust declarations
+of our self-sufficiency. But there is no
+real self-sufficiency, and Emerson and Whitman<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_35" id="Page_35">[Pg 35]</a></span>
+themselves, in other moods, have written
+most suggestive passages upon our European
+inheritances and affiliations.</p>
+
+<p>The fortunes of the early New England colonies,
+in fact, were followed by Protestant Europe
+with the keen solicitude and affection of
+kinsmen. Oliver Cromwell signs his letter
+to John Cotton in 1651, "Your affectionate
+friend to serve you." The settlements were regarded
+as outposts of European ideas. Their
+Calvinism, so cheaply derided and so superficially
+understood, even to-day, was the intellectual
+platform of that portion of Europe
+which was mentally and morally awake to the
+vast issues involved in individual responsibility
+and self-government. Contemporary
+European democracy is hardly yet aware that
+Calvin's <i>Institutes</i> is one of its great charters.
+Continental Protestantism of the seventeenth
+century, like the militant Republicanism of
+the English Commonwealth, thus perused with
+fraternal interest the letters from Massachusetts
+Bay. And if Europe watched America
+in those days, it was no less true that America
+was watching Europe. Towards the end of
+the century, Cotton Mather, "prostrate in the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_36" id="Page_36">[Pg 36]</a></span>
+dust" before the Lord, as his newly published
+<i>Diary</i> tells us, is wrestling "on the behalf of
+whole nations." He receives a "strong Persuasion
+that very overturning Dispensations of
+Heaven will quickly befal the French Empire";
+he "lifts up his Cries for a mighty and
+speedy Revolution" there. "I spread before the
+Lord the Condition of His Church abroad ... especially
+in Great Britain and in France. And I
+prayed that the poor Vaudois may not be ruined
+by the Peace now made between France and
+Savoy. I prayed likewise for further Mortifications
+upon the Turkish Empire." Here
+surely was one colonial who was trying, in Cecil
+Rhodes's words, to "think continentally!"</p>
+
+<p>Furthermore, the leaders of those early colonies
+were in large measure university men,
+disciplined in the classics, fit representatives of
+European culture. It has been reckoned that
+between the years 1630 and 1690 there were
+in New England as many graduates of Cambridge
+and Oxford as could be found in any
+population of similar size in the mother country.
+At one time during those years there was
+in Massachusetts and Connecticut alone a
+Cambridge graduate for every two hundred and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_37" id="Page_37">[Pg 37]</a></span>
+fifty inhabitants. Like the exiled Greeks in
+Matthew Arnold's poem, they "undid their
+corded bales"&mdash;of learning, it is true, rather
+than of merchandise&mdash;upon these strange and
+inhospitable shores: and the traditions of
+Greek and Hebrew and Latin scholarship were
+maintained with no loss of continuity. To the
+lover of letters there will always be something
+fine in the thought of that narrow seaboard
+fringe of faith in the classics, widening slowly
+as the wilderness gave way, making its invisible
+road up the rivers, across the mountains,
+into the great interior basin, and only after the
+Civil War finding an enduring home in the
+magnificent state universities of the West.
+Lovers of Greek and Roman literature may
+perhaps always feel themselves pilgrims and
+exiles in this vast industrial democracy of ours,
+but they have at least secured for us, and that
+from the very first day of the colonies, some
+of the best fruitage of internationalism. For
+that matter, what was, and is, that one Book&mdash;to
+the eyes of the Protestant seventeenth
+century infallible and inexpressively sacred&mdash;but
+the most potent and universal commerce
+of ideas and spirit, passing from the Orient,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_38" id="Page_38">[Pg 38]</a></span>
+through Greek and Roman civilization, into
+the mind and heart of Western Europe and
+America?</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Oh, East is East, and West is West,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And never the twain shall meet,"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>declares a confident poet of to-day. But East
+and West met long ago in the matchless phrases
+translated from Hebrew and Greek and Latin
+into the English Bible; and the heart of the
+East there answers to the heart of the West as
+in water face answereth to face. That the colonizing
+Englishmen of the seventeenth century
+were Hebrews in spiritual culture, and heirs of
+Greece and Rome without ceasing to be Anglo-Saxon
+in blood, is one of the marvels of the history
+of civilization, and it is one of the basal
+facts in the intellectual life of the United States
+of to-day.</p>
+
+<p>Yet that life, as I have already hinted, is not
+so simple in its terms as it might be if we had to
+reckon merely with the men of a single stock,
+albeit with imaginations quickened by contact
+with an Oriental religion, and minds disciplined,
+directly or indirectly, by the methods and the
+literatures which the Revival of Learning imposed
+upon modern Europe. American formal<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_39" id="Page_39">[Pg 39]</a></span>
+culture is, and has been, from the beginning, predominantly
+English. Yet it has been colored by
+the influences of other strains of race, and by
+alien intellectual traditions. Such international
+influences as have reached us through German
+and Scandinavian, Celtic and Italian, Russian
+and Jewish immigration, are well marked in
+certain localities, although their traces may be
+difficult to follow in the main trend of American
+writing. The presence of Negro, Irishman, Jew,
+and German, has affected our popular humor
+and satire, and is everywhere to be marked in
+the vocabulary and tone of our newspapers.
+The cosmopolitan character of the population
+of such cities as New York and Chicago strikes
+every foreign observer. Each one of the manifold
+races now transplanted here and in process
+of Americanization has for a while its own newspapers
+and churches and social life carried on in
+a foreign dialect. But this stage of evolution
+passes swiftly. The assimilative forces of American
+schools, industry, commerce, politics, are
+too strong for the foreign immigrant to resist.
+The Italian or Greek fruit pedler soon prefers
+to talk English, and his children can be made
+to talk nothing else. This extraordinary amalgamating<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_40" id="Page_40">[Pg 40]</a></span>
+power of English culture explains,
+no doubt, why German and Scandinavian immigration&mdash;to
+take examples from two of the
+most intelligent and educated races that have
+contributed to the up-building of the country&mdash;have
+left so little trace, as yet, upon our
+more permanent literature.</p>
+
+<p>But blood will have its say sooner or later.
+No one knows how profoundly the strong
+mentality of the Jew, already evident enough
+in the fields of manufacturing and finance, will
+mould the intellectual life of the United States.
+The mere presence, to say nothing of the rapid
+absorption, of these millions upon millions of
+aliens, as the children of the Puritans regard
+them, is a constant evidence of the subtle ways
+in which internationalism is playing its part in
+the fashioning of the American temper. The
+moulding hand of the German university has
+been laid upon our higher institutions of learning
+for seventy years, although no one can
+demonstrate in set terms whether the influence
+of Goethe, read now by three generations of
+American scholars and studied by millions of
+youth in the schools, has left any real mark upon
+our literature. Abraham Lincoln, in his store-keeping<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_41" id="Page_41">[Pg 41]</a></span>
+days, used to sit under a tree outside
+the grocery store of Lincoln and Berry, reading
+Voltaire. One would like to think that he
+then and there assimilated something of the incomparable
+lucidity of style of the great Frenchman.
+But Voltaire's influence upon Lincoln's
+style cannot be proved, any more than Rousseau's
+direct influence upon Jefferson. Tolstoï
+and Ibsen have, indeed, left unmistakable traces
+upon American imaginative writing during the
+last quarter of a century. Frank Norris was indebted
+to Zola for the scheme of that uncompleted
+trilogy, the prose epic of the Wheat; and
+Owen Wister has revealed a not uncommon experience
+of our younger writing men in confessing
+that the impulse toward writing his Western
+stories came to him after reading the delightful
+pages of a French romancer. But all this tells
+us merely what we knew well enough before:
+that from colonial days to the present hour the
+Atlantic has been no insuperable barrier between
+the thought of Europe and the mind of
+America; that no one race bears aloft all the
+torches of intellectual progress; and that a really
+vital writer of any country finds a home in the
+spiritual life of every other country, even though<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_42" id="Page_42">[Pg 42]</a></span>
+it may be difficult to find his name in the local
+directory.</p>
+
+<p>Finally, we must bear in mind that purely
+literary evidence as to the existence of certain
+national traits needs corroboration from many
+non-literary sources. If it is dangerous to judge
+modern Japan by the characteristics of a piece
+of pottery, it is only less misleading to select
+half a dozen excellent New England writers of
+fifty years ago as sole witnesses to the qualities
+of contemporary America. We must broaden
+the range of evidence. The historians of American
+literature must ultimately reckon with all
+those sources of mental and emotional quickening
+which have yielded to our pioneer people
+a substitute for purely literary pleasures:
+they must do justice to the immense mass of
+letters, diaries, sermons, editorials, speeches,
+which have served as the grammar and phrase-book
+of national feeling. A history of our literature
+must be flexible enough, as I have said
+elsewhere, to include "the social and economic
+and geographical background of American life;
+the zest of the explorer, the humor of the pioneer;
+the passion of old political battles; the
+yearning after spiritual truth and social readjustment;<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_43" id="Page_43">[Pg 43]</a></span>
+the baffled quest of beauty. Such a
+history must be broad enough for the <i>Federalist</i>
+and for Webster's oratory, for Beecher's sermons
+and Greeley's editorials, and the Lincoln-Douglas
+debates. It must picture the daily
+existence of our citizens from the beginning;
+their working ideas, their phrases and shibboleths
+and all their idols of the forum and the
+cave. It should portray the misspelled ideals
+of a profoundly idealistic people who have been
+usually immersed in material things."</p>
+
+<p>Our most characteristic American writing,
+as must be pointed out again and again, is not
+the self-conscious literary performance of a Poe
+or a Hawthorne. It is civic writing; a citizen
+literature, produced, like the <i>Federalist</i>, and
+Garrison's editorials and Grant's <i>Memoirs</i>, without
+any stylistic consciousness whatever; a sort
+of writing which has been incidental to the accomplishment
+of some political, social, or moral
+purpose, and which scarcely regards itself as
+literature at all. The supreme example of it is
+the "Gettysburg Address." Homeliness, simplicity,
+directness, preoccupation with moral
+issues, have here been but the instrument of
+beauty; phrase and thought and feeling have a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_44" id="Page_44">[Pg 44]</a></span>
+noble fitness to the national theme. "Nothing
+of Europe here," we may instinctively exclaim,
+and yet the profounder lesson of this citizen
+literature of ours is in the universality of the
+fundamental questions which our literature presents.
+The "Gettysburg Address" would not
+to-day have a secure fame in Europe if it spoke
+nothing to the ear and the heart of Europe.
+And this brings us back to our main theme.
+Lincoln, like Franklin, like many another
+lesser master of our citizen literature, is a typical
+American. In the writing produced by such
+men, there cannot but be a revelation of American
+characteristics. We are now to attempt an
+analysis of these national traits, as they have
+been expressed by our representative writers.</p>
+
+<p>Simple as the problem seems, when thus
+stated, its adequate performance calls for a
+constant sensitiveness to the conditions prevalent,
+during a long period, in English and Continental
+society and literature. The most rudimentary
+biographical sketch of such eminent
+contemporary American authors as Mr. Henry
+James and Mr. Howells shows that Europe
+is an essential factor in the intellectual life and
+in the artistic procedure of these writers. Yet<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_45" id="Page_45">[Pg 45]</a></span>
+in their racial and national relationships they
+are indubitably American. In their local variations
+from type they demand from the critic
+an understanding of the culture of the Ohio
+Valley, and of Boston and New York. The
+analysis of the mingled racial, psychological,
+social, and professional traits in these masters of
+contemporary American fiction presents to the
+critic a problem as fascinating as, and I think
+more complex than, a corresponding study of
+Meredith or Hardy, of Daudet or D'Annunzio.
+In the three hundred years that have
+elapsed since Englishmen who were trained
+under Queen Elizabeth settled at Jamestown,
+Virginia, we have bred upon this soil many a
+master of speech. They have been men of
+varied gifts: now of clear intelligence, now of
+commanding power; men of rugged simplicity
+and of tantalizing subtlety; poets, novelists,
+orators, essayists, and publicists, who have interpreted
+the soul of America to the mind of
+the world. Our task is to exhibit the essential
+Americanism of these spokesmen of ours, to
+point out the traits which make them most
+truly representative of the instincts of the
+tongue-tied millions who work and plan and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_46" id="Page_46">[Pg 46]</a></span>
+pass from sight without the gift and art of
+utterance; to find, in short, among the books
+which are recognized as constituting our American
+literature, some vital and illuminating illustrations
+of our national characteristics. For
+a truly "American" book&mdash;like an American
+national game, or an American city&mdash;is that
+which reveals, consciously or unconsciously,
+the American mind.</p>
+
+
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_47" id="Page_47">[Pg 47]</a></span></p><hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="II" id="II"></a>II<br /><br />
+
+The American Mind</h2>
+
+
+<p>The origin of the phrase, "the American
+mind," was political. Shortly after the middle
+of the eighteenth century, there began to be a
+distinctly American way of regarding the debatable
+question of British Imperial control.
+During the period of the Stamp Act agitation
+our colonial-bred politicians and statesmen
+made the discovery that there was a mode of
+thinking and feeling which was native&mdash;or
+had by that time become a second nature&mdash;to
+all the colonists. Jefferson, for example,
+employs those resonant and useful words "the
+American mind" to indicate that throughout
+the American colonies an essential unity of
+opinion had been developed as regards the
+chief political question of the day.</p>
+
+<p>It is one of the most striking characteristics
+of the present United States that this instinct of
+political unity should have endured, triumphing<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_48" id="Page_48">[Pg 48]</a></span>
+over every temporary motive of division. The
+inhabitants of the United States belong to a
+single political type. There is scarcely a news-stand
+in any country of Continental Europe
+where one may not purchase a newspaper
+openly or secretly opposed to the government,&mdash;not
+merely attacking an unpopular administration
+or minister or ruler,&mdash;but desiring
+and plotting the overthrow of the entire political
+system of the country. It is very difficult
+to find such a newspaper anywhere in the
+United States. I myself have never seen one.
+The opening sentence of President Butler's
+admirable little book, <i>The American as He
+Is</i>, originally delivered as lectures before the
+University of Copenhagen, runs as follows:</p>
+
+<blockquote><p>"The most impressive fact in American life
+is the substantial unity of view in regard to
+the fundamental questions of government and
+of conduct among a population so large, distributed
+over an area so wide, recruited from
+sources so many and so diverse, living under
+conditions so widely different."</p></blockquote>
+
+<p>But the American type of mind is evident
+in many other fields than that of politics.
+The stimulating book from which I have just<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_49" id="Page_49">[Pg 49]</a></span>
+quoted, attempts in its closing paragraph, after
+touching upon the more salient features of our
+national activity, to define the typical American
+in these words:&mdash;</p>
+
+<blockquote><p>"The typical American is he who, whether
+rich or poor, whether dwelling in the North,
+South, East, or West, whether scholar, professional
+man, merchant, manufacturer, farmer,
+or skilled worker for wages, lives the life of a
+good citizen and good neighbor; who believes
+loyally and with all his heart in his country's
+institutions, and in the underlying principles
+on which these institutions are built; who
+directs both his private and his public life by
+sound principles; who cherishes high ideals;
+and who aims to train his children for a useful
+life and for their country's service."</p></blockquote>
+
+<p>This modest and sensible statement indicates
+the existence of a national point of view. We
+have developed in the course of time, as a result
+of certain racial inheritances and historic experiences,
+a national "temper" or "ethos"; a
+more or less settled way of considering intellectual,
+moral, and social problems; in short, a
+peculiarly national attitude toward the universal
+human questions.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_50" id="Page_50">[Pg 50]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>In a narrower sense, "the American mind"
+may mean the characteristics of the American intelligence,
+as it has been studied by Mr. Bryce,
+De Tocqueville, and other trained observers
+of our methods of thinking. It may mean the
+specific achievements of the American intelligence
+in fields like science and scholarship and
+history. In all these particular departments of
+intellectual activity the methods and the results
+of American workers have recently received expert
+and by no means uniformly favorable assessment
+from investigators upon both sides of
+the Atlantic. But the observer of literary processes
+and productions must necessarily take a
+somewhat broader survey of national tendencies.
+He must study what Nathaniel Hawthorne,
+with the instinct of a romance writer,
+preferred to call the "heart" as distinguished
+from the mere intellect. He must watch the
+moral and social and imaginative impulses of
+the individual; the desire for beauty; the hunger
+for self-expression; the conscious as well as the
+unconscious revelation of personality; and he
+must bring all this into relation&mdash;if he can,
+and knowing that the finer secrets are sure to
+elude him!&mdash;with the age-long impulses of the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_51" id="Page_51">[Pg 51]</a></span>
+race and with the mysterious tides of feeling
+that flood or ebb with the changing fortunes of
+the nation.</p>
+
+<p>One way to begin to understand the typical
+American is to take a look at him in Europe.
+It does not require a professional beggar or
+a licensed guide to identify him. Not that the
+American in Europe need recall in any particular
+the familiar pictorial caricature of "Uncle
+Sam." He need not bear any outward resemblances
+to such stage types as that presented in
+"The Man From Home." He need not even
+suggest, by peculiarities of speech or manner,
+that he has escaped from the pages of those
+novels of international observation in which
+Mr. James and Mr. Howells long ago attained
+an unmatched artistry. Our "American
+Abroad," at the present hour, may be studied
+without the aid of any literary recollections
+whatever. There he is, with his wife and daughters,
+and one may stare at him with all the
+frankness of a compatriot. He is obviously
+well-to-do,&mdash;else he would not be there at
+all,&mdash;and the wife and daughters seem very
+well-to-do indeed. He is kindly; considerate&mdash;sometimes
+effusively considerate&mdash;of his<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_52" id="Page_52">[Pg 52]</a></span>
+fellow travellers; patient with the ladies of his
+family, who in turn are noticeably patient with
+him. He is genial&mdash;very willing to talk with
+polyglot headwaiters and chauffeurs; in fact
+the wife and daughters are also practised conversationalists,
+although their most loyal admirers
+must admit that their voices <i>are</i> a trifle
+sharp or flat. These ladies are more widely
+read than "papa." He has not had much leisure
+for Ruskin and Symonds and Ferrero.
+His lack of historical training limits his curiosity
+concerning certain phases of his European
+surroundings; but he uses his eyes well upon
+such general objects as trains, hotel-service,
+and Englishmen. In spite of his habitual geniality,
+he is rather critical of foreign ways,
+although this is partly due to his lack of acquaintance
+with them. Intellectually, he is
+really more modest and self-distrustful than
+his conversation or perhaps his general bearing
+would imply; in fact, his wife and daughters,
+emboldened very likely by the training of their
+women's clubs, have a more commendable
+daring in assaulting new intellectual positions.</p>
+
+<p>Yet the American does not lack quickness,
+either of wits or emotion. His humor and sentiment<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_53" id="Page_53">[Pg 53]</a></span>
+make him an entertaining companion.
+Even when his spirits run low, his patriotism
+is sure to mount in proportion, and he can always
+tell you with enthusiasm in just how many
+days he expects to be back again in what he
+calls "God's country."</p>
+
+<p>This, or something like this, is the "American"
+whom the European regards with curiosity,
+contempt, admiration, or envy, as the case
+may be, but who is incontestably modifying
+Western Europe, even if he is not, as many
+journalists and globe-trotters are fond of asserting,
+"Americanizing" the world. Interesting
+as it is to glance at him against that European
+background which adds picturesqueness to his
+qualities, the "Man from Home" is still more
+interesting in his native habitat. There he has
+been visited by hundreds of curious and observant
+foreigners, who have left on record a whole
+literature of bewildered and bewildering, irritating
+and flattering and amusing testimony concerning
+the Americans. Settlers like Crèvec&#339;ur
+in the glowing dawn of the Republic, poets like
+Tom Moore, novelists like Charles Dickens,&mdash;other
+novelists like Mr. Arnold Bennett,&mdash;professional
+travellers like Captain Basil Hall,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_54" id="Page_54">[Pg 54]</a></span>
+students of contemporary sociology like Paul
+Bourget and Mr. H. G. Wells, French journalists,
+German professors, Italian admirers of
+Colonel Roosevelt, political theorists like De
+Tocqueville, profound and friendly observers
+like Mr. Bryce, have had, and will continue to
+have, their say.</p>
+
+<p>The reader who tries to take all this testimony
+at its face value, and to reconcile its contradictions,
+will be a candidate for the insane
+asylum. Yet the testimony is too amusing to
+be neglected and some of it is far too important
+to be ignored. Mr. John Graham Brooks, after
+long familiarity with these foreign opinions of
+America, has gathered some of the most representative
+of them into a delightful and stimulating
+volume entitled <i>As Others See Us</i>. There
+one may find examples of what the foreigner
+has seen, or imagined he has seen, during his
+sojourn in America, and what he has said
+about it afterwards. Mr. Brooks is too charitable
+to our visitors to quote the most fantastic
+and highly colored of their observations;
+but what remains is sufficiently bizarre.</p>
+
+<p>The real service of such a volume is to train
+us in discounting the remarks made about us in<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_55" id="Page_55">[Pg 55]</a></span>
+a particular period like the eighteen-thirties, or
+from observations made in a special place, like
+Newport, or under special circumstances, like a
+Bishop's private car. It helps us to make allowances
+for the inevitable angle of nationality, the
+equally inevitable personal equation. A recent
+ambitious book on America, by a Washington
+journalist of long residence here, although of
+foreign birth, declares that "the chief trait of
+the American people is the love of gain and the
+desire of wealth acquired through commerce."
+That is the opinion of an expert observer, who
+has had extraordinary chances for seeing precisely
+what he has seen. I think it, notwithstanding,
+a preposterous opinion, fully as preposterous
+as Professor Muensterberg's notion
+that America has latterly grown more monarchical
+in its tendencies,&mdash;but I must remember
+that, in my own case, as in that of the journalist
+under consideration, there are allowances to be
+made for race, and training, and natural idiosyncracy
+of vision.</p>
+
+<p>The native American, it may be well to remember,
+is something of an observer himself.
+If his observations upon the characteristics
+of his countrymen are less piquant than the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_56" id="Page_56">[Pg 56]</a></span>
+foreigner's, it is chiefly because the American
+writes, upon the whole, less incisively than he
+talks. But incisive native writing about American
+traits is not lacking. If a missionary, say in
+South Africa, has read the New York <i>Nation</i>
+every week for the past forty years, he has had
+an extraordinary "moving picture" of American
+tendencies, as interpreted by independent,
+trenchant, and high-minded criticism.
+That a file of the <i>Nation</i> will convey precisely
+the same impression of American tendencies
+as a file of the <i>Sun</i>, for instance, or the <i>Boston
+Evening Transcript</i>, is not to be affirmed. The
+humor of the London <i>Punch</i> and the New
+York <i>Life</i> does not differ more radically than
+the aspects of American civilization as viewed
+by two rival journals in Newspaper Row. The
+complexity of the material now collected and
+presented in daily journalism is so great that
+adequate editorial interpretation is obviously
+impossible. All the more insistently does this
+heterogeneous picture of American life demand
+the impartial interpretation of the historian, the
+imaginative transcription of the novelist. Humorist
+and moralist, preacher and mob orator
+and social essayist, shop-talk and talk over the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_57" id="Page_57">[Pg 57]</a></span>
+tea-cup or over the pipe, and the far more illuminating
+instruction of events, are fashioning
+day by day the infinitely delicate processes of
+our national self-assessment. Scholars like Mr.
+Henry Adams or Mr. James Ford Rhodes will
+explain to us American life as it was during the
+administrations of Jefferson or in the eighteen-fifties.
+Professor Turner will expound the significance
+of the frontier in American history.
+Mr. Henry James will portray with unrivalled
+psychological insight the Europeanized American
+of the eighteen-seventies and eighties. Literary
+critics like Professor Wendell or Professor
+Trent will deduce from our literature itself evidence
+concerning this or that national quality;
+and all this mass of American expert testimony,
+itself a result and a proof of national self-awareness
+and self-respect, must be put into the scales
+to balance, to confirm, or to outweigh the reports
+furnished by foreigners.</p>
+
+<p>I do not pretend to be able, like an expert
+accountant, to draw up a balance-sheet of national
+qualities, to credit or debit the American
+character with this or that precise quantity
+of excellence or defect. But having turned the
+pages of many books about the United States,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_58" id="Page_58">[Pg 58]</a></span>
+and listened to many conversations about its
+inhabitants in many states of the Union, I venture
+to collect a brief list of the qualities which
+have been assigned to us, together with a few,
+but not, I trust, too many, of our admitted
+national defects.</p>
+
+<p>Like that excellent German who wrote the
+History of the English Drama in six volumes,
+I begin with Physical Geography. The differentiation
+of the physical characteristics of our
+branch of the English race is admittedly due,
+in part, to climate. In spite of the immense
+range of climatic variations as one passes from
+New England to New Orleans, from the Mississippi
+Valley to the high plains of the Far
+West, or from the rainy Oregon belt southward
+to San Diego, the settlers of English
+stock find a prevalent atmospheric condition,
+as a result of which they begin, in a generation
+or two, to change in physique. They grow
+thinner and more nervous, they "lean forward,"
+as has been admirably said of them,
+while the Englishman "leans back"; they are
+less heavy and less steady; their voices are
+higher, sharper; their athletes get more easily
+"on edge"; they respond, in short, to an excessively<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_59" id="Page_59">[Pg 59]</a></span>
+stimulating climate. An old-fashioned
+sea-captain put it all into a sentence when he
+said that he could drink a bottle of wine with
+his dinner in Liverpool and only a half a bottle
+in New York. Explain the cause as we may,
+the fact seems to be that the body of John
+Bull changes, in the United States, into the
+body of Uncle Sam.</p>
+
+<p>There are mental differences no less pronounced.
+No adjective has been more frequently
+applied to the Anglo-Saxon than the
+word "dull." The American mind has been
+accused of ignorance, superficiality, levity, commonplaceness,
+and dozens of other defects, but
+"dulness" is not one of them. "Smartness,"
+rather, is the preferred epithet of derogation;
+or, to rise a little in the scale of valuation, it is
+the word "cleverness," used with that lurking
+contempt for cleverness which is truly English
+and which long survived in the dialect of New
+England, where the village ne'er-do-well or
+Jack-of-all-trades used to be pronounced a
+"clever" fellow. The variety of employments
+to which the American pioneers were obliged
+to betake themselves has done something, no
+doubt, to produce a national versatility, a quick<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_60" id="Page_60">[Pg 60]</a></span>
+assimilation of new methods and notions, a
+ready adaptability to novel emergencies. An
+invaluable pioneer trait is curiosity; the settler
+in a new country, like Moses in the wilderness
+of Arabia, must "turn aside to see"; he must
+look into things, learn to read signs,&mdash;or else
+the Indians or frost or freshet will soon put an
+end to his pioneering. That curiosity concerning
+strangers which so much irritated Dickens
+and Mrs. Trollope was natural to the children
+of Western emigrants to whom the difference
+between Sioux and Pawnee had once meant
+life or death. "What's your business, stranger,
+in these parts?" was an instinctive, because it
+had once been a vital, question. That it degenerates
+into mere inquisitiveness is true enough;
+just as the "acuteness," the "awareness," essential
+to the existence of one generation becomes
+only "cuteness," the typical tin-pedler's
+habit of mind, in the generation following.</p>
+
+<p>American inexperience, the national rawness
+and unsophistication which has impressed so
+many observers, has likewise its double significance
+when viewed historically. We have
+exhibited, no doubt, the amateurishness and
+recklessness which spring from relative isolation,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_61" id="Page_61">[Pg 61]</a></span>
+from ignorance as to how they manage
+elsewhere this particular sort of thing,&mdash;the
+conservation of forests, let us say, or the government
+of colonial dependencies. National
+smugness and conceit, the impatience crystallized
+in the phrase, "What have we got to do
+with abroad?" have jarred upon the nerves of
+many cultivated Americans. But it is no less
+true that a nation of pioneers and settlers, like
+the isolated individual, learns certain rough-and-ready
+Robinson Crusoe ways of getting
+things done. A California mining-camp is sure
+to establish law and order in due time, though
+never, perhaps, a law and order quite according
+to Blackstone. In the most trying crises of
+American political history, it was not, after all,
+a question of profiting by European experience.
+Washington and Lincoln, in their sorest
+struggles, had nothing to do with "abroad";
+the problem had first to be thought through,
+and then fought through, in American and not
+in European terms. Not a half-dozen Englishmen
+understood the bearings of the Kansas-Nebraska
+Bill, or, if they did, we were little the
+wiser. We had to wait until a slow-minded
+frontier lawyer mastered it in all its implications,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_62" id="Page_62">[Pg 62]</a></span>
+and then patiently explained it to the
+farmers of Illinois, to the United States, and
+to the world.</p>
+
+<p>It is true that the unsophisticated mode of
+procedure may turn out to be sheer folly,&mdash;a
+"sixteen to one" triumph of provincial barbarism.
+But sometimes it is the secret of freshness
+and of force. Your cross-country runner
+scorns the highway, but that is because he has
+confidence in his legs and loins, and he likes
+to take the fences. Fenimore Cooper, when
+he began to write stories, knew nothing about
+the art of novel-making as practised in Europe,
+but he possessed something infinitely
+better for him, namely, instinct, and he took
+the right road to the climax of a narrative as
+unerringly as the homing bee follows its viewless
+trail.</p>
+
+<p>No one can be unaware how easily this
+superb American confidence may turn to over-confidence,
+to sheer recklessness. We love to
+run past the signals, in our railroading and in
+our thinking. Emerson will "plunge" on a
+new idea as serenely as any stock-gambler ever
+"plunged" in Wall Street, and a pretty school-teacher
+will tell you that she has become an<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_63" id="Page_63">[Pg 63]</a></span>
+advocate of the "New Thought" as complacently
+as an old financier will boast of having
+bought Calumet and Hecla when it was selling
+at 25. (Perhaps the school-teacher may get
+as good a bargain. I cannot say.) Upon the
+whole, Americans back individual guesswork
+and pay cheerfully when they lose. A great
+many of them, as it happens, have guessed
+right. Even those who continue to guess
+wrong, like Colonel Sellers, have the indefeasible
+romantic appetite for guessing again. The
+American temperament and the chances of
+American history have brought constant temptation
+to speculation, and plenty of our people
+prefer to gamble upon what they love to call
+a "proposition," rather than to go to the
+bottom of the facts. They would rather speculate
+than know.</p>
+
+<p>Doubtless there are purely physical causes
+that have encouraged this mental attitude,
+such as the apparently inexhaustible resources
+of a newly opened country, the consciousness
+of youthful energy, the feeling that any
+very radical mistake in pitching camp to-day
+can easily be rectified when we pitch camp
+to-morrow. The habit of exaggeration which<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_64" id="Page_64">[Pg 64]</a></span>
+was so particularly annoying to English visitors
+in the middle of the last century&mdash;annoying
+even to Charles Dickens, who was himself
+something of an expert in exuberance&mdash;is
+a physical and moral no less than a mental
+quality. That monstrous braggadocio which
+Dickens properly satirized in <i>Martin Chuzzlewit</i>
+was partly, of course, the product of
+provincial ignorance. Doubtless there were,
+and there are still, plenty of Pograms who are
+convinced that Henry Clay and Daniel Webster
+overtop all the intellectual giants of the
+Old World. But that youthful bragging, and
+perhaps some of the later bragging as well, has
+its social side. It is a perverted idealism. It
+springs from group loyalty, from sectional
+fidelity. The settlement of "Eden" may be
+precisely what Dickens drew it: a miasmatic
+mud-hole. Yet we who are interested in the
+new town do not intend, as the popular phrase
+has it, "to give ourselves away." We back
+our own "proposition," so that to this day
+Chicago cannot tell the truth to St. Louis, nor
+Harvard to Yale. Braggadocio thus gets glorified
+through its rootage in loyalty; and likewise
+extravagance&mdash;surely one of the worst<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_65" id="Page_65">[Pg 65]</a></span>
+of American mental vices&mdash;is often based
+upon a romantic confidence in individual opinion
+or in the righteousness of some specific
+cause. Convince a blue-blooded American like
+Wendell Phillips that the abolition of slavery
+is right, and, straightway, words and even facts
+become to him mere weapons in a splendid
+warfare. His statements grow rhetorical, reckless,
+virulent. Proof seems to him, as it did to
+the contemporary Transcendentalist philosophers,
+an impertinence. The sole question is,
+"Are you on the Lord's side?" i.e., on the
+side of Wendell Phillips.</p>
+
+<p>Excuse as we may the faults of a gifted
+combatant in a moral crisis like the abolition
+controversy, the fact remains that the intellectual
+dangers of the oratorical temperament
+are typically American. What is commonly
+called our "Fourth of July" period has
+indeed passed away. It has few apologists,
+perhaps fewer than it really deserves. It is
+possible to regret the disappearance of that
+old-fashioned assertion of patriotism and pride,
+and to question whether historical pageants
+and a "noiseless Fourth" will develop any
+better citizens than the fathers were. But on<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_66" id="Page_66">[Pg 66]</a></span>
+the purely intellectual side, the influence of
+that spread-eagle oratory was disastrous.
+Throughout wide-extended regions of the
+country, and particularly in the South and
+West, the "orator" grew to be, in the popular
+mind, the normal representative of intellectual
+ability. Words, rather than things,
+climbed into the saddle. Popular assemblies
+were taught the vocabulary and the logic of
+passion, rather than of sober, lucid reasoning.
+The "stump" grew more potent than school-house
+and church and bench; and it taught
+its reckless and passionate ways to more than
+one generation. The intellectual leaders of the
+newer South have more than once suffered
+ostracism for protesting against this glorification
+of mere oratory. But it is not the South
+alone that has suffered. Wherever a mob can
+gather, there are still the dangers of the old
+demagogic vocabulary and rhetoric. The mob
+state of mind is lurking still in the excitable
+American temperament.</p>
+
+<p>The intellectual temptations of that temperament
+are revealed no less in our popular journalism.
+This journalism, it is needless to say,
+is extremely able, but it is reckless to the last<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_67" id="Page_67">[Pg 67]</a></span>
+degree. The extravagance of its head-lines and
+the over-statements of its news columns are
+direct sources of profit, since they increase the
+circulation and it is circulation which wins
+advertising space. I think it is fair to say that
+the American people, as a whole, like precisely
+the sort of journalism which they get. The
+tastes of the dwellers in cities control, more
+and more, the character of our newspapers.
+The journals of New York, Chicago, and San
+Francisco are steadily gaining in circulation, in
+resourcefulness, and in public spirit, but they
+are, for the most part, unscrupulous in attack,
+sophistical, and passionate. They outvie the
+popular pulpit in sentimentality. They play
+with fire.</p>
+
+<p>The note of exaggeration which is heard in
+American oratory and journalism is struck
+again in the popular magazines. Their campaign
+of "exposure," during the last decade,
+has been careless of individual and corporate
+rights and reputations. Even the magazine
+sketches and short stories are keyed up to a
+hysteric pitch. So universally is this characteristic
+national tension displayed in our periodical
+literature that no one is much surprised to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_68" id="Page_68">[Pg 68]</a></span>
+read in his morning paper that some one has
+called the President of the United States a liar,&mdash;or
+that some one has been called a liar by
+the President of the United States.</p>
+
+<p>For an explanation of these defects, shall we
+fall back upon a convenient maxim of De
+Tocqueville's and admit with him that "a democracy
+is unsuited to meditation"? We are
+forced to do so. But then comes the inevitable
+second thought that a democracy must needs
+have other things than meditation to attend to.
+Athenian and Florentine and Versailles types
+of political despotism have all proved highly
+favorable to the lucubrations of philosophers
+and men of letters who enjoyed the despot's
+approbation. For that matter, no scheme of
+life was ever better suited to meditation than
+an Indian reservation in the eighteen-seventies,
+with a Great Father in Washington to furnish
+blankets, flour, and tobacco. Yet that is
+not quite the American ideal of existence, and
+it even failed to produce the peaceable fruits
+of meditation in the Indian himself.</p>
+
+<p>One may freely admit the shortcomings of
+the American intelligence; the "commonness
+of mind and tone" which Mr. Bryce believes<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_69" id="Page_69">[Pg 69]</a></span>
+to be inseparable from the presence of such
+masses of men associated under modern democratic
+government; the frivolity and extravagance
+which represent the gasconading of the
+romantic temper in face of the grey practicalities
+of everyday routine; the provincial boastfulness
+and bad taste which have resulted from
+intellectual isolation; the lack, in short, of a
+code, whether for thought or speech or behavior.
+And nevertheless, one's instinctive Americanism
+replies, May it not be better, after
+all, to have gone without a code for a while, to
+have lacked that orderly and methodized and
+socialized European intelligence, and to have
+had the glorious sense of bringing things to
+pass in spite of it? There is just one thing that
+would have been fatal to our democracy. It is
+the feeling expressed in La Bruyère's famous
+book: "Everything has been said, everything
+has been written, everything has been done."
+Here in America everything was to do; we
+were forced to conjugate our verbs in the future
+tense. No doubt our existence has been,
+in some respects, one of barbarism, but it has
+been the barbarism of life and not of death. A
+rawboned baby sprawling on the mud floor<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_70" id="Page_70">[Pg 70]</a></span>
+of a Kentucky log cabin is a more hopeful
+spectacle than a wholly civilized funeral.</p>
+
+<p>"Perhaps it is," rejoins the European critic,
+somewhat impatiently, "but you are confusing
+the issue. We find certain grave defects in the
+American mind, defects which, if you had not
+had what Thomas Carlyle called 'a great deal
+of land for a very few people,' would long ago
+have involved you in disaster. You admit the
+mental defects, but you promptly shift the
+question to one of moral qualities, of practical
+energy, of subduing your wilderness, and so
+forth. You have too often absented yourself
+from the wedding banquet, from the European
+symposium of wit and philosophy, from the
+polished and orderly and delightful play and
+interplay of civilized mind,&mdash;and your excuse
+is the old one: that you are trying your yoke
+of oxen and cannot come. We charge you with
+intellectual sins, and you enter the plea of
+moral preoccupation. If you will permit personal
+examples, you Americans have made ere
+now your national heroes out of men whose
+reasoning powers remained those of a college
+sophomore, who were unable to state an opponent's
+position with fairness, who lacked wholly<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_71" id="Page_71">[Pg 71]</a></span>
+the judicial quality, who were vainglorious and
+extravagant, who had, in short, the mind of an
+exuberant barbarian; but you instantly forget
+their intellectual defects in the presence of their
+abounding physical and moral energy, their
+freedom from any taint of personal corruption,
+their whole-souled desire and effort for the
+public good. Were not such heroes, impossible
+as they would have been in any other civilized
+country, perfectly illuminative of your
+national state of mind?"</p>
+
+<p>For one, I confess that I do not know what
+reply to make to my imaginary European critic.
+I suspect that he is right. At any rate, we stand
+here at the fork of the road. If we do not wish to
+linger any longer over a catalogue of intellectual
+sins, let us turn frankly to our moral preoccupations,
+comforting ourselves, if we like, as we
+abandon the field of purely intellectual rivalry
+with Europe, in the reflection that it is the
+muddle-headed Anglo-Saxon, after all, who is
+the dominant force in the modern world.</p>
+
+<p>The moral temper of the American people
+has been analyzed no less frequently than their
+mental traits. Foreign and native observers are
+alike agreed in their recognition of the extraordinary<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_72" id="Page_72">[Pg 72]</a></span>
+American energy. The sheer power
+of the American bodily machine, driven by the
+American will, is magnificent. It is often driven
+too hard, and with reckless disregard of anything
+save immediate results. It wears out more
+quickly than the bodily machine of the Englishman.
+It is typical that the best distance runners
+of Great Britain usually beat ours, while we beat
+them in the sprints. Our public men are frequently&mdash;as
+the athletes say&mdash;"all in" at
+sixty. Their energy is exhausted at just the time
+that many an English statesman begins his best
+public service. But after making every allowance
+for wasteful excess, for the restless and impatient
+consumption of nervous forces which
+nature intended that we should hold in reserve,
+the fact remains that American history has demonstrated
+the existence of a dynamic national
+energy, physical and moral, which is still unabated.
+Immigration has turned hitherward the
+feet of millions upon millions of young men
+from the hardiest stocks of Europe. They replenish
+the slackening streams of vigor. When
+the northern New Englander cannot make a
+living on the old farm, the French Canadian
+takes it off his hands, and not only improves<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_73" id="Page_73">[Pg 73]</a></span>
+the farm, but raises big crops of boys. So with
+Italians, Swedes, Germans, Irish, Jews, and
+Portuguese, and all the rest. We are a nation
+of immigrants, a digging, hewing, building,
+breeding, bettering race, of mixed blood and
+varying creeds, but of fundamental faith in the
+wages of going on; a race compounded of materials
+crude but potent; raw, but with blood
+that is red and bones that are big; a race that is
+accomplishing its vital tasks, and, little by little,
+transmuting brute forces and material energies
+into the finer play of mind and spirit.</p>
+
+<p>From the very beginning, the American
+people have been characterized by idealism. It
+was the inner light of Pilgrim and Quaker colonists;
+it gleams no less in the faces of the children
+of Russian Jew immigrants to-day. American
+irreverence has been noted by many a foreign
+critic, but there are certain subjects in
+whose presence our reckless or cynical speech
+is hushed. Compared with current Continental
+humor, our characteristic American humor is
+peculiarly reverent. The purity of woman and
+the reality of religion are not considered topics
+for jocosity. Cleanness of body and of mind are
+held by our young men to be not only desirable<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_74" id="Page_74">[Pg 74]</a></span>
+but attainable virtues. There is among us, in
+comparison with France or Germany, a defective
+reverence for the State as such; and a
+positive irreverence towards the laws of the
+Commonwealth, and towards the occupants of
+high political positions. Mayor, Judge, Governor,
+Senator, or even President, may be the
+butt of such indecorous ridicule as shocks or
+disgusts the foreigner; but nevertheless the
+personal joke stops short of certain topics which
+Puritan tradition disapproves. The United
+States is properly called a Christian nation,
+not merely because the Supreme Court has so
+affirmed it, but because the phrase "a Christian
+nation" expresses the historical form which
+the religious idealism of the country has made
+its own. The Bible is still considered, by the
+mass of the people, a sacred book; oaths in
+courts of law, oaths of persons elected to great
+office, are administered upon it. American
+faith in education, as all the world knows, has
+from the beginning gone hand in hand with
+faith in religion; the school-house was almost
+as sacred a symbol as the meeting-house; and
+the munificence of American private benefactions
+to the cause of education furnishes to-day<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_75" id="Page_75">[Pg 75]</a></span>
+one of the most striking instances of idealism
+in the history of civilization.</p>
+
+<p>The ideal passions of patriotism, of liberty,
+of loyalty to home and section, of humanitarian
+and missionary effort, have all burned with a
+clear flame in the United States. The optimism
+which lies so deeply embedded in the
+American character is one phase of the national
+mind. Charles Eliot Norton once said
+to me, with his dry humor, that there was an
+infallible test of the American authorship of
+any anonymous article or essay: "Does it contain
+the phrase 'After all, we need not despair'?
+If it does, it was written by an American."
+In spite of all that is said about the
+practicality of the American, his love of gain
+and his absorption in material interests, those
+who really know him are aware how habitually
+he confronts his practical tasks in a spirit of
+romantic enthusiasm. He marches downtown
+to his prosaic day's job and calls it "playing
+the game"; to work as hard as he can is to
+"get into the game," and to work as long as
+he can is to "stay in the game"; he loves to
+win fully as much as the Jew and he hates to
+lose fully as much as the Englishman, but<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_76" id="Page_76">[Pg 76]</a></span>
+losing or winning, he carries into his business
+activity the mood of the idealist.</p>
+
+<p>It is easy to think of all this as self-deception
+as the emotional effusiveness of the
+American temperament; but to refuse to see
+its idealism is to mistake fundamentally the
+character of the American man. No doubt he
+does deceive himself often as to his real motives:
+he is a mystic and a bargain-hunter by
+turns. Divided aims, confused ideals, have
+struggled for the mastery among us, ever since
+Challon's <i>Voyage</i>, in 1606, announced that the
+purpose of the first colonists to Virginia was
+"both to seek to convert the savages, as also
+to seek out what benefits or commodities
+might be had in those parts." How that
+"both"&mdash;"as also" keeps echoing in American
+history: "both" to christianize the Negro
+and work him at a profit, "both" duty and
+advantage in retaining the Philippines; "both"
+international good will and increased armaments;
+"both" Sunday morning precepts and
+Monday morning practice; "both" horns of
+a dilemma; "both God and mammon"; did
+ever a nation possess a more marvellous
+water-tight compartment method of believing<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_77" id="Page_77">[Pg 77]</a></span>
+and honoring opposites! But in all this unconscious
+hypocrisy the American is perhaps
+not worse&mdash;though he may be more absurd!&mdash;than
+other men.</p>
+
+<p>Another aspect of the American mind is
+found in our radicalism. "To be an American,"
+it has been declared, "is to be a radical."
+That statement needs qualification. Intellectually
+the American is inclined to radical views;
+he is willing to push certain social theories
+very far; he will found a new religion, a new
+philosophy, a new socialistic community, at
+the slightest notice or provocation; but he has
+at bottom a fund of moral and political conservatism.
+Thomas Jefferson, one of the greatest
+of our radical idealists, had a good deal of
+the English squire in him after all. Jeffersonianism
+endures, not merely because it is a radical
+theory of human nature, but because it
+expresses certain facts of human nature. The
+American mind looks forward, not back; but
+in practical details of land, taxes, and governmental
+machinery we are instinctively cautious
+of change. The State of Connecticut knows
+that her constitution is ill adapted to the present
+conditions of her population, but the difficulty<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_78" id="Page_78">[Pg 78]</a></span>
+is to persuade the rural legislators to
+amend it. Yet everybody admits that amendment
+will come "some day." This admission
+is a characteristic note of American feeling;
+and every now and then come what we call
+"uplift" movements, when radicalism is in
+the very air, and a thousand good "causes"
+take fresh vigor.</p>
+
+<p>One such period was in the New England
+of the eighteen-forties. We are moving in a
+similar&mdash;only this time a national&mdash;current
+of radicalism, to-day. But a change in the
+weather or the crops has before now turned
+many of our citizens from radicalism into conservatism.
+There is, in fact, conservatism in
+our blood and radicalism in our brains, and
+now one and now the other rules. Very typical
+of American radicalism is that story of the
+old sea-captain who was ignorant, as was supposed,
+of the science of navigation, and who
+cheerfully defended himself by saying that he
+could work his vessel down to Boston Light
+without knowing any navigation, and after that
+he could go where he "dum pleased." I suspect
+the old fellow pulled his sextant and
+chronometer out of his chest as soon as he<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_79" id="Page_79">[Pg 79]</a></span>
+really needed them. American radicalism is
+not always as innocent of the world's experience
+as it looks. In fact, one of the most
+interesting phases of this twentieth century
+"uplift" movement is its respect and even
+glorification of expert opinion. A German expert
+in city-planning electrifies an audience of
+Chicago club-women by talking to them about
+drains, ash-carts, and flower-beds. A hundred
+other experts, in sanitation, hygiene, chemistry,
+conservation of natural resources, government
+by commission, tariffs, arbitration treaties,
+are talking quite as busily; and they have
+the attention of a national audience that is
+listening with genuine modesty, and with a real
+desire to refashion American life on wiser and
+nobler plans. In this national forward movement
+in which we are living, radicalism has
+shown its beneficent aspect of constructive
+idealism.</p>
+
+<p>No catalogue of American qualities and defects
+can exclude the trait of individualism.
+We exalt character over institutions, says Mr.
+Brownell; we like our institutions because they
+suit us, and not because we admire institutions.
+"Produce great persons," declares Walt Whitman,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_80" id="Page_80">[Pg 80]</a></span>
+"the rest follows." Whether the rest follows
+or not, there can be no question that
+Americans, from the beginning, have laid singular
+stress upon personal qualities. The religion
+and philosophy of the Puritans were in
+this respect at one with the gospel of the frontier.
+It was the principle of "every man for
+himself"; solitary confrontation of his God,
+solitary struggle with the wilderness. "He
+that will not work," declared John Smith after
+that first disastrous winter at Jamestown,
+"neither let him eat." The pioneer must
+clear his own land, harvest his own crops,
+defend his own fireside; his temporal and
+eternal salvation were strictly his own affair.
+He asked, and expected, no aid from the community;
+he could at most "change works"
+in time of harvest, with a neighbor, if he had
+one. It was the sternest school of self-reliance,
+from babyhood to the grave, that human
+society is ever likely to witness. It bred heroes
+and cranks and hermits; its glories and
+its eccentricities are written in the pages of
+Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman; they are
+written more permanently still in the instinctive
+American faith in individual manhood.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_81" id="Page_81">[Pg 81]</a></span>
+Our democracy idolizes a few individuals; it
+ignores their defective training, or, it may be,
+their defective culture; it likes to think of an
+Andrew Jackson who was a "lawyer, judge,
+planter, merchant, general, and politician," before
+he became President; it asks only that the
+man shall not change his individual character
+in passing from one occupation or position to
+another; in fact, it is amused and proud to
+think of Grant hauling cordwood to market, of
+Lincoln keeping store or Roosevelt rounding-up
+cattle. The one essential question was
+put by Hawthorne into the mouth of Holgrave
+in the <i>House of the Seven Gables</i>. Holgrave had
+been by turns a schoolmaster, clerk in a store,
+editor, pedler, lecturer on Mesmerism, and
+daguerreotypist, but "amid all these personal
+vicissitudes," says Hawthorne, "he had never
+lost his identity.... He had never violated
+the innermost man, but had carried his conscience
+along with him." There speaks the
+local accent of Puritanism, but the voice insisting
+upon the moral integrity of the individual
+is the undertone of America.</p>
+
+<p>Finally, and surely not the least notable of
+American traits, is public spirit. Triumphant<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_82" id="Page_82">[Pg 82]</a></span>
+individualism checks itself, or is rudely checked
+in spite of itself, by considerations of the general
+good. How often have French critics confessed,
+with humiliation, that in spite of the
+superior socialization of the French intelligence,
+France has yet to learn from America the art
+and habit of devoting individual fortunes to
+the good of the community. Our American
+literature, as has been already pointed out, is
+characteristically a citizen literature, responsive
+to the civic note, the production of men who,
+like the writers of the <i>Federalist</i>, applied a vigorous
+practical intelligence, a robust common
+sense, to questions affecting the interest of
+everybody. The spirit of fair play in our free
+democracy has led Americans to ask not merely
+what is right and just for one, the individual,
+but what are righteousness and justice and fair
+play for all. Democracy, as embodied in such
+a leader as Lincoln, has meant Fellowship.
+Nothing finer can be said of a representative
+American than to say of him, as Mr. Norton
+said of Mr. Lowell, that he had a "most public
+soul."</p>
+
+<p>No one can present such a catalogue of
+American qualities as I have attempted without<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_83" id="Page_83">[Pg 83]</a></span>
+realizing how much escapes his classification.
+Conscious criticism and assessment of national
+characteristics is essential to an understanding
+of them; but one feels somehow that the net is
+not holding. The analysis of English racial inheritances,
+as modified by historical conditions,
+yields much, no doubt; but what are we to say
+of such magnificent embodiments of the American
+spirit as are revealed in the Swiss immigrant
+Agassiz, the German exile Carl Schurz,
+the native-born mulatto Booker Washington?
+The Americanism of representative Americans
+is something which must be felt; it is to be
+reached by imaginative perception and sympathy,
+no less than by the process of formal
+analysis. It would puzzle the experts in racial
+tendencies to find arithmetically the common
+denominator of such American figures as Franklin,
+Washington, Jackson, Webster, Lee, Lincoln,
+Emerson, and "Mark Twain"; yet the
+countrymen of those typical Americans instinctively
+recognize in them a sort of largeness,
+genuineness, naturalness, kindliness, humor,
+effectiveness, idealism, which are indubitably
+and fundamentally American.</p>
+
+<p>There are certain sentiments of which we<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_84" id="Page_84">[Pg 84]</a></span>
+ourselves are conscious, though we can scarcely
+translate them into words, and these vaguely
+felt emotions of admiration, of effort, of fellowship
+and social faith are the invisible America.
+Take, for a single example, the national admiration
+for what we call a "self-made" man: here
+is a boy selling candy and newspapers on a
+Michigan Central train; he makes up his mind
+to be a lawyer; in twelve years from that day
+he is general counsel for the Michigan Central
+road; he enters the Senate of the United States
+and becomes one of its leading figures. The instinctive
+flush of sympathy and pride with which
+Americans listen to such a story is far more
+deeply based than any vulgar admiration for
+money-making abilities. No one cares whether
+such a man is rich or poor. He has vindicated
+anew the possibilities of manhood under American
+conditions of opportunity; the miracle of
+our faith has in him come true once more.</p>
+
+<p>No one can understand America with his
+brains. It is too big, too puzzling. It tempts,
+and it deceives. But many an illiterate immigrant
+has felt the true America in his pulses
+before he ever crossed the Atlantic. The descendant
+of the Pilgrims still remains ignorant<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_85" id="Page_85">[Pg 85]</a></span>
+of our national life if he does not respond to its
+glorious zest, its throbbing energy, its forward
+urge, its uncomprehending belief in the future,
+its sense of the fresh and mighty world just
+beyond to-day's horizon. Whitman's "Pioneers,
+O Pioneers" is one of the truest of
+American poems because it beats with the pulse
+of this onward movement, because it is full of
+this laughing and conquering fellowship and
+of undefeated faith.</p>
+
+
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_86" id="Page_86">[Pg 86]</a></span></p><hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="III" id="III"></a>III<br /><br />
+
+American Idealism</h2>
+
+
+<p>Our endeavor to state the general characteristics
+of the American mind has already given
+us some indication of what Americans really
+care for. The things or the qualities which
+they like, the objects of their conscious or unconscious
+striving, are their ideals. "There
+is what I call the American idea," said Theodore
+Parker in the Anti-Slavery Convention
+of 1850. "This idea demands, as the proximate
+organization thereof, a democracy&mdash;that
+is, a government of all the people, by all the
+people, for all the people; of course, a government
+on the principle of eternal justice, the
+unchanging law of God; for shortness' sake, I
+will call it the idea of Freedom." That is one
+of a thousand definitions of American idealism.
+Books devoted to the "Spirit of America"&mdash;like
+the volume by Henry van Dyke which
+bears that very title&mdash;give a programme of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_87" id="Page_87">[Pg 87]</a></span>
+national accomplishments and aspirations. But
+our immediate task is more specific. It is to
+point out how adequately this idealistic side of
+the national temperament has been expressed
+in American writing. Has our literature kept
+equal pace with our thinking and feeling?</p>
+
+<p>We do not need, in attempting to answer
+this question, any definition of idealism, in its
+philosophical or in its more purely literary
+sense. There are certain fundamental human
+sentiments which lift men above brutes, Frenchmen
+above "frog-eaters," and Englishmen
+above "shop-keepers." These ennobling sentiments
+or ideals, while universal in their essential
+nature, assume in each civilized nation a
+somewhat specific coloring. The national literature
+reveals the myriad shades and hues of
+private and public feeling, and the more truthful
+this literary record, the more delicate and
+noble become the harmonies of local and national
+thought or emotion with the universal
+instincts and passions of mankind. On the
+other hand, when the literature of Spain, for
+instance, or of Italy, fails, within a given period,
+in range and depth of human interest, we are
+compelled to believe either that the Spain or<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_88" id="Page_88">[Pg 88]</a></span>
+Italy of that age was wanting in the nobler
+ideals, or that it lacked literary interpretation.</p>
+
+<p>In the case of America we are confronted by
+a similar dilemma. Since the beginning of the
+seventeenth century this country has been, in
+a peculiar sense, the home of idealism; but our
+literature has remained through long periods
+thin and provincial, barren in cosmopolitan
+significance; and the hard fact faces us to-day
+that only three or four of our writers have
+aroused any strong interest in the cultivated
+readers of continental Europe. Evidently, then,
+either the torch of American idealism does not
+burn as brightly as we think, or else our writers,
+with but few exceptions, have not hitherto
+possessed the height and reach and grasp to
+hold up the torch so that the world could see
+it. Let us look first at the flame, and then at
+the torch-bearers.</p>
+
+<p>Readers of Carlyle have often been touched
+by the humility with which that disinherited
+child of Calvinism speaks of Goethe's doctrine
+of the "Three Reverences," as set forth in <i>Wilhelm
+Meister</i>. Again and again, in his correspondence
+and his essays, does Carlyle recur
+to that teaching of the threefold Reverence:<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_89" id="Page_89">[Pg 89]</a></span>
+Reverence for what is above us, for what is
+around us and for what is under us; that is to
+say, the ethnic religion which frees us from debasing
+fear, the philosophical religion which
+unites us with our comrades, and the Christian
+religion which recognizes humility and poverty
+and suffering as divine.</p>
+
+<p>"To which of these religions do you specially
+adhere?" inquired Wilhelm.</p>
+
+<p>"To all the three," replied the sages; "for
+in their union they produce what may properly
+be called the true Religion. Out of those three
+Reverences springs the highest Reverence,
+Reverence for Oneself."</p>
+
+<p>An admirable symbolism, surely; vaguer,
+no doubt, than the old symbols which Carlyle
+had learned in the Kirk at Ecclefechan, but
+less vague, in turn, than that doctrine of reverence
+for the Oversoul, which was soon to be
+taught at Concord.</p>
+
+<p>As one meditates upon the idealism of the
+first colonists in America, one is tempted to ask
+what their "reverences" were. Toward what
+tangible symbols of the invisible did their eyes
+instinctively turn?</p>
+
+<p>For New England, at least, the answer is<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_90" id="Page_90">[Pg 90]</a></span>
+relatively simple. One form of it is contained
+in John Adams's well-known prescription for
+Virginia, as recorded in his <i>Diary</i> for July 21,
+1786. "Major Langbourne dined with us
+again. He was lamenting the difference of character
+between Virginia and New England. I
+offered to give him a receipt for making a New
+England in Virginia. He desired it; and I recommended
+to him town-meetings, training-days,
+town-schools, and ministers."</p>
+
+<p>The "ministers," it will be noticed, come
+last on the Adams list. But the order of precedence
+is unimportant.</p>
+
+<p>Here are four symbols, or, if you like, "reverences."
+Might not the Virginia planters,
+loyal to their own specific symbol of the "gentleman,"&mdash;no
+unworthy ideal, surely; one
+that had been glorified in European literature
+ever since Castiligione wrote his <i>Courtier</i>, and
+one that had been transplanted from England
+to Virginia as soon as Sir Walter Raleigh's men
+set foot on the soil which took its name from
+the Virgin Queen,&mdash;might not the Virginia
+gentlemen have pondered to their profit over
+the blunt suggestion of the Massachusetts commoner?
+No doubt; and yet how much picturesqueness<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_91" id="Page_91">[Pg 91]</a></span>
+and nobility&mdash;and tragedy, too&mdash;we
+should have missed, if our history had not
+been full of these varying symbols, clashing
+ideals, different Reverences!</p>
+
+<p>One Reverence, at least, was common to the
+Englishman of Virginia and to the Englishman
+of Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay. They
+were joint heirs of the Reformation, children of
+that waxing and puissant England which was a
+nation of one book, the Bible; a book whose
+phrases color alike the <i>Faerie Queen</i> of Spenser
+and the essays of Francis Bacon; a book
+rich beyond all others in human experience;
+full of poetry, history, drama; the test of conduct;
+the manual of devotion; and above all,
+and blinding all other considerations by the
+very splendor of the thought, a book believed
+to be the veritable Word of the unseen God.
+For these colonists in the wilderness, as for the
+Protestant Europe which they had left irrevocably
+behind them, the Bible was the plainest
+of all symbols of idealism: it was the first of
+the "Reverences."</p>
+
+<p>The Church was a symbol likewise, but to
+the greater portion of colonial America the
+Church meant chiefly the tangible band of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_92" id="Page_92">[Pg 92]</a></span>
+militant believers within the limits of a certain
+township or parish, rather than the mystical
+Bride of Christ. Except in Maryland and Virginia,
+whither the older forms of Church worship
+were early transplanted, there was scanty
+reverence for the Establishment. There was
+neither clergyman nor minister on board the
+Mayflower. In Rufus Choate's oration on the
+Pilgrims before the New England Society of
+New York in 1843, occurred the famous sentence
+about "a church without a bishop and a
+state without a King"; to which Dr. Wainwright,
+rector of St. John's, replied wittily at
+the dinner following the oration that there
+"can be no church without a bishop." This is
+perhaps a question for experts; but Thomas
+Hooker, Thomas Shepard, and John Cotton
+would have sided with Rufus Choate. The awe
+which had once been paid to the Establishment
+was transferred, in the seventeenth-century
+New England, to the minister. The minister
+imposed himself upon the popular imagination,
+partly through sheer force of personal ascendency,
+and partly as a symbol of the theocracy,&mdash;the
+actual governing of the Commonwealth
+by the laws and spirit of the sterner Scriptures.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_93" id="Page_93">[Pg 93]</a></span>
+The minister dwelt apart as upon an awful
+Sinai. It was no mere romantic fancy of Hawthorne
+that shadowed his countenance with a
+black veil. The church organization, too,&mdash;though
+it may have lacked its bishop,&mdash;had
+a despotic power over its communicants; to be
+cast out of its fellowship involved social and
+political consequences comparable to those following
+excommunication by the Church of
+Rome. Hawthorne and Whittier and Longfellow&mdash;all
+of them sound antiquarians,
+though none of them in sympathy with the
+theology of Puritanism&mdash;have described in
+fit terms the bareness of the New England
+meeting-house. What intellectual severity and
+strain was there; what prodigality of learning;
+what blazing intensity of devotion; what pathos
+of women's patience, and of children, prematurely
+old, stretched upon the rack of insoluble
+problems! What dramas of the soul were
+played through to the end in those barn-like
+buildings, where the musket, perhaps, stood in
+the corner of the pew! "How aweful is this
+place!" must have been murmured by the
+lips of all; though there were many who have
+added, "This is the gate of Heaven."<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_94" id="Page_94">[Pg 94]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The gentler side of colonial religion is winningly
+portrayed in Whittier's <i>Pennsylvania
+Pilgrim</i> and in his imaginary journal of Margaret
+Smith. There were sunnier slopes, warmer
+exposures for the ripening of the human spirit,
+in the Southern colonies. Even in New England
+there was sporadic revolt from the beginning.
+The number of non-church-members increased
+rapidly after 1700; Franklin as a youth
+in Boston admired Cotton Mather's ability, but
+he did not go to church, "Sunday being my
+studying day." Doubtless there were always
+humorous sceptics like Mrs. Stowe's delightful
+Sam Lawson in <i>Oldtown Folks</i>. Lawson's
+comment on Parson Simpson's service epitomizes
+two centuries of New England thinking.
+"Wal," said Sam, "Parson Simpson's a smart
+man; but I tell ye, it's kind o' discouragin'.
+Why, he said our state and condition by natur
+was just like this. We was clear down in a well
+fifty feet deep, and the sides all round nothin'
+but glare ice; but we was under immediate obligations
+to get out, 'cause we was free, voluntary
+agents. But nobody ever had got out, and
+nobody would, unless the Lord reached down
+and took 'em. And whether he would or not<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_95" id="Page_95">[Pg 95]</a></span>
+nobody could tell; it was all sovereignty. He
+said there wan't one in a hundred, not one in
+a thousand,&mdash;not one in ten thousand,&mdash;that
+would be saved. Lordy massy, says I to myself,
+ef that's so they're any of 'em welcome to my
+chance. <i>And so I kind o' ris up and come out.</i>"</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Stowe's novel is fairly representative
+of a great mass of derivative literature which
+draws its materials from the meeting-house
+period of American history. But the direct literature
+of that period has passed almost wholly
+into oblivion. Jonathan Edwards had one of
+the finest minds of his century; no European
+standard of comparison is too high for him; he
+belongs with Pascal, with Augustine, if you like,
+with Dante. But his great treatises written in
+the Stockbridge woods are known only to a few
+technical students of philosophy. One terrible
+sermon, preached at Enfield in 1741, is still
+read by the curious; but scarcely anybody knows
+of the ineffable tenderness, dignity, and pathos
+of his farewell sermon to his flock at Northampton:
+and the Yale Library possesses nearly
+twelve hundred of Edwards's sermons which
+have never been printed at all. Nor does anybody,
+save here and there an antiquarian, read<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_96" id="Page_96">[Pg 96]</a></span>
+Shepard and Hooker and Mayhew. And yet
+these preachers and their successors furnished
+the emotional equivalents of great prose and
+verse to generations of men. "That is poetry,"
+says Professor Saintsbury (in a dangerous latitudinarianism,
+perhaps!), "which gives the
+reader the feeling of poetry." Here we touch
+one of the fundamental characteristics of our
+national state of mind, in its relation to literature.
+We are careless of form and type, yet we
+crave the emotional stimulus. Milton, greatest
+of Puritan poets, was read and quoted all too
+seldom in the Puritan colonies, and yet those
+colonists were no strangers to the emotions of
+sublimity and awe and beauty. They found
+them in the meeting-house instead of in a book;
+precisely as, in a later day, millions of Americans
+experienced what was for them the emotional
+equivalent of poetry in the sermons of
+Henry Ward Beecher and Phillips Brooks.
+French pulpit oratory of the seventeenth century
+wins recognition as a distinct type of literature;
+its great practitioners, like Massillon,
+Bourdaloue, Bossuet, are appraised in all the
+histories of the national literature and in books
+devoted to the evolution of literary species. In<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_97" id="Page_97">[Pg 97]</a></span>
+the American colonies the great preachers performed
+the functions of men of letters without
+knowing it. They have been treated with too
+scant respect in the histories of American literature.
+It is one of the penalties of Protestantism
+that the audiences, after a while, outgrow
+the preacher. The development of the
+historic sense, of criticism, of science, makes an
+impassable gulf between Jonathan Edwards
+and the American churches of the twentieth
+century. A sense of profound changes in theology
+has left our contemporaries indifferent to
+the literature in which the old theology was
+clothed.</p>
+
+<p>There is one department of American literary
+production, of which Bossuet's famous sermon
+on Queen Henrietta Maria of England
+may serve to remind us, which illustrates significantly
+the national idealism. I mean the
+commemorative oration. The addresses upon
+the Pilgrim Fathers by such orators as Everett,
+Webster, and Choate; the countless orations
+before such organizations as the New England
+Society of New York and the Phi Beta Kappa;
+the papers read before historical and patriotic
+societies; the birthday and centenary discourses<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_98" id="Page_98">[Pg 98]</a></span>
+upon national figures like Washington or Lincoln,
+have all performed, and are still performing,
+an inestimable service in stimulating popular
+loyalty to the idealism of the fathers. As
+literature, most of this production is derivative:
+we listen to eloquence about the Puritans, but
+we do not read the Puritans; the description
+of Arthur Dimmesdale's election sermon in
+<i>The Scarlet Letter</i>, moving as it may be, tempts
+no one to open the stout collections of election
+sermons in the libraries. Yet the original literature
+of mediæval chivalry is known only to
+a few scholars: Tennyson's <i>Idylls</i> outsell the
+<i>Mabinogion</i> and Malory. The actual world of
+literature is always shop-worn; a world chiefly
+of second-hand books, of warmed-over emotions
+and it is not surprising that many listeners
+to orations about Lincoln do not personally
+emulate Lincoln, and that many of the most
+enthusiastic dealers in the sentiment of the ancestral
+meeting-house do not themselves attend
+church.</p>
+
+<p>The other ingredients of John Adams's ideal
+Commonwealth are no less significant of our
+national disposition. Take the school-house.
+It was planted in the wilderness for the training<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_99" id="Page_99">[Pg 99]</a></span>
+of boys and girls and for a future "godly and
+learned ministry." The record of American
+education is a long story of idealism which has
+touched literature at every turn. The "red
+school-house" on the hill-top or at the cross-roads,
+the "log-colleges" in forgotten hamlets,
+the universities founded by great states, are all
+a record of the American faith&mdash;which has
+sometimes been called a fetich&mdash;in education.
+In its origin, it was a part of the essential programme
+of Calvinism to make a man able to
+judge for himself upon the most momentous
+questions; a programme, too, of that political
+democracy which lay embedded in the tenets
+of Calvinism, a democracy which believes and
+must continue to believe that an educated electorate
+can safeguard its own interests and train
+up its own leaders. The poetry of the American
+school-house was written long ago by Whittier,
+in describing Joshua Coffin's school under
+the big elm on the cross-road in East Haverhill;
+its humor and pathos and drama have been
+portrayed by innumerable story-writers and essayists.
+Mrs. Martha Baker Dunn's charming
+sketches, entitled "Cicero in Maine" and "Virgil
+in Maine," indicate the idealism once taught<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_100" id="Page_100">[Pg 100]</a></span>
+in the old rural academies,&mdash;and it is taught
+there still. City men will stop wistfully on the
+street, in the first week of September, to watch
+the boys and girls go trudging off to their first
+day of school; men who believe in nothing else
+at least believe in that! And school and college
+and university remain, as in the beginning, the
+first garden-ground and the last refuge of literature.</p>
+
+<p>That "town-meeting" which John Adams
+thought Virginia might do well to adopt has
+likewise become a symbol of American idealism.
+Together with the training-day, it represented
+the rights and duties and privileges of
+free men; the machinery of self-government.
+It was democracy, rather than "representative"
+government, under its purest aspect. Sentiments
+of responsibility to the town, the political unit,
+and to the Commonwealth, the group of units,
+were bred there. Likewise, it was a training-school
+for sententious speech and weighty
+action; its roots, as historians love to demonstrate,
+run back very far; and though the modern
+drift to cities has made its machinery ineffective
+in the larger communities, it remains a perpetual
+spring or feeding stream to the broader currents<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_101" id="Page_101">[Pg 101]</a></span>
+of our national life. Without an understanding
+of the town-meeting and its equivalents,
+our political literature loses much of its
+significance. Like the school-house and meeting-house,
+it has become glorified by our men
+of letters. John Fiske and other historians
+have celebrated it in some of the most brilliant
+pages of our political writing; and that
+citizen literature, so deeply characteristic of us,
+found in the plain, forthright, and public-spirited
+tone of town-meeting discussions its keynote.
+The spectacular debates of our national
+history, the dramatic contests in the great arena
+of the Senate Chamber, the discussions before
+huge popular audiences in the West, have maintained
+the civic point of view, have developed
+and dignified and enriched the prose style first
+employed by American freemen in deciding
+their local affairs in the presence of their neighbors.
+"I am a part of this people," said Lincoln
+proudly in one of his famous debates of
+1858; "I was raised just a little east of here";
+and this nearness to the audience, this directness
+and simplicity and genuineness of our best political
+literature, its homely persuasiveness and
+force, is an inheritance of the town-meeting.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_102" id="Page_102">[Pg 102]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Bible and meeting-house, school-house and
+town-meeting, thus illustrate concretely the
+responsiveness of the American character to
+idealistic impulses. They are external symbols
+of a certain state of mind. It may indeed be
+urged that they are primarily signs of a moral
+and social or institutional trend, and are therefore
+non-literary evidence of American idealism.
+Nevertheless, institutional as they may be
+deemed, they lie close to that poetry of daily
+duty in which our literature has not been poor.
+They are fundamentally related to that attitude
+of mind, that habitual temper of the spirit,
+which has produced, in all countries of settled
+use and wont, the literature of idealism. Brunetière
+said of Flaubert's most famous woman
+character that poor Emma Bovary, the prey
+and the victim of Romantic desires, was after
+all much like the rest of us except that she
+lacked the intelligence to perceive the charm
+and poetry of the daily task. We have already
+touched upon the purely romantic side of
+American energy and of American imagination,
+and we must shortly look more closely
+still at those impulses of daring, those moods
+of heightened feeling, that intensified individualism,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_103" id="Page_103">[Pg 103]</a></span>
+the quest of strangeness and terror and
+wild beauty, which characterize our romantic
+writing. But this romanticism is, as it were, a
+segment of the larger circle of idealism. It is
+idealism accentuated by certain factors, driven
+to self-expression by the passions of scorn or
+of desire; it exceeds, in one way or another,
+the normal range of experience and emotion.
+Our romantic American literature is doubtless
+our greatest. And yet some of the most characteristic
+tendencies of American writing are to
+be found in the poetry of daily experience, in
+the quiet accustomed light that falls upon one's
+own doorway and garden, in the immemorial
+charm of going forth to one's labor and returning
+in the evening,&mdash;poetry old as the world.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>Let us see how this glow of idealism touches
+some of the more intimate aspects of human experience.
+"Out of the three Reverences," says
+Wilhelm Meister, "springs the highest Reverence,
+Reverence for Oneself." Open the
+pages of Hawthorne. Moving wholly within
+the framework of established institutions, with
+no desire to shatter the existing scheme of
+social order, choosing as its heroes men of the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_104" id="Page_104">[Pg 104]</a></span>
+meeting-house, town-meeting, and training-day,
+how intensely nevertheless does the imagination
+of this fiction-writer illuminate the Body
+and the Soul!</p>
+
+<p>Take first the Body. The inheritance of
+English Puritanism may be traced throughout
+our American writing, in its reverence for physical
+purity. The result is something unique in
+literary history. Continental critics, while recognizing
+the intellectual and artistic powers
+revealed in <i>The Scarlet Letter</i>, have seldom
+realized the awfulness, to the Puritan mind,
+of the very thought of an adulterous minister.
+That a priest in southern Europe should break
+his vows is indeed scandalous; but the sin is regarded
+as a failure of the natural man to keep
+a vow requiring supernatural grace for its fulfilment;
+it may be that the priest had no vocation
+for his sacred office; he is unfrocked, punished,
+forgotten, yet a certain mantle of human
+charity still covers his offence. But in the Puritan
+scheme (and <i>The Scarlet Letter</i>, save for
+that one treacherous, warm human moment in
+the woodland where "all was spoken," lies
+wholly within the set framework of Puritanism)
+there is no forgiveness for a sin of the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_105" id="Page_105">[Pg 105]</a></span>
+flesh. There is only Law, Law stretching on
+into infinitude until the mind shudders at it.
+Hawthorne knew his Protestant New England
+through and through. <i>The Scarlet Letter</i> is the
+most striking example in our national literature
+of that idealization of physical purity, but hundreds
+of other romances and poems, less morbid
+if less great, assert in unmistakable terms
+the same moral conviction, the same ideal.</p>
+
+<p>Yet, in spite of its theme, there was never a
+less adulterous novel than this book which plays
+so artistically with the letter A. The body is
+branded, is consumed, is at last, perhaps, transfigured
+by the intense rays of light emitted from
+the suffering soul.</p>
+
+<blockquote><p>"The soul is form and doth the body make."</p></blockquote>
+
+<p>In this intense preoccupation with the Soul,
+Hawthorne's romance is in unison with the
+more mystical and spiritual utterances of Catholicism
+as well as of Protestantism. It was in
+part a resultant of that early American isolation
+which contributed so effectively to the artistic
+setting of <i>The Scarlet Letter</i>. But in his
+doctrine of spiritual integrity, in the agonized
+utterance, "Be true&mdash;be true!" as well as in<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_106" id="Page_106">[Pg 106]</a></span>
+his reverence for purity of the body, our greatest
+romancer was typical of the imaginative literature
+of his countrymen. The restless artistic
+experiments of Poe presented the human body
+in many a ghastly and terrifying aspect of illness
+and decay, and distorted by all passions
+save one. His imagination was singularly sexless.
+Pathological students have pointed out
+the relation between this characteristic of Poe's
+writing, and his known tendencies toward opium-eating,
+alcoholism, and tuberculosis. But
+no such explanation is at hand to elucidate the
+absence of sexual passion from the novels of
+the masculine-minded Fenimore Cooper. One
+may say, indeed, that Cooper's novels, like
+Scott's, lack intensity of spiritual vision; that
+their tone is consonant with the views of a sound
+Church of England parson in the eighteenth
+century; and that the absence of physical passion,
+like the absence of purely spiritual insight,
+betrays a certain defect in Cooper's imaginative
+grasp and depth. But it is better criticism, after
+all, to remember that these three pioneers in
+American fiction-writing were composing for
+an audience in which Puritan traditions or tastes
+were predominant. Not one of the three men<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_107" id="Page_107">[Pg 107]</a></span>
+but would have instantly sacrificed an artistic
+effect, legitimate in the eyes of Fielding or
+Goethe or Balzac, rather than&mdash;in the phrase
+so often satirized&mdash;"bring a blush to the cheek
+of innocence." In other words, the presence
+of a specific audience, accustomed to certain
+Anglo-Saxon and Puritanic restraint of topic
+and of speech, has from the beginning of our
+imaginative literature coöperated with the instinct
+of our writers. That Victorian reticence
+which is so plainly seen even in such full-bodied
+writers as Dickens or Thackeray&mdash;a reticence
+which men like Mr. Bernard Shaw and Mr.
+Galsworthy and Mr. Wells think so hypocritical
+and dangerous to society and which they
+have certainly done their utmost to abolish&mdash;has
+hitherto dominated our American writing.
+The contemporary influence of great Continental
+writers to whom reticence is unknown,
+combined with the influence of a contemporary
+opera and drama to which reticence would be
+unprofitable, are now assaulting this dominant
+convention. Very possibly it is doomed. But
+it is only within recent years that its rule has
+been questioned.</p>
+
+<p>One result of it may, I think, be fairly admitted.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_108" id="Page_108">[Pg 108]</a></span>
+While very few writers of eminence,
+after all, in any country, wish to bring a "blush
+to the cheek of innocence," they naturally wish,
+as Thackeray put it in one of the best-known
+of his utterances, to be permitted to depict a
+man to the utmost of their power. American
+literary conventions, like English conventions,
+have now and again laid a restraining and compelling
+hand upon the legitimate exercise of this
+artistic instinct; and this fact has coöperated
+with many social, ethical, and perhaps physiological
+causes to produce a thinness or bloodlessness
+in our books. They are graceful, pleasing,
+but pale, like one of those cool whitish
+uncertain skies of an American spring. They
+lack "body," like certain wines. It is not often
+that we can produce a real Burgundy. We have
+had many distinguished fiction-writers, but none
+with the physical gusto of a Fielding, a Smollett,
+or even a Dickens, who, idealist and romanticist
+as he was, and Victorian as were his
+artistic preferences, has this animal life which
+tingles upon every page. We must confess that
+there is a certain quality of American idealism
+which is covertly suspicious or openly hostile to
+the glories of bodily sensation. Emerson's thin<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_109" id="Page_109">[Pg 109]</a></span>
+high shoulders peep up reproachfully above the
+desk; Lanier is playing his reproachful flute;
+Longfellow reads Frémont's Rocky Mountain
+experiences while lying abed, and sighs "But, ah,
+the discomforts!"; Irving's <i>Astoria</i>, superb as
+were the possibilities of its physical background,
+tastes like parlor exploration. Even Dana's
+<i>Before the Mast</i> and Parkman's <i>Oregon Trail</i>,
+transcripts of robust actual experience, and admirable
+books, reveal a sort of physical paleness
+compared with Turgenieff's <i>Notes of a Sportsman</i>
+and Tolstoï's <i>Sketches</i> of Sebastopol and
+the Crimea. They are Harvard undergraduate
+writing, after all!</p>
+
+<p>These facts illustrate anew that standing
+temptation of the critic of American literature to
+palliate literary shortcomings by the plea that we
+possess certain admirable non-literary qualities.
+The dominant idealism of the nation has levied,
+or seemed to levy, a certain tax upon our writing.
+Some instincts, natural to the full-blooded
+utterance of Continental literature, have been
+starved or eliminated here. Very well. The characteristic
+American retort to this assertion would
+be: Better our long record and habit of idealism
+than a few masterpieces more or less. As a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_110" id="Page_110">[Pg 110]</a></span>
+people, we have cheerfully accepted the Puritan
+restraint of speech, we have respected the shamefaced
+conventions of decent and social utterance.
+Like the men and women described in Locker-Lampson's
+verses, Americans</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i2">"eat, and drink, and scheme, and plod,&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">They go to church on Sunday;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And many are afraid of God&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And more of Mrs. Grundy."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Now Mrs. Grundy is assuredly not the most desirable
+of literary divinities, but the student of
+classical literature can easily think of other divinities,
+celebrated in exquisite Greek and Roman
+verse, who are distinctly less desirable still.</p>
+
+<p>"Not passion, but sentiment," said Hawthorne,
+in a familiar passage of criticism of
+his own <i>Twice-Told Tales</i>. How often must the
+student of American literature echo that half-melancholy
+but just verdict, as he surveys the
+transition from the spiritual intensity of a few of
+our earlier writers to the sentimental qualities
+which have brought popular recognition to the
+many. Take the word "soul" itself. Calvinism
+shadowed and darkened the meaning, perhaps,
+and yet its spiritual passion made the word
+"soul" sublime. The reaction against Calvinism<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_111" id="Page_111">[Pg 111]</a></span>
+has made religion more human, natural,
+and possibly more Christlike, but "soul" has
+lost the thrilling solemnity with which Edwards
+pronounced the word. Emerson and Hawthorne,
+far as they had escaped from the bonds
+of their ancestral religion, still utter the word
+"soul" with awe. But in the popular sermon
+and hymn and story of our day,&mdash;with
+their search after the sympathetic and the sentimental,
+after what is called in magazine slang
+"heart-interest,"&mdash;the word has lost both its
+intellectual distinction and its literary magic.
+It will regain neither until it is pronounced
+once more with spiritual passion.</p>
+
+<p>But in literature, as in other things, we must
+take what we can get. The great mass of our
+American writing is sentimental, because it has
+been produced by, and for, an excessively sentimental
+people. The poems in Stedman's carefully
+chosen <i>Anthology</i>, the prose and verse
+in the two volume Stedman-Hutchinson collection
+of American Literature, the Library of
+Southern Literature, and similar sectional anthologies,
+the school Readers and Speakers,&mdash;particularly
+in the half-century between
+1830 and 1880,&mdash;our newspapers and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_112" id="Page_112">[Pg 112]</a></span> magazines,&mdash;particularly
+the so-called "yellow"
+newspapers and the illustrated magazines typified
+by <i>Harper's Monthly</i>,&mdash;are all fairly dripping
+with sentiment. American oratory is notoriously
+the most sentimental oratory of the
+civilized world. The <i>Congressional Record</i> still
+presents such specimens of sentiment&mdash;delivered
+or given leave to be printed, it is true,
+for "home consumption" rather than to affect
+the course of legislation&mdash;as are inexplicable to
+an Englishman or a Frenchman or an Italian.</p>
+
+<p>Immigrants as we all are, and migratory as
+we have ever been,&mdash;so much so that one
+rarely meets an American who was born in
+the house built by his grandfather,&mdash;we cling
+with peculiar fondness to the sentiment of
+"Home." The best-known American poem,
+for decades, was Samuel Woodworth's "Old
+Oaken Bucket," the favorite popular song was
+Stephen Foster's "My Old Kentucky Home,"
+the favorite play was Denman Thompson's
+"Old Homestead." Without that appealing
+word "mother" the American melodrama would
+be robbed of its fifth act. Without pictures of
+"the child" the illustrated magazines would go
+into bankruptcy. No country has witnessed<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_113" id="Page_113">[Pg 113]</a></span>
+such a production of periodicals and books for
+boys and girls: France and Germany imitate
+in vain <i>The Youth's Companion</i> and <i>St. Nicholas</i>,
+as they did the stories of "Oliver Optic" and
+<i>Little Women</i> and <i>Little Lord Fauntleroy</i>.</p>
+
+<p>The sentimental attitude towards women and
+children, which is one of the most typical aspects
+of American idealism, is constantly illustrated
+in our short stories. Bret Harte, disciple
+of Dickens as he was, and Romantic as was
+his fashion of dressing up his miners and gamblers,
+was accurately faithful to the American
+feeling towards the "kid" and the "woman."
+"Tennessee's Partner," "The Luck of Roaring
+Camp," "Christmas at Sandy Bar," are obvious
+examples. Owen Wister's stories are
+equally faithful and admirable in this matter.
+The American girl still does astonishing things
+in international novels, as she has continued
+to do since the eighteen-sixties, but they are
+astonishing mainly to the European eye and
+against the conventionalized European background.
+She does the same things at home,
+and neither she nor her mother sees why she
+should not, so universal among us is the chivalrous
+interpretation of actions and situations<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_114" id="Page_114">[Pg 114]</a></span>
+which amaze the European observer. The popular
+American literature which recognizes and
+encourages this position of the "young girl"
+in our social structure is a literature primarily
+of sentiment. The note of passion&mdash;in the European
+sense of that word&mdash;jars and shatters
+it. The imported "problem-play," written for
+an adult public in Paris or London, introduces
+social facts and intellectual elements almost
+wholly alien to the experience of American
+matinée audiences. Disillusioned historians of
+our literature have instanced this unsophistication
+as a proof of our national inexperience;
+yet it is often a sort of radiant and triumphant
+unsophistication which does not lose its innocence
+in parting with its ignorance.</p>
+
+<p>That sentimental idealization of classes,
+whether peasant, bourgeois, or aristocratic,
+which has long been a feature of Continental
+and English poetry and fiction, is practically
+absent from American literature. Whatever the
+future may bring, there have hitherto been no
+fixed classes in American society. Webster was
+guilty of no exaggeration when he declared that
+the whole North was made up of laborers,
+and Lincoln spoke in the same terms in his<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_115" id="Page_115">[Pg 115]</a></span>
+well-known sentences about "hired laborers":
+"twenty-five years ago I was a hired laborer."
+The relative uniformity of economic and social
+conditions, which prevailed until toward the
+close of the nineteenth century, made, no
+doubt, for the happiness of the greatest number,
+but it failed, naturally, to afford that picturesqueness
+of class contrast and to stimulate
+that sentiment of class distinction, in which
+European literature is so rich.</p>
+
+<p>Very interesting, in the light of contemporary
+economic conditions, is the effort made by
+American poets in the middle of the last century
+to glorify labor. They were not so much
+idealizing a particular laboring class, as endeavoring,
+in Whitman's words, "To teach the
+average man the glory of his walk and trade."
+Whitman himself sketched the American workman
+in almost every attitude which appealed
+to his own sense of the picturesque and heroic.
+But years before <i>Leaves of Grass</i> was published,
+Whittier had celebrated in his <i>Songs of Labor</i>
+the glorified images of lumberman and drover,
+shoemaker and fisherman. Lucy Larcom and
+the authors of <i>The Lowell Offering</i> portrayed
+the fine idealism of the young women&mdash;of the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_116" id="Page_116">[Pg 116]</a></span>
+best American stock&mdash;who went enthusiastically
+to work in the cotton-mills of Lowell and
+Lawrence, or who bound shoes by their own
+firesides on the Essex County farms. That glow
+of enthusiasm for labor was chiefly moral, but
+it was poetical as well. The changes which have
+come over the economic and social life of America
+are nowhere more sharply indicated than in
+that very valley of the Merrimac where, sixty
+and seventy years ago, one could "hear America
+singing." There are few who are singing to-day
+in the cotton-mills; the operators, instead
+of girls from the hill-farms, are Greeks, Lithuanians,
+Armenians, Italians. Whittier's drovers
+have gone forever; the lumbermen and deep-sea
+fishermen have grown fewer, and the men
+who still swing the axes and haul the frozen
+cod-lines are mostly aliens. The pride that once
+broke into singing has turned harsh and silent.
+"Labor" looms vast upon the future political
+and social horizon, but the songs of labor have
+lost the lyric note. They have turned into the
+dramas and tragedies of labor, as portrayed
+with the swift and fierce insistence of the short
+story, illustrated by the Kodak. In the great
+agricultural sections of the West and South the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_117" id="Page_117">[Pg 117]</a></span>
+old bucolic sentiment still survives,&mdash;that simple
+joy of seeing the "frost upon the pumpkin"
+and "the fodder in the stock" which Mr. James
+Whitcomb Riley has sung with such charming
+fidelity to the type. But even on the Western
+farms toil has grown less manual. It is more a
+matter of expert handling of machinery. Reaping
+and binding may still have their poet, but
+he needs to be a Kipling rather than a Burns.</p>
+
+<p>Our literature, then, reveals few traces of
+idealization of a class, and but little idealization
+of trades or callings. Neither class nor calling
+presents anything permanent to the American
+imagination, or stands for anything ultimate in
+American experience. On the other hand, our
+writing is rich in local sentiment and sectional
+loyalty. The short story, which has seized so
+greedily the more dramatic aspects of American
+energy, has been equally true to the quiet
+background of rural scenery and familiar ways.
+American idealism, as shown in the transformation
+of the lesser loyalties of home and countryside
+into the larger loyalties of state and
+section, and the absorption of these, in turn,
+into the emotions of nationalism, is particularly
+illustrated in our political verse. A striking<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_118" id="Page_118">[Pg 118]</a></span>
+example of the imaginative visualization of the
+political units of a state is the spirited roll-call
+of the counties in Whittier's "Massachusetts
+to Virginia." But the burden of that fine poem,
+after all, is the essential unity of Massachusetts
+as a sovereign state, girding herself to repel the
+attack of another sovereign state, Virginia. Now
+the evolution of our political history, both local
+and national, has tended steadily, for half a
+century, to the obliteration, for purposes of the
+imagination, of county lines within state lines.
+At the last Republican state convention held
+in Massachusetts, there were no county banners
+displayed, for the first time in half a century.
+Many a city-dweller to-day cannot tell in what
+county he is living unless he has happened to
+make a transfer of real estate. State lines themselves
+are fading away. The federal idea has
+triumphed. Doubtless the majority of the fellow
+citizens of John Randolph of Roanoke were
+all the more proud of him because the poet
+could say of him, in writing an admiring and
+mournful epitaph:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Beyond Virginia's border line<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">His patriotism perished."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>The great collections of Civil War verse, which<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_119" id="Page_119">[Pg 119]</a></span>
+are lying almost unread in the libraries, are store-houses
+of this ancient state pride and jealousy,
+which was absorbed so fatally into the larger
+sectional antagonism. "Maryland, my Maryland"
+gave place to "Dixie," just as Whittier's
+"Massachusetts to Virginia" was forgotten
+when marching men began to sing "John
+Brown's Body" and "The Battle Hymn of the
+Republic." The literature of sectionalism still
+lingers in its more lovable aspect in the verse
+and fiction which still celebrates the fairer side
+of the civilization of the Old South: its ideals
+of chivalry and local loyalty, its gracious women
+and gallant men. Our literature needs to cultivate
+this provincial affection for the past, as an
+offset to the barren uniformity which the federal
+scheme allows. But the ultimate imaginative
+victory, like the actual political victory of
+the Civil War, is with the thought and feeling
+of Nationalism. It is foreshadowed in that passionate
+lyric cry of Lowell, which sums up so
+much and, like all true passion, anticipates so
+much:&mdash;</p>
+
+<blockquote><p>"O Beautiful! my Country!"</p></blockquote>
+
+<p>The literary record of American idealism
+thus illustrates how deeply the conception of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_120" id="Page_120">[Pg 120]</a></span>
+Nationalism has affected the imagination of
+our countrymen. The literary record of the
+American conception of liberty runs further
+back. Some historians have allowed themselves
+to think that the American notion of
+liberty is essentially declamatory, a sort of futile
+echo of Patrick Henry's "Give me Liberty
+or give me Death"; and not only declamatory,
+but hopelessly theoretical and abstract. They
+grant that it was a trumpet-note, no doubt, for
+agitators against the Stamp Act, and for pamphleteers
+like Thomas Paine; that it may have
+been a torch for lighting dark and weary ways
+in the Revolutionary War; but they believe it
+likewise to be a torch which gleams with the
+fire caught from France and which was passed
+back to France in turn when her own great
+bonfire was ready for lighting. The facts, however,
+are inconsistent with this picturesque
+theory of contemporary reactionists. It is true
+that the word "liberty" has been full of temptation
+for generations of American orators, that
+it has become an idol of the forum, and often
+a source of heat rather than of light. But to
+treat American Liberty as if she habitually wore
+the red cap is to nourish a Francophobia as<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_121" id="Page_121">[Pg 121]</a></span>
+absurd as Edmund Burke's. The sober truth
+is that the American working theory of Liberty
+is singularly like St. Paul's. "Ye have been
+called unto liberty; only use not liberty for an
+occasion to the flesh." A few sentences from
+John Winthrop, written in 1645, are significant:
+"There is a twofold liberty, natural ... and
+civil or federal. The first is common to
+man with beasts and other creatures. By this,
+man, as he stands in relation to man simply,
+hath liberty to do what he lists; it is a liberty
+to evil as well as to good. This liberty is incompatible
+and inconsistent with authority....
+The other kind of liberty I call civil or federal,
+it may also be termed moral.... This liberty
+is the proper end and object of authority, and
+cannot subsist without it; and it is a liberty to
+that only which is good, just, and honest. This
+liberty you are to stand for, with the hazard
+(not only of your goods, but) of your lives, if
+need be.... This liberty is maintained and
+exercised in a way of subjection to authority;
+it is of the same kind of liberty wherewith
+Christ hath made us free."</p>
+
+<p>There speaks the governor, the man of affairs,
+the typical citizen of the future republic. The<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_122" id="Page_122">[Pg 122]</a></span>
+liberty to do as one pleases is a dream of the
+Renaissance; but out of dreamland it does not
+work. Nobody, even in revolutionary France,
+imagines that it will work. Jefferson, who is popularly
+supposed to derive his notion of liberty
+from French theorists, is to all practical purposes
+nearer to John Winthrop than he is to
+Rousseau. The splendid phrases of his "Declaration"
+are sometimes characterized as abstractions.
+They are really generalizations from past
+political experience. An arbitrary king, assuming
+a liberty to do as he liked, had encroached
+upon the long-standing customs and authority
+of the colonists. Jefferson, at the bidding of the
+Continental Congress, served notice of the royal
+trespass, and incidentally produced (as Lincoln
+said) a "standard maxim for free society."</p>
+
+<p>It is true, no doubt, that the word "liberty"
+became in Jefferson's day, and later, a mere partisan
+or national shibboleth, standing for no
+reality, degraded to a catchword, a symbol of
+antagonism to Great Britain. In the political
+debates and the impressive prose and verse of
+the anti-slavery struggle, the word became once
+more charged with vital meaning; it glowed
+under the heat and pressure of an idea. Towards<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_123" id="Page_123">[Pg 123]</a></span>
+the end of the nineteenth century it went temporarily
+out of fashion. The late Colonel Higginson,
+an ideal type of what Europeans call an
+"1848" man, attended at the close of the century
+some sessions of the American Historical
+Association. In his own address, at the closing
+dinner, he remarked that there was one word for
+which he had listened in vain during the reading
+of the papers by the younger men. It was
+the word "liberty." One of the younger school
+retorted promptly that since we had the thing
+liberty, we had no need to glorify the word.
+But Colonel Higginson, stanch adherent as he
+was of the "good old cause," was not convinced.
+Like many another lover of American letters,
+he thought that William Vaughn Moody's
+"Ode in Time of Hesitation" deserved a place
+by the side of Lowell's "Commemoration
+Ode," and that when the ultimate day of reckoning
+comes for the whole muddled Imperialistic
+business, the standard of reckoning must
+be "liberty" as Winthrop and Jefferson and
+Lincoln and Lowell and Vaughn Moody understood
+the word.</p>
+
+<p>In the mean time we must confess that the
+history of our literature, with a few noble exceptions,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_124" id="Page_124">[Pg 124]</a></span>
+shows a surprising defect in the passion for
+freedom. Tennyson's famous lines about "Freedom
+broadening slowly down from precedent
+to precedent" are perfectly American in their
+conservative tone; while it is Englishmen like
+Byron and Landor and Shelley and Swinburne
+who have written the most magnificent republican
+poetry. The "land of the free" turns to
+the monarchic mother country, after all, for the
+glow and thunder and splendor of the poetry
+of freedom. It is one of the most curious phenomena
+in the history of literature. Shall we
+enter the preoccupation plea once more? Enjoying
+the thing liberty, have we been therefore
+less concerned with the idea? Or is it simply
+another illustration of the defective passion of
+American literature?</p>
+
+<p>Yet there is one phase of political loyalty
+which has been cherished by the imagination of
+Americans, and which has inspired noteworthy
+oratory and noble political prose. It is the sentiment
+of Union. In one sense, of course, this
+dates back to the period of Franklin's <i>bon mot</i>
+about our all hanging together, or hanging separately.
+It is found in Hamilton's pamphlets,
+in Paine's <i>Crisis</i>, in the <i>Federalist</i>, in Washington's<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_125" id="Page_125">[Pg 125]</a></span>
+"Farewell Address." It is peculiarly associated
+with the name and fame of Daniel Webster,
+and, to a less degree, with the career of
+Henry Clay. In the stress of the debate over
+slavery, many a Northerner with abolitionist
+convictions, like the majority of Southerners
+with slave-holding convictions, forgot the splendid
+peroration of Webster's "Reply to Hayne"
+and were willing to "let the Union go." But
+in the four tragic and heroic years that followed
+the firing upon the American flag at Fort Sumter
+the sentiment of Union was made sacred by
+such sacrifices as the patriotic imagination of
+a Clay or a Webster had never dreamed. A new
+literature resulted. A lofty ideal of indissoluble
+Union was preached in pulpits, pleaded
+for in editorials, sung in lyrics, and woven
+into the web of fiction. Edward Everett Hale's
+<i>Man Without a Country</i> became one of the
+most poignantly moving of American stories.
+In Walt Whitman's <i>Drum-Taps</i> and his later
+poems, the "Union of these States" became
+transfigured with mystical significance: no longer
+a mere political compact, dissoluble at will,
+but a spiritual entity, a new incarnation of the
+soul of man.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_126" id="Page_126">[Pg 126]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>We must deal later with that American instinct
+of fellowship which Whitman believed to
+have been finally cemented by the Civil War,
+and which has such import for the future of our
+democracy. There are likewise communal loyalties,
+glowing with the new idealism which has
+come with the twentieth century: ethical, municipal,
+industrial, and artistic movements which
+are full of promise for the higher life of the country,
+but which have not yet had time to express
+themselves adequately in literature. There are
+stirrings of racial loyalty among this and that
+element of our composite population,&mdash;as for
+instance among the gifted younger generation
+of American Jews,&mdash;a racial loyalty not antagonistic
+to the American current of ideas, but
+rather in full unison with it. Internationalism
+itself furnishes motives for the activity of the
+noblest imaginations, and the true literature of
+internationalism has hardly yet begun. It is in
+the play and counterplay of these new forces
+that the American literature of the twentieth
+century must measure itself. Communal feelings
+novel to Americans bred under the accepted
+individualism will doubtless assert themselves
+in our prose and verse. But it is to be<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_127" id="Page_127">[Pg 127]</a></span>
+remembered that the best writing thus far produced
+on American soil has been a result of the
+old conditions: of the old "Reverences"; of the
+pioneer training of mind and body; of the slow
+tempering of the American spirit into an obstinate
+idealism. We do not know what course the
+ship may take in the future, but</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"We know what Master laid thy keel,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">What Workman wrought thy ribs of steel,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Who made each mast and sail and rope,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">What anvil rang, what hammers beat,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">In what a forge and what a heat<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Were shaped the anchors of thy hope!"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_128" id="Page_128">[Pg 128]</a></span></p><hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="IV" id="IV"></a>IV<br /><br />
+
+Romance and Reaction</h2>
+
+
+<p>The characteristic attitude of the American
+mind, as we have seen, is one of idealism. We
+may now venture to draw a smaller circle within
+that larger circle of idealistic impulses, and
+to label the smaller circle "romance." Here,
+too, as with the word "idealism," although we
+are to make abundant use of literary illustrations
+of national tendencies, we have no need of a severely
+technical definition of terms. When we
+say, "Tom is an idealist" and "Lorenzo is a
+romantic fellow," we convey at least one tolerably
+clear distinction between Tom and Lorenzo.
+The idealist has a certain characteristic
+habit of mind or inclination of spirit. When
+confronted by experience, he reacts in a certain
+way. In his individual and social impulses, in
+the travail of his soul, or in his commerce with
+his neighbors and the world, he behaves in a
+more or less well-defined fashion. The romanticist,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_129" id="Page_129">[Pg 129]</a></span>
+when confronted by the same objects and
+experiences, exhibits another type of behavior.
+Lorenzo, though he be Tom's brother, is a
+different fellow; he is&mdash;in the opinion of his
+friends, at least&mdash;a rather more peculiar person,
+a creature of more varying moods, of heightened
+feelings, of stranger ways. Like Tom, he
+is a person of sentiment, but his sentiment attaches
+itself, not so much to everyday aspects
+of experience, as to that which is unusual or terrifying,
+lovely or far away; he possesses, or would
+like to possess, bodily or spiritual daring. He
+has the adventurous heart. He is of those who
+love to go down to the sea in ships and do business
+in great waters. Lorenzo the romanticist
+is made of no finer clay than Tom the idealist,
+but his nerves are differently tuned. Your deep-sea
+fisherman, after all, is only a fisherman at bottom.
+That is to say, he too is an idealist, but
+he wants to catch different species of fish from
+those which drop into the basket of the landsman.
+Precisely what he covets, perhaps he does
+not know. I was once foolish enough to ask an
+old Alsatian soldier who was patiently holding
+his rod over a most unpromising canal near
+Strassburg, what kind of fish he was fishing for.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_130" id="Page_130">[Pg 130]</a></span>
+"All kinds," was his rebuking answer, and I
+took off my hat to the veteran romanticist.</p>
+
+<p>The words "romance" and "romanticism"
+have been repeated to the ears of our generation
+with wearisome iteration. Not the least of
+the good luck of Wordsworth and Coleridge lay
+in the fact that they scarcely knew that they
+were "romanticists." Middle-aged readers of
+the present day may congratulate themselves
+that in their youth they read Wordsworth and
+Coleridge simply because it was Wordsworth
+and Coleridge and not documents illustrating
+the history of the romantic movement. But the
+rising generation is sophisticated. For better or
+worse it has been taught to distinguish between
+the word "romance" on the one side, and the
+word "romanticism" on the other. "Romantic"
+is a useful but overworked adjective which
+attaches itself indiscriminately to both "romance"
+and "romanticism." Professor Vaughan,
+for example, and a hundred other writers, have
+pointed out that in the narrower and more usual
+sense, the words "romance" and "romanticism"
+point to a love of vivid coloring and strongly
+marked contrasts; to a craving for the unfamiliar,
+the marvellous, and the supernatural. In the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_131" id="Page_131">[Pg 131]</a></span>
+wider and less definite sense, they signify a revolt
+from the purely intellectual view of man's nature;
+a recognition of the instincts and the passions,
+a vague intimation of sympathy between
+man and the world around him,&mdash;in one word,
+the sense of mystery. The narrower and the
+broader meanings pass into one another by imperceptible
+shades. They are affected by the
+well-known historic conditions for romantic
+feeling in the different European countries. The
+common factor, of course, is the man with the
+romantic world set in his heart. It is Gautier
+with his love of color, Victor Hugo enraptured
+with the sound of words, Heine with his self-destroying
+romantic irony, Novalis with his
+blue flower, and Maeterlinck with his <i>Blue Bird</i>.</p>
+
+<p>But these romantic men of letters, writing
+in epochs of romanticism, are by no means
+the only children of romance. Sir Humphrey
+Gilbert and Sir Walter Raleigh were as truly
+followers of "the gleam" as were Spenser or
+Marlowe. The spirit of romance is found wherever
+and whenever men say to themselves, as
+Don Quixote's niece said of her uncle, that
+"they wish better bread than is made of wheat,"
+or when they look within their own hearts, and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_132" id="Page_132">[Pg 132]</a></span>
+assert, as the poet Young said in 1759, long
+before the English romantic movement had
+begun, "there is more in the spirit of man than
+mere prose-reason can fathom."</p>
+
+<p>We are familiar, perhaps too remorsefully
+familiar, with the fact that romance is likely to
+run a certain course in the individual and then
+to disappear. Looking back upon it afterward,
+it resembles the upward and downward zigzag
+of a fever chart. It has in fact often been described
+as a measles, a disease of which no one
+can be particularly proud, although he may
+have no reason to blush for it. Southey said
+that he was no more ashamed of having been
+a republican than of having been a boy. Well,
+people catch Byronism, and get over it, much
+as Southey got over his republicanism. In fact
+Byron himself lived long enough&mdash;though
+he died at thirty-six&mdash;to outgrow his purely
+"Byronic" phase, and to smile at it as knowingly
+as we do. Coleridge's blossoming period
+as a romantic poet was tragically brief. Keats
+and Shelley had the good fortune to die in the
+fulness of their romantic glory. They did not
+outlive their own poetic sense of the wonder
+and mystery of the world. Yet many an old<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_133" id="Page_133">[Pg 133]</a></span>
+poet like Tennyson and Browning has preserved
+his romance to the end. Tennyson dies
+at eighty-three with the full moonlight streaming
+through the oriel window upon his bed,
+and with his fingers clasping Shakespeare's
+<i>Cymbeline</i>.</p>
+
+<p>With most of us commonplace persons, however,
+a reaction from the romantic is almost
+inevitable. The romantic temperament cannot
+long keep the pitch. Poe could indeed do it,
+although he hovered at times near the border
+of insanity. Hawthorne went for relief to his
+profane sea-captains and the carnal-minded superannuated
+employees of the Salem Custom
+House. "The weary weight of all this unintelligible
+world" presses too hard on most of
+those who stop to think about it. The simplest
+way of relief is to shrug one's shoulders
+and let the weight go. That is to say, we cease
+being poets, we are no longer the children of
+romance, although we may remain idealists.
+Perhaps it is external events that change, rather
+than we ourselves. The restoration of the Bourbons,
+the Revolutions of 1830 and 1848, make
+and unmake romantics. Often society catches
+up with the romanticist; he is no longer a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_134" id="Page_134">[Pg 134]</a></span>
+soldier of revolt; he has become a "respectable."
+Or, while remaining a poet, he shifts his attention
+to some more familiar segment of the idealistic
+circle. He sings about his wife instead of
+the wife of somebody else. Like Wordsworth,
+he takes for his theme a Mary Hutchinson instead
+of the unknown and hauntingly alluring
+figure of Lucy. To put it differently, the high
+light, the mysterious color of dawn or sunset
+disappears from his picture of human life. Or,
+the high light may be diffused in a more tranquil
+radiance over the whole surface of experience.
+Such an artist may remain a true painter
+or poet, but he is not a romantic poet or painter
+any longer. He has, like the aging Emerson,
+taken in sail; the god Terminus has said to him,
+"no more."</p>
+
+<p>One must of course admit that the typical
+romanticist has often been characterized by certain
+intellectual and moral weaknesses. But the
+great romance men, like Edmund Spenser, for
+example, may not possess these weaknesses at
+all. Robert Louis Stevenson was passionately
+in love with the romantic in life and with romanticism
+in literature; but it did not make him
+eccentric, weak, or empty. His instinct for enduring<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_135" id="Page_135">[Pg 135]</a></span>
+romance was so admirably fine that it
+brought strength to the sinews of his mind,
+light and air and fire to his soul. Among the
+writers of our own day, it is Mr. Kipling who
+has written some of the keenest satire upon
+romantic foibles, while never ceasing to salute
+his real mistress, the true romance.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Who wast, or yet the Lights were set,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">A whisper in the void,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Who shalt be sung through planets young<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">When this is clean destroyed."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>What are the causes of American romance,
+the circumstances and qualities that have produced
+the romantic element in American life
+and character? Precisely as with the individual
+artist or man of letters, we touch first of all
+upon certain temperamental inclinations. It is
+a question again of the national mind, of the
+differentiation of the race under new climatic
+and physical conditions. We have to reckon
+with the headiness and excitability of youth.
+It was young men who emigrated hither, just as
+in the eighteen-sixties it was young men who
+filled the Northern and the Southern armies.
+The first generations of American immigration
+were made up chiefly of vigorous, imaginative,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_136" id="Page_136">[Pg 136]</a></span>
+and daring youth. The incapables came later.
+It is, I think, safe to assert that the colonists
+of English stock, even as late as 1790,&mdash;when
+more than ninety per cent of the population
+of America had in their veins the blood of the
+British Isles,&mdash;were more responsive to romantic
+impulses than their English cousins.
+For that matter, an Irishman or a Welshman is
+more romantic than an Englishman to-day.</p>
+
+<p>From the very beginning of the American
+settlements, likewise, there were evidences of the
+weaker, the over-excitable side of the romantic
+temper. There were volatile men like Morton
+of Merrymount; there were queer women like
+Anne Hutchinson, admirable woman as she
+was; among the wives of the colonists there
+were plenty of Emily Dickinsons in the germ.
+Among the men, there were schemes that came
+to nothing. There were prototypes of Colonel
+Sellers; a temperamental tendency toward that
+recklessness and extravagance which later historical
+conditions stimulated and confirmed.
+The more completely one studies the history
+of our forefathers on American soil, the more
+deeply does one become conscious of the prevailing
+atmosphere of emotionalism.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_137" id="Page_137">[Pg 137]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Furthermore, as one examines the historic
+conditions under which the spirit of American
+romance has been preserved and heightened
+from time to time, one becomes aware that although
+ours is rather a romance of wonder than
+of beauty, the spirit of beauty is also to be found.
+The first fervors of the romance of discovery
+were childlike in their eagerness. Hakluyt's
+<i>Voyages</i>, John Smith's <i>True Relation of Virginia</i>,
+Thomas Morton's <i>New England's Canaan</i>, all
+appeal to the sense of the marvellous.</p>
+
+<p>Listen to Morton's description of Cape Ann.
+I can never read it without thinking of Botticelli's
+picture of Spring, so naïvely does this
+picturesque rascal suffuse his landscape with the
+feeling for beauty:&mdash;</p>
+
+<blockquote><p>"In the Moneth of June, Anno Salutis 1622,
+it was my chaunce to arrive in the parts of New
+England with 30. Servants, and provision of
+all sorts fit for a plantation: and whiles our
+howses were building, I did indeavour to take
+a survey of the Country: The more I looked,
+the more I liked it. And when I had more seriously
+considered of the bewty of the place, with
+all her faire indowments, I did not thinke that
+in all the knowne world it could be paralel'd,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_138" id="Page_138">[Pg 138]</a></span>
+for so many goodly groves of trees, dainty fine
+round rising hillucks, delicate faire large plaines,
+sweete cristall fountaines, and cleare running
+streames that twine in fine meanders through
+the meads, making so sweete a murmering noise
+to heare as would even lull the sences with delight
+a sleepe, so pleasantly doe they glide upon
+the pebble stones, jetting most jocundly where
+they doe meete and hand in hand runne downe
+to Neptunes Court, to pay the yearely tribute
+which they owe to him as soveraigne Lord of all
+the springs. Contained within the volume of
+the Land, Fowles in abundance, Fish in multitude;
+and discovered, besides, Millions of
+Turtledoves on the greene boughes, which sate
+pecking of the full ripe pleasant grapes that were
+supported by the lusty trees, whose fruitful
+loade did cause the armes to bend: while here
+and there dispersed, you might see Lillies and
+the Daphnean-tree: which made the Land to
+mee seeme paradice: for in mine eie t'was Natures
+Masterpeece; Her cheifest Magazine of
+all where lives her store: if this Land be not
+rich, then is the whole world poore."</p></blockquote>
+
+<p>This is the Morton who, a few years later,
+settled at Merrymount. Let me condense the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_139" id="Page_139">[Pg 139]</a></span>
+story of his settlement, from the narrative of
+the stout-hearted Governor William Bradford's
+<i>History of Plymouth Plantation</i>:&mdash;</p>
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_140" id="Page_140">[Pg 140]</a></span></p>
+<blockquote><p>"And Morton became lord of misrule, and
+maintained (as it were) a schoole of Athisme.
+And after they had gott some good into their
+hands, and gott much by trading with the Indeans,
+they spent it as vainly, in quaffing &amp; drinking
+both wine &amp; strong waters in great exsess,
+and, as some reported 10£. worth in a morning.
+They allso set up a May-pole, drinking and
+dancing aboute it many days togeather, inviting
+the Indean women, for their consorts, dancing
+and frisking togither, (like so many fairies, or
+furies rather,) and worse practises. As if they
+had anew revived &amp; celebrated the feasts of the
+Roman Goddes Flora, or the beasly practieses
+of the madd Bacchinalians. Morton likewise
+(to shew his poetrie) composed sundry rimes
+&amp; verses, some tending to lasciviousnes, and
+others to the detraction &amp; scandall of some persons,
+which he affixed to this idle or idoll May-polle.
+They chainged allso the name of their
+place, and in stead of calling it Mounte Wollaston,
+they call it Merie-mounte, as if this
+joylity would have lasted ever."</p></blockquote>
+
+<p>But it did not last long. Bradford and other
+leaders of the plantations "agreed by mutual
+consent" to "suppress Morton and his consorts."
+"In a friendly and neighborly way"
+they admonished him. "Insolently he persisted."
+"Upon which they saw there was no
+way but to take him by force." "So they mutually
+resolved to proceed," and sent Captain
+Standish to summon him to yield. But, says
+Bradford, Morton and some of his crew came
+out, not to yield, but to shoot; all of them
+rather drunk; Morton himself, with a carbine
+almost half filled with powder and shot, had
+thought to have shot Captain Standish, "<i>but he
+stepped to him and put by his piece and took him</i>."</p>
+
+<p>It is not too fanciful to say that with those
+stern words of Governor Bradford the English
+Renaissance came to an end. The dream of a
+lawless liberty which has been dreamed and
+dreamed out so many times in the history of
+the world was over, for many a day. It was
+only a hundred years earlier that Rabelais had
+written over the doors of his ideal abbey, the
+motto "Do what thou wilt." It is true that
+Rabelais proposed to admit to his Abbey of
+Thélème only such men and women as were<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_141" id="Page_141">[Pg 141]</a></span>
+virtuously inclined. We do not know how
+many persons would have been able and willing
+to go into residence there. At any rate, two
+hundred years went by in New England after
+the fall of Morton before any notable spirit
+dared to cherish once more the old Renaissance
+ideal. At last, in Emerson's doctrine that all
+things are lawful because Nature is good and
+human nature is divine, we have a curious parallel
+to the doctrine of Rabelais. It was the
+old romance of human will under a new form
+and voiced in new accents. Yet in due time the
+hard facts of human nature reasserted themselves
+and put this romantic transcendentalism
+by, even as the implacable Myles Standish put
+by that heavily loaded fowling-piece of the
+drunken Morton.</p>
+
+<p>But men believed in miracles in the first century
+of colonization, and they will continue at
+intervals to believe in them until human nature
+is no more. The marvellous happenings recorded
+in Cotton Mather's <i>Magnalia</i> no longer
+excite us to any "suspension of disbelief."
+We doubt the story of Pocahontas. The fresh
+romantic enthusiasm of a settler like Crèvec&#339;ur
+seems curiously juvenile to-day, as does<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_142" id="Page_142">[Pg 142]</a></span>
+the romantic curiosity of Chateaubriand concerning
+the Mississippi and the Choctaws, or
+the zeal of Wordsworth and Coleridge over
+their dream of a "panti-Socratic" community
+in the unknown valley of the musically-sounding
+Susquehanna. Inexperience is a perpetual
+feeder of the springs of romance. John Wesley,
+it will be remembered, went out to the colony
+of Georgia full of enthusiasm for converting
+the Indians; but as he naïvely remarks in his
+<i>Journal</i>, he "neither found or heard of any Indians
+on the continent of America, who had the
+least desire of being instructed." The sense of
+fact, in other words, supervenes, and the glory
+disappears from the face of romance. The humor
+of Mark Twain's <i>Innocents Abroad</i> turns
+largely upon this sense of remorseless fact confronting
+romantic inexperience.</p>
+
+<p>American history, however, has been marked
+by certain great romantic passions that seem
+endowed with indestructible vitality. The romance
+of discovery, the fascination of the forest
+and sea, the sense of danger and mystery
+once aroused by the very word "redskin," have
+all moulded and will continue to mould the
+national imagination. How completely the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_143" id="Page_143">[Pg 143]</a></span>
+romance of discovery may be fused with the
+glow of humanitarian and religious enthusiasm
+has been shown once for all in the brilliant
+pages of Parkman's story of the Jesuit missions
+in Canada. Pictorial romance can scarcely go
+further than this. In the crisis of Chateaubriand's
+picturesque and passionate tale of the
+American wilderness, no one can escape the
+thrilling, haunting sound of the bell from the
+Jesuit chapel, as it tolls in the night and storm
+that were fatal to the happiness of Atala. One
+scarcely need say that the romance of missions
+has never faded from the American mind. I
+have known a sober New England deacon aged
+eighty-five, who disliked to die because he
+thought he should miss the monthly excitement
+of reading the <i>Missionary Herald</i>. The
+deacon's eyes, like the eyes of many an old sea-captain
+in Salem or Newburyport, were literally
+upon the ends of the earth. No one can
+reckon how many starved souls, deprived of
+normal outlet for human feeling, have found
+in this passionate curiosity and concern for the
+souls of black and yellow men and women in
+the antipodes, a constant source of beneficent
+excitement.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_144" id="Page_144">[Pg 144]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Nor is there any diminution of interest in the
+mere romance of adventure, in the stories of
+hunter and trapper, the journals of Lewis and
+Clarke, the narratives of Boone and Crockett.
+In writing his superb romances of the Northern
+Lakes, the prairie and the sea, Fenimore
+Cooper had merely to bring to an artistic focus
+sentiments that lay deep in the souls of the
+great mass of his American readers. Students
+of our social life have pointed out again and
+again how deeply our national temperament
+has been affected by the existence, during
+nearly three hundred years, of an alien aboriginal
+race forever lurking upon the borders of
+our civilization. "Playing Indian" has been
+immensely significant, not merely in stimulating
+the outdoor activity of generations of
+American boys, but in teaching them the perennial
+importance of certain pioneer qualities
+of observation, resourcefulness, courage, and
+endurance which date from the time when the
+Indians were a daily and nightly menace. Even
+when the Indian has been succeeded by the
+cowboy, the spirit of romance still lingers,&mdash;as
+any collection of cowboy ballads will abundantly
+prove. And when the cowboys pass,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_145" id="Page_145">[Pg 145]</a></span>
+and the real-estate dealers take possession of
+the field, one is tempted to say that romance
+flourishes more than ever.</p>
+
+<p>In short, things are what we make them at
+the moment, what we believe them to be. In
+my grandfather's youth the West was in the
+neighborhood of Port Byron, New York, and
+when he journeyed thither from Massachusetts
+in the eighteen-twenties, the glory of adventure
+enfolded him as completely as the boys
+of the preceding generation had been glorified
+in the War of the Revolution, or the boys of
+the next generation when they went gold-seeking
+in California in 1849. The West, in short,
+means simply the retreating horizon, the beckoning
+finger of opportunity. Like Boston, it
+has been not a place, but a "state of mind."</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"We must go, go, go away from here,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">On the other side the world we're overdue."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>That is the song which sings itself forever
+in the heart of youth. Champlain and Cartier
+heard it in the sixteenth century, Bradford no
+less than Morton in the seventeenth. Some
+Eldorado has always been calling to the more
+adventurous spirits upon American soil. The<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_146" id="Page_146">[Pg 146]</a></span>
+passion of the forty-niner neither began nor
+ended with the discovery of gold in California.
+It is within us. It transmutes the harsh or
+drab-colored everyday routine into tissue of
+fairyland. It makes our "winning of the
+West" a magnificent national epic. It changes
+to-day the black belt of Texas, or the wheat-fields
+of Dakota, into pots of gold that lie at
+the end of rainbows, only that the pot of gold
+is actually there. The human hunger of it all,
+the gorgeous dream-like quality of it all, the
+boundlessness of the vast American spaces, the
+sense of forest and prairie and sky, are all inexplicably
+blended with our notion of the ideal
+America. Henry James once tried to explain
+the difference between Turgenieff and a typical
+French novelist by saying that the back door
+of the Russian's imagination was always open
+upon the endless Russian steppe. No one can
+understand the spirit of American romance if
+he is not conscious of this ever-present hinterland
+in which our spirits have, from the beginning,
+taken refuge and found solace.</p>
+
+<p>We have already noticed, in the chapter on
+idealism, how swiftly the American imagination
+modifies the prosaic facts of everyday<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_147" id="Page_147">[Pg 147]</a></span>
+experience. The idealistic glamour which falls
+upon the day's work changes easily, in the
+more emotional temperaments, and at times,
+indeed, in all of us, into the fervor of true romance.
+Then, the prosaic buying and selling
+becomes the "game." A combination of buyers
+and sellers becomes the "system." The
+place where these buyers and sellers most do
+congregate and concentrate becomes "Wall
+Street"&mdash;a sort of anthropomorphic monster
+which seems to buy and sell the bodies and souls
+of men. Seen half a continent away, through the
+mists of ignorance and prejudice and partisan
+passion, "Wall Street" has loomed like some
+vast Gibraltar. To the broker's clerk who earns
+his weekly salary in that street, the Nebraska
+notion of "Wall Street" is too grotesque for
+discussion.</p>
+
+<p>How easily every phase of American business
+life may take on the hues of romance is
+illustrated by the history of our railroads. No
+wonder that Bret Harte wrote a poem about
+the meeting of the eastward and westward facing
+engines when the two sections of the Union
+Pacific Railroad at last drew near each other
+on the interminable plains and the two engines<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_148" id="Page_148">[Pg 148]</a></span>
+could talk. Of course what they said was
+poetry. There was a time when even the Erie
+Canal was poetic. The Panama Canal to-day, in
+the eyes of most Americans, is something other
+than a mere feat of engineering. We are doing
+more than making "the dirt fly." The canal
+represents victory over hostile forces, conquest
+of unwilling Nature, achievement of what had
+long been deemed impossible, the making not
+of a ditch, but of History.</p>
+
+<p>So with all that American zest for camping,
+fishing, sailing, racing, which lies deep in the
+Anglo-Saxon, and which succeeds to the more
+primitive era of actual struggle against savage
+beasts or treacherous men or mysterious forests.
+It is at once an outlet and a nursery for
+romantic emotion. The out-of-doors movement
+which began with Thoreau's hut on Walden
+Pond, and which has gone on broadening
+and deepening to this hour, implies far more
+than mere variation from routine. It furnishes,
+indeed, a healthful escape from the terrific pressure
+of modern social and commercial exigencies.
+Yet its more important function is to provide
+for grown-ups a chance to "play Indian"
+too.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_149" id="Page_149">[Pg 149]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>But outdoors and indoors, after all, lie in the
+heart and mind, rather than in the realm of
+actual experience. The romantic imagination
+insists upon taking its holiday, whether the
+man who possesses it gets his holiday or not.
+I have never known a more truly romantic
+figure than a certain tin-pedler in Connecticut
+who, in response to the question, "Do you do
+a good business?" made this perfectly Stevensonian
+reply: "Well, I make a living selling
+crockery and tinware, but my <i>business</i> is the
+propagation of truth."</p>
+
+<p>This wandering idealist may serve to remind
+us again of the difference between romance and
+romanticism. The true romance is of the spirit.
+Romanticism shifts and changes with external
+fortunes, with altering emotions, with the alternate
+play of light and shade over the vast landscape
+of human experience. The typical romanticist,
+as we have seen, is a man of moods.
+It is only a Poe who can keep the pitch through
+the whole concert of experience. But the deeper
+romance of the spirit is oblivious of these changes
+of external fortune, this rising or falling of
+the emotional temperature. The moral life of
+America furnishes striking illustrations of the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_150" id="Page_150">[Pg 150]</a></span>
+steadfastness with which certain moral causes
+have been kept, as it were, in the focus of intense
+feeling. Poetry, undefeated and unwavering
+poetry, has transfigured such practical
+propaganda as the abolition of slavery, the
+emancipation of woman, the fight against the
+liquor traffic, the emancipation of the individual
+from the clutches of economic and commercial
+despotism. Men like Colonel Thomas Wentworth
+Higginson, women like Julia Ward
+Howe, fought for these causes throughout their
+lives. Colonel Higginson's attitude towards
+women was not merely chivalric (for one may
+be chivalrous without any marked predisposition
+to romance), but nobly romantic also.
+James Russell Lowell, poet as he was, outlived
+that particular phase of romantic moral reform
+which he had been taught by Maria White. But
+in other men and women bred in that old New
+England of the eighteen-forties, the moral fervor
+knew no restraint. Garrison, although in
+many respects a most unromantic personality,
+was engaged in a task which gave him all the
+inspiration of romance. A romantic "atmosphere,"
+fully as highly colored as any of the
+romantic atmospheres that we are accustomed<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_151" id="Page_151">[Pg 151]</a></span>
+to mark in literature, surrounded as with a
+luminous mist the figures of the New England
+transcendentalists. They, too, as Heine said of
+himself, were soldiers. They felt themselves
+enlisted for a long but ultimately victorious
+campaign. They were willing to pardon, in
+their comrades and in themselves, those imaginative
+excesses which resemble the physical
+excesses of a soldier's camp. Transcendentalism
+was thus a militant philosophy and religion,
+with both a destructively critical and a positively
+constructive creed. Channing, Parker,
+Alcott, Margaret Fuller, were warrior-priests,
+poets and prophets of a gallant campaign
+against inherited darkness and bigotry, and for
+the light.</p>
+
+<p>The atmosphere of that score of years in
+New England was now superheated, now
+rarefied, thin, and cold; but it was never
+quite the normal atmosphere of every day. On
+the purely literary side, it is needless to say,
+these men and women sought inspiration in
+Coleridge and Carlyle and other English and
+German romanticists. In fact, the most enduring
+literature of New England between 1830
+and 1865 was distinctly a romantic literature.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_152" id="Page_152">[Pg 152]</a></span>
+It was rooted, however, not so much in those
+swift changes of historic condition, those startling
+liberations of the human spirit which gave
+inspiration to the romanticism of the Continent,
+as it was in the deep and vital fervor with
+which these New Englanders envisaged the
+problems of the moral life.</p>
+
+<p>Other illustrations of the American capacity
+for romance lie equally close at hand. Take, for
+instance, the stout volume in which Mr. Burton
+Stevenson has collected the <i>Poems of American
+History</i>. Here are nearly seven hundred
+pages of closely printed patriotic verse. While
+Stedman's <i>Anthology</i> reveals no doubt national
+aspirations and national sentiment, as well as
+the emotional fervor of individuals, Mr. Stevenson's
+collection has the advantage of focussing
+this national feeling upon specific events.
+Stedman's <i>Anthology</i> is an enduring document
+of American idealism, touching in the sincerity
+of its poetic moods, pathetic in its long lists
+of men and women who are known by one
+poem only, or who have never, for one reason
+or another, fulfilled their poetic promise. The
+thousand poems which it contains are more
+striking, in fact, for their promise than for their<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_153" id="Page_153">[Pg 153]</a></span>
+performance. They are intimations of what
+American men and women would have liked
+to do or to be. In this sense, it is a precious
+volume, but it is certainly not commensurate,
+either in passion or in artistic perfection, with
+the forces of that American life which it tries
+to interpret. Indeed, Mr. Stedman, after finishing
+his task of compilation, remarked to
+more than one of his friends that what this
+country needed was some "adult male verse."</p>
+
+<p>The <i>Poems of American History</i> collected by
+Mr. Stevenson are at least vigorous and concrete.
+One aspect of our history which especially
+lends itself to Mr. Stevenson's purpose
+is the romance which attaches itself to war. It
+is scarcely necessary to say nowadays that all
+wars, even the noblest, have had their sordid,
+grimy, selfish, bestial aspect; and that the intelligence
+and conscience of our modern world
+are more and more engaged in the task of making
+future wars impossible. But the slightest
+acquaintance with American history reveals
+the immense reservoir of romantic emotion
+which has been drawn upon in our national
+struggles. War, of course, is an immemorial
+source of romantic feeling. William James's<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_154" id="Page_154">[Pg 154]</a></span>
+notable essay on "A Moral Substitute for
+War" endeavored to prove that our modern
+economic and social life, if properly organized,
+would give abundant outlet and satisfaction to
+those romantic impulses which formerly found
+their sole gratification in battle. Many of us
+believe that he was right; but for the moment
+we must look backward and not forward. We
+must remember the stern if rude poetry inspired
+by our Revolutionary struggle, the romantic
+halo that falls upon the youthful figure
+of Nathan Hale, the baleful light that touches
+the pale face of Benedict Arnold, the romance
+of the Bennington fight to the followers of
+Stark and Ethan Allen, the serene voice of
+the "little captain," John Paul Jones:&mdash;"We
+have not struck, we have just begun our part
+of the fighting." The colors of romance still
+drape the Chesapeake and the Shannon, Tecumseh
+and Tippecanoe. The hunters of Kentucky,
+the explorers of the Yellowstone and the
+Columbia, the emigrants who left their bones
+along the old Santa Fé Trail, are our Homeric
+men.</p>
+
+<p>The Mexican War affords pertinent illustration,
+not only of romance, but of reaction. The<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_155" id="Page_155">[Pg 155]</a></span>
+earlier phases of the Texan struggle for independence
+have much of the daring, the splendid
+rashness, the glorious and tragic catastrophes
+of the great romantic adventures of the Old
+World. It is not the Texans only who still
+"remember the Alamo," but when those brilliant
+and dramatic adventures of border warfare
+became drawn into the larger struggle for
+the extension of slavery, the poetic reaction began.
+The physical and moral pretence of warfare,
+the cheap splendors of epaulets and feathers,
+shrivelled at the single touch of the satire
+of the <i>Biglow Papers</i>. Lowell, writing at that
+moment with the instinct and fervor of a prophet,
+brought the whole vainglorious business
+back to the simple issue of right and wrong:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"'Taint your eppyletts an' feathers<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Make the thing a grain more right;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">'Taint afollerin' your bell-wethers<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Will excuse ye in His sight;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Ef you take a sword an' dror it,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">An' go stick a feller thru,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Guv'ment aint to answer for it,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">God'll send the bill to you."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>But far more interesting is the revelation of
+the American capacity for romance which was<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_156" id="Page_156">[Pg 156]</a></span>
+made possible by the war between the States.
+Stevenson's <i>Poems of American History</i> and
+Stedman's <i>Anthology</i> give abundant illustration
+of almost every aspect of that epical struggle.
+The South was in a romantic mood from the
+very beginning. The North drifted into it after
+Sumter. I have already said that no one can
+examine a collection of Civil War verse without
+being profoundly moved by its evidence
+of American idealism. In specific phases of the
+struggle, in connection with certain battle-fields
+and certain leaders of both North and South,
+this idealism is heightened into pure romance,
+so that even our novelists feel that they can
+give no adequate picture of the war without
+using the colors of poetry. Most critics, no
+doubt, agree in feeling that we are still too
+near to that epoch-making crisis of our national
+existence to do it any justice in the terms of
+literature. Perhaps we must wait for the perfected
+romance of the years 1861-65, until the
+men and the events of that struggle are as
+remote as the heroes of Greece and Troy. Certainly
+no one can pass a final judgment upon
+the verse occasioned by recent struggles in
+arms. Any one who has studied the English<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_157" id="Page_157">[Pg 157]</a></span>
+poetry inspired by the South-African War will
+be painfully conscious of the emotional and
+moral complexity of all such issues, of the bitter
+injustice which poets, as well as other men,
+render to one another, of the impossibility of
+transmuting into the pure gold of romance the
+emotions originating in the stock market, in
+race-hatred, and in national vainglory.</p>
+
+<p>We have lingered too long, perhaps, over
+these various evidences of the romantic temper
+of America. We must now glance at the
+forces of reaction, the recoil to fact. What
+is it which contradicts, inhibits, or negatives
+the romantic tendency? Among other forces,
+there is certainly humor. Humor and romance
+often go hand in hand, but humor is commonly
+fatal to romanticism. There is satire, which rebukes
+both romanticism and romance, which
+exposes the fallacies of the one, and punctures
+the exuberance of the other. More effective,
+perhaps, than either humor or satire as an antiseptic
+against romance, is the overmastering
+sense of fact. This is what Emerson called the
+instinct for the milk in the pan, an instinct
+which Emerson himself possessed extraordinarily
+on his purely Yankee side, and which a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_158" id="Page_158">[Pg 158]</a></span>
+pioneer country is forced continually to develop
+and to recognize. Camping, for instance, develops
+both the romantic sense and the fact
+sense. Supper must be cooked, even at Walden
+Pond. There must be hewers of wood and
+drawers of water, and the dishes ought to be
+washed.</p>
+
+<p>On a higher plane, also, than this mere
+sense of physical necessity, there are forces
+limiting the influence of romance. Schiller put
+it all into one famous line:&mdash;</p>
+
+<blockquote><p>"Und was uns alle bändigt, das Gemeine."</p></blockquote>
+
+<p>Or listen to Keats:&mdash;</p>
+
+<blockquote><p>"'T is best to remain aloof from people, and
+like their good parts, without being eternally
+troubled with the dull process of their everyday
+lives.... All I can say is that standing at
+Charing Cross, and looking East, West, North
+and South, I can see nothing but dullness."</p></blockquote>
+
+<p>And Henry James, describing New York in
+his book, <i>The American Scene</i>, speaks of "the
+overwhelming preponderance of the unmitigated
+'business-man' face ... the consummate
+monotonous commonness of the pushing
+male crowd, moving in its dense mass&mdash;with<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_159" id="Page_159">[Pg 159]</a></span>
+the confusion carried to chaos for any intelligence,
+any perception; a welter of objects and
+sounds in which relief, detachment, dignity,
+meaning, perished utterly and lost all rights
+... the universal <i>will to move</i>&mdash;to move,
+move, move, as an end in itself, an appetite at
+any price."</p>
+
+<p>One need not be a poet like Keats or an inveterate
+psychologist like Henry James, in order
+to become aware how the commonplaceness
+of the world rests like a fog upon the mind and
+heart. No one goes to his day's work and
+comes home again without a consciousness of
+contact with an unspiritual atmosphere, or incompletely
+spiritualized forces, not merely with
+indifference, to what Emerson would term
+"the over-soul," but with a lack of any faith
+in the things which are unseen. Take those
+very forces which have limited the influence of
+Emerson throughout the United States; they
+illustrate the universal forces which clip the
+wings of romance. The obstacles in the path
+of Emerson's influence are not merely the religious
+and denominational differences which
+Dr. George A. Gordon portrayed in a notable
+article at the time of the Emerson Centenary.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_160" id="Page_160">[Pg 160]</a></span>
+The real obstacles are more serious. It is true
+that Dr. Park of Andover, Dr. Bushnell of
+Hartford, and Dr. Hodge of Princeton, could
+say in Emerson's lifetime: "We know a better,
+a more Scriptural and certificated road toward
+the very things which Emerson is seeking
+for. We do not grant that we are less idealistic
+than he. We think him a dangerous guide, following
+wandering fires. It is better to journey
+safely with us."</p>
+
+<p>But I have known at least two livery-stable
+keepers and many college professors who would
+unite in saying: "Hodge and Park and Bushnell
+and Emerson are all following after something
+that does not exist. One is not much
+more mistaken than the others. We can get
+along perfectly well in our business without any
+of those ideas at all. Let us stick to the milk
+in the pan, the horse in the stall, the documents
+which you will find in the library."</p>
+
+<p>There exists, in other words, in all classes
+of American society to-day, just as there existed
+during the Revolution, during the transcendental
+movement, or the Civil War, an immense
+mass of unspiritualized, unvitalized American
+manhood and womanhood. No literature<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_161" id="Page_161">[Pg 161]</a></span>
+comes from it and no religion, though there is
+much human kindness, much material progress,
+and some indestructible residuum of that idealism
+which lifts man above the brute.</p>
+
+<p>Yet the curious and the endlessly fascinating
+thing about these forces of reaction is that they
+themselves shift and change. We have seen
+that external romance depending upon strangeness
+of scene, novelty of adventure, rich atmospheric
+distance of space or time, disappears
+with the changes of civilization. The farm expands
+over the wolf's den, the Indian becomes
+a blacksmith, but do the gross and material
+instincts ultimately triumph? He would be a
+hardy prophet who should venture to assert it.
+We must reckon always with the swing of the
+human pendulum, with the reaction against reaction.
+Here, for example, during the last decade,
+has been book after book written about
+the reaction against democracy. All over the
+world, it is asserted, there are unmistakable signs
+that democracy will not practically work in the
+face of the modern tasks to which the world
+has set itself. One reads these books, one persuades
+himself that the hour for democracy is
+passing, and then one goes out on the street<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_162" id="Page_162">[Pg 162]</a></span>
+and buys a morning newspaper and discovers
+that democracy has scored again. So is it with
+the experience of the individual. You may
+fancy that the romance of the seas passes, for
+you, with the passing of the square-sailed ship.
+If Mr. Kipling's poetry cannot rouse you from
+that mood of reaction, walk down to the end
+of the pier to-morrow and watch the ocean
+liner come up the harbor. If there is no romance
+there, you do not know romance when
+you see it!</p>
+
+<p>Take the case of the farmer; his prosaic life
+is the butt of the newspaper paragraphers from
+one end of the country to the other. But does
+romance disappear from the farm with machinery
+and scientific agriculture? There are farmers
+who follow Luther Burbank's experiments
+with plants, with all the fascination
+which used to attach to alchemy and astrology.
+The farmer has no longer Indians to fight or
+a wilderness to subdue, but the soils of his
+farm are analyzed at his state university by
+men who live in the daily atmosphere of the
+romance of science, and who say, as a professor
+in the University of Chicago said once,
+that "a flower is so wonderful that if you knew<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_163" id="Page_163">[Pg 163]</a></span>
+what was going on within its cell-structure,
+you would be afraid to stay alone with it in
+the dark."</p>
+
+<p>The reaction from romance, therefore, real
+as it is, and dead weight as it lies upon the
+soul of the nation, often breeds the very forces
+which destroy it. In other words, the reaction
+against one type of romance produces inevitably
+another type of romance, other aspects of
+wonder, terror, and beauty. Following the romance
+of adventure comes, after never so deep
+a trough in the sea, the romance of science, like
+the crest of another wave; and then comes what
+we call, for lack of a better word, the psychological
+romance, the old mystery and strangeness
+of the human soul, Æschylus and Job, as
+Victor Hugo says, in the poor crawfish gatherer
+on the rocks of Brittany.</p>
+
+<p>We must remember that we are endeavoring
+to measure great spaces and to take account
+of the "amplitude of time." The individual
+"fact-man," as Coleridge called him, remains
+perhaps a fact-man to the end, just as the
+dreamer may remain a dreamer. But no single
+generation is compounded all of fact or all of
+dream. Longfellow felt, no doubt, that there<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_164" id="Page_164">[Pg 164]</a></span>
+was an ideal United States, which Dickens did
+not discover during that first visit of 1842; he
+would have set the Cambridge which he knew
+over against the Cincinnati viewed by Mrs.
+Trollope; he would have asserted that the
+homes characterized by refinement, by cultivation,
+by pure and simple sentiment, made up
+the true America. But even among Longfellow's
+own contemporaries there was Whitman,
+who felt that the true America was something
+very different from that exquisitely tempered
+ideal of Longfellow. There was Thoreau, who,
+over in Concord, had been pushing forward
+the frontier of the mind and senses, who had
+opened his back-yard gate, as it were, upon the
+boundless and mysterious territory of Nature.
+There was Emerson, who was preaching an
+intellectual independence of the Old World
+which should correspond to the political and
+social independence of the Western Hemisphere.
+There was Parkman, whose hatred of
+philanthropy, whose lack of spirituality, is a
+striking illustration of the rebound of New
+England idealism against itself, of the reaction
+into stoicism. What different worlds these men
+lived in, and yet they were all inhabitants, so to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_165" id="Page_165">[Pg 165]</a></span>
+speak, of the same parish; most of them met
+often around the same table! The lesson of
+their variety of experience and differences of
+gifts as workmen in that great palace of literature
+which is so variously built, is that no action
+and reaction in the imaginative world is ever
+final. Least of all do these actions and reactions
+affect the fortunes of true romance. The born
+dreamer may fall from one dream into another,
+but he still murmurs, in the famous line of
+William Ellery Channing,&mdash;</p>
+
+<blockquote><p>"If my bark sinks, 't is to another sea."</p></blockquote>
+
+<p>No line in our literature is more truly American,&mdash;unless
+it be that other splendid metaphor,
+by David Wasson, which says the same
+thing in other words:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Life's gift outruns my fancies far,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">And drowns the dream<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">In larger stream,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">As morning drinks the morning-star."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_166" id="Page_166">[Pg 166]</a></span></p><hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="V" id="V"></a>V<br /><br />
+
+Humor and Satire</h2>
+
+
+<p>A distinguished professor in the Harvard
+Divinity School once began a lecture on Comedy
+by saying that the study of the comic had
+made him realize for the first time that a joke
+was one of the most solemn things in the world.
+The analysis of humor is no easy matter. It is
+hard to say which is the more dreary: an essay
+on humor illustrated by a series of jokes,
+or an exposition of humor in the technical
+terms of philosophy. No subject has been more
+constantly discussed. But it remains difficult to
+decide what humor is. It is easier to declare
+what seemed humorous to our ancestors, or
+what seems humorous to us to-day. For humor
+is a shifting thing. The well-known collections
+of the writings of American humorists surprise
+us by their revelation of the changes in public
+taste. Humor&mdash;or the sense of humor&mdash;alters
+while we are watching. What seemed a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_167" id="Page_167">[Pg 167]</a></span>
+good joke to us yesterday seems but a poor
+joke to-day. And yet it is the same joke!
+What is true of the individual is all the more
+true of the national sense of humor. This vast
+series of kaleidoscopic changes which we call
+America; has it produced a humor of its own?</p>
+
+<p>Let us avoid for the moment the treacherous
+territory of definitions. Let us, rather, take
+one concrete example: a pair of men, a knight
+and his squire, who for three hundred years
+have ridden together down the broad highway
+of the world's imagination. Everybody sees
+that Don Quixote and Sancho Panza are humorous.
+Define them as you will&mdash;idealist
+and realist, knight and commoner, dreamer
+and proverb-maker&mdash;these figures represent
+to all the world two poles of human experience.
+A Frenchman once said that all of us are
+Don Quixotes on one day and Sancho Panzas
+on the next. Humor springs from this contrast.
+It is the electric flash between the two
+poles of experience.</p>
+
+<p>Most philosophers who have meditated
+upon the nature of the comic point out that it
+is closely allied with the tragic. Flaubert once
+compared our human idealism to the flight of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_168" id="Page_168">[Pg 168]</a></span>
+a swallow; at one moment it is soaring toward
+the sunset, at the next moment some one
+shoots it and it tumbles into the mud with
+blood upon its glistening wings. The sudden
+poignant contrast between light, space, freedom,
+and the wounded bleeding bird in the
+mud, is of the very essence of tragedy. But
+something like that is always happening in comedy.
+There is the same element of incongruity,
+without the tragic consequence. It is only the
+humorist who sees things truly because he sees
+both the greatness and the littleness of mortals;
+but even he may not know whether to
+laugh or to cry at what he sees. Those collisions
+and contrasts out of which the stuff of
+tragedy is woven, such as the clash between the
+higher and lower nature of a man, between his
+past and his present, between one's duties to
+himself and to his family or the state, between,
+in a word, his character and his situation, are
+all illustrated in comedy as completely as in
+tragedy. The countryman in the city, the city
+man in the country, is in a comic situation.
+Here is a coward named Falstaff, and Shakespeare
+puts him into battle. Here is a vain person, and
+Malvolio is imprisoned and twitted by<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_169" id="Page_169">[Pg 169]</a></span>
+a clown. Here is an ignoramus, and Dogberry
+is placed on the judge's bench. These contrasts
+might, indeed, be tragic enough, but they are
+actually comic. Such characters are not ruled
+by fate but by a sportive chance. The gods
+connive at them. They are ruled, like tragic
+characters, by necessity and blindness; but the
+blindness, instead of leading to tragic ruin,
+leads only to being caught as in some harmless
+game of blind-man's-buff. There is retribution,
+but Falstaff is only pinched by the fairies. Comedy
+of intrigue and comedy of character lead
+to no real catastrophe. The end of it on the
+stage is not death but matrimony; and "home
+well pleased we go."</p>
+
+<p>A thousand definitions of humor lay stress
+upon this element of incongruity. Hazlitt begins
+his illuminating lectures on the Comic
+Writers by declaring, "Man is the only animal
+that laughs or weeps; for he is the only
+animal that is struck with the difference between
+what things are and what they ought to be."
+James Russell Lowell took the same ground.
+"Humor," he said once, "lies in the contrast
+of two ideas. It is the universal disenchanter.
+It is the sense of comic contradiction which<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_170" id="Page_170">[Pg 170]</a></span>
+arises from the perpetual comment which the
+understanding makes upon the impressions received
+through the imagination." If that sentence
+seems too abstract, all we need do is to
+think of Sancho Panza, the man of understanding,
+talking about Don Quixote, the man of
+imagination.</p>
+
+<p>We must not multiply quotations, but it is
+impossible not to remember the distinction
+made by Carlyle in writing about Richter.
+"True humor," says Carlyle, "springs not
+more from the head than from the heart. It is
+not contempt; its essence is love." In other
+words, not merely the great humorists of the
+world's literature&mdash;Cervantes, Rabelais, Fielding,
+Thackeray, Dickens&mdash;but the writers of
+comic paragraphs for to-morrow's newspaper,
+all regard our human incongruities with a sort
+of affection. The comic spirit is essentially a
+social spirit. The great figures of tragedy are
+solitary. The immortal figures of comedy belong
+to a social group.</p>
+
+<p>No recent discussion of humor is more illuminating
+and more directly applicable to the
+conditions of American life than that of the
+contemporary French philosopher Bergson.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_171" id="Page_171">[Pg 171]</a></span>
+Bergson insists throughout his brilliant little
+book on <i>Laughter</i> that laughter is a social function.
+Life demands elasticity. Hence whatever
+is stiff, automatic, machine-like, excites a smile.
+We laugh when a person gives us the impression
+of being a thing,&mdash;a sort of mechanical toy.
+Every inadaptation of the individual to society
+is potentially comic. Thus laughter becomes
+a social initiation. It is a kind of hazing which
+we visit upon one another. But we do not isolate
+the comic personage as we do the solitary,
+tragic figure. The comic personage is usually
+a type; he is one of an absurd group; he is a
+miser, a pedant, a pretentious person, a doctor
+or a lawyer in whom the professional traits
+have become automatic so that he thinks more
+of his professional behavior than he does of
+human health and human justice. Of all these
+separatist tendencies, laughter is the great corrective.
+When the individual becomes set in
+his ways, obstinate, preoccupied, automatic,
+the rest of us laugh him out of it if we can.
+Of course all that we are thinking about at
+the moment is his ridiculousness. But nevertheless,
+by laughing we become the saviors of
+society.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_172" id="Page_172">[Pg 172]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>No one, I think, can help observing that
+this conception of humor as incongruity is particularly
+applicable to a new country. On the
+new soil and under the new sky, in new social
+groupings, all the fundamental contrasts and
+absurdities of our human society assume a new
+value. We see them under a fresh light. They
+are differently focussed. The broad humors
+of the camp, its swift and picturesque play of
+light and shade, its farce and caricature no less
+than its atmosphere of comradeship, of sentiment,
+and of daring, are all transferred to the
+humor of the newly settled country. The very
+word "humor" once meant singularity of character,
+"some extravagant habit, passion, or affection,"
+says Dryden, "particular to some one
+person." Every newly opened country encourages,
+for a while, this oddness and incongruity
+of individual character. It fosters it,
+and at the same moment it laughs at it. It decides
+that such characters are "humorous." As
+the social conditions of such a country change,
+the old pioneer instinct for humor, and the
+pioneer forms of humor, may endure, though
+the actual frontier may have moved far westward.</p>
+
+<p>There is another conception of humor<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_173" id="Page_173">[Pg 173]</a></span>
+scarcely less famous than the notion of incongruity.
+It is the conception associated with the
+name of the English philosopher Hobbes, who
+thought that humor turned upon a sense of
+superiority. "The passion of laughter," said
+Hobbes, "is nothing else but sudden glory
+arising from some sudden conception of some
+eminency in ourselves by comparison with the
+inferiority of others, or with our own formerly."
+Too cynical a view, declare many critics, but
+they usually end by admitting that there is a
+good deal in it after all. I am inclined to think
+that Hobbes's famous definition is more applicable
+to wit than it is to humor. Wit is more
+purely intellectual than humor. It rejoices in
+its little triumphs. It requires, as has been remarked,
+a good head, while humor takes a
+good heart, and fun good spirits. If you take
+Carlyle literally when he says that humor is
+love, you cannot wholly share Hobbes's conviction
+that laughter turns upon a sense of
+superiority, and yet surely we all experience a
+sense of kindly amusement which turns upon
+the fact that we, the initiated, are superior, for
+the moment, to the unlucky person who is just
+having his turn in being hazed. It may be the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_174" id="Page_174">[Pg 174]</a></span>
+play of intellect or the coarser play of animal
+spirits. One might venture to make a distinction
+between the low comedy of the Latin races
+and the low comedy of the Germanic races
+by pointing out that the superiority in the
+Latin comedy usually turns upon quicker wits,
+whereas the superiority in the Germanic farce
+is likely to turn upon stouter muscles. But
+whether it be a play of wits or of actual cudgelling,
+the element of superiority and inferiority
+is almost always there.</p>
+
+<p>I remember that some German, I dare say
+in a forgotten lecture-room, once illustrated the
+humor of superiority in this way. A company
+of strolling players sets up its tent in a country
+village. On the front seat is a peasant,
+laughing at the antics of the clown. The peasant
+flatters himself that he sees through those
+practical jokes on the stage; the clown ought
+to have seen that he was about to be tripped
+up, but he was too stupid. But the peasant
+saw that it was coming all the time. He laughs
+accordingly. Just behind the peasant sits the
+village shopkeeper. He has watched stage
+clowns many a time and he laughs, not at the
+humor of the farce, but at the naïve laughter<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_175" id="Page_175">[Pg 175]</a></span>
+of the peasant in front of him. He, the shopkeeper,
+is superior to such broad and obvious
+humor as that. Behind the shopkeeper sits the
+schoolmaster. The schoolmaster is a pedant;
+he has probably lectured to his boys on the
+theory of humor, and he smiles in turn at the
+smile of superiority on the face of the shopkeeper.
+Well, peeping in at the door of the tent
+is a man of the world, who glances at the clown,
+then at the peasant, then at the shopkeeper,
+then at the schoolmaster, each one of whom
+is laughing at the others, and the man of the
+world laughs at them all!</p>
+
+<p>Let us take an even simpler illustration. We
+all know the comfortable sense of proprietorship
+which we experience after a few days' sojourn
+at a summer hotel. We know our place
+at the table; we call the head waiter by his first
+name; we are not even afraid of the clerk. Now
+into this hotel, where we sit throned in conscious
+superiority, comes a new arrival. He has
+not yet learned the exits and entrances. He
+starts for the kitchen door inadvertently when
+he should be headed for the drawing-room.
+We smile at him. Why? Precisely because
+that was what we did on the morning of our<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_176" id="Page_176">[Pg 176]</a></span>
+own arrival. We have been initiated, and it is
+now his turn.</p>
+
+<p>If it is true that a newly settled country
+offers endless opportunities for the humor
+which turns upon incongruity, it is also true
+that the new country offers countless occasions
+for the humor which turns upon the sudden
+glory of superiority. The backwoodsman is
+amusing to the man of the settlements, and the
+backwoodsman, in turn, gets his full share of
+amusement out of watching the "tenderfoot"
+in the woods. It is simply the case of the old
+resident versus the newcomer. The superiority
+need be in no sense a cruel or taunting superiority,
+although it often happens to be so.
+The humor of the pioneers is not very delicately
+polished. The joke of the frontier tavern
+or grocery store is not always adapted to a
+drawing-room audience, but it turns in a surprisingly
+large number of instances upon exactly
+the same intellectual or social superiority
+which gives point to the <i>bon mots</i> of the most
+cultivated and artificial society in the world.</p>
+
+<p>The humor arising from incongruity, then,
+and the humor arising from a sense of superiority,
+are both of them social in their nature.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_177" id="Page_177">[Pg 177]</a></span>
+No less social, surely, is the function of satire.
+It is possible that satire may be decaying, that
+it is becoming, if it has not already become, a
+mere splendid or odious tradition. But let us
+call it a great tradition and, upon the whole, a
+splendid one. Even when debased to purely
+party or personal uses, the verse satire of a
+Dryden retains its magnificent resonance; "the
+ring," says Saintsbury, "as of a great bronze
+coin thrown down on marble." The malignant
+couplets of an Alexander Pope still gleam like
+malevolent jewels through the dust of two hundred
+years. The cynicism, the misanthropy,
+the mere adolescent badness of Byron are powerless
+to clip the wings of the wide-ranging, far-darting
+wit and humor and irony of <i>Don Juan</i>.
+The homely Yankee dialect, the provinciality,
+the "gnarly" flavor of the <i>Biglow Papers</i> do
+not prevent our finding in that pungent and
+resplendent satire the powers of Lowell at full
+play; and, what is more than that, the epitome
+of the American spirit in a moral crisis.</p>
+
+<p>I take the names of those four satirists, Dryden,
+Pope, Byron, and Lowell, quite at random;
+but they serve to illustrate a significant principle;
+namely, that great satire becomes ennobled as<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_178" id="Page_178">[Pg 178]</a></span>
+it touches communal, not merely individual
+interests, as it voices social and not merely individual
+ideals. Those four modern satirists
+were steeped in the nationalistic political poetry
+of the Old Testament. They were familiar with
+its war anthems, dirges, and prophecies, its concern
+for the prosperity and adversity, the sin
+and the punishment, of a people. Here the
+writers of the Golden Age of English satire
+found their vocabulary and phrase-book, their
+grammar of politics and history, their models
+of good and evil kings; and in that Biblical
+school of political poetry, which has affected our
+literature from the Reformation down to Mr.
+Kipling, there has always been a class in satire!
+The satirical portraits, satirical lyrics, satirical
+parables of the Old Testament prophets are
+only less noteworthy than their audacity in
+striking high and hard. Their foes were the all-powerful:
+Babylon and Assyria and Egypt
+loom vast and terrible upon the canvases of
+Isaiah and Ezekiel; and poets of a later time
+have learned there the secrets of social and political
+idealism, and the signs of national doom.</p>
+
+<p>There are two familiar types of satire associated
+with the names of Horace and Juvenal.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_179" id="Page_179">[Pg 179]</a></span>
+Both types are abundantly illustrated in English
+and American literature. When you meet
+a bore or a hypocrite or a plain rascal, is it better
+to chastise him with laughter or to flay him
+with shining fury? I shall take both horns of the
+dilemma and assert that both methods are admirable
+and socially useful. The minor English
+and American poets of the seventeenth and
+eighteenth centuries were never weary of speaking
+of satire as a terrific weapon which they
+were forced to wield as saviors of society. But
+whether they belonged to the urbane school of
+Horace, or to the severely moralistic school of
+Juvenal, they soon found themselves falling
+into one or the other of two modes of writing.
+They addressed either the little audience or the
+big audience, and they modified their styles accordingly.
+The great satirists of the Renaissance,
+for example, like More, Erasmus, and
+Rabelais, wrote simply for the persons who
+were qualified to understand them. More and
+Erasmus wrote their immortal satires in Latin.
+By so doing they addressed themselves to
+cultivated Europe. They ran no risk of being
+misunderstood by persons for whom the joke
+was not intended. All readers of Latin were<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_180" id="Page_180">[Pg 180]</a></span>
+like members of one club. Of course membership
+was restricted to the learned, but had not
+Horace talked about being content with a few
+readers, and was not Voltaire coming by and by
+with the advice to try for the "little public"?</p>
+
+<p>The typical wit of the eighteenth century,
+whether in London, Paris, or in Franklin's
+printing-shop in Philadelphia, had, of course,
+abandoned Latin. But it still addressed itself
+to the "little public," to the persons who were
+qualified to understand. The circulation of the
+<i>Spectator</i>, which represents so perfectly the wit,
+humor, and satire of the early eighteenth century
+in England, was only about ten thousand
+copies. This limited audience smiled at the urbane
+delicate touches of Mr. Steele and Mr.
+Addison. They understood the allusions. The
+fable concerned them and not the outsiders. It
+was something like Oliver Wendell Holmes
+reading his witty and satirical couplets to an
+audience of Harvard alumni. The jokes are in
+the vernacular, but in a vernacular as spoken
+in a certain social medium. It is all very delightful.</p>
+
+<p>But there is a very different kind of audience
+gathering all this while outside the Harvard<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_181" id="Page_181">[Pg 181]</a></span>
+gates. These two publics for the humorist we
+may call the invited and the uninvited; the inner
+circle and the outer circle: first, those who
+have tickets for the garden party, and who
+stroll over the lawn, decorously gowned and
+properly coated, conversing with one another
+in the accepted social accents and employing
+the recognized social adjectives; and second,
+the crowd outside the gates,&mdash;curious, satirical,
+good-natured in the main, straightforward
+of speech and quick to applaud a ready wit or
+a humor-loving eye or a telling phrase spoken
+straight from the heart of the mob.</p>
+
+<p>Will an author choose to address the selected
+guests or the casual crowd? Either way lies
+fame, if one does it well. Your uninvited men
+find themselves talking to the uninvited crowd.
+Before they know it they are famous too. They
+are fashioning another manner of speech. Defoe
+is there, with his saucy ballads selling triumphantly
+under his very pillory; with his <i>True-Born
+Englishman</i> puncturing forever the fiction
+of the honorable ancestry of the English aristocracy;
+with his <i>Crusoe</i> and <i>Moll Flanders</i>,
+written, as Lamb said long afterwards, for the
+servant-maid and the sailor. Swift is there, with<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_182" id="Page_182">[Pg 182]</a></span>
+his terrific <i>Drapier's Letters</i>, anonymous, aimed
+at the uneducated, with cold fury bludgeoning
+a government into obedience; with his <i>Gulliver's
+Travels</i>, so transparent upon the surface
+that a child reads the book with delight and
+remains happily ignorant that it is a satire upon
+humanity. And then, into the London of Defoe
+and Swift, and into the very centre of the middle-class
+mob, steps, in 1724, the bland Benjamin
+Franklin in search of a style "smooth, clear,
+and short," and for half a century, with consummate
+skill, shapes that style to his audience.
+His young friend Thomas Paine takes the style
+and touches it with passion, until he becomes
+the perfect pamphleteer, and his <i>Crisis</i> is worth
+as much to our Revolution&mdash;men said&mdash;as
+the sword of Washington. After another generation
+the gaunt Lincoln, speaking that same
+plain prose of Defoe, Swift, Franklin, and Paine,&mdash;Lincoln
+who began his first Douglas debate,
+not like his cultivated opponent with the conventional
+"Ladies and Gentlemen," but with
+the ominously intimate, "My Fellow Citizens,"&mdash;Lincoln
+is saying, "I am not master of language;
+I have not a fine education; I am not
+capable of entering into a disquisition upon dialectics,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_183" id="Page_183">[Pg 183]</a></span>
+as I believe you call it; but I do not
+believe the language I employed bears any such
+construction as Judge Douglas puts upon it.
+But I don't care about a quibble in regard to
+words. I know what I meant, and <i>I will not
+leave this crowd in doubt</i>, if I can explain it to
+them, what I really meant in the use of that
+paragraph."</p>
+
+<p>"<i>I will not leave this crowd in doubt</i>"; that is
+the final accent of our spoken prose, the prose
+addressed to one's fellow citizens, to the great
+public. This is the prose spoken in the humor
+and satire of Dickens. Dressed in a queer dialect,
+and put into satirical verse, it is the language
+of the <i>Biglow Papers</i>. Uttered with the
+accent of a Chicago Irishman, it is the prose
+admired by millions of the countrymen of
+"Mr. Dooley."</p>
+
+<p>Satire written to the "little public" tends
+toward the social type; that written to the
+"great public" to the political type. It is obvious
+that just as a newly settled country offers
+constant opportunity for the humor of incongruity
+and the humor arising from a sense of
+superiority, it likewise affords a daily stimulus
+to the use of satire. That moralizing Puritan<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_184" id="Page_184">[Pg 184]</a></span>
+strain of censure which lost none of its harshness
+in crossing the Atlantic Ocean found full
+play in the colonial satire of the seventeenth
+and eighteenth centuries. As the topics for satire
+grew wider and more political in their scope,
+the audiences increased. To-day the very oldest
+issues of the common life of that queer
+"political animal" named man are discussed
+by our popular newspaper satirists in the presence
+of a democratic audience that stretches
+from the Atlantic to the Pacific.</p>
+
+<p>Is there, then, a distinctly American type of
+humor and satire? I think it would be difficult
+to prove that our composite American nationality
+has developed a mode of humor and satire
+which is racially different from the humor
+and satire of the Old World. All racial lines
+in literature are extremely difficult to draw. If
+you attempt to analyze English humor, you
+find that it is mostly Scotch or Irish. If you
+put Scotch and Irish humor under the microscope,
+you discover that most of the best
+Scotch and Irish jokes are as old as the Greeks
+and the Egyptians. You pick up a copy of
+<i>Fliegende Blätter</i> and you get keen amusement
+from its revelation of German humor. But how<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_185" id="Page_185">[Pg 185]</a></span>
+much of this humor, after all, is either essentially
+universal in its scope or else a matter of
+mere stage-setting and machinery? Without
+the Prussian lieutenant the <i>Fliegende Blätter</i>
+would lose half its point; nor can one imagine
+a <i>Punch</i> without a picture of the English policeman.
+The lieutenant and the policeman,
+however, are a part of the accepted social furniture
+of the two countries. They belong to the
+decorative background of the social drama.
+They heighten the effectiveness of local humor,
+but it may be questioned whether they afford
+any evidence of genuine racial differentiation as
+to the sense of the comic.</p>
+
+<p>What one can abundantly prove, however,
+is that the United States afford a new national
+field for certain types of humor and satire. Our
+English friends are never weary of writing magazine
+articles about Yankee humor, in which
+they explain the peculiarities of the American
+joke with a dogmatism which has sometimes
+been thought to prove that there is such a
+thing as national lack of humor, whether there
+be such a thing as national humor or not. One
+such article, I remember, endeavored to prove
+that the exaggeration often found in American<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_186" id="Page_186">[Pg 186]</a></span>
+humor was due to the vastness of the American
+continent. Our geography, that is to say,
+is too much for the Yankee brain. Mr. Birrell,
+an expert judge of humor, surely, thinks
+that the characteristic of American humor lies
+in its habit of speaking of something hideous
+in a tone of levity. Many Englishmen, in fact,
+have been as much impressed with this minimizing
+trick of American humor as with the
+converse trick of magnifying. Upon the Continent
+the characteristic trait of American
+humor has often been thought to be its exuberance
+of phrase. Many shrewd judges of
+our newspaper humor have pointed out that
+one of its most favorite methods is the suppression
+of one link in the chain of logical
+reasoning. Such generalizations as these are
+always interesting, although they may not take
+us very far.</p>
+
+<p>Yet it is clear that certain types of humor
+and satire have proved to be specially adapted
+to the American soil and climate. Whether or
+not these types are truly indigenous one may
+hesitate to say, yet it remains true that the well-known
+conditions of American life have stimulated
+certain varieties of humor into such a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_187" id="Page_187">[Pg 187]</a></span>
+richness of manifestation as the Old World can
+scarcely show.</p>
+
+<p>Curiously enough, one of the most perfected
+types of American humor is that urbane Horatian
+variety which has often been held to be
+the exclusive possession of the cultivated and
+restricted societies of older civilization. Yet it
+is precisely this kind of humor which has been
+the delight of some of the most typical American
+minds. Benjamin Franklin, for example,
+modelled his style and his sense of the humorous
+on the papers of the <i>Spectator</i>. He produced
+humorous fables and apologues, choice
+little morsels of social and political persiflage,
+which were perfectly suited, not merely to the
+taste of London in the so-called golden age of
+English satire, but to the tone of the wittiest
+salons of Paris in the age when the old régime
+went tottering, talking, quoting, jesting to its
+fall. Read Franklin's charming and wise letter
+to Madame Brillon about giving too much
+for the whistle. It is the perfection of well-bred
+humor: a humor very American, very
+Franklinian, although its theme and tone and
+phrasing might well have been envied by Horace
+or Voltaire.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_188" id="Page_188">[Pg 188]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The gentle humor of Irving is marked by
+precisely those traits of urbanity and restraint
+which characterize the parables of Franklin.
+Does not the <i>Autocrat of the Breakfast Table</i>
+itself presuppose the existence of a truly cultivated
+society? Its tone&mdash;"As I was saying
+when I was interrupted"&mdash;is the tone of the intimate
+circle. There was so much genuine humanity
+in the gay little doctor that persons born
+outside the circle of Harvard College and the
+North Shore and Boston felt themselves at once
+initiated by the touch of his merry wand into
+a humanized, kindly theory of life. The humor
+of George William Curtis had a similarly
+mellow and ripened quality. It is a curious
+comment upon that theory of Americans which
+represents us primarily as a loud-voiced, assertive,
+headstrong people, to be thus made
+aware that many of the humorists whom we
+have loved best are precisely those whose writing
+has been marked by the most delicate restraint,
+whose theory of life has been the most
+highly urbane and civilized, whose work is indistinguishable
+in tone&mdash;though its materials
+are so different&mdash;from that of other humorous
+writers on the other side of the Atlantic. On<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_189" id="Page_189">[Pg 189]</a></span>
+its social side all this is a fresh proof of the extraordinary
+adaptability of the American mind.
+On the literary side it is one more evidence
+of the national fondness for neatness and perfection
+of workmanship.</p>
+
+<p>But we are something other than a nation of
+mere lovers and would-be imitators of Charles
+Lamb. The moralistic type of humor, the crack
+of Juvenal's whip, as well as the delicate Horatian
+playing around the heart-strings, has
+characterized our humor and satire from the
+beginning. At bottom the American is serious.
+Beneath the surface of his jokes there is moral
+earnestness, there is ethical passion. Take, for
+example, some of the apothegms of "Josh
+Billings." He failed with the public until he
+took up the trick of misspelling his words.
+When he had once gained his public he sometimes
+delighted them with sheer whimsical incongruity,
+like this:&mdash;</p>
+
+<blockquote><p>"There iz 2 things in this life for which we
+are never fully prepared, and that iz twins."</p></blockquote>
+
+<p>But more often the tone is really grave. It
+is only the spelling that is queer. The moralizing
+might be by La Bruyère or La Rochefoucauld.
+Take this:<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_190" id="Page_190">[Pg 190]</a></span>&mdash;</p>
+
+<blockquote><p>"Life iz short, but it iz long enuff to ruin
+enny man who wants tew be ruined."</p></blockquote>
+
+<p>Or this:&mdash;</p>
+
+<blockquote><p>"When a feller gits a goin doun hill, it dus
+seem as tho evry thing had bin greased for the
+okashun." That is what writers of tragedy
+have been showing, ever since the Greeks!</p></blockquote>
+
+<p>Or finally, this, which has the perfect tone
+of the great French moralists:&mdash;</p>
+
+<blockquote><p>"It iz a verry delicate job to forgive a man
+without lowering him in his own estimashun,
+and yures too."</p></blockquote>
+
+<p>See how the moralistic note is struck in the
+field of political satire. It is 1866, and "Petroleum
+V. Nasby," writing from "Confedrit
+X Roads," Kentucky, gives Deekin Pogram's
+views on education. "He didn't bleeve in
+edjucashun, generally speekin. The common
+people was better off without it, ez edjucashun
+hed a tendency to unsettle their minds. He
+had seen the evil effex ov it in niggers and poor
+whites. So soon ez a nigger masters the spellin
+book and gits into noosepapers, he becomes
+dissatisfied with his condishin, and hankers
+after a better cabin and more wages. He towunst
+begins to insist onto ownin land hisself,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_191" id="Page_191">[Pg 191]</a></span>
+and givin his children edjucashun, and, ez a nigger,
+for our purposes, aint worth a soo markee."</p>
+
+<p>The single phrase, "ez a nigger," spells
+a whole chapter of American history.</p>
+
+<p>That quotation from "Petroleum V. Nasby"
+serves also to illustrate a species of American
+humor which has been of immense historical
+importance and which has never been more
+active than it is to-day: the humor, namely, of
+local, provincial, and sectional types. Much of
+this falls under Bergson's conception of humor
+as social censure. It rebukes the extravagance,
+the rigidity, the unawareness of the individual
+who fails to adapt himself to his social environment.
+It takes the place, in our categories of
+humor, of those types of class humor and
+satire in which European literature is so rich.
+The mobility of our population, the constant
+shifting of professions and callings, has prevented
+our developing fixed class types of
+humor. We have not even the lieutenant or
+the policeman as permanent members of our
+humorous stock company. The policeman of
+to-day may be mayor or governor to-morrow.
+The lieutenant may go back to his grocery
+wagon or on to his department store. But<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_192" id="Page_192">[Pg 192]</a></span>
+whenever and wherever such an individual fails
+to adapt himself to his new companions, fails
+to take on, as it were, the colors of his new
+environment, to speak in the new social accents,
+to follow the recognized patterns of behavior,
+then the kindly whip of the humorist is already
+cracking round his ears. The humor and satire
+of college undergraduate journalism turns
+mainly upon the recognized ability or inability
+of different individuals to adapt themselves to
+their changing pigeon-holes in the college organism.
+A freshman must behave like a freshman,
+or he is laughed at. Yet he must not behave
+as if he were nothing but the automaton
+of a freshman, or he will be laughed at more
+merrily still.</p>
+
+<p>One of the first discoveries of our earlier
+humorists was the Down-East Yankee. "I'm
+going to Portland whether or no," says Major
+Jack Downing, telling the story of his boyhood;
+"I'll see what this world is made of yet.
+So I tackled up the old horse and packed in a
+load of ax handles and a few notions, and mother
+fried me a few doughnuts ... for I told
+her I didn't know how long I should be gone,"&mdash;and
+off he goes to Portland, to see what the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_193" id="Page_193">[Pg 193]</a></span>
+world is made of. It is a little like Defoe, and
+a good deal like the young Ulysses, bent upon
+knowing cities and men and upon getting the
+best of bargains.</p>
+
+<p>Each generation of Americans has known
+something like that trip to Portland. Each
+generation has had to measure its wits, its resources,
+its manners, against new standards of
+comparison. At every stage of the journey
+there are mishaps and ridiculous adventures;
+but everywhere, likewise, there is zest, conquest,
+initiation; the heart of a boy who "wants
+to know"&mdash;as the Yankees used to say; or,
+in more modern phrase,&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i4">"to admire and for to see,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">For to behold this world so wide."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>There is the same romance of adventure in
+the humor concerning the Irishman, the Negro,
+the Dutchman, the Dago, the farmer. Each in
+turn becomes humorous through failure to
+adapt himself to the prevalent type. A long-bearded
+Jew is not ridiculous in Russia, but he
+rapidly becomes ridiculous even on the East
+Side of New York. Underneath all this popular
+humor of the comic supplements one may
+catch glimpses of the great revolving wheels<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_194" id="Page_194">[Pg 194]</a></span>
+which are crushing the vast majority of our
+population into something like uniformity. It
+is a process of social attrition. The sharp edges
+of individual behavior get rounded off. The
+individual loses color and picturesqueness, precisely
+as he casts aside the national costume of
+the land from which he came. His speech, his
+gait, his demeanor, become as nearly as possible
+like the speech and carriage of all his
+neighbors. If he resists, he is laughed at; and if
+he does not personally heed the laughter, he
+may be sure that his children do. It is the children
+of our immigrants who catch the sly smiles
+of their school-fellows, who overhear jokes
+from the newspapers and on the street corners,
+who bring home to their foreign-born fathers
+and mothers the imperious childish demand to
+make themselves like unto everybody else.</p>
+
+<p>A similar social function is performed by that
+well-known mode of American humor which
+ridicules the inhabitants of certain states. Why
+should New Jersey, for example, be more ridiculous
+than Delaware? In the eyes of the newspaper
+paragrapher it unquestionably is, just as
+Missouri has more humorous connotations than
+Kentucky. We may think we understand why<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_195" id="Page_195">[Pg 195]</a></span>
+we smile when a man says that he comes from
+Kalamazoo or Oshkosh, but the smile when he
+says "Philadelphia" or "Boston" or "Brooklyn"
+is only a trifle more subtle. It is none the
+less real. Why should the suburban dweller of
+every city be regarded with humorous condescension
+by the man who is compelled to sleep
+within the city limits? No one can say, and yet
+without that humor of the suburbs the comic
+supplements of American newspapers would
+be infinitely less entertaining,&mdash;to the people
+who enjoy comic supplements.</p>
+
+<p>So it is with the larger divisions of our national
+life. Yankee, Southerner, Westerner,
+Californian, Texan, each type provokes certain
+connotations of humor when viewed by any of
+the other types. Each type in turn has its note
+of provinciality when compared with the norm
+of the typical American. It is quite possible to
+maintain that our literature, like our social life,
+has suffered by this ever-present American sense
+of the ridiculous. Our social consciousness
+might be far more various and richly colored,
+there might be more true provincial independence
+of speech and custom and imagination if
+we had not to reckon with this ever-present censure<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_196" id="Page_196">[Pg 196]</a></span>
+of laughter, this fear of finding ourselves,
+our city, our section, out of touch with the prevalent
+tone and temper of the country as a
+whole. It is one of the forfeits we are bound to
+pay when we play the great absorbing game of
+democracy.</p>
+
+<p>We are now ready to ask once more whether
+there is a truly national type of American humor.
+Viewed exclusively from the standpoint
+of racial characteristics, we have seen that this
+question as to a national type of humor is difficult
+to answer. But we have seen with equal
+clearness that the United States has offered a
+singularly rich field for the development of the
+sense of humor; and furthermore that there
+are certain specialized forms of humor which
+have flourished luxuriantly upon our soil. Our
+humorists have made the most of their native
+materials. Every pioneer trait of versatility,
+curiosity, shrewdness, has been turned somehow
+to humorous account. The very institutions
+of democracy, moulding day by day and
+generation after generation the habits and the
+mental characteristics of millions of men, have
+produced a social atmosphere in which humor
+is one of the most indisputable elements.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_197" id="Page_197">[Pg 197]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>I recall a notable essay by Mr. Charles Johnston
+on the essence of American humor in which
+he applies to the conditions of American life
+one familiar distinction between humor and wit.
+Wit, he asserts, scores off the other man, humor
+does not. Wit frequently turns upon tribal
+differences, upon tribal vanity. The mordant
+wit of the Jew, for example, from the
+literature of the Old Testament down to the
+raillery of Heine, has turned largely upon the
+sense of racial superiority, of intellectual and
+moral differences. But true humor, Mr. Johnston
+goes on to argue, has always a binding, a
+uniting quality. Thus Huckleberry Finn and
+Jim Hawkins, white man and black man, are
+afloat together on the Mississippi River raft and
+they are made brethren by the fraternal quality
+of Mark Twain's humor. Thus the levelling
+quality of Bret Harte's humor bridges social
+and moral chasms. It creates an atmosphere
+of charity and sympathy. In fact, the typical
+American humor, according to the opinion of
+Mr. Johnston, emphasizes the broad and humane
+side of our common nature. It reveals
+the common soul. It possesses a surplusage of
+power, of buoyancy and of conquest over circumstances.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_198" id="Page_198">[Pg 198]</a></span>
+It means at its best a humanizing
+of our hearts.</p>
+
+<p>Some people will think that all this is too
+optimistic, but if you are not optimistic enough
+you cannot keep up with the facts. Certain it
+is that the pioneers of American national humor,
+the creators of what we may call the "all-American"
+type of humor, have possessed precisely
+the qualities which Mr. Johnston has
+pointed out. They are apparent in the productions
+of Artemus Ward. The present generation
+vaguely remembers Artemus Ward as
+the man who was willing to send all his wife's
+relatives to the war and who, standing by the
+tomb of Shakespeare, thought it "a success."
+But no one who turns to the almost forgotten
+pages of that kindly jester can fail to be impressed
+by his sunny quality, by the atmosphere
+of fraternal affection which glorifies his queer
+spelling and his somewhat threadbare witticisms.
+Mark Twain, who is universally recognized
+by Europeans as a representative of
+typical American humor, had precisely those
+qualities of pioneer curiosity, swift versatility,
+absolute democracy, which are characteristic
+of the national temper. His lively accounts of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_199" id="Page_199">[Pg 199]</a></span>
+frontier experiences in <i>Roughing It</i>, his comments
+upon the old world in <i>Innocents Abroad</i>
+and <i>A Tramp Abroad</i>, his hatred of pretence
+and injustice, his scorn at sentimentality coupled
+with his insistence upon the rights of sentiment,
+in a word his persistent idealism, make Mark
+Twain one of the most representative of American
+writers. Largeness, freedom, human sympathy,
+are revealed upon every page.</p>
+
+<p>It is true that the dangers of American humor
+are no less in evidence there. There is the
+danger of extravagance, which in Mark Twain's
+earlier writings was carried to lengths of absurdity.
+There is the old danger of the professional
+humorist of fearing to fail to score his
+point, and so of underscoring it with painful
+reiteration. Mark Twain is frequently grotesque.
+Sometimes there is evidence of imperfect
+taste, or of bad taste. Sometimes there is
+actual vulgarity. In his earlier books particularly
+there is revealed that lack of discipline
+which has been such a constant accompaniment
+of American writing. Yet a native of Hannibal,
+Missouri, trained on a river steamboat and
+in a country printing-office and in mining-camps,
+can scarcely be expected to exhibit the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_200" id="Page_200">[Pg 200]</a></span>
+finely balanced critical sense of a Matthew Arnold.
+Mark Twain was often accused in the
+first years of his international reputation of a
+characteristically American lack of reverence.
+He is often irreverent. But here again the
+boundaries of his irreverence are precisely those
+which the national instinct itself has drawn.
+The joke stops short of certain topics which the
+American mind holds sacred. We all have our
+favorite pages in the writings of this versatile
+and richly endowed humorist, but I think no
+one can read his description of the coyote in
+<i>Roughing It</i>, and Huckleberry Finn's account
+of his first visit to the circus, without realizing
+that in this fresh revelation of immemorial
+human curiosity, this vivid perception of incongruity
+and surprise, this series of lightning-like
+flashes from one pole of experience to the
+other, we have not only masterpieces of world
+humor, but a revelation of a distinctly American
+reaction to the facts presented by universal
+experience.</p>
+
+<p>The picturesque personality and the extraordinarily
+successful career of Mark Twain
+kept him, during the last twenty-five years of
+his life, in the focus of public attention. But<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_201" id="Page_201">[Pg 201]</a></span>
+no one can read the pages of the older American
+humorists,&mdash;or try to recall to mind the
+names of paragraphers who used to write comic
+matter for this or that newspaper,&mdash;without
+realizing how swiftly the dust of oblivion settles
+upon all the makers of mere jokes. It is
+enough, perhaps, that they caused a smile for
+the moment. Even those humorists who mark
+epochs in the history of American provincial
+and political satire, like Seba Smith with his
+<i>Major Jack Downing</i>, Newell with his <i>Papers
+of Orpheus C. Kerr</i>, "Petroleum V. Nasby's"
+<i>Letters from the Confedrit X Roads</i>, Shillaber's
+<i>Mrs. Partington</i>&mdash;all these have disappeared
+round the turn of the long road.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Hans Breitman gife a barty&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Vhere ish dot barty now?"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>It seems as if the conscious humorists, the
+professional funny writers, had the shortest
+lease of literary life. They play their little comic
+parts before a well-disposed but restless audience
+which is already impatiently waiting for
+some other "turn." One of them makes a hit
+with a song or story, just as a draughtsman for
+a Sunday colored supplement makes a hit with
+his "Mutt and Jeff." For a few months everybody<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_202" id="Page_202">[Pg 202]</a></span>
+smiles and then comes the long oblivion.
+The more permanent American humor has
+commonly been written by persons who were
+almost unconscious, not indeed of the fact that
+they were creating humorous characters, but
+unconscious of the effort to provoke a laugh.
+The smile lasts longer than the laugh. Perhaps
+that is the secret. One smiles as one reads the
+delicate sketches of Miss Jewett. One smiles
+over the stories of Owen Wister and of Thomas
+Nelson Page. The trouble, possibly, with the
+enduring qualities of the brilliant humorous
+stories of "O. Henry" was that they tempt
+the reader to laugh too much and to smile too
+little. When one reads the <i>Legend of Sleepy
+Hollow</i> or <i>Diedrich Knickerbocker's History of
+New York</i>, it is always with this gentle parting
+of the lips, this kindly feeling toward the
+author, his characters and the world. A humorous
+page which produces that effect for generation
+after generation, has the stamp of literature.
+One may doubt whether even the extraordinary
+fantasies of Mark Twain are more successful,
+judged by the mere vulgar test of concrete
+results, than the delicate humor of Charles
+Lamb. Our current newspaper and magazine<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_203" id="Page_203">[Pg 203]</a></span>
+humor is in no respect more fascinating than
+in its suggestion as to the permanent effectiveness
+of its comic qualities. Who could say,
+when he first read Mr. Finley P. Dunne's
+"Mr. Dooley" sketches, whether this was
+something that a whole nation of readers would
+instantly and instinctively rejoice over, would
+find a genial revelation of American characteristics,
+would recognize as almost the final word
+of kindly satire upon our overworked, over-excited,
+over-anxious, over-self-conscious generation?</p>
+
+<p>The range of this contemporary newspaper
+and magazine humor is well-nigh universal,&mdash;always
+saving, it is true, certain topics or states
+of mind which the American public cannot
+regard as topics for laughter. With these few
+exceptions nothing is too high or too low for
+it. The paragraphers joke about the wheel-barrow,
+the hen, the mule, the mother-in-law,
+the President of the United States. There is
+no ascending or descending scale of importance.
+Any of the topics can raise a laugh. If
+one examines a collection of American parodies,
+one will find that the happy national talent
+for fun-making finds full scope in the parody<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_204" id="Page_204">[Pg 204]</a></span>
+and burlesque of the dearest national sentiments.
+But no one minds; everybody believes
+that the sentiments endure while the jokes will
+pass. The jokes, intended as they are for an
+immense audience, necessarily lack subtlety.
+They tend to partake of the methods of pictorial
+caricature. Indeed, caricature itself, as
+Bergson has pointed out, emphasizes those
+"automatic, mechanical-toy" traits of character
+and behavior which isolate the individual
+and make him ill adapted for his function in
+society. Our verbal wit and humor, no less
+than the pencil of our caricaturists, have this
+constant note of exaggeration. "These violent
+delights have violent ends." But during
+their brief and laughing existence they serve
+to normalize society. They set up, as it were,
+a pulpit in the street upon which the comic
+spirit may mount and preach her useful sermon
+to all comers.</p>
+
+<p>Despite the universality of the objects of
+contemporary American humor, despite, too,
+its prevalent method of caricature, it remains
+true that its character is, on the whole, clean,
+easy-going, and kindly. The old satire of hatred
+has lost its force. No one knows why. "Satire<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_205" id="Page_205">[Pg 205]</a></span>
+has grown weak," says Mr. Chesterton, "precisely
+because belief has grown weak." That
+is one theory. The late Henry D. Lloyd, of
+Chicago, declared in one of his last books:
+"The world has outgrown the dialect and temper
+of hatred. The style of the imprecatory
+psalms and the denunciating prophets is out of
+date. No one knows these times if he is not
+conscious of this change." That is another
+theory. Again, party animosities are surely
+weaker than they were. Caricatures are less personally
+offensive; if you doubt it, look at any
+of the collections of caricatures of Napoleon,
+or of George the Fourth. Irony is less often
+used by pamphleteers and journalists. It is a
+delicate rhetorical weapon, and journalists who
+aim at the great public are increasingly afraid
+to use it, lest the readers miss the point. In
+the editorials in the Hearst newspapers, for
+instance, there is plenty of invective and innuendo,
+but rarely irony: it might not be understood,
+and the crowd must not be left in
+doubt.</p>
+
+<p>Possibly the old-fashioned satire has disappeared
+because the game is no longer considered
+worth the candle. To puncture the tire of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_206" id="Page_206">[Pg 206]</a></span>
+pretence is amusing enough; but it is useless to
+stick tacks under the steam road-roller: the
+road-roller advances remorselessly and smooths
+down your mischievous little tacks and you
+too, indifferently. The huge interests of politics,
+trade, progress, override your passionate
+protest. "Shall gravitation cease when you
+go by?" I do not compare Colonel Roosevelt
+with gravitation, but have all the satirical squibs
+against our famous contemporary, from the
+"Alone in Cubia" to the "Teddy-see," ever
+cost him, in a dozen years, a dozen votes?</p>
+
+<p>Very likely Mr. Lloyd and Mr. Chesterton
+are right. We are less censorious than our ancestors
+were. Americans, on the whole, try to
+avoid giving pain through speech. The satirists
+of the golden age loved that cruel exercise
+of power. Perhaps we take things less
+seriously than they did; undoubtedly our attention
+is more distracted and dissipated. At
+any rate, the American public finds it easier to
+forgive and forget, than to nurse its wrath to
+keep it warm. Our characteristic humor of
+understatement, and our equally characteristic
+humor of overstatement, are both likely to be
+cheery at bottom, though the mere wording<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_207" id="Page_207">[Pg 207]</a></span>
+may be grim enough. No popular saying is
+more genuinely characteristic of American humor
+than the familiar "Cheer up. The worst
+is yet to come."</p>
+
+<p>Whatever else one may say or leave unsaid
+about American humor, every one realizes that
+it is a fundamentally necessary reaction from
+the pressure of our modern living. Perhaps it
+is a handicap. Perhaps we joke when we should
+be praying. Perhaps we make fun when we
+ought to be setting our shoulders to the wheel.
+But the deeper fact is that most American
+shoulders are set to the wheel too often and
+too long, and if they do not stop for the joke
+they are done for. I have always suspected
+that Mr. Kipling was thinking of American
+humor when he wrote in his well-known lines
+on "The American Spirit":&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"So imperturbable he rules<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Unkempt, disreputable, vast&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And in the teeth of all the schools<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">I&mdash;I shall save him at the last."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>That is the very secret of the American sense
+of humor: the conviction that something is
+going to save us at the last. Otherwise there
+would be no joke! It is no accident, surely,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_208" id="Page_208">[Pg 208]</a></span>
+that the man who is increasingly idolized as the
+most representative of all Americans, the burden-bearer
+of his people, the man of sorrows
+and acquainted with grief, should be our most
+inveterate humorist. Let Lincoln have his story
+and his joke, for he had faith in the saving of
+the nation; and while his Cabinet are waiting
+impatiently to listen to his Proclamation of
+Emancipation, give him another five minutes
+to read aloud to them that new chapter by
+Artemus Ward.</p>
+
+
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_209" id="Page_209">[Pg 209]</a></span></p><hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="VI" id="VI"></a>VI<br /><br />
+
+Individualism and Fellowship</h2>
+
+
+<p>It would be difficult to find a clearer expression
+of the old doctrine of individualism than
+is uttered by Carlyle in his London lecture on
+"The Hero as Man of Letters." Listen to the
+grim child of Calvinism as he fires his "Annandale
+grapeshot" into that sophisticated London
+audience: "Men speak too much about the
+world.... The world's being saved will not
+save us; nor the world's being lost destroy us.
+We should look to ourselves.... For the
+saving of the world I will trust confidently to
+the Maker of the world; and look a little to my
+own saving, which I am more competent to!"</p>
+
+<p>Carlyle was never more soundly Puritanic,
+never more perfectly within the lines of the
+moral traditions of his race than in these injunctions
+to let the world go and to care for
+the individual soul.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_210" id="Page_210">[Pg 210]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>We are familiar with the doctrine on this
+side of the Atlantic. Here is a single phrase
+from Emerson's <i>Journal</i> of September, 1833,
+written on his voyage home from that memorable
+visit to Europe where he first made
+Carlyle's acquaintance. "Back again to myself,"
+wrote Emerson, as the five-hundred-ton
+sailing ship beat her way westward for a long
+month across the stormy North Atlantic:&mdash;"Back
+again to myself.&mdash;A man contains all
+that is needful to his government within himself.
+He is made a law unto himself. All real
+good or evil that can befall him must be from
+himself.... The purpose of life seems to be
+to acquaint a man with himself."</p>
+
+<p>In the following August he is writing:&mdash;</p>
+
+<blockquote><p>"Societies, parties, are only incipient stages,
+tadpole states of men, as caterpillars are social,
+but the butterfly not. The true and finished
+man is ever alone."</p></blockquote>
+
+<p>On March 23, 1835:&mdash;</p>
+
+<blockquote><p>"Alone is wisdom. Alone is happiness.
+Society nowadays makes us low-spirited,
+hopeless. Alone is Heaven."</p></blockquote>
+
+<p>And once more:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_211" id="Page_211">[Pg 211]</a></span></p><blockquote><p>"If Æschylus is that man he is taken for,
+he has not yet done his office when he has educated
+the learned of Europe for a thousand
+years. He is now to approve himself a master
+of delight to me. If he cannot do that, all his
+fame shall avail him nothing. I were a fool not
+to sacrifice a thousand Æschyluses to my intellectual
+integrity."</p></blockquote>
+
+<p>These quotations have to do with the personal
+life. Let me next illustrate the individualism
+of the eighteen-thirties by the attitude
+of two famous individualists toward the prosaic
+question of paying taxes to the State. Carlyle
+told Emerson that he should pay taxes to the
+House of Hanover just as long as the House
+of Hanover had the physical force to collect
+them,&mdash;and not a day longer.</p>
+
+<p>Henry Thoreau was even more recalcitrant.
+Let me quote him:&mdash;</p>
+
+<blockquote><p>"I have paid no poll-tax for six years. I was
+put into a jail once on this account, for one
+night; and, as I stood considering the walls of
+solid stone, two or three feet thick, the door
+of wood and iron, a foot thick, and the iron
+grating which strained the light, I could not
+help being struck with the foolishness of that
+institution which treated me as if I were mere<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_212" id="Page_212">[Pg 212]</a></span>
+flesh and blood and bones, to be locked up. I
+wondered that it should have concluded at
+length that this was the best use it could put
+me to, and had never thought to avail itself of
+my services in some way. I saw that, if there
+was a wall of stone between me and my townsmen,
+there was a still more difficult one to climb
+or break through before they could get to be as
+free as I was. I did not for a moment feel confined,
+and the walls seemed a great waste of stone
+and mortar. I felt as if I alone of all my townsmen
+had paid my tax. They plainly did not
+know how to treat me, but behaved like persons
+who are underbred. In every threat and
+in every compliment there was a blunder; for
+they thought that my chief desire was to stand
+on the other side of that stone wall. I could not
+but smile to see how industriously they locked
+the door on my meditations, which followed
+them out again without let or hindrance, and
+<i>they</i> were really all that was dangerous. As they
+could not reach me, they had resolved to punish
+my body; just as boys, if they cannot come
+at some person against whom they have a spite,
+will abuse his dog. I saw that the State was
+half-witted, that it was timid as a lone woman<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_213" id="Page_213">[Pg 213]</a></span>
+with her silver spoons, and that it did not know
+its friends from its foes, and I lost all my remaining
+respect for it, and pitied it."</p></blockquote>
+
+<p>Here is Thoreau's attitude toward the problems
+of the inner life. The three quotations
+are from his <i>Walden</i>:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Probably I should not consciously and deliberately
+forsake my particular calling to do
+the good which society demands of me, to save
+the universe from annihilation."</p>
+
+<p>"I went to the woods because I wished to
+live deliberately, to front only the essential
+facts of life, and see if I could not learn what
+it had to teach, and not, when I came to die,
+discover that I had not lived. I did not wish
+to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor
+did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was
+quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck
+out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily
+and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was
+not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close,
+to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its
+lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why
+then to get the whole and genuine meanness
+of it, and publish its meanness to the world;
+or if it were sublime, to know it by experience,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_214" id="Page_214">[Pg 214]</a></span>
+and be able to give a true account of it in my
+next excursion."</p>
+
+<p>"It is said that the British Empire is very
+large and respectable, and that the United States
+are a first-rate power. We do not believe that
+a tide rises and falls behind every man which
+can float the British Empire like a chip, if he
+should ever harbor it in his mind."</p>
+
+<p>All of these quotations from Emerson and
+Thoreau are but various modes of saying "Let
+the world go." Everybody knows that in later
+crises of American history, both Thoreau and
+Emerson forgot their old preaching of individualism,
+or at least merged it in the larger
+doctrine of identification of the individual with
+the acts and emotions of the community. And
+nevertheless as men of letters they habitually
+laid stress upon the rights and duties of the
+private person. Upon a hundred brilliant pages
+they preached the gospel that society is in conspiracy
+against the individual manhood of every
+one of its members.</p>
+
+<p>They had a right to this doctrine. They came
+by it honestly through long lines of ancestral
+heritage. The republicanism of the seventeenth
+century in the American forests, as well as upon<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_215" id="Page_215">[Pg 215]</a></span>
+the floor of the English House of Commons,
+had asserted that private persons had the right
+to make and unmake kings. The republican
+theorists of the eighteenth century had insisted
+that life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness
+were the birthright of each individual. This
+doctrine was related, of course, to the doctrine
+of equality. If republicanism teaches that "I
+am as good as others," democracy is forever
+hinting "Others are as good as I." Democracy
+has been steadily extending the notion of rights
+and duties. The first instinct, perhaps, is to
+ask what is right, just, lawful, for me? Next,
+what is right, just, lawful for my crowd? That
+is to say, my family, my clan, my race, my country.
+The third instinct bids one ask what is
+right and just and lawful, not merely for me,
+and for men like me, but for everybody. And
+when we get that third question properly answered,
+we can afford to close school-house and
+church and court-room, for this world's work
+will have ended.</p>
+
+<p>We have already glanced at various phases
+of colonial individualism. We have had a
+glimpse of Cotton Mather prostrate upon the
+dusty floor of his study, agonizing now for<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_216" id="Page_216">[Pg 216]</a></span>
+himself and now for the countries of Europe;
+we have watched Jonathan Edwards in his
+solitary ecstasies in the Northampton and the
+Stockbridge woods; we have seen Franklin
+preaching his gospel of personal thrift and of
+getting on in the world. Down to the very
+verge of the Revolution the American pioneer
+spirit was forever urging the individual to fight
+for his own hand. Each boy on the old farms
+had his own chores to do; each head of a family
+had to plan for himself. The most tragic
+failure of the individual in those days was the
+poverty or illness which compelled him to "go
+on the town." To be one of the town poor indicated
+that the individualistic battle had been
+fought and lost. No one ever dreamed, apparently,
+that a time for old-age pensions and
+honorable retiring funds was coming. The feeling
+against any form of community assistance
+was like the bitter hatred of the workhouse
+among English laborers of the eighteen-forties.</p>
+
+<p>The stress upon purely personal qualities
+gave picturesqueness, color, and vigor to the
+early life of the United States. Take the persons
+whom Parkman describes in his <i>Oregon
+Trail</i>. They have the perfect clearness of outline<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_217" id="Page_217">[Pg 217]</a></span>
+of the portraits by Walter Scott and the
+great Romantic school of novelists who loved
+to paint pictures of interesting individual men.
+There is the same stress upon individualistic
+portraiture in Irving's <i>Astoria</i>; in the humorous
+journals of early travellers in the Southern
+States. It is the secret of the curiosity with
+which we observe the gamblers and miners and
+stage-drivers described by Bret Harte. In the
+rural communities of to-day, in the older portions
+of the country, and in the remoter settlements
+of the West and Southwest, the individual
+man has a sort of picturesque, and, as it
+were, artistic value, which the life of cities does
+not allow. The gospel of self-reliance and of
+solitude is not preached more effectively by
+the philosophers of Concord than it is by the
+backwoodsmen, the spies, and the sailors of
+Fenimore Cooper. Individualism as a doctrine
+of perfection for the private person and individualism
+as a literary creed have thus gone
+hand in hand. "Produce great persons, the rest
+follows," cried Walt Whitman. He was thinking
+at the moment about American society and
+politics. But he believed that the same law held
+good in poetry. Once get your great man and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_218" id="Page_218">[Pg 218]</a></span>
+let him abandon himself to poetry and the
+great poetry will be the result. It was almost
+precisely the same teaching as in Carlyle's lecture
+on "The Hero as Poet."</p>
+
+<p>Well, it is clear enough nowadays that both
+Whitman and Carlyle underrated the value of
+discipline. The lack of discipline is the chief
+obstacle to effective individualism. The private
+person must be well trained, or he cannot
+do his work; and as civilization advances, it
+becomes exceedingly difficult to train the individual
+without social coöperation. A Paul or a
+Mahomet may discipline his own soul in the
+Desert of Arabia; he may there learn the lessons
+that may later make him a leader of men.
+But for the average man and indeed for most
+of the exceptional men, the path to effectiveness
+lies through social and professional discipline.
+Here is where the frontier stage of our
+American life was necessarily weak. We have
+seen that our ancestors gained something, no
+doubt, from their spirit of unconventionally
+and freedom. But they also lost something
+through their dislike for discipline, their indifference
+to criticism, their ineradicable tendency,
+whether in business, in diplomacy, in art and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_219" id="Page_219">[Pg 219]</a></span>
+letters and education, to go "across lots." A
+certain degree of physical orderliness was, indeed,
+imposed upon our ancestors by the conditions
+of pioneer life. The natural prodigality
+and recklessness of frontier existence was here
+and there sharply checked. Order is essential
+in a camp, and the thin line of colonies was
+all camping. A certain instinct for order underlay
+that resourcefulness which impresses every
+reader of our history. Did the colonist need a
+tool? He learned to make it himself. Isolation
+from the mother country was a stimulus
+to the inventive imagination. Before long they
+were maintaining public order in the same
+ingenious fashion in which they kept house.
+Appeals to London took too much time. "We
+send a complaint this year," ran the saying,
+"the next year they send to inquire, the third
+year the ministry is changed." No wonder that
+resourcefulness bred independent action, stimulated
+the Puritan taste for individualism, and
+led the way to self-government.</p>
+
+<p>Yet who does not know that the inherent
+instinct for political order may be accompanied
+by mental disorderliness? Even your modern
+Englishman&mdash;as the saying goes&mdash;"muddles<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_220" id="Page_220">[Pg 220]</a></span>
+through." The minds of our American forefathers
+were not always lucid. The mysticism
+of the New England Calvinists sometimes bred
+fanaticism. The practical and the theoretical
+were queerly blended. The essential unorderliness
+of the American mind is admirably illustrated
+by that "Father of all the Yankees,"
+Benjamin Franklin. No student of Franklin's
+life fails to be impressed by its happy casualness,
+its cheerful flavor of the rogue-romance.
+Gil Blas himself never drifted into and out of
+an adventure with a more offhand and imperturbable
+adroitness. Franklin went through life
+with the joyous inventiveness of the amateur.
+He had the amateur's enthusiasm, coupled with
+a clairvoyant penetration into technical problems
+such as few amateurs have possessed. With
+all of his wonderful patience towards other men,
+Franklin had in the realm of scientific experiment
+something of the typical impatience of
+the mere dabbler. He was inclined to lose interest
+in the special problem before it was worked
+out. His large, tolerant intelligence was often
+as unorderly as his papers and accounts. He
+was a wonderful colonial Jack-of-all-trades;
+with a range of suggestion, a resourcefulness,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_221" id="Page_221">[Pg 221]</a></span>
+a knack of assimilation, a cosmopolitan many-sidedness,
+which has left us perpetually his debtors.
+Under different surroundings, and disciplined
+by a more severe and orderly training,
+Franklin might easily have developed the very
+highest order of professional scientific achievement.
+His natural talent for organization of
+men and institutions, his "early projecting public
+spirit," his sense of the lack of formal educational
+advantages in the colonies, made him
+the founder of the Philadelphia Academy, the
+successful agitator for public libraries. Academicism,
+even in the narrow sense, owes much to
+this LL.D. of St. Andrews, D.C.L. of Oxford,
+and intimate associate of French academicians.
+But one smiles a little, after all, to see the bland
+printer in this academic company: he deserves
+his place there, indeed, but he is something
+more and other than his associates. He is the
+type of youthful, inexhaustible colonial America;
+reckless of precedent, self-taught, splendidly
+alive; worth, to his day and generation, a
+dozen born academicians; and yet suggesting
+by his very imperfections, that the Americans
+of a later day, working under different conditions,
+are bound to develop a sort of professional<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_222" id="Page_222">[Pg 222]</a></span>
+skill, of steady, concentrated, ordered intellectual
+activity, for which Franklin possessed
+the potential capacity rather than the opportunity
+and the desire.</p>
+
+<p>Yet there were latent lines of order, hints and
+prophecies of a coming fellowship, running
+deep and straight beneath the confused surface
+of the preoccupied colonial consciousness. In another
+generation we see the rude Western democracy
+asserting itself in the valley of the Mississippi.
+This breed of pioneers, like their
+fathers on the Atlantic coast line, could turn
+their hands to anything, because they must.
+"The average man," says Mr. Herbert Croly,
+"without any special bent or qualifications, was
+in the pioneer states the useful man. In that
+country it was sheer waste to spend much energy
+upon tasks which demanded skill, prolonged
+experience, high technical standards, or
+exclusive devotion.... No special equipment
+was required. The farmer was obliged to be all
+kinds of a rough mechanic. The business man
+was merchant, manufacturer, and storekeeper.
+Almost everybody was something of a politician.
+The number of parts which a man of
+energy played in his time was astonishingly<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_223" id="Page_223">[Pg 223]</a></span>
+large. Andrew Jackson was successively a lawyer,
+judge, planter, merchant, general, politician,
+and statesman; and he played most of these
+parts with conspicuous success. In such a society
+a man who persisted in one job, and who
+applied the most rigorous and exacting standards
+to his work, was out of place and really inefficient.
+His finished product did not serve its
+temporary purpose much better than did the
+current careless and hasty product, and his
+higher standards and peculiar ways constituted
+an implied criticism on the easy methods of his
+neighbors. He interfered with the rough good-fellowship
+which naturally arises among a group
+of men who submit good naturedly and uncritically
+to current standards. It is no wonder, consequently,
+that the pioneer Democracy viewed
+with distrust and aversion the man with a special
+vocation and high standards of achievement."</p>
+
+<p>The truth of this comment is apparent to
+everybody. It explains the still lingering popular
+suspicion of the "academic" type of man.
+But we are likely to forget that back of all that
+easy versatility and reckless variety of effort
+there was some sound and patient and constructive<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_224" id="Page_224">[Pg 224]</a></span>
+thinking. Lincoln used to describe himself
+humorously, slightingly, as a "mast-fed" lawyer,
+one who had picked up in the woods the
+scattered acorns of legal lore. It was a true
+enough description, but after all, there were
+very few college-bred lawyers in the Eighth Illinois
+Circuit or anywhere else who could hold
+their own, even in a purely professional struggle,
+with that long-armed logician from the
+backwoods.</p>
+
+<p>There was once a "mast-fed" novelist in
+this country, who scandalously slighted his
+academic opportunities, went to sea, went into
+the navy, went to farming, and then went into
+novel-writing to amuse himself. He cared nothing
+and knew nothing about conscious literary
+art; his style is diffuse, his syntax the
+despair of school-teachers, and many of his
+characters are bores. But once let him strike
+the trail of a story, and he follows it like his
+own Hawkeye; put him on salt water or in the
+wilderness, and he knows rope and paddle, axe
+and rifle, sea and forest and sky; and he knows
+his road home to the right ending of a story
+by an instinct as sure as an Indian's. Professional
+novelists like Balzac, professional critics<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_225" id="Page_225">[Pg 225]</a></span>
+like Sainte-Beuve, stand amazed at Fenimore
+Cooper's skill and power. The true engineering
+and architectural lines are there. They
+were not painfully plotted beforehand, like
+George Eliot's. Cooper took, like Scott, "the
+easiest path across country," just as a bee-hunter
+seems to take the easiest path through
+the woods. But the bee-hunter, for all his apparent
+laziness, never loses sight of the air-drawn
+line, marked by the homing bee; and
+your <i>Last of the Mohicans</i> will be instinctively,
+inevitably right, while your <i>Daniel Deronda</i>
+will be industriously wrong.</p>
+
+<p>Cooper literally builded better than he knew.
+Obstinately unacademic in his temper and
+training, he has won the suffrages of the most
+fastidious and academic judges of excellence in
+his profession. The secret is, I suppose, that
+the lawlessness, the amateurishness, the indifference
+to standards were on the surface,&mdash;apparent
+to everybody,&mdash;the soundness and
+rightness of his practice were unconscious.</p>
+
+<p>Franklin and Lincoln and Cooper, therefore,
+may be taken as striking examples of individuals
+trained in the old happy-go-lucky
+way, and yet with marked capacities for socialization,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_226" id="Page_226">[Pg 226]</a></span>
+for fellowship. They succeeded, even
+by the vulgar tests of success, in spite of their
+lack of discipline. But for most men the chief
+obstacle to effective labor even as individuals
+is the lack of thoroughgoing training.</p>
+
+<p>It is scarcely necessary to add that there are
+vast obstacles in the way of individualism as a
+working theory of society. Carlyle's theory of
+"Hero Worship" has fewer adherents than
+for half a century. It is picturesque,&mdash;that
+conception of a great, sincere man and of a
+world reverencing him and begging to be led
+by him. But the difficulty is that contemporary
+democracy does not say to the Hero, as
+Carlyle thought it must say, "Govern me! I am
+mad and miserable, and cannot govern myself!"</p>
+
+<p>Democracy says to the Hero, "Thank you
+very much, but this is our affair. Join us, if
+you like. We shall be glad of your company.
+But we are not looking for governors. We
+propose to govern ourselves."</p>
+
+<p>Even from the point of view of literature
+and art,&mdash;fields of activity where the individual
+performer has often been felt to be quite
+independent of his audience,&mdash;it is quite evident
+nowadays that the old theory of individualism<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_227" id="Page_227">[Pg 227]</a></span>
+breaks down. Even your lyric poet,
+who more than any other artist stands or sings
+alone, falls easily into mere lyric eccentricity
+if he is not bound to his fellows by wholesome
+and normal ties. In fact, this lyric eccentricity,
+weakness, wistfulness, is one of the notable defects
+of American poetry. We have always been
+lacking in the more objective forms of literary
+art, like epic and drama. Poe, and the imitators
+of Poe, have been regarded too often by
+our people as the normal type of poet. One
+must not forget the silent solitary ecstasies
+that have gone into the making of enduring
+lyric verse, but our literature proves abundantly
+how soon sweetness may turn to an
+Emily Dickinson strain of morbidness; how
+fatally the lovely becomes transformed into the
+queer. The history of the American short
+story furnishes many similar examples. The
+artistic intensity of a Hawthorne, his ethical
+and moral preoccupations, are all a part of the
+creed of individualistic art. But both Hawthorne
+and Poe would have written,&mdash;one dare
+not say better stories, but at least greater and
+broader and more human stories,&mdash;if they
+had not been forced to walk so constantly in<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_228" id="Page_228">[Pg 228]</a></span>
+solitary pathways. That fellowship in artistic
+creation which has characterized some of the
+greatest periods of art production was something
+wholly absent from the experience of
+these gifted and lonely men. Even Emerson
+and Thoreau wrote "whim" over their portals
+more often than any artist has the privilege to
+write it. Emerson never had any thorough
+training, either in philosophy, theology, or
+history. He admits it upon a dozen smiling
+pages. Perhaps it adds to his purely personal
+charm, just as Montaigne's confession of his intellectual
+and moral weaknesses heightens our
+fondness for the Prince of Essayists. But the
+deeper fact is that not only Emerson and Thoreau,
+Poe and Hawthorne, but practically every
+American writer and artist from the beginning
+has been forced to do his work without the sustaining
+and heartening touch of national fellowship
+and pride. Emerson himself felt the
+chilling poverty in the intellectual and emotional
+life of the country. He betrays it in this
+striking passage from his <i>Journal</i>, about the
+sculptor Greenough:&mdash;</p>
+
+<blockquote><p>"What interest has Greenough to make a
+good statue? Who cares whether it is good?<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_229" id="Page_229">[Pg 229]</a></span>
+A few prosperous gentlemen and ladies; but
+the Universal Yankee Nation roaring in the
+capitol to approve or condemn would make his
+eye and hand and heart go to a new tune."</p></blockquote>
+
+<p>Those words were written in 1836, but we
+are still waiting for that new national anthem,
+sustaining the heart and the voice of the individual
+artist. Yet there are signs that it is coming.</p>
+
+<p>It is obvious that the day for the old individualism
+has passed. Whether one looks at
+art and literature or at the general activities of
+American society, it is clear that the isolated individual
+is incompetent to carry on his necessary
+tasks. This is not saying that we have
+outgrown the individual. We shall never outgrow
+the individual. We need for every page
+of literature and for every adequate performance
+of society more highly perfected individuals.
+Some one said of Edgar Allan Poe that
+he did not know enough to be a great poet.
+All around us and every day we find individuals
+who do not know enough for their specific
+job; men who do not love enough, men in
+whom the power of will is too feeble. Such
+men, as individuals, must know and love and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_230" id="Page_230">[Pg 230]</a></span>
+will more adequately; and this not merely to
+perfect their functioning as individuals, but to
+fulfill their obligations to contemporary society.
+A true spiritual democracy will never be
+reached until highly trained individuals are
+united in the bonds of fraternal feeling. Every
+individual defect in training, defect in aspiration,
+defect in passion, becomes ultimately a
+defect in society.</p>
+
+<p>Let us turn, then, to those conditions of
+American society which have prepared the way
+for, and foreshadowed, a more perfect fellowship.
+We shall instantly perceive the relation
+of these general social conditions to the specific
+performances of our men of letters. We have
+repeatedly noted that our most characteristic
+literature is what has been called a citizen literature.
+It is the sort of writing which springs
+from a sense of the general needs of the community
+and which has had for its object the safe-guarding
+or the betterment of the community.
+Aside from a few masterpieces of lyric poetry,
+and aside from the short story as represented
+by such isolated artists as Poe and Hawthorne,
+our literature as a whole has this civic note. It
+may be detected in the first writings of the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_231" id="Page_231">[Pg 231]</a></span>
+colonists. Captain John Smith's angry order
+at Jamestown, "He that will not work neither
+let him eat," is one of the planks in the platform
+of democracy. Under the trying and depressing
+conditions of that disastrous settlement
+at Eden in <i>Martin Chuzzlewit</i> it is the
+quick wits and the brave heart of Mark Tapley
+which prove him superior to his employer.
+The same sermon is preached in Mr. Barrie's
+play, <i>The Admirable Crichton</i>: cast away upon
+the desert island, the butler proves himself a
+better man than his master. This is the motive
+of a very modern play, but it may be illustrated
+a hundred times in the history of the
+seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in America.
+The practical experiences of the colonists
+confirmed them in their republican theories. It
+is true that they held to a doctrine of religious
+and political individualism. But the moment
+these theories were put to work in the wilderness
+a new order of things decreed that this individualism
+should be modified in the direction
+of fellowship. Calvinism itself, for all of its insistence
+upon the value of the individual soul,
+taught also the principle of the equality of all
+souls before God. It was thus that the <i>Institutes</i><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_232" id="Page_232">[Pg 232]</a></span>
+of Calvin became one of the charters of
+democracy. The democratic drift in the writings
+of Franklin and Jefferson is too well known
+to need any further comment. The triumph
+of the rebellious colonists of 1776 was a triumph
+of democratic principles; and although
+a Tory reaction came promptly, although Hamiltonianism
+came to stay as a beneficent check
+to over-radical, populistic theories, the history
+of the last century and a quarter has abundantly
+shown the vitality and the endurance of democratic
+ideas.</p>
+
+<p>One may fairly say that the decade in which
+American democracy revealed its most ugly
+and quarrelsome aspect was the decade of the
+eighteen-thirties. That was the decade when
+Washington Irving and Fenimore Cooper came
+home from long sojourns in Europe. They
+found themselves confronted at once by sensitive,
+suspicious neighbors who hated England
+and Europe and had a lurking or open hostility
+towards anything that savored of Old World
+culture. Yet in that very epoch when English
+visitors were passing their most harsh and censorious
+verdict upon American culture, Emerson
+was writing in his <i>Journal</i> (June 18, 1834)<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_233" id="Page_233">[Pg 233]</a></span>
+a singular prophecy to the effect that the evils
+of our democracy, so far as literature was concerned,
+were to be cured by the remedy of
+more democracy. Is it not striking that he turns
+away from the universities and the traditional
+culture of New England and looks towards the
+Jacksonism of the new West to create a new
+and native American literature? Here is the
+passage:&mdash;</p>
+
+<blockquote><p>"We all lean on England; scarce a verse,
+a page, a newspaper, but is writ in imitation of
+English forms; our very manners and conversation
+are traditional, and sometimes the life
+seems dying out of all literature, and this
+enormous paper currency of Words is accepted
+instead. I suppose the evil may be cured by
+this rank rabble party, the Jacksonism of the
+country, heedless of English and of all literature&mdash;a
+stone cut out of the ground without
+hands;&mdash;they may root out the hollow dilettantism
+of our cultivation in the coarsest way,
+and the new-born may begin again to frame
+their own world with greater advantage."</p></blockquote>
+
+<p>From that raw epoch of the eighteen-thirties
+on to the Civil War, one may constantly detect
+in American writing the accents of democratic<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_234" id="Page_234">[Pg 234]</a></span>
+radicalism. Partly, no doubt, it was a heritage
+of the sentiment of the French Revolution.
+"My father," said John Greenleaf Whittier,
+"really believed in the Preamble of the Bill of
+Rights, which re-affirmed the Declaration of
+Independence." So did the son! Equally clear
+in the writings of those thirty years are echoes
+of the English radicalism which had so much
+in common with the democratic movement
+across the English Channel. The part which
+English thinkers and English agitators played
+in securing for America the fruits of her own
+democratic principles has never been adequately
+acknowledged.</p>
+
+<p>That the outcome of the Civil War meant
+a triumph of democratic ideas as against aristocratic
+privilege, no one can doubt. There were
+no stancher adherents of the democratic idea
+than our intellectual aristocrats. The best
+Union editorials at the time of the Civil War,
+says James Ford Rhodes, were written by scholars
+like Charles Eliot Norton and James Russell
+Lowell. I think it was Lowell who once said,
+in combatting the old aristocratic notion of
+white man supremacy, that no gentleman is
+willing to accept privileges that are inaccessible<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_235" id="Page_235">[Pg 235]</a></span>
+to other men. This is precisely like the famous
+sentence of Walt Whitman which first arrested
+the attention of "Golden Rule Jones," the
+mayor of Toledo, and which made him not
+only a Whitmaniac for the rest of his life but
+one of the most useful of American citizens.
+The line was, "I will accept nothing which all
+may not have their counterpart of on the same
+terms."</p>
+
+<p>This instinct of fellowship cannot be separated,
+of course, from the older instincts of
+righteousness and justice. It involves, however,
+more than giving the other man his due.
+It means feeling towards him as towards another
+"fellow." It involves the sentiment of
+partnership. Historians of early mining life in
+California have noted the new phase of social
+feeling in the mining-camps which followed
+upon the change from the pan&mdash;held and
+shaken by the solitary miner&mdash;to the cradle,
+which required the coöperation of at least two
+men. It was when the cradle came in that the
+miners first began to say "partner." As the
+cradle gave way to placer mining, larger and
+larger schemes of coöperation came into use.
+In fact, Professor Royce has pointed out in his<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_236" id="Page_236">[Pg 236]</a></span>
+<i>History of California</i> that the whole lesson of
+California history is precisely the lesson most
+necessary to be learned by the country as a
+whole, namely, that the phase of individual
+gain-getting and individualistic power always
+leads to anarchy and reaction, and that it
+becomes necessary, even in the interests of
+effective individualism itself, to recognize the
+compelling and ultimate authority of society.</p>
+
+<p>What went on in California between 1849
+and 1852 is precisely typical of what is going
+on everywhere to-day. American men and
+women are learning, as we say, "to get together."
+It is the distinctly twentieth-century
+programme. We must all learn the art of getting
+together, not merely to conserve the interests
+of literature and art and society, but
+to preserve the individual himself in his just
+rights. Any one who misunderstands the depth
+and the scope of the present political restlessness
+which is manifested in every section of the
+country, misunderstands the American instinct
+for fellowship. It is a law of that fellowship
+that what is right and legitimate for me is right
+and legitimate for the other fellow also. The
+American mind and the American conscience<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_237" id="Page_237">[Pg 237]</a></span>
+are becoming socialized before our very eyes.
+American art and literature must keep pace
+with this socialization of the intelligence and
+the conscience, or they will be no longer representative
+of the true America.</p>
+
+<p>Literary illustrations of this spirit of fraternalism
+lie close at hand. They are to be found
+here and there even in the rebellious, well-nigh
+anarchic, individualism of the Concord men.
+They are to be found throughout the prose
+and verse of Whittier. No one has preached
+a truer or more effective gospel of fellowship
+than Longfellow, whose poetry has been one
+of the pervasive influences in American democracy,
+although Longfellow had but little to
+say about politics and never posed in a slouch
+hat and with his trousers tucked into his boots.
+Fellowship is taught in the <i>Biglow Papers</i> of
+Lowell and the stories of Mrs. Stowe. It is
+wholly absent from the prose and verse of Poe,
+and it imparts but a feeble warmth to the delicately
+written pages of Hawthorne. But in the
+books written for the great common audience
+of American men and women, like the novels
+of Winston Churchill; and in the plays which
+have scored the greatest popular successes, like<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_238" id="Page_238">[Pg 238]</a></span>
+those of Denman Thompson, Bronson Howard,
+Gillette, Augustus Thomas, the doctrine of
+fellowship is everywhere to be traced. It is in
+the poems of James Whitcomb Riley and of
+Sam Walter Foss; in the work of hundreds of
+lesser known writers of verse and prose who
+have echoed Foss's sentiment about living in
+a "house by the side of the road" and being
+a "friend of man."</p>
+
+<p>To many readers the supreme literary example
+of the gospel of American fellowship
+is to be found in Walt Whitman. One will
+look long before one finds a more consistent
+or a nobler doctrine of fellowship than is
+chanted in <i>Leaves of Grass</i>. It is based upon
+individualism; the strong body and the possessed
+soul, sure of itself amid the whirling of
+the "quicksand years"; but it sets these strong
+persons upon the "open road" in comradeship;
+it is the sentiment of comradeship which
+creates the indissoluble union of "these States";
+and the States, in turn, in spite of every
+"alarmist," "partialist," or "infidel," are to
+stretch out unsuspicious and friendly hands of
+fellowship to the whole world. Anybody has
+the right to call <i>Leaves of Grass</i> poor poetry,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_239" id="Page_239">[Pg 239]</a></span>
+if he pleases; but nobody has the right to deny
+its magnificent Americanism.</p>
+
+<p>It is not merely in literature that this message
+of fellowship is brought to our generation.
+Let me quote a few sentences from the recent
+address of George Gray Barnard, the sculptor,
+in explaining the meaning of his marble groups
+now placed at the entrance to the Capitol
+of Pennsylvania. "I resolved," says Barnard,
+"that I would build such groups as should
+stand at the entrance to the People's temple
+... the home of those visions of the ever-widening
+and broadening brotherhood that gives
+to life its dignity and its meaning. Life is told
+in terms of labor. It is fitting that labor, its triumphs,
+its message, should be told to those
+who gaze upon a temple of the people. The
+worker is the hope of all the future. The needs
+of the worker, his problems, his hopes, his untold
+longings, his sacrifices, his triumphs, all
+of these are the field of the art of the future.
+Slowly we are groping our way towards the new
+brotherhood, and when that day dawns, men
+will enter a world made a paradise by labor.
+Labor makes us kin. It is for this reason that
+there has been placed at the entrance of this<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_240" id="Page_240">[Pg 240]</a></span>
+great building the message of the Adam and
+Eve of the future, the message of labor and of
+fraternity."</p>
+
+<p>That there are defects in this gospel and
+programme of American fellowship, every one
+is aware. If the obstacle to effective individualism
+is lack of discipline, the obstacles to effective
+fellowship are vagueness, crankiness, inefficiency,
+and the relics of primal selfishness.
+Nobody in our day has preached the tidings
+of universal fellowship more fervidly and powerfully
+than Tolstoï. Yet when one asks the
+great Russian, "What am I to do as a member
+of this fellowship?" Tolstoï gives but a confused
+and impractical answer. He applies to
+the complex and contradictory facts of our
+contemporary civilization the highest test and
+standard known to him: namely, the principles
+of the New Testament. But if you ask
+him precisely how these principles are to be
+made the working programme of to-morrow,
+the Russian mysticism and fanaticism settle
+over him like a fog. We pass Tolstoïans on
+the streets of our American cities every day;
+they have the eyes of dreamers, of those who
+would build, if they could, a new Heaven and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_241" id="Page_241">[Pg 241]</a></span>
+a new Earth. But they do not know exactly
+how to go about it. Our practical Western
+minds seize upon some actual plan for constructive
+labor. Miss Jane Addams organizes
+her settlements in the slums; Booker Washington
+gives his race models of industrial education;
+President Eliot has a theory of university
+reform and then struggles successfully for
+forty years to put that theory into practice.
+Compared with the concrete performance of
+such social workers as these, the gospel according
+to Whitman and Tolstoï is bound to seem
+vague in its outlines, and ineffective in its concrete
+results. That such a gospel attracts cranks
+and eccentrics of all sorts is not to be wondered
+at. They come and go, but the deeper conceptions
+of fraternalism remain.</p>
+
+<p>A further obstacle to the progress of fellowship
+lies in selfishness. But let us see how even
+the coarser and rawer and cruder traits of the
+American character may be related to the
+spirit of common endeavor which is slowly
+transforming our society, and modifying, before
+our eyes, our contemporary art and literature.</p>
+
+<p>"The West," says James Bryce, "is the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_242" id="Page_242">[Pg 242]</a></span>
+most American part of America, that is to say
+the part where those features which distinguish
+America from Europe come out in the strongest
+relief." We have already noted in our study
+of American romance how the call of the West
+represented for a while the escape from reality.
+The individual, following that retreating horizon
+which we name the West, found an escape
+from convention and from social law. Beyond
+the Mississippi or beyond the Rockies meant
+to him that "somewheres east of Suez" where
+the Ten Commandments are no longer to be
+found, where the individual has free rein. But
+by and by comes the inevitable reaction, the
+return to reality. The pioneer sobers down;
+he finds that "the Ten Commandments will not
+budge"; he sees the need of law and order; he
+organizes a vigilance committee; he impanels
+a jury, even though the old Spanish law does
+not recognize a jury. The new land settles to
+its rest. The output of the gold mines shrinks
+into insignificance when compared with the cash
+value of crops of hay and potatoes. The old
+picturesque individualism yields to a new social
+order, to the conception of the rights of
+the state. The story of the West is thus an<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_243" id="Page_243">[Pg 243]</a></span>
+epitome of the individual human life as well as
+the history of the United States.</p>
+
+<p>We have been living through a period where
+the mind of the West has seemed to be the
+typical national mind. We have been indifferent
+to traditions. We have overlooked the defective
+training of the individual, provided he
+"made good." We have often, as in the free
+silver craze, turned our back upon universal
+experience. We have been recklessly deaf to
+the teachings of history; we have spoken of the
+laws of literature and art as if they were mere
+conventions designed to oppress the free activity
+of the artist. Typical utterances of our
+writers are Jack London's "I want to get away
+from the musty grip of the past," and Frank
+Norris's "I do not want to write literature, I
+want to write life."</p>
+
+<p>The soul of the West, and a good deal of
+the soul of America, has been betrayed in words
+like those. Not to share this hopefulness of the
+West, its stress upon feeling rather than thinking,
+its superb confidence, is to be ignorant of
+the constructive forces of the nation. The humor
+of the West, its democracy, its rough kindness,
+its faith in the people, its generous notion<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_244" id="Page_244">[Pg 244]</a></span>
+of "the square deal for everybody," its elevation
+of the man above the dollar, are all typical
+of the American way of looking at the world.
+Typical also, is its social solidarity, its swift
+emotionalism of the masses. It is the Western
+interest in the ethical aspect of social movements
+that is creating some of the moving forces
+in American society to-day. Experiment stations
+of all kinds flourish on that soil. Chicago
+newspapers are more alive to new ideas than
+the newspapers of New York or Boston. No
+one can understand the present-day America
+if he does not understand the men and women
+who live between the Allegheny Mountains
+and the Rocky Mountains. They have worked
+out, more successfully than the composite population
+of the East, a general theory of the
+relation of the individual to society; in other
+words, a combination of individualism with
+fellowship.</p>
+
+<p>To draw up an indictment against this typical
+section of our country is to draw up an indictment
+against our people as a whole. And
+yet one who studies the literature and art produced
+in the great Mississippi Valley will see,
+I believe, that the needs of the West are the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_245" id="Page_245">[Pg 245]</a></span>
+real needs of America. Take that commonness
+of mind and tone, which friendly foreign critics,
+from De Tocqueville to Bryce, have indicated
+as one of the dangers of our democracy. This
+commonness of mind and tone is often one of
+the penalties of fellowship. It may mean a
+levelling down instead of a levelling up.</p>
+
+<p>Take the tyranny of the majority,&mdash;to which
+Mr. Bryce has devoted one of his most suggestive
+chapters. You begin by recognizing the
+rights of the majority. You end by believing
+that the majority must be right. You cease to
+struggle against it. In other words, you yield
+to what Mr. Bryce calls "the fatalism of the
+multitude." The individual has a sense of insignificance.
+It is vain to oppose the general
+current. It is easier to acquiesce and to submit.
+The sense of personal responsibility lessens.
+What is the use of battling for one's own opinions
+when one can already see that the multitude
+is on the other side? The greater your
+democratic faith in the ultimate rightness of
+the multitude, the less perhaps your individual
+power of will. The easier is it for you to believe
+that everything is coming out right, whether
+you put your shoulder to the wheel or not.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_246" id="Page_246">[Pg 246]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The problem of overcoming these evils is
+nothing less than the problem of spiritualizing
+democracy. There are some of our hero-worshipping
+people who think that that vast result
+can still be accomplished by harking back to
+some such programme as the "great man"
+theory of Carlyle. Another theory of spiritualizing
+democracy, no less familiar to the student
+of nineteen-century literature, is what is
+called "the divine average" doctrine of Walt
+Whitman. The average man is to be taught
+the glory of his walk and trade. Round every
+head there is to be an aureole. "A common
+wave of thought and joy, lifting mankind
+again," is to make us forget the old distinction
+between the individual and the social group.
+We are all to be the sons of the morning.</p>
+
+<p>We must not pause to analyze or to illustrate
+these two theories. Carlyle's theory seems
+to me to be outworn, and Whitman's theory
+is premature. But it is clear that they both
+admit that the mass of men are as yet incompletely
+spiritualized, not yet raised to their full
+stature. Unquestionably, our American life is,
+in European eyes at least, monotonously uniform.
+It is touched with self-complacency. It<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_247" id="Page_247">[Pg 247]</a></span>
+is too intent upon material progress. It confuses
+bigness with greatness. It is unrestful. It is
+marked by intellectual impatience. Our authors
+are eager to write life rather than literature. But
+they are so eager that they overlook the need
+of literary discipline. They do not learn to
+write literature and therefore most of them are
+incapable of interpreting life. They escape, perhaps,
+from "the musty grip of the past," but
+in so doing they refuse to learn the inexorable
+lessons of the past. Hence the fact that our
+books lack power, that they are not commensurate
+with the living forces of the country.
+The unconscious, moral, and spiritual life of
+the nation is not back of them, making "eye
+and hand and heart go to a new tune."</p>
+
+<p>If we could have that, we should ask no
+more, for we believe in the nation. I heard a
+doctor say, the other day, that a man's chief lesson
+was to pull his brain down into his spinal
+cord; that is to say, to make his activities not
+so much the result of conscious thought and
+volition, as of unconscious, reflex action; to
+stop thinking and willing, and simply <i>do</i> what
+one has to do. May there not be a hint here
+of the ultimate relation of the individual to the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_248" id="Page_248">[Pg 248]</a></span>
+social organism; the relation of our literature
+to our national character? There is a period,
+no doubt, when the individual must painfully
+question himself, test his powers, and acquire
+the sense of his own place in the world. But
+there also comes a more mature period when he
+takes that place unconsciously, does his work
+almost without thinking about it, as if it were
+not his work at all. The brain has gone down
+into the spinal cord; the man is functioning as
+apart of the organism of society; he has ceased
+to question, to plan, to decide; it is instinct
+that does his work for him.</p>
+
+<p>Literature and art, at their noblest, function
+in that instinctive way. They become the unconscious
+expression of a civilization. A nation
+passes out of its adolescent preoccupation
+with plans and with materials. It learns to do
+its work, precisely as Goethe bade the artist do
+his task, without talking about it. We, too,
+shall outgrow in time our questioning, our self-analysis,
+our futile comparison of ourselves
+with other nations, our self-conscious study of
+our own national character. We shall not forget
+the distinction between "each" and "all,"
+but "all" will increasingly be placed at the service<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_249" id="Page_249">[Pg 249]</a></span>
+of "each." With fellowship based upon
+individualism, and with individualism ever
+leading to fellowship, America will perform
+its vital tasks, and its literature will be the
+unconscious and beautiful utterance of its
+inner life.</p>
+
+
+<p class="center"><span class="smcap">THE END.</span></p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_250" id="Page_250"></a></span></p>
+<p class="center"><small>The Riverside Press</small><br /><br />
+
+<small>CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS</small><br /><br />
+
+<small>U. S. A.</small></p>
+
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<h3>Transcriber's Notes</h3>
+
+
+<p>Page <a href="#Page_67">67</a>: Changed compaign to campaign:<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">(Their compaign of "exposure," during the last decade,)</span><br />
+<br />
+Pages <a href="#Page_158">158</a>, <a href="#Page_165">165</a>: Retained spaced 'T is and 't is to match original text:<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">("'T is best to remain aloof from people,)</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">("If my bark sinks, 't is to another sea.")</span><br />
+<br />
+Page <a href="#Page_222">222</a>: Changed conciousness to consciousness:<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">(the preoccupied colonial conciousness.)</span><br />
+<br />
+Page <a href="#Page_223">223</a>: Changed explans to explains:<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">(It explans the still lingering popular suspicion)</span><br />
+<br />
+Page <a href="#Page_232">232</a>: Changed sojurns to sojourns:<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">(Fenimore Cooper came home from long sojurns in Europe.)</span><br />
+</p>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The American Mind, by Bliss Perry
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+</body>
+</html>
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The American Mind, by Bliss Perry
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The American Mind
+       The E. T. Earl Lectures
+
+Author: Bliss Perry
+
+Release Date: September 10, 2009 [EBook #29952]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE AMERICAN MIND ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Diane Monico, and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+THE AMERICAN MIND
+
+_The E. T. Earl Lectures_
+
+1912
+
+
+
+
+By the Same Author
+
+
+The American Mind
+Park-Street Papers
+John Greenleaf Whittier: A Memoir
+Walt Whitman
+The Amateur Spirit
+A Study of Prose Fiction
+The Powers at Play
+The Plated City
+Salem Kittredge and Other Stories
+The Broughton House
+
+
+
+
+The American Mind
+
+By Bliss Perry
+
+[Illustration: The Riverside Press]
+
+Boston and New York
+
+Houghton Mifflin Company
+
+1912
+
+
+
+
+COPYRIGHT, 1912, BY BLISS PERRY
+
+ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
+
+_Published October 1912_
+
+
+
+
+TO
+
+WALTER MORRIS HART
+
+
+
+
+Preface
+
+
+_The material for this book was delivered as the E. T. Earl Lectures
+for 1912 at the Pacific Theological Seminary, Berkeley, California, and
+I wish to take this opportunity to express to the President and Faculty
+of that institution my appreciation of their generous hospitality._
+
+_The lectures were also given at the Lowell Institute, Boston, the
+Brooklyn Institute, and elsewhere, under the title "American Traits in
+American Literature." In revising them for publication a briefer title
+has seemed desirable, and I have therefore availed myself of
+Jefferson's phrase "The American Mind," as suggesting, more accurately
+perhaps than the original title, the real theme of discussion._
+
+                              B. P.
+
+CAMBRIDGE, 1912.
+
+
+
+
+Contents
+
+
+I.   RACE, NATION, AND BOOK              3
+
+II.  THE AMERICAN MIND                  47
+
+III. AMERICAN IDEALISM                  86
+
+IV.  ROMANCE AND REACTION              128
+
+V.   HUMOR AND SATIRE                  166
+
+VI.  INDIVIDUALISM AND FELLOWSHIP      209
+
+
+
+
+THE AMERICAN MIND
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+Race, Nation, and Book
+
+
+Many years ago, as a student in a foreign university, I remember
+attacking, with the complacency of youth, a German history of the
+English drama, in six volumes. I lost courage long before the author
+reached the age of Elizabeth, but I still recall the subject of the
+opening chapter: it was devoted to the physical geography of Great
+Britain. Writing, as the good German professor did, in the triumphant
+hour of Taine's theory as to the significance of place, period, and
+environment in determining the character of any literary production,
+what could be more logical than to begin at the beginning? Have not the
+chalk cliffs guarding the southern coast of England, have not the
+fatness of the midland counties and the soft rainy climate of a North
+Atlantic island, and the proud, tenacious, self-assertive folk that are
+bred there, all left their trace upon _A Midsummer Night's Dream_, and
+_Every Man in his Humour_ and _She Stoops to Conquer_? Undoubtedly.
+Latitude and longitude, soil and rainfall and food-supply, racial
+origins and crossings, political and social and economic conditions,
+must assuredly leave their marks upon the mental and artistic
+productiveness of a people and upon the personality of individual
+writers.
+
+Taine, who delighted to point out all this, and whose _English
+Literature_ remains a monument of the defects as well as of the
+advantages of his method, was of course not the inventor of the
+climatic theory. It is older than Aristotle, who discusses it in his
+treatise on _Politics_. It was a topic of interest to the scholars of
+the Renaissance. Englishmen of the seventeenth century, with an unction
+of pseudo-science added to their natural patriotism, discovered in the
+English climate one of the reasons of England's greatness. Thomas
+Sprat, writing in 1667 on the History of the Royal Society, waxes bold
+and asserts: "If there can be a true character given of the Universal
+Temper of any Nation under Heaven, then certainly this must be ascribed
+to our countrymen, that they have commonly an unaffected sincerity,
+that they love to deliver their minds with a sound simplicity, that
+they have the middle qualities between the reserved, subtle southern
+and the rough, unhewn northern people, that they are not extremely
+prone to speak, that they are more concerned what others will think of
+the strength than of the fineness of what they say, and that a
+universal modesty possesses them. These qualities are so conspicuous
+and proper to the soil that we often hear them objected to us by some
+of our neighbor Satyrists in more disgraceful expressions.... Even the
+position of our climate, the air, the influence of the heaven, the
+composition of the English blood, as well as the embraces of the Ocean,
+seem to join with the labours of the _Royal Society_ to render our
+country a Land of Experimental Knowledge."
+
+The excellent Sprat was the friend and executor of the poet Cowley, who
+has in the Preface to his _Poems_ a charming passage about the relation
+of literature to the external circumstances in which it is written.
+
+"If _wit_ be such a _Plant_ that it scarce receives heat enough to keep
+it alive even in the _summer_ of our cold _Clymate_, how can it choose
+but wither in a long and a sharp _winter_? a warlike, various and a
+tragical age is best to write _of_, but worst to write _in_." And he
+adds this, concerning his own art of poetry: "There is nothing that
+requires so much serenity and chearfulness of _spirit_; it must not be
+either overwhelmed with the cares of _Life_, or overcast with the
+_Clouds_ of _Melancholy_ and _Sorrow_, or shaken and disturbed with the
+storms of injurious _Fortune_; it must, like the _Halcyon_, have fair
+weather to breed in. The Soul must be filled with bright and delightful
+_Idaeas_, when it undertakes to communicate delight to others, which is
+the main end of _Poesie_. One may see through the stile of _Ovid de
+Trist._, the humbled and dejected condition of _Spirit_ with which he
+wrote it; there scarce remains any footstep of that _Genius_, _Quem nec
+Jovis ira, nec ignes_, etc. The _cold_ of the country has strucken
+through all his faculties, and benummed the very _feet_ of his
+_Verses_."
+
+Madame de Stael's _Germany_, one of the most famous of the "national
+character" books, begins with a description of the German landscape.
+But though nobody, from Ovid in exile down to Madame de Stael,
+questions the general significance of place, time, and circumstances as
+affecting the nature of a literary product, when we come to the exact
+and as it were mathematical demonstration of the precise workings of
+these physical influences, our generation is distinctly more cautious
+than were the literary critics of forty years ago. Indeed, it is a
+hundred years since Fisher Ames, ridiculing the theory that climate
+acts directly upon literary products, said wittily of Greece: "The figs
+are as fine as ever, but where are the Pindars?" The theory of race, in
+particular, has been sharply questioned by the experts. "Saxon" and
+"Norman," for example, no longer seem to us such simple terms as
+sufficed for the purpose of Scott's _Ivanhoe_ or of Thierry's _Norman
+Conquest_, a book inspired by Scott's romance. The late Professor
+Freeman, with characteristic bluntness, remarked of the latter book:
+"Thierry says at the end of his work that there are no longer either
+Normans or Saxons except in history.... But in Thierry's sense of the
+word, it would be truer to say that there never were 'Normans' or
+'Saxons' anywhere, save in the pages of romances like his own."
+
+There is a brutal directness about this verdict upon a rival historian
+which we shall probably persist in calling "Saxon"; but it is no worse
+than the criticisms of Matthew Arnold's essay on "The Celtic Spirit"
+made to-day by university professors who happen to know Old Irish at
+first hand, and consequently consider Arnold's opinion on Celtic
+matters to be hopelessly amateurish.
+
+The wiser scepticism of our day concerning all hard-and-fast racial
+distinctions has been admirably summed up by Josiah Royce. "A race
+psychology," he declares, "is still a science for the future to
+discover.... We do not scientifically know what the true racial
+varieties of mental type really are. No doubt there are such varieties.
+The judgment day, or the science of the future, may demonstrate what
+they are. We are at present very ignorant regarding the whole matter."
+
+Nowhere have the extravagances of the application of racial theories to
+intellectual products been more pronounced than in the fields of art
+and literature. Audiences listen to a waltz which the programme
+declares to be an adaptation of a Hungarian folk-song, and though they
+may be more ignorant of Hungary than Shakespeare was of Bohemia, they
+have no hesitation in exclaiming: "How truly Hungarian this is!" Or,
+it may be, how truly "Japanese" is this vase which was made in
+Japan--perhaps for the American market; or how intensely "Russian" is
+this melancholy tale by Turgenieff. This prompt deduction of racial
+qualities from works of art which themselves give the critic all the
+information he possesses about the races in question,--or, in other
+words, the enthusiastic assertion that a thing is like itself,--is one
+of the familiar notes of amateur criticism. It is travelling in a
+circle, and the corregiosity of Corregio is the next station.
+
+Blood tells, no doubt, and a masterpiece usually betrays some token of
+the place and hour of its birth. A knowledge of the condition of
+political parties in Athens in 416 B.C. adds immensely to the enjoyment
+of the readers of Aristophanes; the fun becomes funnier and the daring
+even more splendid than before. Moliere's training as an actor does
+affect the dramaturgic quality of his comedies. All this is
+demonstrable, and to the prevalent consciousness of it our generation
+is deeply indebted to Taine and his pupils. But before displaying
+dogmatically the inevitable brandings of racial and national traits on
+a national literature, before pointing to this and that unmistakable
+evidence of local or temporal influence on the form or spirit of a
+masterpiece, we are now inclined to make some distinct reservations.
+These reservations are not without bearing upon our own literature in
+America.
+
+There are, for instance, certain artists who seem to escape the
+influences of the time-spirit. The most familiar example is that of
+Keats. He can no doubt be assigned to the George the Fourth period by a
+critical examination of his vocabulary, but the characteristic
+political and social movements of that epoch in England left him almost
+untouched. Edgar Allan Poe might have written some of his tales in the
+seventeenth century or in the twentieth; he might, like Robert Louis
+Stevenson, have written in Samoa rather than in the Baltimore,
+Philadelphia, or New York of his day; his description of the Ragged
+Mountains of Virginia, within very sight of the university which he
+attended, was borrowed, in the good old convenient fashion, from
+Macaulay; in fact, it requires something of Poe's own ingenuity to find
+in Poe, who is one of the indubitable assets of American literature,
+anything distinctly American.
+
+Wholly aside from such spiritual insulation of the single writer,
+there is the obvious fact that none of the arts, not even literature,
+and not all of them together, can furnish a wholly adequate
+representation of racial or national characteristics. It is well known
+to-day that the so-called "classic" examples of Greek art, most of
+which were brought to light and discoursed upon by critics from two to
+four centuries ago, represent but a single phase of Greek feeling; and
+that the Greeks, even in what we choose to call their most
+characteristic period, had a distinctly "romantic" tendency which their
+more recently discovered plastic art betrays. But even if we had all
+the lost statues, plays, poems, and orations, all the Greek paintings
+about which we know so little, and the Greek music about which we know
+still less, does anybody suppose that this wealth of artistic
+expression would furnish a wholly satisfactory notion of the racial and
+psychological traits of the Greek people?
+
+One may go even further. Does a truly national art exist anywhere,--an
+art, that is to say, which conveys a trustworthy and adequate
+expression of the national temper as a whole? We have but to reflect
+upon the European and American judgments, during the last thirty
+years, concerning the representative quality of the art of Japan, and
+to observe how many of those facile generalizations about the Japanese
+character, deduced from vases and prints and enamel, were smashed to
+pieces by the Russo-Japanese War. This may illustrate the blunders of
+foreign criticism, perhaps, rather than any inadequacy in the racially
+representative character of Japanese art. But it is impossible that
+critics, and artists themselves, should not err, in the conscious
+endeavor to pronounce upon the infinitely complex materials with which
+they are called upon to deal. We must confess that the expression of
+racial and national characteristics, by means of only one art, such as
+literature, or by all the arts together, is at best imperfect, and is
+always likely to be misleading unless corroborated by other evidence.
+
+For it is to be remembered that in literature, as in the other fields
+of artistic activity, we are dealing with the question of form; of
+securing a concrete and pleasurable embodiment of certain emotions. It
+may well happen that literature not merely fails to give an adequate
+report of the racial or national or personal emotions felt during a
+given epoch, but that it fails to report these emotions at all. Not
+only the "old, unhappy, far-off" things of racial experience, but the
+new and delight-giving experiences of the hour, may lack their poet.
+Widespread moods of public elation or wistfulness or depression have
+passed without leaving a shadow upon the mirror of art. There was no
+one to hold the mirror or even to fashion it. No note of Renaissance
+criticism, whether in Italy, France, or England, is more striking, and
+in a way more touching, than the universal feeling that in the
+rediscovery of the classics men had found at last the "terms of art,"
+the rules and methods of a game which they had long wished to be
+playing. Englishmen and Frenchmen of the sixteenth century will not
+allow that their powers are less virile, their emotions less eager,
+than those of the Greeks and Romans. Only, lacking the very terms of
+art, they had not been able to arrive at fit expression; the soul had
+found no body wherewith to clothe itself into beauty. As they avowed in
+all simplicity, they needed schoolmasters; the discipline of Aristotle
+and Horace and Virgil; a body of critical doctrine, to teach them how
+to express the France and England or Italy of their day, and thus give
+permanence to their fleeting vision of the world. Naive as may have
+been the Renaissance expression of this need of formal training, blind
+as it frequently was to the beauty which we recognize in the
+undisciplined vernacular literatures of mediaeval Europe, those groping
+scholars were essentially right. No one can paint or compose by nature.
+One must slowly master an art of expression.
+
+Now through long periods of time, and over many vast stretches of
+territory, as our own American writing abundantly witnesses, the whole
+formal side of expression may be neglected. "Literature," in its
+narrower sense, may not exist. In that restricted and higher meaning of
+the term, literature has always been uncommon enough, even in Athens or
+Florence. It demands not merely personal distinction or power, not
+merely some uncommon height or depth or breadth of capacity and
+insight, but a purely artistic training, which in the very nature of
+the case is rare. Millions of Russians, perhaps, have felt about the
+general problems of life much as Turgenieff felt, but they lacked the
+sheer literary art with which the _Notes of a Sportsman_ was written.
+Thousands of frontier lawyers and politicians shared Lincoln's hard
+and varied and admirable training in the mastery of speech, but in his
+hands alone was the weapon wrought to such perfection of temper and
+weight and edge that he spoke and wrote literature without knowing it.
+
+Such considerations belong, I am aware, to the accepted
+commonplaces,--perhaps to what William James used to call "the
+unprofitable delineation of the obvious." Everybody recognizes that
+literary gifts imply an exceptionally rich development of general human
+capacities, together with a professional aptitude and training of which
+but few men are capable. There is but one lumberman in camp who can
+play the fiddle, though the whole camp can dance. Thus the great book,
+we are forever saying, is truly representative of myriads of minds in a
+certain degree of culture, although but one man could have written it.
+The writing member of a family is often the one who acquires notoriety
+and a bank account, but he is likely to have candid friends who admit,
+though not always in his presence, that, aside from this one
+professional gift and practice, he is not intellectually or emotionally
+or spiritually superior to his brothers and sisters. Waldo Emerson
+thought himself the intellectual inferior of his brother Charles; and
+good observers loved to maintain that John Holmes was wittier than
+Oliver Wendell, and Ezekiel Webster a better lawyer than Daniel.
+
+Applied to the literary history of a race, this principle is
+suggestive. We must be slow to affirm that, because certain ideas and
+feelings did not attain, in this or that age or place, to purely
+literary expression, they were therefore not in existence. The men and
+women of the colonial period in our own country, for instance, have
+been pretty uniformly declared to have been deficient in the sense of
+beauty. What is the evidence? It is mostly negative. They produced no
+poetry, fiction, painting, sculpture, or music worthy of the name. They
+were predominantly Puritan, and the whole world has been informed that
+English Puritanism was hostile to Art. They were preoccupied with
+material and moral concerns. Even if they had remained in England,
+Professor Trent affirms, these contemporaries of Milton and Bunyan
+would have produced no art or literature. Now it is quite true that for
+nearly two hundred years after the date of the first settlement of the
+American colonists, opportunities for cultivating the arts did not
+exist. But that the sense of beauty was wholly atrophied, I, for one,
+do not believe. The passionate eagerness with which the forefathers
+absorbed the noblest of all poetry and prose in the pages of their one
+book, the Bible; the unwearied curiosity and care with which those
+farmers and fishermen and woodsmen read the signs of the sky; their awe
+of the dark wilderness and their familiar traffic with the great deep;
+the silences of lonely places; the opulence of primeval meadows by the
+clear streams; the English flowers that were made to bloom again in
+farmhouse windows and along garden walks; the inner visions, more
+lovely still, of duty and of moral law; the spirit of sacrifice; the
+daily walk with God, whether by green pastures of the spirit or through
+ways that were dark and terrible;--is there in all this no discipline
+of the soul in moral beauty, and no training of the eye to perceive the
+exquisite harmonies of the visible earth? It is true that the Puritans
+had no professional men of letters; it is true that doctrinal sermons
+provided their chief intellectual sustenance; true that their lives
+were stern, and that many of the softer emotions were repressed. But
+beauty may still be traced in the fragments of their recorded speech,
+in their diaries and letters and phrases of devotion. You will search
+the eighteenth century of old England in vain for such ecstasies of
+wonder at the glorious beauty of the universe as were penned by
+Jonathan Edwards in his youthful _Diary_. There is every presumption,
+from what we know of the two men, that Whittier's father and
+grandfather were peculiarly sensitive to the emotions of home and
+neighborhood and domesticity which their gifted descendant--too
+physically frail to be absorbed in the rude labor of the farm--has
+embodied in _Snow-Bound_. The Quaker poet knew that he surpassed his
+forefathers in facility in verse-making, but he would have been amused
+(as his _Margaret Smith's Journal_ proves) at the notion that his
+ancestors were without a sense of beauty or that they lacked
+responsiveness to the chords of fireside sentiment. He was simply the
+only Whittier, except his sister Elizabeth, who had ever found leisure,
+as old-fashioned correspondents used to say, "to take his pen in hand."
+This leisure developed in him the sense--latent no doubt in his
+ancestors--of the beauty of words, and the excitement of rhythm.
+Emerson's _Journal_ in the eighteen-thirties glows with a Dionysiac
+rapture over what he calls "delicious days"; but did the seven
+generations of clergymen from whom Emerson descended have no delicious
+and haughty and tender days that passed unrecorded? Formal literature
+perpetuates and glorifies many aspects of individual and national
+experience; but how much eludes it wholly, or is told, if at all, in
+broken syllables, in Pentecostal tongues that seem to be our own and
+yet are unutterably strange!
+
+To confess thus that literature, in the proper sense of the word,
+represents but a narrow segment of personal or racial experience, is
+very far from a denial of the genuineness and the significance of the
+affirmations which literature makes. We recognize instinctively that
+Whittier's _Snow-Bound_ is a truthful report, not merely of a certain
+farmhouse kitchen in East Haverhill, Massachusetts, during the early
+nineteenth century, but of a mode of thinking and feeling which is
+widely diffused wherever the Anglo-Saxon race has wandered. Perhaps
+_Snow-Bound_ lacks a certain universality of suggestiveness which
+belongs to a still more famous poem, _The Cotter's Saturday Night_ of
+Burns, but both of these portrayals of rustic simplicity and peace owe
+their celebrity to their truly representative character. They are
+evidence furnished by a single art, as to a certain mode and coloring
+of human existence; but every corroboration of that evidence heightens
+our admiration for the artistic sincerity and insight of the poet. To
+draw an illustration from a more splendid epoch, let us remind
+ourselves that the literature of the "spacious times of great
+Elizabeth"--a period of strong national excitement, and one deeply
+representative of the very noblest and most permanent traits of English
+national character--was produced within startlingly few years and in a
+local territory extremely limited. The very language in which that
+literature is clothed was spoken only by the court, by a couple of
+counties, and at the two universities. Its prose and verse were frankly
+experimental. It is true that such was the emotional ferment of the
+score of years preceding the Armada, that great captains and voyagers
+who scarcely wrote a line were hailed as kings of the realm of
+imagination, and that Puttenham, in phrases which that generation
+could not have found extravagant, inscribes his book on Poetry to Queen
+Elizabeth as the "most excellent Poet" of the age. Well, the glorified
+political images may grow dim or tawdry with time, but the poetry has
+endured, and it is everywhere felt to be a truly national, a deeply
+racial product. Its time and place and hour were all local; but the
+Canadian and the American, the South African and Australasian
+Englishman feels that that Elizabethan poetry is his poetry still.
+
+When we pass, therefore, as we must shortly do, to the consideration of
+this and that literary product of America, and to the scrutiny of the
+really representative character of our books, we must bear in mind that
+the questions concerning the race, the place, the hour, the
+man,--questions so familiar to modern criticism,--remain valid and
+indeed essential; but that in applying them to American writing there
+are certain allowances, qualifications, adjustments of the scale of
+values, which are no less important to an intelligent perception of the
+quality of our literature. This task is less simple than the critical
+assessment of a typical German or French or Scandinavian writer, where
+the strain of blood is unmixed, the continuity of literary tradition
+unbroken, the precise impact of historical and personal influences more
+easy to estimate. I open, for example, any one of half a dozen French
+studies of Balzac. Here is a many-sided man, a multifarious writer, a
+personality that makes ridiculous the merely formal pigeon-holing and
+labelling processes of professional criticism. And yet with what
+perfect precision of method and certainty of touch do Le Breton, for
+example, or Brunetiere, in their books on Balzac, proceed to indicate
+those impulses of race and period and environment which affected the
+character of Balzac's novels! The fact that he was born in Tours in
+1799 results in the inevitable and inevitably expert paragraphs about
+Gallic blood, and the physical exuberance of the Touraine surroundings
+of his youth, and the post-revolutionary tendency to disillusion and
+analysis. And so with Balzac's education, his removal to Paris in the
+Restoration period, his ventures in business and his affairs of love,
+his admiration for Shakespeare and for Fenimore Cooper; his mingled
+Romanticism and Realism; his Titanism and his childishness; his
+stupendous outline for the Human Comedy; and his scarcely less
+astounding actual achievement. All this is discussed by his biographers
+with the professional dexterity of critics trained intellectually in
+the Latin traditions and instinctively aware of the claims of race,
+biographers familiar with every page of French history, and profoundly
+interested, like their readers, in every aspect of French life. Alas,
+we may say, in despairing admiration of such workmanship, "they order
+these things better in France." And they do; but racial unity, and long
+lines of national literary tradition, make these things easier to order
+than they are with us. The intellectual distinction of American
+critical biographies like Lounsbury's _Cooper_ or Woodberry's
+_Hawthorne_ is all the more notable because we possess such a slender
+body of truly critical doctrine native to our own soil; because our
+national literary tradition as to available material and methods is
+hardly formed; because the very word "American" has a less precise
+connotation than the word "New Zealander."
+
+Let us suppose, for instance, that like Professor Woodberry a few years
+ago, we were asked to furnish a critical study of Hawthorne. The author
+of _The Scarlet Letter_ is one of the most justly famous of American
+writers. But precisely what national traits are to be discovered in
+this eminent fellow-countryman of ours? We turn, like loyal disciples
+of Taine and Sainte-Beuve, to his ancestral stock. We find that it is
+English as far back as it can be traced; as purely English as the
+ancestry of Dickens or Thackeray, and more purely English than the
+ancestry of Browning or Burke or His Majesty George the Fifth. Was
+Hawthorne, then, simply an Englishman living in America? He himself did
+not think so,--as his _English Note-Books_ abundantly prove. But just
+what subtle racial differentiation had been at work, since William
+Hawthorne migrated to Massachusetts with Winthrop in 1630? Here we
+face, unless I am mistaken, that troublesome but fascinating question
+of Physical Geography. Climate, soil, food, occupation, religious or
+moral preoccupation, social environment, Salem witchcraft and Salem
+seafaring had all laid their invisible hands upon the physical and
+intellectual endowment of the child born in 1804. Does this make
+Nathaniel Hawthorne merely an "Englishman with a difference," as Mr.
+Kipling, born in India, is an "Englishman with a difference"?
+Hawthorne would have smiled, or, more probably, he would have sworn, at
+such a question. He considered himself an American Democrat; in fact a
+_contra mundum_ Democrat, for good or for ill. Is it, then, a political
+theory, first put into full operation in this country a scant
+generation before Hawthorne's birth, which made him un-English? We must
+walk warily here. Our Canadian neighbors of English stock have much the
+same climate, soil, occupations, and preoccupations as the inhabitants
+of the northern territory of the United States. They have much the same
+courts, churches, and legislatures. They read the same books and
+magazines. They even prefer baseball to cricket. They are loyal
+adherents of a monarchy, but they are precisely as free, as
+self-governing, and--in the social sense of the word--as
+"democratic"--in spite of the absence of a republican form of
+government--as the citizens of that "land of the free and home of the
+brave" which lies to the south of them. Yet Canadian literature, one
+may venture to affirm, has remained to this hour a "colonial"
+literature, or, if one prefers the phrase, a literature of "Greater
+Britain." Was Hawthorne possibly right in his instinct that politics
+did make a difference, and that in writing _The Marble Faun_,--the
+scene of which is laid in Rome,--or _The House of the Seven
+Gables_,--which is a story of Salem,--he was consistently engaged in
+producing, not "colonial" or "Greater-British" but distinctly American
+literature? We need not answer this question prematurely, if we wish to
+reserve our judgment, but it is assuredly one of the questions which
+the biographers and critics of our men of letters must ultimately face
+and answer.
+
+Furthermore, the student of literature produced in the United States of
+America must face other questions almost as complicated as this of
+race. In fact, when we choose Hawthorne as a typical case in which to
+observe the American refashioning of the English temper into something
+not English, we are selecting a very simple problem compared with the
+complexities which have resulted from the mingling of various European
+stocks upon American soil. But take, for the moment, the mere obvious
+matter of expanse of territory. We are obliged to reckon, not with a
+compact province such as those in which many Old World literatures
+have been produced, but with what our grandfathers considered a
+"boundless continent." This vast national domain was long ago
+"organized" for political purposes: but so far as literature is
+concerned it remains unorganized to-day. We have, as has been
+constantly observed, no literary capital, like London or Paris, to
+serve as the seat of centralized authority; no code of literary
+procedure and conduct; no "lawgivers of Parnassus"; no supreme court of
+letters, whose judgments are recognized and obeyed. American public
+opinion asserts itself with singular unanimity and promptness in the
+field of politics. In literary matters we remain in the stage of
+anarchic individualism, liable to be stampeded from time to time by
+mob-excitement over a popular novel or moralistic tract, and then
+disintegrating, as before, into an incoherent mass of individually
+intelligent readers.
+
+The reader who has some personal acquaintance with the variations of
+type in different sections of this immense territory of ours finds his
+curiosity constantly stimulated by the presence of sectional and local
+characteristics. There are sharply cut provincial peculiarities, of
+course, in Great Britain and in Germany, in Italy and Spain, and in
+all of the countries a corresponding "regional" literature has been
+developed. Our provincial variations of accent and vocabulary, in
+passing from North to South or East to West, are less striking, on the
+whole, than the dialectical differences found in the various English
+counties. But our general uniformity of grammar and the comparatively
+slight variations in spoken accent cover an extraordinary variety of
+local and sectional modes of thinking and feeling. The reader of
+American short stories and lyrics must constantly ask himself: Is this
+truth to local type consistent with the main trend of American
+production? Is this merely a bit of Virginia or Texas or California, or
+does it, while remaining no less Southern or Western in its local
+coloring, suggest also the ampler light, the wide generous air of the
+United States of America?
+
+The observer of this relationship between local and national types will
+find some American communities where all the speech or habitual thought
+is of the future. Foreigners usually consider such communities the most
+typically "American," as doubtless they are; but there are other
+sections, still more faithfully exploited by local writers, where the
+mood is wistful and habitually regards the past. America, too, like the
+Old World,--and in New England more than elsewhere,--has her note of
+decadence, of disillusion, of autumnal brightness and transiency. Some
+sections of the country, and notably the slave-holding states in the
+forty years preceding the Civil War, have suffered widespread
+intellectual blight. The best talent of the South, for a generation,
+went into politics, in the passionately loyal endeavor to prop up a
+doomed economic and social system; and the loss to the intellectual
+life of the country cannot be reckoned. Over vast sections of our
+prosperous and intelligent people of the Mississippi Basin to-day the
+very genius of commonplaceness seems to hover. Take the great State of
+Iowa, with its well-to-do and homogeneous population, its fortunate
+absence of perplexing city-problems, its general air of prosperity and
+content. It is a typical state of the most typically American portion
+of the country; but it breeds no books. Yet in Indiana, another state
+of the same general conditions as to population and prosperity, and
+only one generation further removed than Iowa from primitive pioneer
+conditions, books are produced at a rate which provokes a universal
+American smile. I do not affirm that the literary critic is bound to
+answer all such local puzzles as this. But he is bound at least to
+reflect upon them, and to demand of every local literary product
+throughout this varied expanse of states: Is the root of the
+"All-American" plant growing here, or is it not?
+
+Furthermore, the critic must pursue this investigation of national
+traits in our writing, not only over a wide and variegated territory,
+but through a very considerable sweep of time. American literature is
+often described as "callow," as the revelation of "national
+inexperience," and in other similar terms. It is true that we had no
+professional men of letters before Irving and that the blossoming time
+of the notable New England group of writers did not come until nearly
+the middle of the nineteenth century. But we have had time enough,
+after all, to show what we wish to be and what we are. There have been
+European books about America ever since the days of Columbus; it is
+three hundred years since the first books were written in America.
+Modern English prose, the language of journalism, of science, of social
+intercourse, came into being only in the early eighteenth century, in
+the age of Queen Anne. But Cotton Mather's _Magnalia_, a vast book
+dealing with the past history of New England, was printed in 1702, only
+a year later than Defoe's _True-Born Englishman_. For more than two
+centuries the development of English speech and English writing on this
+side of the Atlantic has kept measurable pace--now slower, now
+swifter--with the speech of the mother country. When we recall the
+scanty term of years within which was produced the literature of the
+age of Elizabeth, it seems like special pleading to insist that America
+has not yet had time to learn or recite her bookish lessons.
+
+This is not saying that we have had a continuous or adequate
+development, either of the intellectual life, or of literary
+expression. There are certain periods of strong intellectual movement,
+of heightened emotion, alike in the colonial epoch and since the
+adoption of our present form of government, in which it is natural to
+search for revelations of those qualities which we now feel to be
+essential to our national character. Certain epochs of our history, in
+other words, have been peculiarly "American," and have furnished the
+most ideal expression of national tendencies.
+
+If asked to select the three periods of our history which in this sense
+have been most significant, most of us, I imagine, would choose the
+first vigorous epoch of New England Puritanism, say from 1630 to 1676;
+then, the epoch of the great Virginians, say from 1766 to 1789; and
+finally the epoch of distinctly national feeling, in which New England
+and the West were leaders, between 1830 and 1865. Those three
+generations have been the most notable in the three hundred years since
+the permanent settlements began. Each of them has revealed, in a noble
+fashion, the political, ethical, and emotional traits of our people;
+and although the first two of the three periods concerned themselves
+but little with literary expression of the deep-lying characteristics
+of our stock, the expression is not lacking. Thomas Hooker's sermon on
+the "Foundation of Political Authority," John Winthrop's grave advice
+on the "Nature of Liberty," Jefferson's "Declaration," Webster's "Reply
+to Hayne," Lincoln's "Inaugurals," are all fundamentally American.
+They are political in their immediate purpose, but, like the speeches
+of Edmund Burke, they are no less literature because they are concerned
+with the common needs and the common destiny. Hooker and Winthrop wrote
+before our formal national existence began; Jefferson, at the hour of
+the nation's birth; and Lincoln, in the day of its sharpest trial. Yet,
+though separated from one another by long intervals of time, the
+representative figures of the three epochs, English in blood and
+American in feeling, are not so unlike as one might think. A thorough
+grasp of our literature thus requires--and in scarcely less a degree
+than the mastery of one of the literatures of Europe--a survey of a
+long period, the search below the baffling or contradictory surface of
+national experience for the main drift of that experience, and the
+selection of the writers, of one generation after another, who have
+given the most fit and permanent and personalized expression to the
+underlying forces of the national life.
+
+There is another preliminary word which needs no less to be said. It
+concerns the question of international influences upon national
+literature. Our own generation has been taught by many events that no
+race or country can any longer live "to itself." Internationalism is in
+the very atmosphere: and not merely as regards politics in the narrowed
+sense, but with reference to questions of economics, sociology, art,
+and letters. The period of international isolation of the United
+States, we are rather too fond of saying, closed with the
+Spanish-American War. It would be nearer the truth to say that so far
+as the things of the mind and the spirit are concerned, there has never
+been any absolute isolation. The Middle West, from the days of Jackson
+to Lincoln, that raw West described by Dickens and Mrs. Trollope, comes
+nearer isolation than any other place or time. The period of the most
+eloquent assertions of American independence in artistic and literary
+matters was the epoch of New England Transcendentalism, which was
+itself singularly cosmopolitan in its literary appetites. The letters
+and journals of Emerson, Whitman, and Thoreau show the strong European
+meat on which these men fed, just before their robust declarations of
+our self-sufficiency. But there is no real self-sufficiency, and
+Emerson and Whitman themselves, in other moods, have written most
+suggestive passages upon our European inheritances and affiliations.
+
+The fortunes of the early New England colonies, in fact, were followed
+by Protestant Europe with the keen solicitude and affection of kinsmen.
+Oliver Cromwell signs his letter to John Cotton in 1651, "Your
+affectionate friend to serve you." The settlements were regarded as
+outposts of European ideas. Their Calvinism, so cheaply derided and so
+superficially understood, even to-day, was the intellectual platform of
+that portion of Europe which was mentally and morally awake to the vast
+issues involved in individual responsibility and self-government.
+Contemporary European democracy is hardly yet aware that Calvin's
+_Institutes_ is one of its great charters. Continental Protestantism of
+the seventeenth century, like the militant Republicanism of the English
+Commonwealth, thus perused with fraternal interest the letters from
+Massachusetts Bay. And if Europe watched America in those days, it was
+no less true that America was watching Europe. Towards the end of the
+century, Cotton Mather, "prostrate in the dust" before the Lord, as
+his newly published _Diary_ tells us, is wrestling "on the behalf of
+whole nations." He receives a "strong Persuasion that very overturning
+Dispensations of Heaven will quickly befal the French Empire"; he
+"lifts up his Cries for a mighty and speedy Revolution" there. "I
+spread before the Lord the Condition of His Church abroad ...
+especially in Great Britain and in France. And I prayed that the poor
+Vaudois may not be ruined by the Peace now made between France and
+Savoy. I prayed likewise for further Mortifications upon the Turkish
+Empire." Here surely was one colonial who was trying, in Cecil Rhodes's
+words, to "think continentally!"
+
+Furthermore, the leaders of those early colonies were in large measure
+university men, disciplined in the classics, fit representatives of
+European culture. It has been reckoned that between the years 1630 and
+1690 there were in New England as many graduates of Cambridge and
+Oxford as could be found in any population of similar size in the
+mother country. At one time during those years there was in
+Massachusetts and Connecticut alone a Cambridge graduate for every two
+hundred and fifty inhabitants. Like the exiled Greeks in Matthew
+Arnold's poem, they "undid their corded bales"--of learning, it is
+true, rather than of merchandise--upon these strange and inhospitable
+shores: and the traditions of Greek and Hebrew and Latin scholarship
+were maintained with no loss of continuity. To the lover of letters
+there will always be something fine in the thought of that narrow
+seaboard fringe of faith in the classics, widening slowly as the
+wilderness gave way, making its invisible road up the rivers, across
+the mountains, into the great interior basin, and only after the Civil
+War finding an enduring home in the magnificent state universities of
+the West. Lovers of Greek and Roman literature may perhaps always feel
+themselves pilgrims and exiles in this vast industrial democracy of
+ours, but they have at least secured for us, and that from the very
+first day of the colonies, some of the best fruitage of
+internationalism. For that matter, what was, and is, that one Book--to
+the eyes of the Protestant seventeenth century infallible and
+inexpressively sacred--but the most potent and universal commerce of
+ideas and spirit, passing from the Orient, through Greek and Roman
+civilization, into the mind and heart of Western Europe and America?
+
+    "Oh, East is East, and West is West,
+    And never the twain shall meet,"
+
+declares a confident poet of to-day. But East and West met long ago in
+the matchless phrases translated from Hebrew and Greek and Latin into
+the English Bible; and the heart of the East there answers to the heart
+of the West as in water face answereth to face. That the colonizing
+Englishmen of the seventeenth century were Hebrews in spiritual
+culture, and heirs of Greece and Rome without ceasing to be Anglo-Saxon
+in blood, is one of the marvels of the history of civilization, and it
+is one of the basal facts in the intellectual life of the United States
+of to-day.
+
+Yet that life, as I have already hinted, is not so simple in its terms
+as it might be if we had to reckon merely with the men of a single
+stock, albeit with imaginations quickened by contact with an Oriental
+religion, and minds disciplined, directly or indirectly, by the methods
+and the literatures which the Revival of Learning imposed upon modern
+Europe. American formal culture is, and has been, from the beginning,
+predominantly English. Yet it has been colored by the influences of
+other strains of race, and by alien intellectual traditions. Such
+international influences as have reached us through German and
+Scandinavian, Celtic and Italian, Russian and Jewish immigration, are
+well marked in certain localities, although their traces may be
+difficult to follow in the main trend of American writing. The presence
+of Negro, Irishman, Jew, and German, has affected our popular humor and
+satire, and is everywhere to be marked in the vocabulary and tone of
+our newspapers. The cosmopolitan character of the population of such
+cities as New York and Chicago strikes every foreign observer. Each one
+of the manifold races now transplanted here and in process of
+Americanization has for a while its own newspapers and churches and
+social life carried on in a foreign dialect. But this stage of
+evolution passes swiftly. The assimilative forces of American schools,
+industry, commerce, politics, are too strong for the foreign immigrant
+to resist. The Italian or Greek fruit pedler soon prefers to talk
+English, and his children can be made to talk nothing else. This
+extraordinary amalgamating power of English culture explains, no
+doubt, why German and Scandinavian immigration--to take examples from
+two of the most intelligent and educated races that have contributed to
+the up-building of the country--have left so little trace, as yet, upon
+our more permanent literature.
+
+But blood will have its say sooner or later. No one knows how
+profoundly the strong mentality of the Jew, already evident enough in
+the fields of manufacturing and finance, will mould the intellectual
+life of the United States. The mere presence, to say nothing of the
+rapid absorption, of these millions upon millions of aliens, as the
+children of the Puritans regard them, is a constant evidence of the
+subtle ways in which internationalism is playing its part in the
+fashioning of the American temper. The moulding hand of the German
+university has been laid upon our higher institutions of learning for
+seventy years, although no one can demonstrate in set terms whether the
+influence of Goethe, read now by three generations of American scholars
+and studied by millions of youth in the schools, has left any real mark
+upon our literature. Abraham Lincoln, in his store-keeping days, used
+to sit under a tree outside the grocery store of Lincoln and Berry,
+reading Voltaire. One would like to think that he then and there
+assimilated something of the incomparable lucidity of style of the
+great Frenchman. But Voltaire's influence upon Lincoln's style cannot
+be proved, any more than Rousseau's direct influence upon Jefferson.
+Tolstoi and Ibsen have, indeed, left unmistakable traces upon American
+imaginative writing during the last quarter of a century. Frank Norris
+was indebted to Zola for the scheme of that uncompleted trilogy, the
+prose epic of the Wheat; and Owen Wister has revealed a not uncommon
+experience of our younger writing men in confessing that the impulse
+toward writing his Western stories came to him after reading the
+delightful pages of a French romancer. But all this tells us merely
+what we knew well enough before: that from colonial days to the present
+hour the Atlantic has been no insuperable barrier between the thought
+of Europe and the mind of America; that no one race bears aloft all the
+torches of intellectual progress; and that a really vital writer of any
+country finds a home in the spiritual life of every other country, even
+though it may be difficult to find his name in the local directory.
+
+Finally, we must bear in mind that purely literary evidence as to the
+existence of certain national traits needs corroboration from many
+non-literary sources. If it is dangerous to judge modern Japan by the
+characteristics of a piece of pottery, it is only less misleading to
+select half a dozen excellent New England writers of fifty years ago as
+sole witnesses to the qualities of contemporary America. We must
+broaden the range of evidence. The historians of American literature
+must ultimately reckon with all those sources of mental and emotional
+quickening which have yielded to our pioneer people a substitute for
+purely literary pleasures: they must do justice to the immense mass of
+letters, diaries, sermons, editorials, speeches, which have served as
+the grammar and phrase-book of national feeling. A history of our
+literature must be flexible enough, as I have said elsewhere, to
+include "the social and economic and geographical background of
+American life; the zest of the explorer, the humor of the pioneer; the
+passion of old political battles; the yearning after spiritual truth
+and social readjustment; the baffled quest of beauty. Such a history
+must be broad enough for the _Federalist_ and for Webster's oratory,
+for Beecher's sermons and Greeley's editorials, and the Lincoln-Douglas
+debates. It must picture the daily existence of our citizens from the
+beginning; their working ideas, their phrases and shibboleths and all
+their idols of the forum and the cave. It should portray the misspelled
+ideals of a profoundly idealistic people who have been usually immersed
+in material things."
+
+Our most characteristic American writing, as must be pointed out again
+and again, is not the self-conscious literary performance of a Poe or a
+Hawthorne. It is civic writing; a citizen literature, produced, like
+the _Federalist_, and Garrison's editorials and Grant's _Memoirs_,
+without any stylistic consciousness whatever; a sort of writing which
+has been incidental to the accomplishment of some political, social, or
+moral purpose, and which scarcely regards itself as literature at all.
+The supreme example of it is the "Gettysburg Address." Homeliness,
+simplicity, directness, preoccupation with moral issues, have here been
+but the instrument of beauty; phrase and thought and feeling have a
+noble fitness to the national theme. "Nothing of Europe here," we may
+instinctively exclaim, and yet the profounder lesson of this citizen
+literature of ours is in the universality of the fundamental questions
+which our literature presents. The "Gettysburg Address" would not
+to-day have a secure fame in Europe if it spoke nothing to the ear and
+the heart of Europe. And this brings us back to our main theme.
+Lincoln, like Franklin, like many another lesser master of our citizen
+literature, is a typical American. In the writing produced by such men,
+there cannot but be a revelation of American characteristics. We are
+now to attempt an analysis of these national traits, as they have been
+expressed by our representative writers.
+
+Simple as the problem seems, when thus stated, its adequate performance
+calls for a constant sensitiveness to the conditions prevalent, during
+a long period, in English and Continental society and literature. The
+most rudimentary biographical sketch of such eminent contemporary
+American authors as Mr. Henry James and Mr. Howells shows that Europe
+is an essential factor in the intellectual life and in the artistic
+procedure of these writers. Yet in their racial and national
+relationships they are indubitably American. In their local variations
+from type they demand from the critic an understanding of the culture
+of the Ohio Valley, and of Boston and New York. The analysis of the
+mingled racial, psychological, social, and professional traits in these
+masters of contemporary American fiction presents to the critic a
+problem as fascinating as, and I think more complex than, a
+corresponding study of Meredith or Hardy, of Daudet or D'Annunzio. In
+the three hundred years that have elapsed since Englishmen who were
+trained under Queen Elizabeth settled at Jamestown, Virginia, we have
+bred upon this soil many a master of speech. They have been men of
+varied gifts: now of clear intelligence, now of commanding power; men
+of rugged simplicity and of tantalizing subtlety; poets, novelists,
+orators, essayists, and publicists, who have interpreted the soul of
+America to the mind of the world. Our task is to exhibit the essential
+Americanism of these spokesmen of ours, to point out the traits which
+make them most truly representative of the instincts of the tongue-tied
+millions who work and plan and pass from sight without the gift and
+art of utterance; to find, in short, among the books which are
+recognized as constituting our American literature, some vital and
+illuminating illustrations of our national characteristics. For a truly
+"American" book--like an American national game, or an American
+city--is that which reveals, consciously or unconsciously, the American
+mind.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+The American Mind
+
+
+The origin of the phrase, "the American mind," was political. Shortly
+after the middle of the eighteenth century, there began to be a
+distinctly American way of regarding the debatable question of British
+Imperial control. During the period of the Stamp Act agitation our
+colonial-bred politicians and statesmen made the discovery that there
+was a mode of thinking and feeling which was native--or had by that
+time become a second nature--to all the colonists. Jefferson, for
+example, employs those resonant and useful words "the American mind" to
+indicate that throughout the American colonies an essential unity of
+opinion had been developed as regards the chief political question of
+the day.
+
+It is one of the most striking characteristics of the present United
+States that this instinct of political unity should have endured,
+triumphing over every temporary motive of division. The inhabitants of
+the United States belong to a single political type. There is scarcely
+a news-stand in any country of Continental Europe where one may not
+purchase a newspaper openly or secretly opposed to the government,--not
+merely attacking an unpopular administration or minister or ruler,--but
+desiring and plotting the overthrow of the entire political system of
+the country. It is very difficult to find such a newspaper anywhere in
+the United States. I myself have never seen one. The opening sentence
+of President Butler's admirable little book, _The American as He Is_,
+originally delivered as lectures before the University of Copenhagen,
+runs as follows:
+
+    "The most impressive fact in American life is the substantial
+    unity of view in regard to the fundamental questions of
+    government and of conduct among a population so large,
+    distributed over an area so wide, recruited from sources so
+    many and so diverse, living under conditions so widely
+    different."
+
+But the American type of mind is evident in many other fields than that
+of politics. The stimulating book from which I have just quoted,
+attempts in its closing paragraph, after touching upon the more salient
+features of our national activity, to define the typical American in
+these words:--
+
+    "The typical American is he who, whether rich or poor,
+    whether dwelling in the North, South, East, or West, whether
+    scholar, professional man, merchant, manufacturer, farmer, or
+    skilled worker for wages, lives the life of a good citizen
+    and good neighbor; who believes loyally and with all his
+    heart in his country's institutions, and in the underlying
+    principles on which these institutions are built; who directs
+    both his private and his public life by sound principles; who
+    cherishes high ideals; and who aims to train his children for
+    a useful life and for their country's service."
+
+This modest and sensible statement indicates the existence of a
+national point of view. We have developed in the course of time, as a
+result of certain racial inheritances and historic experiences, a
+national "temper" or "ethos"; a more or less settled way of considering
+intellectual, moral, and social problems; in short, a peculiarly
+national attitude toward the universal human questions.
+
+In a narrower sense, "the American mind" may mean the characteristics
+of the American intelligence, as it has been studied by Mr. Bryce, De
+Tocqueville, and other trained observers of our methods of thinking. It
+may mean the specific achievements of the American intelligence in
+fields like science and scholarship and history. In all these
+particular departments of intellectual activity the methods and the
+results of American workers have recently received expert and by no
+means uniformly favorable assessment from investigators upon both sides
+of the Atlantic. But the observer of literary processes and productions
+must necessarily take a somewhat broader survey of national tendencies.
+He must study what Nathaniel Hawthorne, with the instinct of a romance
+writer, preferred to call the "heart" as distinguished from the mere
+intellect. He must watch the moral and social and imaginative impulses
+of the individual; the desire for beauty; the hunger for
+self-expression; the conscious as well as the unconscious revelation of
+personality; and he must bring all this into relation--if he can, and
+knowing that the finer secrets are sure to elude him!--with the
+age-long impulses of the race and with the mysterious tides of feeling
+that flood or ebb with the changing fortunes of the nation.
+
+One way to begin to understand the typical American is to take a look
+at him in Europe. It does not require a professional beggar or a
+licensed guide to identify him. Not that the American in Europe need
+recall in any particular the familiar pictorial caricature of "Uncle
+Sam." He need not bear any outward resemblances to such stage types as
+that presented in "The Man From Home." He need not even suggest, by
+peculiarities of speech or manner, that he has escaped from the pages
+of those novels of international observation in which Mr. James and Mr.
+Howells long ago attained an unmatched artistry. Our "American Abroad,"
+at the present hour, may be studied without the aid of any literary
+recollections whatever. There he is, with his wife and daughters, and
+one may stare at him with all the frankness of a compatriot. He is
+obviously well-to-do,--else he would not be there at all,--and the wife
+and daughters seem very well-to-do indeed. He is kindly;
+considerate--sometimes effusively considerate--of his fellow
+travellers; patient with the ladies of his family, who in turn are
+noticeably patient with him. He is genial--very willing to talk with
+polyglot headwaiters and chauffeurs; in fact the wife and daughters are
+also practised conversationalists, although their most loyal admirers
+must admit that their voices _are_ a trifle sharp or flat. These ladies
+are more widely read than "papa." He has not had much leisure for
+Ruskin and Symonds and Ferrero. His lack of historical training limits
+his curiosity concerning certain phases of his European surroundings;
+but he uses his eyes well upon such general objects as trains,
+hotel-service, and Englishmen. In spite of his habitual geniality, he
+is rather critical of foreign ways, although this is partly due to his
+lack of acquaintance with them. Intellectually, he is really more
+modest and self-distrustful than his conversation or perhaps his
+general bearing would imply; in fact, his wife and daughters,
+emboldened very likely by the training of their women's clubs, have a
+more commendable daring in assaulting new intellectual positions.
+
+Yet the American does not lack quickness, either of wits or emotion.
+His humor and sentiment make him an entertaining companion. Even when
+his spirits run low, his patriotism is sure to mount in proportion, and
+he can always tell you with enthusiasm in just how many days he expects
+to be back again in what he calls "God's country."
+
+This, or something like this, is the "American" whom the European
+regards with curiosity, contempt, admiration, or envy, as the case may
+be, but who is incontestably modifying Western Europe, even if he is
+not, as many journalists and globe-trotters are fond of asserting,
+"Americanizing" the world. Interesting as it is to glance at him
+against that European background which adds picturesqueness to his
+qualities, the "Man from Home" is still more interesting in his native
+habitat. There he has been visited by hundreds of curious and observant
+foreigners, who have left on record a whole literature of bewildered
+and bewildering, irritating and flattering and amusing testimony
+concerning the Americans. Settlers like Crevecoeur in the glowing dawn
+of the Republic, poets like Tom Moore, novelists like Charles
+Dickens,--other novelists like Mr. Arnold Bennett,--professional
+travellers like Captain Basil Hall, students of contemporary sociology
+like Paul Bourget and Mr. H. G. Wells, French journalists, German
+professors, Italian admirers of Colonel Roosevelt, political theorists
+like De Tocqueville, profound and friendly observers like Mr. Bryce,
+have had, and will continue to have, their say.
+
+The reader who tries to take all this testimony at its face value, and
+to reconcile its contradictions, will be a candidate for the insane
+asylum. Yet the testimony is too amusing to be neglected and some of it
+is far too important to be ignored. Mr. John Graham Brooks, after long
+familiarity with these foreign opinions of America, has gathered some
+of the most representative of them into a delightful and stimulating
+volume entitled _As Others See Us_. There one may find examples of what
+the foreigner has seen, or imagined he has seen, during his sojourn in
+America, and what he has said about it afterwards. Mr. Brooks is too
+charitable to our visitors to quote the most fantastic and highly
+colored of their observations; but what remains is sufficiently
+bizarre.
+
+The real service of such a volume is to train us in discounting the
+remarks made about us in a particular period like the
+eighteen-thirties, or from observations made in a special place, like
+Newport, or under special circumstances, like a Bishop's private car.
+It helps us to make allowances for the inevitable angle of nationality,
+the equally inevitable personal equation. A recent ambitious book on
+America, by a Washington journalist of long residence here, although of
+foreign birth, declares that "the chief trait of the American people is
+the love of gain and the desire of wealth acquired through commerce."
+That is the opinion of an expert observer, who has had extraordinary
+chances for seeing precisely what he has seen. I think it,
+notwithstanding, a preposterous opinion, fully as preposterous as
+Professor Muensterberg's notion that America has latterly grown more
+monarchical in its tendencies,--but I must remember that, in my own
+case, as in that of the journalist under consideration, there are
+allowances to be made for race, and training, and natural idiosyncracy
+of vision.
+
+The native American, it may be well to remember, is something of an
+observer himself. If his observations upon the characteristics of his
+countrymen are less piquant than the foreigner's, it is chiefly
+because the American writes, upon the whole, less incisively than he
+talks. But incisive native writing about American traits is not
+lacking. If a missionary, say in South Africa, has read the New York
+_Nation_ every week for the past forty years, he has had an
+extraordinary "moving picture" of American tendencies, as interpreted
+by independent, trenchant, and high-minded criticism. That a file of
+the _Nation_ will convey precisely the same impression of American
+tendencies as a file of the _Sun_, for instance, or the _Boston Evening
+Transcript_, is not to be affirmed. The humor of the London _Punch_ and
+the New York _Life_ does not differ more radically than the aspects of
+American civilization as viewed by two rival journals in Newspaper Row.
+The complexity of the material now collected and presented in daily
+journalism is so great that adequate editorial interpretation is
+obviously impossible. All the more insistently does this heterogeneous
+picture of American life demand the impartial interpretation of the
+historian, the imaginative transcription of the novelist. Humorist and
+moralist, preacher and mob orator and social essayist, shop-talk and
+talk over the tea-cup or over the pipe, and the far more illuminating
+instruction of events, are fashioning day by day the infinitely
+delicate processes of our national self-assessment. Scholars like Mr.
+Henry Adams or Mr. James Ford Rhodes will explain to us American life
+as it was during the administrations of Jefferson or in the
+eighteen-fifties. Professor Turner will expound the significance of the
+frontier in American history. Mr. Henry James will portray with
+unrivalled psychological insight the Europeanized American of the
+eighteen-seventies and eighties. Literary critics like Professor
+Wendell or Professor Trent will deduce from our literature itself
+evidence concerning this or that national quality; and all this mass of
+American expert testimony, itself a result and a proof of national
+self-awareness and self-respect, must be put into the scales to
+balance, to confirm, or to outweigh the reports furnished by
+foreigners.
+
+I do not pretend to be able, like an expert accountant, to draw up a
+balance-sheet of national qualities, to credit or debit the American
+character with this or that precise quantity of excellence or defect.
+But having turned the pages of many books about the United States, and
+listened to many conversations about its inhabitants in many states of
+the Union, I venture to collect a brief list of the qualities which
+have been assigned to us, together with a few, but not, I trust, too
+many, of our admitted national defects.
+
+Like that excellent German who wrote the History of the English Drama
+in six volumes, I begin with Physical Geography. The differentiation of
+the physical characteristics of our branch of the English race is
+admittedly due, in part, to climate. In spite of the immense range of
+climatic variations as one passes from New England to New Orleans, from
+the Mississippi Valley to the high plains of the Far West, or from the
+rainy Oregon belt southward to San Diego, the settlers of English stock
+find a prevalent atmospheric condition, as a result of which they
+begin, in a generation or two, to change in physique. They grow thinner
+and more nervous, they "lean forward," as has been admirably said of
+them, while the Englishman "leans back"; they are less heavy and less
+steady; their voices are higher, sharper; their athletes get more
+easily "on edge"; they respond, in short, to an excessively
+stimulating climate. An old-fashioned sea-captain put it all into a
+sentence when he said that he could drink a bottle of wine with his
+dinner in Liverpool and only a half a bottle in New York. Explain the
+cause as we may, the fact seems to be that the body of John Bull
+changes, in the United States, into the body of Uncle Sam.
+
+There are mental differences no less pronounced. No adjective has been
+more frequently applied to the Anglo-Saxon than the word "dull." The
+American mind has been accused of ignorance, superficiality, levity,
+commonplaceness, and dozens of other defects, but "dulness" is not one
+of them. "Smartness," rather, is the preferred epithet of derogation;
+or, to rise a little in the scale of valuation, it is the word
+"cleverness," used with that lurking contempt for cleverness which is
+truly English and which long survived in the dialect of New England,
+where the village ne'er-do-well or Jack-of-all-trades used to be
+pronounced a "clever" fellow. The variety of employments to which the
+American pioneers were obliged to betake themselves has done something,
+no doubt, to produce a national versatility, a quick assimilation of
+new methods and notions, a ready adaptability to novel emergencies. An
+invaluable pioneer trait is curiosity; the settler in a new country,
+like Moses in the wilderness of Arabia, must "turn aside to see"; he
+must look into things, learn to read signs,--or else the Indians or
+frost or freshet will soon put an end to his pioneering. That curiosity
+concerning strangers which so much irritated Dickens and Mrs. Trollope
+was natural to the children of Western emigrants to whom the difference
+between Sioux and Pawnee had once meant life or death. "What's your
+business, stranger, in these parts?" was an instinctive, because it had
+once been a vital, question. That it degenerates into mere
+inquisitiveness is true enough; just as the "acuteness," the
+"awareness," essential to the existence of one generation becomes only
+"cuteness," the typical tin-pedler's habit of mind, in the generation
+following.
+
+American inexperience, the national rawness and unsophistication which
+has impressed so many observers, has likewise its double significance
+when viewed historically. We have exhibited, no doubt, the
+amateurishness and recklessness which spring from relative isolation,
+from ignorance as to how they manage elsewhere this particular sort of
+thing,--the conservation of forests, let us say, or the government of
+colonial dependencies. National smugness and conceit, the impatience
+crystallized in the phrase, "What have we got to do with abroad?" have
+jarred upon the nerves of many cultivated Americans. But it is no less
+true that a nation of pioneers and settlers, like the isolated
+individual, learns certain rough-and-ready Robinson Crusoe ways of
+getting things done. A California mining-camp is sure to establish law
+and order in due time, though never, perhaps, a law and order quite
+according to Blackstone. In the most trying crises of American
+political history, it was not, after all, a question of profiting by
+European experience. Washington and Lincoln, in their sorest struggles,
+had nothing to do with "abroad"; the problem had first to be thought
+through, and then fought through, in American and not in European
+terms. Not a half-dozen Englishmen understood the bearings of the
+Kansas-Nebraska Bill, or, if they did, we were little the wiser. We had
+to wait until a slow-minded frontier lawyer mastered it in all its
+implications, and then patiently explained it to the farmers of
+Illinois, to the United States, and to the world.
+
+It is true that the unsophisticated mode of procedure may turn out to
+be sheer folly,--a "sixteen to one" triumph of provincial barbarism.
+But sometimes it is the secret of freshness and of force. Your
+cross-country runner scorns the highway, but that is because he has
+confidence in his legs and loins, and he likes to take the fences.
+Fenimore Cooper, when he began to write stories, knew nothing about the
+art of novel-making as practised in Europe, but he possessed something
+infinitely better for him, namely, instinct, and he took the right road
+to the climax of a narrative as unerringly as the homing bee follows
+its viewless trail.
+
+No one can be unaware how easily this superb American confidence may
+turn to over-confidence, to sheer recklessness. We love to run past the
+signals, in our railroading and in our thinking. Emerson will "plunge"
+on a new idea as serenely as any stock-gambler ever "plunged" in Wall
+Street, and a pretty school-teacher will tell you that she has become
+an advocate of the "New Thought" as complacently as an old financier
+will boast of having bought Calumet and Hecla when it was selling at
+25. (Perhaps the school-teacher may get as good a bargain. I cannot
+say.) Upon the whole, Americans back individual guesswork and pay
+cheerfully when they lose. A great many of them, as it happens, have
+guessed right. Even those who continue to guess wrong, like Colonel
+Sellers, have the indefeasible romantic appetite for guessing again.
+The American temperament and the chances of American history have
+brought constant temptation to speculation, and plenty of our people
+prefer to gamble upon what they love to call a "proposition," rather
+than to go to the bottom of the facts. They would rather speculate than
+know.
+
+Doubtless there are purely physical causes that have encouraged this
+mental attitude, such as the apparently inexhaustible resources of a
+newly opened country, the consciousness of youthful energy, the feeling
+that any very radical mistake in pitching camp to-day can easily be
+rectified when we pitch camp to-morrow. The habit of exaggeration
+which was so particularly annoying to English visitors in the middle
+of the last century--annoying even to Charles Dickens, who was himself
+something of an expert in exuberance--is a physical and moral no less
+than a mental quality. That monstrous braggadocio which Dickens
+properly satirized in _Martin Chuzzlewit_ was partly, of course, the
+product of provincial ignorance. Doubtless there were, and there are
+still, plenty of Pograms who are convinced that Henry Clay and Daniel
+Webster overtop all the intellectual giants of the Old World. But that
+youthful bragging, and perhaps some of the later bragging as well, has
+its social side. It is a perverted idealism. It springs from group
+loyalty, from sectional fidelity. The settlement of "Eden" may be
+precisely what Dickens drew it: a miasmatic mud-hole. Yet we who are
+interested in the new town do not intend, as the popular phrase has it,
+"to give ourselves away." We back our own "proposition," so that to
+this day Chicago cannot tell the truth to St. Louis, nor Harvard to
+Yale. Braggadocio thus gets glorified through its rootage in loyalty;
+and likewise extravagance--surely one of the worst of American mental
+vices--is often based upon a romantic confidence in individual opinion
+or in the righteousness of some specific cause. Convince a blue-blooded
+American like Wendell Phillips that the abolition of slavery is right,
+and, straightway, words and even facts become to him mere weapons in a
+splendid warfare. His statements grow rhetorical, reckless, virulent.
+Proof seems to him, as it did to the contemporary Transcendentalist
+philosophers, an impertinence. The sole question is, "Are you on the
+Lord's side?" i.e., on the side of Wendell Phillips.
+
+Excuse as we may the faults of a gifted combatant in a moral crisis
+like the abolition controversy, the fact remains that the intellectual
+dangers of the oratorical temperament are typically American. What is
+commonly called our "Fourth of July" period has indeed passed away. It
+has few apologists, perhaps fewer than it really deserves. It is
+possible to regret the disappearance of that old-fashioned assertion of
+patriotism and pride, and to question whether historical pageants and a
+"noiseless Fourth" will develop any better citizens than the fathers
+were. But on the purely intellectual side, the influence of that
+spread-eagle oratory was disastrous. Throughout wide-extended regions
+of the country, and particularly in the South and West, the "orator"
+grew to be, in the popular mind, the normal representative of
+intellectual ability. Words, rather than things, climbed into the
+saddle. Popular assemblies were taught the vocabulary and the logic of
+passion, rather than of sober, lucid reasoning. The "stump" grew more
+potent than school-house and church and bench; and it taught its
+reckless and passionate ways to more than one generation. The
+intellectual leaders of the newer South have more than once suffered
+ostracism for protesting against this glorification of mere oratory.
+But it is not the South alone that has suffered. Wherever a mob can
+gather, there are still the dangers of the old demagogic vocabulary and
+rhetoric. The mob state of mind is lurking still in the excitable
+American temperament.
+
+The intellectual temptations of that temperament are revealed no less
+in our popular journalism. This journalism, it is needless to say, is
+extremely able, but it is reckless to the last degree. The
+extravagance of its head-lines and the over-statements of its news
+columns are direct sources of profit, since they increase the
+circulation and it is circulation which wins advertising space. I think
+it is fair to say that the American people, as a whole, like precisely
+the sort of journalism which they get. The tastes of the dwellers in
+cities control, more and more, the character of our newspapers. The
+journals of New York, Chicago, and San Francisco are steadily gaining
+in circulation, in resourcefulness, and in public spirit, but they are,
+for the most part, unscrupulous in attack, sophistical, and passionate.
+They outvie the popular pulpit in sentimentality. They play with fire.
+
+The note of exaggeration which is heard in American oratory and
+journalism is struck again in the popular magazines. Their campaign of
+"exposure," during the last decade, has been careless of individual and
+corporate rights and reputations. Even the magazine sketches and short
+stories are keyed up to a hysteric pitch. So universally is this
+characteristic national tension displayed in our periodical literature
+that no one is much surprised to read in his morning paper that some
+one has called the President of the United States a liar,--or that some
+one has been called a liar by the President of the United States.
+
+For an explanation of these defects, shall we fall back upon a
+convenient maxim of De Tocqueville's and admit with him that "a
+democracy is unsuited to meditation"? We are forced to do so. But then
+comes the inevitable second thought that a democracy must needs have
+other things than meditation to attend to. Athenian and Florentine and
+Versailles types of political despotism have all proved highly
+favorable to the lucubrations of philosophers and men of letters who
+enjoyed the despot's approbation. For that matter, no scheme of life
+was ever better suited to meditation than an Indian reservation in the
+eighteen-seventies, with a Great Father in Washington to furnish
+blankets, flour, and tobacco. Yet that is not quite the American ideal
+of existence, and it even failed to produce the peaceable fruits of
+meditation in the Indian himself.
+
+One may freely admit the shortcomings of the American intelligence; the
+"commonness of mind and tone" which Mr. Bryce believes to be
+inseparable from the presence of such masses of men associated under
+modern democratic government; the frivolity and extravagance which
+represent the gasconading of the romantic temper in face of the grey
+practicalities of everyday routine; the provincial boastfulness and bad
+taste which have resulted from intellectual isolation; the lack, in
+short, of a code, whether for thought or speech or behavior. And
+nevertheless, one's instinctive Americanism replies, May it not be
+better, after all, to have gone without a code for a while, to have
+lacked that orderly and methodized and socialized European
+intelligence, and to have had the glorious sense of bringing things to
+pass in spite of it? There is just one thing that would have been fatal
+to our democracy. It is the feeling expressed in La Bruyere's famous
+book: "Everything has been said, everything has been written,
+everything has been done." Here in America everything was to do; we
+were forced to conjugate our verbs in the future tense. No doubt our
+existence has been, in some respects, one of barbarism, but it has been
+the barbarism of life and not of death. A rawboned baby sprawling on
+the mud floor of a Kentucky log cabin is a more hopeful spectacle than
+a wholly civilized funeral.
+
+"Perhaps it is," rejoins the European critic, somewhat impatiently,
+"but you are confusing the issue. We find certain grave defects in the
+American mind, defects which, if you had not had what Thomas Carlyle
+called 'a great deal of land for a very few people,' would long ago
+have involved you in disaster. You admit the mental defects, but you
+promptly shift the question to one of moral qualities, of practical
+energy, of subduing your wilderness, and so forth. You have too often
+absented yourself from the wedding banquet, from the European symposium
+of wit and philosophy, from the polished and orderly and delightful
+play and interplay of civilized mind,--and your excuse is the old one:
+that you are trying your yoke of oxen and cannot come. We charge you
+with intellectual sins, and you enter the plea of moral preoccupation.
+If you will permit personal examples, you Americans have made ere now
+your national heroes out of men whose reasoning powers remained those
+of a college sophomore, who were unable to state an opponent's position
+with fairness, who lacked wholly the judicial quality, who were
+vainglorious and extravagant, who had, in short, the mind of an
+exuberant barbarian; but you instantly forget their intellectual
+defects in the presence of their abounding physical and moral energy,
+their freedom from any taint of personal corruption, their whole-souled
+desire and effort for the public good. Were not such heroes, impossible
+as they would have been in any other civilized country, perfectly
+illuminative of your national state of mind?"
+
+For one, I confess that I do not know what reply to make to my
+imaginary European critic. I suspect that he is right. At any rate, we
+stand here at the fork of the road. If we do not wish to linger any
+longer over a catalogue of intellectual sins, let us turn frankly to
+our moral preoccupations, comforting ourselves, if we like, as we
+abandon the field of purely intellectual rivalry with Europe, in the
+reflection that it is the muddle-headed Anglo-Saxon, after all, who is
+the dominant force in the modern world.
+
+The moral temper of the American people has been analyzed no less
+frequently than their mental traits. Foreign and native observers are
+alike agreed in their recognition of the extraordinary American
+energy. The sheer power of the American bodily machine, driven by the
+American will, is magnificent. It is often driven too hard, and with
+reckless disregard of anything save immediate results. It wears out
+more quickly than the bodily machine of the Englishman. It is typical
+that the best distance runners of Great Britain usually beat ours,
+while we beat them in the sprints. Our public men are frequently--as
+the athletes say--"all in" at sixty. Their energy is exhausted at just
+the time that many an English statesman begins his best public service.
+But after making every allowance for wasteful excess, for the restless
+and impatient consumption of nervous forces which nature intended that
+we should hold in reserve, the fact remains that American history has
+demonstrated the existence of a dynamic national energy, physical and
+moral, which is still unabated. Immigration has turned hitherward the
+feet of millions upon millions of young men from the hardiest stocks of
+Europe. They replenish the slackening streams of vigor. When the
+northern New Englander cannot make a living on the old farm, the French
+Canadian takes it off his hands, and not only improves the farm, but
+raises big crops of boys. So with Italians, Swedes, Germans, Irish,
+Jews, and Portuguese, and all the rest. We are a nation of immigrants,
+a digging, hewing, building, breeding, bettering race, of mixed blood
+and varying creeds, but of fundamental faith in the wages of going on;
+a race compounded of materials crude but potent; raw, but with blood
+that is red and bones that are big; a race that is accomplishing its
+vital tasks, and, little by little, transmuting brute forces and
+material energies into the finer play of mind and spirit.
+
+From the very beginning, the American people have been characterized by
+idealism. It was the inner light of Pilgrim and Quaker colonists; it
+gleams no less in the faces of the children of Russian Jew immigrants
+to-day. American irreverence has been noted by many a foreign critic,
+but there are certain subjects in whose presence our reckless or
+cynical speech is hushed. Compared with current Continental humor, our
+characteristic American humor is peculiarly reverent. The purity of
+woman and the reality of religion are not considered topics for
+jocosity. Cleanness of body and of mind are held by our young men to be
+not only desirable but attainable virtues. There is among us, in
+comparison with France or Germany, a defective reverence for the State
+as such; and a positive irreverence towards the laws of the
+Commonwealth, and towards the occupants of high political positions.
+Mayor, Judge, Governor, Senator, or even President, may be the butt of
+such indecorous ridicule as shocks or disgusts the foreigner; but
+nevertheless the personal joke stops short of certain topics which
+Puritan tradition disapproves. The United States is properly called a
+Christian nation, not merely because the Supreme Court has so affirmed
+it, but because the phrase "a Christian nation" expresses the
+historical form which the religious idealism of the country has made
+its own. The Bible is still considered, by the mass of the people, a
+sacred book; oaths in courts of law, oaths of persons elected to great
+office, are administered upon it. American faith in education, as all
+the world knows, has from the beginning gone hand in hand with faith in
+religion; the school-house was almost as sacred a symbol as the
+meeting-house; and the munificence of American private benefactions to
+the cause of education furnishes to-day one of the most striking
+instances of idealism in the history of civilization.
+
+The ideal passions of patriotism, of liberty, of loyalty to home and
+section, of humanitarian and missionary effort, have all burned with a
+clear flame in the United States. The optimism which lies so deeply
+embedded in the American character is one phase of the national mind.
+Charles Eliot Norton once said to me, with his dry humor, that there
+was an infallible test of the American authorship of any anonymous
+article or essay: "Does it contain the phrase 'After all, we need not
+despair'? If it does, it was written by an American." In spite of all
+that is said about the practicality of the American, his love of gain
+and his absorption in material interests, those who really know him are
+aware how habitually he confronts his practical tasks in a spirit of
+romantic enthusiasm. He marches downtown to his prosaic day's job and
+calls it "playing the game"; to work as hard as he can is to "get into
+the game," and to work as long as he can is to "stay in the game"; he
+loves to win fully as much as the Jew and he hates to lose fully as
+much as the Englishman, but losing or winning, he carries into his
+business activity the mood of the idealist.
+
+It is easy to think of all this as self-deception as the emotional
+effusiveness of the American temperament; but to refuse to see its
+idealism is to mistake fundamentally the character of the American man.
+No doubt he does deceive himself often as to his real motives: he is a
+mystic and a bargain-hunter by turns. Divided aims, confused ideals,
+have struggled for the mastery among us, ever since Challon's _Voyage_,
+in 1606, announced that the purpose of the first colonists to Virginia
+was "both to seek to convert the savages, as also to seek out what
+benefits or commodities might be had in those parts." How that
+"both"--"as also" keeps echoing in American history: "both" to
+christianize the Negro and work him at a profit, "both" duty and
+advantage in retaining the Philippines; "both" international good will
+and increased armaments; "both" Sunday morning precepts and Monday
+morning practice; "both" horns of a dilemma; "both God and mammon"; did
+ever a nation possess a more marvellous water-tight compartment method
+of believing and honoring opposites! But in all this unconscious
+hypocrisy the American is perhaps not worse--though he may be more
+absurd!--than other men.
+
+Another aspect of the American mind is found in our radicalism. "To be
+an American," it has been declared, "is to be a radical." That
+statement needs qualification. Intellectually the American is inclined
+to radical views; he is willing to push certain social theories very
+far; he will found a new religion, a new philosophy, a new socialistic
+community, at the slightest notice or provocation; but he has at bottom
+a fund of moral and political conservatism. Thomas Jefferson, one of
+the greatest of our radical idealists, had a good deal of the English
+squire in him after all. Jeffersonianism endures, not merely because it
+is a radical theory of human nature, but because it expresses certain
+facts of human nature. The American mind looks forward, not back; but
+in practical details of land, taxes, and governmental machinery we are
+instinctively cautious of change. The State of Connecticut knows that
+her constitution is ill adapted to the present conditions of her
+population, but the difficulty is to persuade the rural legislators to
+amend it. Yet everybody admits that amendment will come "some day."
+This admission is a characteristic note of American feeling; and every
+now and then come what we call "uplift" movements, when radicalism is
+in the very air, and a thousand good "causes" take fresh vigor.
+
+One such period was in the New England of the eighteen-forties. We are
+moving in a similar--only this time a national--current of radicalism,
+to-day. But a change in the weather or the crops has before now turned
+many of our citizens from radicalism into conservatism. There is, in
+fact, conservatism in our blood and radicalism in our brains, and now
+one and now the other rules. Very typical of American radicalism is
+that story of the old sea-captain who was ignorant, as was supposed, of
+the science of navigation, and who cheerfully defended himself by
+saying that he could work his vessel down to Boston Light without
+knowing any navigation, and after that he could go where he "dum
+pleased." I suspect the old fellow pulled his sextant and chronometer
+out of his chest as soon as he really needed them. American radicalism
+is not always as innocent of the world's experience as it looks. In
+fact, one of the most interesting phases of this twentieth century
+"uplift" movement is its respect and even glorification of expert
+opinion. A German expert in city-planning electrifies an audience of
+Chicago club-women by talking to them about drains, ash-carts, and
+flower-beds. A hundred other experts, in sanitation, hygiene,
+chemistry, conservation of natural resources, government by commission,
+tariffs, arbitration treaties, are talking quite as busily; and they
+have the attention of a national audience that is listening with
+genuine modesty, and with a real desire to refashion American life on
+wiser and nobler plans. In this national forward movement in which we
+are living, radicalism has shown its beneficent aspect of constructive
+idealism.
+
+No catalogue of American qualities and defects can exclude the trait of
+individualism. We exalt character over institutions, says Mr. Brownell;
+we like our institutions because they suit us, and not because we
+admire institutions. "Produce great persons," declares Walt Whitman,
+"the rest follows." Whether the rest follows or not, there can be no
+question that Americans, from the beginning, have laid singular stress
+upon personal qualities. The religion and philosophy of the Puritans
+were in this respect at one with the gospel of the frontier. It was the
+principle of "every man for himself"; solitary confrontation of his
+God, solitary struggle with the wilderness. "He that will not work,"
+declared John Smith after that first disastrous winter at Jamestown,
+"neither let him eat." The pioneer must clear his own land, harvest his
+own crops, defend his own fireside; his temporal and eternal salvation
+were strictly his own affair. He asked, and expected, no aid from the
+community; he could at most "change works" in time of harvest, with a
+neighbor, if he had one. It was the sternest school of self-reliance,
+from babyhood to the grave, that human society is ever likely to
+witness. It bred heroes and cranks and hermits; its glories and its
+eccentricities are written in the pages of Emerson, Thoreau, and
+Whitman; they are written more permanently still in the instinctive
+American faith in individual manhood. Our democracy idolizes a few
+individuals; it ignores their defective training, or, it may be, their
+defective culture; it likes to think of an Andrew Jackson who was a
+"lawyer, judge, planter, merchant, general, and politician," before he
+became President; it asks only that the man shall not change his
+individual character in passing from one occupation or position to
+another; in fact, it is amused and proud to think of Grant hauling
+cordwood to market, of Lincoln keeping store or Roosevelt rounding-up
+cattle. The one essential question was put by Hawthorne into the mouth
+of Holgrave in the _House of the Seven Gables_. Holgrave had been by
+turns a schoolmaster, clerk in a store, editor, pedler, lecturer on
+Mesmerism, and daguerreotypist, but "amid all these personal
+vicissitudes," says Hawthorne, "he had never lost his identity.... He
+had never violated the innermost man, but had carried his conscience
+along with him." There speaks the local accent of Puritanism, but the
+voice insisting upon the moral integrity of the individual is the
+undertone of America.
+
+Finally, and surely not the least notable of American traits, is public
+spirit. Triumphant individualism checks itself, or is rudely checked
+in spite of itself, by considerations of the general good. How often
+have French critics confessed, with humiliation, that in spite of the
+superior socialization of the French intelligence, France has yet to
+learn from America the art and habit of devoting individual fortunes to
+the good of the community. Our American literature, as has been already
+pointed out, is characteristically a citizen literature, responsive to
+the civic note, the production of men who, like the writers of the
+_Federalist_, applied a vigorous practical intelligence, a robust
+common sense, to questions affecting the interest of everybody. The
+spirit of fair play in our free democracy has led Americans to ask not
+merely what is right and just for one, the individual, but what are
+righteousness and justice and fair play for all. Democracy, as embodied
+in such a leader as Lincoln, has meant Fellowship. Nothing finer can be
+said of a representative American than to say of him, as Mr. Norton
+said of Mr. Lowell, that he had a "most public soul."
+
+No one can present such a catalogue of American qualities as I have
+attempted without realizing how much escapes his classification.
+Conscious criticism and assessment of national characteristics is
+essential to an understanding of them; but one feels somehow that the
+net is not holding. The analysis of English racial inheritances, as
+modified by historical conditions, yields much, no doubt; but what are
+we to say of such magnificent embodiments of the American spirit as are
+revealed in the Swiss immigrant Agassiz, the German exile Carl Schurz,
+the native-born mulatto Booker Washington? The Americanism of
+representative Americans is something which must be felt; it is to be
+reached by imaginative perception and sympathy, no less than by the
+process of formal analysis. It would puzzle the experts in racial
+tendencies to find arithmetically the common denominator of such
+American figures as Franklin, Washington, Jackson, Webster, Lee,
+Lincoln, Emerson, and "Mark Twain"; yet the countrymen of those typical
+Americans instinctively recognize in them a sort of largeness,
+genuineness, naturalness, kindliness, humor, effectiveness, idealism,
+which are indubitably and fundamentally American.
+
+There are certain sentiments of which we ourselves are conscious,
+though we can scarcely translate them into words, and these vaguely
+felt emotions of admiration, of effort, of fellowship and social faith
+are the invisible America. Take, for a single example, the national
+admiration for what we call a "self-made" man: here is a boy selling
+candy and newspapers on a Michigan Central train; he makes up his mind
+to be a lawyer; in twelve years from that day he is general counsel for
+the Michigan Central road; he enters the Senate of the United States
+and becomes one of its leading figures. The instinctive flush of
+sympathy and pride with which Americans listen to such a story is far
+more deeply based than any vulgar admiration for money-making
+abilities. No one cares whether such a man is rich or poor. He has
+vindicated anew the possibilities of manhood under American conditions
+of opportunity; the miracle of our faith has in him come true once
+more.
+
+No one can understand America with his brains. It is too big, too
+puzzling. It tempts, and it deceives. But many an illiterate immigrant
+has felt the true America in his pulses before he ever crossed the
+Atlantic. The descendant of the Pilgrims still remains ignorant of our
+national life if he does not respond to its glorious zest, its
+throbbing energy, its forward urge, its uncomprehending belief in the
+future, its sense of the fresh and mighty world just beyond to-day's
+horizon. Whitman's "Pioneers, O Pioneers" is one of the truest of
+American poems because it beats with the pulse of this onward movement,
+because it is full of this laughing and conquering fellowship and of
+undefeated faith.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+American Idealism
+
+
+Our endeavor to state the general characteristics of the American mind
+has already given us some indication of what Americans really care for.
+The things or the qualities which they like, the objects of their
+conscious or unconscious striving, are their ideals. "There is what I
+call the American idea," said Theodore Parker in the Anti-Slavery
+Convention of 1850. "This idea demands, as the proximate organization
+thereof, a democracy--that is, a government of all the people, by all
+the people, for all the people; of course, a government on the
+principle of eternal justice, the unchanging law of God; for shortness'
+sake, I will call it the idea of Freedom." That is one of a thousand
+definitions of American idealism. Books devoted to the "Spirit of
+America"--like the volume by Henry van Dyke which bears that very
+title--give a programme of national accomplishments and aspirations.
+But our immediate task is more specific. It is to point out how
+adequately this idealistic side of the national temperament has been
+expressed in American writing. Has our literature kept equal pace with
+our thinking and feeling?
+
+We do not need, in attempting to answer this question, any definition
+of idealism, in its philosophical or in its more purely literary sense.
+There are certain fundamental human sentiments which lift men above
+brutes, Frenchmen above "frog-eaters," and Englishmen above
+"shop-keepers." These ennobling sentiments or ideals, while universal
+in their essential nature, assume in each civilized nation a somewhat
+specific coloring. The national literature reveals the myriad shades
+and hues of private and public feeling, and the more truthful this
+literary record, the more delicate and noble become the harmonies of
+local and national thought or emotion with the universal instincts and
+passions of mankind. On the other hand, when the literature of Spain,
+for instance, or of Italy, fails, within a given period, in range and
+depth of human interest, we are compelled to believe either that the
+Spain or Italy of that age was wanting in the nobler ideals, or that
+it lacked literary interpretation.
+
+In the case of America we are confronted by a similar dilemma. Since
+the beginning of the seventeenth century this country has been, in a
+peculiar sense, the home of idealism; but our literature has remained
+through long periods thin and provincial, barren in cosmopolitan
+significance; and the hard fact faces us to-day that only three or four
+of our writers have aroused any strong interest in the cultivated
+readers of continental Europe. Evidently, then, either the torch of
+American idealism does not burn as brightly as we think, or else our
+writers, with but few exceptions, have not hitherto possessed the
+height and reach and grasp to hold up the torch so that the world could
+see it. Let us look first at the flame, and then at the torch-bearers.
+
+Readers of Carlyle have often been touched by the humility with which
+that disinherited child of Calvinism speaks of Goethe's doctrine of the
+"Three Reverences," as set forth in _Wilhelm Meister_. Again and again,
+in his correspondence and his essays, does Carlyle recur to that
+teaching of the threefold Reverence: Reverence for what is above us,
+for what is around us and for what is under us; that is to say, the
+ethnic religion which frees us from debasing fear, the philosophical
+religion which unites us with our comrades, and the Christian religion
+which recognizes humility and poverty and suffering as divine.
+
+"To which of these religions do you specially adhere?" inquired
+Wilhelm.
+
+"To all the three," replied the sages; "for in their union they produce
+what may properly be called the true Religion. Out of those three
+Reverences springs the highest Reverence, Reverence for Oneself."
+
+An admirable symbolism, surely; vaguer, no doubt, than the old symbols
+which Carlyle had learned in the Kirk at Ecclefechan, but less vague,
+in turn, than that doctrine of reverence for the Oversoul, which was
+soon to be taught at Concord.
+
+As one meditates upon the idealism of the first colonists in America,
+one is tempted to ask what their "reverences" were. Toward what
+tangible symbols of the invisible did their eyes instinctively turn?
+
+For New England, at least, the answer is relatively simple. One form
+of it is contained in John Adams's well-known prescription for
+Virginia, as recorded in his _Diary_ for July 21, 1786. "Major
+Langbourne dined with us again. He was lamenting the difference of
+character between Virginia and New England. I offered to give him a
+receipt for making a New England in Virginia. He desired it; and I
+recommended to him town-meetings, training-days, town-schools, and
+ministers."
+
+The "ministers," it will be noticed, come last on the Adams list. But
+the order of precedence is unimportant.
+
+Here are four symbols, or, if you like, "reverences." Might not the
+Virginia planters, loyal to their own specific symbol of the
+"gentleman,"--no unworthy ideal, surely; one that had been glorified in
+European literature ever since Castiligione wrote his _Courtier_, and
+one that had been transplanted from England to Virginia as soon as Sir
+Walter Raleigh's men set foot on the soil which took its name from the
+Virgin Queen,--might not the Virginia gentlemen have pondered to their
+profit over the blunt suggestion of the Massachusetts commoner? No
+doubt; and yet how much picturesqueness and nobility--and tragedy,
+too--we should have missed, if our history had not been full of these
+varying symbols, clashing ideals, different Reverences!
+
+One Reverence, at least, was common to the Englishman of Virginia and
+to the Englishman of Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay. They were joint
+heirs of the Reformation, children of that waxing and puissant England
+which was a nation of one book, the Bible; a book whose phrases color
+alike the _Faerie Queen_ of Spenser and the essays of Francis Bacon; a
+book rich beyond all others in human experience; full of poetry,
+history, drama; the test of conduct; the manual of devotion; and above
+all, and blinding all other considerations by the very splendor of the
+thought, a book believed to be the veritable Word of the unseen God.
+For these colonists in the wilderness, as for the Protestant Europe
+which they had left irrevocably behind them, the Bible was the plainest
+of all symbols of idealism: it was the first of the "Reverences."
+
+The Church was a symbol likewise, but to the greater portion of
+colonial America the Church meant chiefly the tangible band of
+militant believers within the limits of a certain township or parish,
+rather than the mystical Bride of Christ. Except in Maryland and
+Virginia, whither the older forms of Church worship were early
+transplanted, there was scanty reverence for the Establishment. There
+was neither clergyman nor minister on board the Mayflower. In Rufus
+Choate's oration on the Pilgrims before the New England Society of New
+York in 1843, occurred the famous sentence about "a church without a
+bishop and a state without a King"; to which Dr. Wainwright, rector of
+St. John's, replied wittily at the dinner following the oration that
+there "can be no church without a bishop." This is perhaps a question
+for experts; but Thomas Hooker, Thomas Shepard, and John Cotton would
+have sided with Rufus Choate. The awe which had once been paid to the
+Establishment was transferred, in the seventeenth-century New England,
+to the minister. The minister imposed himself upon the popular
+imagination, partly through sheer force of personal ascendency, and
+partly as a symbol of the theocracy,--the actual governing of the
+Commonwealth by the laws and spirit of the sterner Scriptures. The
+minister dwelt apart as upon an awful Sinai. It was no mere romantic
+fancy of Hawthorne that shadowed his countenance with a black veil. The
+church organization, too,--though it may have lacked its bishop,--had a
+despotic power over its communicants; to be cast out of its fellowship
+involved social and political consequences comparable to those
+following excommunication by the Church of Rome. Hawthorne and Whittier
+and Longfellow--all of them sound antiquarians, though none of them in
+sympathy with the theology of Puritanism--have described in fit terms
+the bareness of the New England meeting-house. What intellectual
+severity and strain was there; what prodigality of learning; what
+blazing intensity of devotion; what pathos of women's patience, and of
+children, prematurely old, stretched upon the rack of insoluble
+problems! What dramas of the soul were played through to the end in
+those barn-like buildings, where the musket, perhaps, stood in the
+corner of the pew! "How aweful is this place!" must have been murmured
+by the lips of all; though there were many who have added, "This is the
+gate of Heaven."
+
+The gentler side of colonial religion is winningly portrayed in
+Whittier's _Pennsylvania Pilgrim_ and in his imaginary journal of
+Margaret Smith. There were sunnier slopes, warmer exposures for the
+ripening of the human spirit, in the Southern colonies. Even in New
+England there was sporadic revolt from the beginning. The number of
+non-church-members increased rapidly after 1700; Franklin as a youth in
+Boston admired Cotton Mather's ability, but he did not go to church,
+"Sunday being my studying day." Doubtless there were always humorous
+sceptics like Mrs. Stowe's delightful Sam Lawson in _Oldtown Folks_.
+Lawson's comment on Parson Simpson's service epitomizes two centuries
+of New England thinking. "Wal," said Sam, "Parson Simpson's a smart
+man; but I tell ye, it's kind o' discouragin'. Why, he said our state
+and condition by natur was just like this. We was clear down in a well
+fifty feet deep, and the sides all round nothin' but glare ice; but we
+was under immediate obligations to get out, 'cause we was free,
+voluntary agents. But nobody ever had got out, and nobody would, unless
+the Lord reached down and took 'em. And whether he would or not nobody
+could tell; it was all sovereignty. He said there wan't one in a
+hundred, not one in a thousand,--not one in ten thousand,--that would
+be saved. Lordy massy, says I to myself, ef that's so they're any of
+'em welcome to my chance. _And so I kind o' ris up and come out._"
+
+Mrs. Stowe's novel is fairly representative of a great mass of
+derivative literature which draws its materials from the meeting-house
+period of American history. But the direct literature of that period
+has passed almost wholly into oblivion. Jonathan Edwards had one of the
+finest minds of his century; no European standard of comparison is too
+high for him; he belongs with Pascal, with Augustine, if you like, with
+Dante. But his great treatises written in the Stockbridge woods are
+known only to a few technical students of philosophy. One terrible
+sermon, preached at Enfield in 1741, is still read by the curious; but
+scarcely anybody knows of the ineffable tenderness, dignity, and pathos
+of his farewell sermon to his flock at Northampton: and the Yale
+Library possesses nearly twelve hundred of Edwards's sermons which have
+never been printed at all. Nor does anybody, save here and there an
+antiquarian, read Shepard and Hooker and Mayhew. And yet these
+preachers and their successors furnished the emotional equivalents of
+great prose and verse to generations of men. "That is poetry," says
+Professor Saintsbury (in a dangerous latitudinarianism, perhaps!),
+"which gives the reader the feeling of poetry." Here we touch one of
+the fundamental characteristics of our national state of mind, in its
+relation to literature. We are careless of form and type, yet we crave
+the emotional stimulus. Milton, greatest of Puritan poets, was read and
+quoted all too seldom in the Puritan colonies, and yet those colonists
+were no strangers to the emotions of sublimity and awe and beauty. They
+found them in the meeting-house instead of in a book; precisely as, in
+a later day, millions of Americans experienced what was for them the
+emotional equivalent of poetry in the sermons of Henry Ward Beecher and
+Phillips Brooks. French pulpit oratory of the seventeenth century wins
+recognition as a distinct type of literature; its great practitioners,
+like Massillon, Bourdaloue, Bossuet, are appraised in all the histories
+of the national literature and in books devoted to the evolution of
+literary species. In the American colonies the great preachers
+performed the functions of men of letters without knowing it. They have
+been treated with too scant respect in the histories of American
+literature. It is one of the penalties of Protestantism that the
+audiences, after a while, outgrow the preacher. The development of the
+historic sense, of criticism, of science, makes an impassable gulf
+between Jonathan Edwards and the American churches of the twentieth
+century. A sense of profound changes in theology has left our
+contemporaries indifferent to the literature in which the old theology
+was clothed.
+
+There is one department of American literary production, of which
+Bossuet's famous sermon on Queen Henrietta Maria of England may serve
+to remind us, which illustrates significantly the national idealism. I
+mean the commemorative oration. The addresses upon the Pilgrim Fathers
+by such orators as Everett, Webster, and Choate; the countless orations
+before such organizations as the New England Society of New York and
+the Phi Beta Kappa; the papers read before historical and patriotic
+societies; the birthday and centenary discourses upon national figures
+like Washington or Lincoln, have all performed, and are still
+performing, an inestimable service in stimulating popular loyalty to
+the idealism of the fathers. As literature, most of this production is
+derivative: we listen to eloquence about the Puritans, but we do not
+read the Puritans; the description of Arthur Dimmesdale's election
+sermon in _The Scarlet Letter_, moving as it may be, tempts no one to
+open the stout collections of election sermons in the libraries. Yet
+the original literature of mediaeval chivalry is known only to a few
+scholars: Tennyson's _Idylls_ outsell the _Mabinogion_ and Malory. The
+actual world of literature is always shop-worn; a world chiefly of
+second-hand books, of warmed-over emotions and it is not surprising
+that many listeners to orations about Lincoln do not personally emulate
+Lincoln, and that many of the most enthusiastic dealers in the
+sentiment of the ancestral meeting-house do not themselves attend
+church.
+
+The other ingredients of John Adams's ideal Commonwealth are no less
+significant of our national disposition. Take the school-house. It was
+planted in the wilderness for the training of boys and girls and for a
+future "godly and learned ministry." The record of American education
+is a long story of idealism which has touched literature at every turn.
+The "red school-house" on the hill-top or at the cross-roads, the
+"log-colleges" in forgotten hamlets, the universities founded by great
+states, are all a record of the American faith--which has sometimes
+been called a fetich--in education. In its origin, it was a part of the
+essential programme of Calvinism to make a man able to judge for
+himself upon the most momentous questions; a programme, too, of that
+political democracy which lay embedded in the tenets of Calvinism, a
+democracy which believes and must continue to believe that an educated
+electorate can safeguard its own interests and train up its own
+leaders. The poetry of the American school-house was written long ago
+by Whittier, in describing Joshua Coffin's school under the big elm on
+the cross-road in East Haverhill; its humor and pathos and drama have
+been portrayed by innumerable story-writers and essayists. Mrs. Martha
+Baker Dunn's charming sketches, entitled "Cicero in Maine" and "Virgil
+in Maine," indicate the idealism once taught in the old rural
+academies,--and it is taught there still. City men will stop wistfully
+on the street, in the first week of September, to watch the boys and
+girls go trudging off to their first day of school; men who believe in
+nothing else at least believe in that! And school and college and
+university remain, as in the beginning, the first garden-ground and the
+last refuge of literature.
+
+That "town-meeting" which John Adams thought Virginia might do well to
+adopt has likewise become a symbol of American idealism. Together with
+the training-day, it represented the rights and duties and privileges
+of free men; the machinery of self-government. It was democracy, rather
+than "representative" government, under its purest aspect. Sentiments
+of responsibility to the town, the political unit, and to the
+Commonwealth, the group of units, were bred there. Likewise, it was a
+training-school for sententious speech and weighty action; its roots,
+as historians love to demonstrate, run back very far; and though the
+modern drift to cities has made its machinery ineffective in the larger
+communities, it remains a perpetual spring or feeding stream to the
+broader currents of our national life. Without an understanding of the
+town-meeting and its equivalents, our political literature loses much
+of its significance. Like the school-house and meeting-house, it has
+become glorified by our men of letters. John Fiske and other historians
+have celebrated it in some of the most brilliant pages of our political
+writing; and that citizen literature, so deeply characteristic of us,
+found in the plain, forthright, and public-spirited tone of
+town-meeting discussions its keynote. The spectacular debates of our
+national history, the dramatic contests in the great arena of the
+Senate Chamber, the discussions before huge popular audiences in the
+West, have maintained the civic point of view, have developed and
+dignified and enriched the prose style first employed by American
+freemen in deciding their local affairs in the presence of their
+neighbors. "I am a part of this people," said Lincoln proudly in one of
+his famous debates of 1858; "I was raised just a little east of here";
+and this nearness to the audience, this directness and simplicity and
+genuineness of our best political literature, its homely persuasiveness
+and force, is an inheritance of the town-meeting.
+
+Bible and meeting-house, school-house and town-meeting, thus illustrate
+concretely the responsiveness of the American character to idealistic
+impulses. They are external symbols of a certain state of mind. It may
+indeed be urged that they are primarily signs of a moral and social or
+institutional trend, and are therefore non-literary evidence of
+American idealism. Nevertheless, institutional as they may be deemed,
+they lie close to that poetry of daily duty in which our literature has
+not been poor. They are fundamentally related to that attitude of mind,
+that habitual temper of the spirit, which has produced, in all
+countries of settled use and wont, the literature of idealism.
+Brunetiere said of Flaubert's most famous woman character that poor
+Emma Bovary, the prey and the victim of Romantic desires, was after all
+much like the rest of us except that she lacked the intelligence to
+perceive the charm and poetry of the daily task. We have already
+touched upon the purely romantic side of American energy and of
+American imagination, and we must shortly look more closely still at
+those impulses of daring, those moods of heightened feeling, that
+intensified individualism, the quest of strangeness and terror and
+wild beauty, which characterize our romantic writing. But this
+romanticism is, as it were, a segment of the larger circle of idealism.
+It is idealism accentuated by certain factors, driven to
+self-expression by the passions of scorn or of desire; it exceeds, in
+one way or another, the normal range of experience and emotion. Our
+romantic American literature is doubtless our greatest. And yet some of
+the most characteristic tendencies of American writing are to be found
+in the poetry of daily experience, in the quiet accustomed light that
+falls upon one's own doorway and garden, in the immemorial charm of
+going forth to one's labor and returning in the evening,--poetry old as
+the world.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Let us see how this glow of idealism touches some of the more intimate
+aspects of human experience. "Out of the three Reverences," says
+Wilhelm Meister, "springs the highest Reverence, Reverence for
+Oneself." Open the pages of Hawthorne. Moving wholly within the
+framework of established institutions, with no desire to shatter the
+existing scheme of social order, choosing as its heroes men of the
+meeting-house, town-meeting, and training-day, how intensely
+nevertheless does the imagination of this fiction-writer illuminate the
+Body and the Soul!
+
+Take first the Body. The inheritance of English Puritanism may be
+traced throughout our American writing, in its reverence for physical
+purity. The result is something unique in literary history. Continental
+critics, while recognizing the intellectual and artistic powers
+revealed in _The Scarlet Letter_, have seldom realized the awfulness,
+to the Puritan mind, of the very thought of an adulterous minister.
+That a priest in southern Europe should break his vows is indeed
+scandalous; but the sin is regarded as a failure of the natural man to
+keep a vow requiring supernatural grace for its fulfilment; it may be
+that the priest had no vocation for his sacred office; he is unfrocked,
+punished, forgotten, yet a certain mantle of human charity still covers
+his offence. But in the Puritan scheme (and _The Scarlet Letter_, save
+for that one treacherous, warm human moment in the woodland where "all
+was spoken," lies wholly within the set framework of Puritanism) there
+is no forgiveness for a sin of the flesh. There is only Law, Law
+stretching on into infinitude until the mind shudders at it. Hawthorne
+knew his Protestant New England through and through. _The Scarlet
+Letter_ is the most striking example in our national literature of that
+idealization of physical purity, but hundreds of other romances and
+poems, less morbid if less great, assert in unmistakable terms the same
+moral conviction, the same ideal.
+
+Yet, in spite of its theme, there was never a less adulterous novel
+than this book which plays so artistically with the letter A. The body
+is branded, is consumed, is at last, perhaps, transfigured by the
+intense rays of light emitted from the suffering soul.
+
+    "The soul is form and doth the body make."
+
+In this intense preoccupation with the Soul, Hawthorne's romance is in
+unison with the more mystical and spiritual utterances of Catholicism
+as well as of Protestantism. It was in part a resultant of that early
+American isolation which contributed so effectively to the artistic
+setting of _The Scarlet Letter_. But in his doctrine of spiritual
+integrity, in the agonized utterance, "Be true--be true!" as well as
+in his reverence for purity of the body, our greatest romancer was
+typical of the imaginative literature of his countrymen. The restless
+artistic experiments of Poe presented the human body in many a ghastly
+and terrifying aspect of illness and decay, and distorted by all
+passions save one. His imagination was singularly sexless. Pathological
+students have pointed out the relation between this characteristic of
+Poe's writing, and his known tendencies toward opium-eating,
+alcoholism, and tuberculosis. But no such explanation is at hand to
+elucidate the absence of sexual passion from the novels of the
+masculine-minded Fenimore Cooper. One may say, indeed, that Cooper's
+novels, like Scott's, lack intensity of spiritual vision; that their
+tone is consonant with the views of a sound Church of England parson in
+the eighteenth century; and that the absence of physical passion, like
+the absence of purely spiritual insight, betrays a certain defect in
+Cooper's imaginative grasp and depth. But it is better criticism, after
+all, to remember that these three pioneers in American fiction-writing
+were composing for an audience in which Puritan traditions or tastes
+were predominant. Not one of the three men but would have instantly
+sacrificed an artistic effect, legitimate in the eyes of Fielding or
+Goethe or Balzac, rather than--in the phrase so often satirized--"bring
+a blush to the cheek of innocence." In other words, the presence of a
+specific audience, accustomed to certain Anglo-Saxon and Puritanic
+restraint of topic and of speech, has from the beginning of our
+imaginative literature cooperated with the instinct of our writers.
+That Victorian reticence which is so plainly seen even in such
+full-bodied writers as Dickens or Thackeray--a reticence which men like
+Mr. Bernard Shaw and Mr. Galsworthy and Mr. Wells think so hypocritical
+and dangerous to society and which they have certainly done their
+utmost to abolish--has hitherto dominated our American writing. The
+contemporary influence of great Continental writers to whom reticence
+is unknown, combined with the influence of a contemporary opera and
+drama to which reticence would be unprofitable, are now assaulting this
+dominant convention. Very possibly it is doomed. But it is only within
+recent years that its rule has been questioned.
+
+One result of it may, I think, be fairly admitted. While very few
+writers of eminence, after all, in any country, wish to bring a "blush
+to the cheek of innocence," they naturally wish, as Thackeray put it in
+one of the best-known of his utterances, to be permitted to depict a
+man to the utmost of their power. American literary conventions, like
+English conventions, have now and again laid a restraining and
+compelling hand upon the legitimate exercise of this artistic instinct;
+and this fact has cooperated with many social, ethical, and perhaps
+physiological causes to produce a thinness or bloodlessness in our
+books. They are graceful, pleasing, but pale, like one of those cool
+whitish uncertain skies of an American spring. They lack "body," like
+certain wines. It is not often that we can produce a real Burgundy. We
+have had many distinguished fiction-writers, but none with the physical
+gusto of a Fielding, a Smollett, or even a Dickens, who, idealist and
+romanticist as he was, and Victorian as were his artistic preferences,
+has this animal life which tingles upon every page. We must confess
+that there is a certain quality of American idealism which is covertly
+suspicious or openly hostile to the glories of bodily sensation.
+Emerson's thin high shoulders peep up reproachfully above the desk;
+Lanier is playing his reproachful flute; Longfellow reads Fremont's
+Rocky Mountain experiences while lying abed, and sighs "But, ah, the
+discomforts!"; Irving's _Astoria_, superb as were the possibilities of
+its physical background, tastes like parlor exploration. Even Dana's
+_Before the Mast_ and Parkman's _Oregon Trail_, transcripts of robust
+actual experience, and admirable books, reveal a sort of physical
+paleness compared with Turgenieff's _Notes of a Sportsman_ and
+Tolstoi's _Sketches_ of Sebastopol and the Crimea. They are Harvard
+undergraduate writing, after all!
+
+These facts illustrate anew that standing temptation of the critic of
+American literature to palliate literary shortcomings by the plea that
+we possess certain admirable non-literary qualities. The dominant
+idealism of the nation has levied, or seemed to levy, a certain tax
+upon our writing. Some instincts, natural to the full-blooded utterance
+of Continental literature, have been starved or eliminated here. Very
+well. The characteristic American retort to this assertion would be:
+Better our long record and habit of idealism than a few masterpieces
+more or less. As a people, we have cheerfully accepted the Puritan
+restraint of speech, we have respected the shamefaced conventions of
+decent and social utterance. Like the men and women described in
+Locker-Lampson's verses, Americans
+
+        "eat, and drink, and scheme, and plod,--
+    They go to church on Sunday;
+    And many are afraid of God--
+    And more of Mrs. Grundy."
+
+Now Mrs. Grundy is assuredly not the most desirable of literary
+divinities, but the student of classical literature can easily think of
+other divinities, celebrated in exquisite Greek and Roman verse, who
+are distinctly less desirable still.
+
+"Not passion, but sentiment," said Hawthorne, in a familiar passage of
+criticism of his own _Twice-Told Tales_. How often must the student of
+American literature echo that half-melancholy but just verdict, as he
+surveys the transition from the spiritual intensity of a few of our
+earlier writers to the sentimental qualities which have brought popular
+recognition to the many. Take the word "soul" itself. Calvinism
+shadowed and darkened the meaning, perhaps, and yet its spiritual
+passion made the word "soul" sublime. The reaction against Calvinism
+has made religion more human, natural, and possibly more Christlike,
+but "soul" has lost the thrilling solemnity with which Edwards
+pronounced the word. Emerson and Hawthorne, far as they had escaped
+from the bonds of their ancestral religion, still utter the word "soul"
+with awe. But in the popular sermon and hymn and story of our
+day,--with their search after the sympathetic and the sentimental,
+after what is called in magazine slang "heart-interest,"--the word has
+lost both its intellectual distinction and its literary magic. It will
+regain neither until it is pronounced once more with spiritual passion.
+
+But in literature, as in other things, we must take what we can get.
+The great mass of our American writing is sentimental, because it has
+been produced by, and for, an excessively sentimental people. The poems
+in Stedman's carefully chosen _Anthology_, the prose and verse in the
+two volume Stedman-Hutchinson collection of American Literature, the
+Library of Southern Literature, and similar sectional anthologies, the
+school Readers and Speakers,--particularly in the half-century between
+1830 and 1880,--our newspapers and magazines,--particularly the
+so-called "yellow" newspapers and the illustrated magazines typified by
+_Harper's Monthly_,--are all fairly dripping with sentiment. American
+oratory is notoriously the most sentimental oratory of the civilized
+world. The _Congressional Record_ still presents such specimens of
+sentiment--delivered or given leave to be printed, it is true, for
+"home consumption" rather than to affect the course of legislation--as
+are inexplicable to an Englishman or a Frenchman or an Italian.
+
+Immigrants as we all are, and migratory as we have ever been,--so much
+so that one rarely meets an American who was born in the house built by
+his grandfather,--we cling with peculiar fondness to the sentiment of
+"Home." The best-known American poem, for decades, was Samuel
+Woodworth's "Old Oaken Bucket," the favorite popular song was Stephen
+Foster's "My Old Kentucky Home," the favorite play was Denman
+Thompson's "Old Homestead." Without that appealing word "mother" the
+American melodrama would be robbed of its fifth act. Without pictures
+of "the child" the illustrated magazines would go into bankruptcy. No
+country has witnessed such a production of periodicals and books for
+boys and girls: France and Germany imitate in vain _The Youth's
+Companion_ and _St. Nicholas_, as they did the stories of "Oliver
+Optic" and _Little Women_ and _Little Lord Fauntleroy_.
+
+The sentimental attitude towards women and children, which is one of
+the most typical aspects of American idealism, is constantly
+illustrated in our short stories. Bret Harte, disciple of Dickens as he
+was, and Romantic as was his fashion of dressing up his miners and
+gamblers, was accurately faithful to the American feeling towards the
+"kid" and the "woman." "Tennessee's Partner," "The Luck of Roaring
+Camp," "Christmas at Sandy Bar," are obvious examples. Owen Wister's
+stories are equally faithful and admirable in this matter. The American
+girl still does astonishing things in international novels, as she has
+continued to do since the eighteen-sixties, but they are astonishing
+mainly to the European eye and against the conventionalized European
+background. She does the same things at home, and neither she nor her
+mother sees why she should not, so universal among us is the chivalrous
+interpretation of actions and situations which amaze the European
+observer. The popular American literature which recognizes and
+encourages this position of the "young girl" in our social structure is
+a literature primarily of sentiment. The note of passion--in the
+European sense of that word--jars and shatters it. The imported
+"problem-play," written for an adult public in Paris or London,
+introduces social facts and intellectual elements almost wholly alien
+to the experience of American matinee audiences. Disillusioned
+historians of our literature have instanced this unsophistication as a
+proof of our national inexperience; yet it is often a sort of radiant
+and triumphant unsophistication which does not lose its innocence in
+parting with its ignorance.
+
+That sentimental idealization of classes, whether peasant, bourgeois,
+or aristocratic, which has long been a feature of Continental and
+English poetry and fiction, is practically absent from American
+literature. Whatever the future may bring, there have hitherto been no
+fixed classes in American society. Webster was guilty of no
+exaggeration when he declared that the whole North was made up of
+laborers, and Lincoln spoke in the same terms in his well-known
+sentences about "hired laborers": "twenty-five years ago I was a hired
+laborer." The relative uniformity of economic and social conditions,
+which prevailed until toward the close of the nineteenth century, made,
+no doubt, for the happiness of the greatest number, but it failed,
+naturally, to afford that picturesqueness of class contrast and to
+stimulate that sentiment of class distinction, in which European
+literature is so rich.
+
+Very interesting, in the light of contemporary economic conditions, is
+the effort made by American poets in the middle of the last century to
+glorify labor. They were not so much idealizing a particular laboring
+class, as endeavoring, in Whitman's words, "To teach the average man
+the glory of his walk and trade." Whitman himself sketched the American
+workman in almost every attitude which appealed to his own sense of the
+picturesque and heroic. But years before _Leaves of Grass_ was
+published, Whittier had celebrated in his _Songs of Labor_ the
+glorified images of lumberman and drover, shoemaker and fisherman. Lucy
+Larcom and the authors of _The Lowell Offering_ portrayed the fine
+idealism of the young women--of the best American stock--who went
+enthusiastically to work in the cotton-mills of Lowell and Lawrence, or
+who bound shoes by their own firesides on the Essex County farms. That
+glow of enthusiasm for labor was chiefly moral, but it was poetical as
+well. The changes which have come over the economic and social life of
+America are nowhere more sharply indicated than in that very valley of
+the Merrimac where, sixty and seventy years ago, one could "hear
+America singing." There are few who are singing to-day in the
+cotton-mills; the operators, instead of girls from the hill-farms, are
+Greeks, Lithuanians, Armenians, Italians. Whittier's drovers have gone
+forever; the lumbermen and deep-sea fishermen have grown fewer, and the
+men who still swing the axes and haul the frozen cod-lines are mostly
+aliens. The pride that once broke into singing has turned harsh and
+silent. "Labor" looms vast upon the future political and social
+horizon, but the songs of labor have lost the lyric note. They have
+turned into the dramas and tragedies of labor, as portrayed with the
+swift and fierce insistence of the short story, illustrated by the
+Kodak. In the great agricultural sections of the West and South the
+old bucolic sentiment still survives,--that simple joy of seeing the
+"frost upon the pumpkin" and "the fodder in the stock" which Mr. James
+Whitcomb Riley has sung with such charming fidelity to the type. But
+even on the Western farms toil has grown less manual. It is more a
+matter of expert handling of machinery. Reaping and binding may still
+have their poet, but he needs to be a Kipling rather than a Burns.
+
+Our literature, then, reveals few traces of idealization of a class,
+and but little idealization of trades or callings. Neither class nor
+calling presents anything permanent to the American imagination, or
+stands for anything ultimate in American experience. On the other hand,
+our writing is rich in local sentiment and sectional loyalty. The short
+story, which has seized so greedily the more dramatic aspects of
+American energy, has been equally true to the quiet background of rural
+scenery and familiar ways. American idealism, as shown in the
+transformation of the lesser loyalties of home and countryside into the
+larger loyalties of state and section, and the absorption of these, in
+turn, into the emotions of nationalism, is particularly illustrated in
+our political verse. A striking example of the imaginative
+visualization of the political units of a state is the spirited
+roll-call of the counties in Whittier's "Massachusetts to Virginia."
+But the burden of that fine poem, after all, is the essential unity of
+Massachusetts as a sovereign state, girding herself to repel the attack
+of another sovereign state, Virginia. Now the evolution of our
+political history, both local and national, has tended steadily, for
+half a century, to the obliteration, for purposes of the imagination,
+of county lines within state lines. At the last Republican state
+convention held in Massachusetts, there were no county banners
+displayed, for the first time in half a century. Many a city-dweller
+to-day cannot tell in what county he is living unless he has happened
+to make a transfer of real estate. State lines themselves are fading
+away. The federal idea has triumphed. Doubtless the majority of the
+fellow citizens of John Randolph of Roanoke were all the more proud of
+him because the poet could say of him, in writing an admiring and
+mournful epitaph:--
+
+    "Beyond Virginia's border line
+     His patriotism perished."
+
+The great collections of Civil War verse, which are lying almost
+unread in the libraries, are store-houses of this ancient state pride
+and jealousy, which was absorbed so fatally into the larger sectional
+antagonism. "Maryland, my Maryland" gave place to "Dixie," just as
+Whittier's "Massachusetts to Virginia" was forgotten when marching men
+began to sing "John Brown's Body" and "The Battle Hymn of the
+Republic." The literature of sectionalism still lingers in its more
+lovable aspect in the verse and fiction which still celebrates the
+fairer side of the civilization of the Old South: its ideals of
+chivalry and local loyalty, its gracious women and gallant men. Our
+literature needs to cultivate this provincial affection for the past,
+as an offset to the barren uniformity which the federal scheme allows.
+But the ultimate imaginative victory, like the actual political victory
+of the Civil War, is with the thought and feeling of Nationalism. It is
+foreshadowed in that passionate lyric cry of Lowell, which sums up so
+much and, like all true passion, anticipates so much:--
+
+    "O Beautiful! my Country!"
+
+The literary record of American idealism thus illustrates how deeply
+the conception of Nationalism has affected the imagination of our
+countrymen. The literary record of the American conception of liberty
+runs further back. Some historians have allowed themselves to think
+that the American notion of liberty is essentially declamatory, a sort
+of futile echo of Patrick Henry's "Give me Liberty or give me Death";
+and not only declamatory, but hopelessly theoretical and abstract. They
+grant that it was a trumpet-note, no doubt, for agitators against the
+Stamp Act, and for pamphleteers like Thomas Paine; that it may have
+been a torch for lighting dark and weary ways in the Revolutionary War;
+but they believe it likewise to be a torch which gleams with the fire
+caught from France and which was passed back to France in turn when her
+own great bonfire was ready for lighting. The facts, however, are
+inconsistent with this picturesque theory of contemporary reactionists.
+It is true that the word "liberty" has been full of temptation for
+generations of American orators, that it has become an idol of the
+forum, and often a source of heat rather than of light. But to treat
+American Liberty as if she habitually wore the red cap is to nourish a
+Francophobia as absurd as Edmund Burke's. The sober truth is that the
+American working theory of Liberty is singularly like St. Paul's. "Ye
+have been called unto liberty; only use not liberty for an occasion to
+the flesh." A few sentences from John Winthrop, written in 1645, are
+significant: "There is a twofold liberty, natural ... and civil or
+federal. The first is common to man with beasts and other creatures. By
+this, man, as he stands in relation to man simply, hath liberty to do
+what he lists; it is a liberty to evil as well as to good. This liberty
+is incompatible and inconsistent with authority.... The other kind of
+liberty I call civil or federal, it may also be termed moral.... This
+liberty is the proper end and object of authority, and cannot subsist
+without it; and it is a liberty to that only which is good, just, and
+honest. This liberty you are to stand for, with the hazard (not only of
+your goods, but) of your lives, if need be.... This liberty is
+maintained and exercised in a way of subjection to authority; it is of
+the same kind of liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free."
+
+There speaks the governor, the man of affairs, the typical citizen of
+the future republic. The liberty to do as one pleases is a dream of
+the Renaissance; but out of dreamland it does not work. Nobody, even in
+revolutionary France, imagines that it will work. Jefferson, who is
+popularly supposed to derive his notion of liberty from French
+theorists, is to all practical purposes nearer to John Winthrop than he
+is to Rousseau. The splendid phrases of his "Declaration" are sometimes
+characterized as abstractions. They are really generalizations from
+past political experience. An arbitrary king, assuming a liberty to do
+as he liked, had encroached upon the long-standing customs and
+authority of the colonists. Jefferson, at the bidding of the
+Continental Congress, served notice of the royal trespass, and
+incidentally produced (as Lincoln said) a "standard maxim for free
+society."
+
+It is true, no doubt, that the word "liberty" became in Jefferson's
+day, and later, a mere partisan or national shibboleth, standing for no
+reality, degraded to a catchword, a symbol of antagonism to Great
+Britain. In the political debates and the impressive prose and verse of
+the anti-slavery struggle, the word became once more charged with vital
+meaning; it glowed under the heat and pressure of an idea. Towards the
+end of the nineteenth century it went temporarily out of fashion. The
+late Colonel Higginson, an ideal type of what Europeans call an "1848"
+man, attended at the close of the century some sessions of the American
+Historical Association. In his own address, at the closing dinner, he
+remarked that there was one word for which he had listened in vain
+during the reading of the papers by the younger men. It was the word
+"liberty." One of the younger school retorted promptly that since we
+had the thing liberty, we had no need to glorify the word. But Colonel
+Higginson, stanch adherent as he was of the "good old cause," was not
+convinced. Like many another lover of American letters, he thought that
+William Vaughn Moody's "Ode in Time of Hesitation" deserved a place by
+the side of Lowell's "Commemoration Ode," and that when the ultimate
+day of reckoning comes for the whole muddled Imperialistic business,
+the standard of reckoning must be "liberty" as Winthrop and Jefferson
+and Lincoln and Lowell and Vaughn Moody understood the word.
+
+In the mean time we must confess that the history of our literature,
+with a few noble exceptions, shows a surprising defect in the passion
+for freedom. Tennyson's famous lines about "Freedom broadening slowly
+down from precedent to precedent" are perfectly American in their
+conservative tone; while it is Englishmen like Byron and Landor and
+Shelley and Swinburne who have written the most magnificent republican
+poetry. The "land of the free" turns to the monarchic mother country,
+after all, for the glow and thunder and splendor of the poetry of
+freedom. It is one of the most curious phenomena in the history of
+literature. Shall we enter the preoccupation plea once more? Enjoying
+the thing liberty, have we been therefore less concerned with the idea?
+Or is it simply another illustration of the defective passion of
+American literature?
+
+Yet there is one phase of political loyalty which has been cherished by
+the imagination of Americans, and which has inspired noteworthy oratory
+and noble political prose. It is the sentiment of Union. In one sense,
+of course, this dates back to the period of Franklin's _bon mot_ about
+our all hanging together, or hanging separately. It is found in
+Hamilton's pamphlets, in Paine's _Crisis_, in the _Federalist_, in
+Washington's "Farewell Address." It is peculiarly associated with the
+name and fame of Daniel Webster, and, to a less degree, with the career
+of Henry Clay. In the stress of the debate over slavery, many a
+Northerner with abolitionist convictions, like the majority of
+Southerners with slave-holding convictions, forgot the splendid
+peroration of Webster's "Reply to Hayne" and were willing to "let the
+Union go." But in the four tragic and heroic years that followed the
+firing upon the American flag at Fort Sumter the sentiment of Union was
+made sacred by such sacrifices as the patriotic imagination of a Clay
+or a Webster had never dreamed. A new literature resulted. A lofty
+ideal of indissoluble Union was preached in pulpits, pleaded for in
+editorials, sung in lyrics, and woven into the web of fiction. Edward
+Everett Hale's _Man Without a Country_ became one of the most
+poignantly moving of American stories. In Walt Whitman's _Drum-Taps_
+and his later poems, the "Union of these States" became transfigured
+with mystical significance: no longer a mere political compact,
+dissoluble at will, but a spiritual entity, a new incarnation of the
+soul of man.
+
+We must deal later with that American instinct of fellowship which
+Whitman believed to have been finally cemented by the Civil War, and
+which has such import for the future of our democracy. There are
+likewise communal loyalties, glowing with the new idealism which has
+come with the twentieth century: ethical, municipal, industrial, and
+artistic movements which are full of promise for the higher life of the
+country, but which have not yet had time to express themselves
+adequately in literature. There are stirrings of racial loyalty among
+this and that element of our composite population,--as for instance
+among the gifted younger generation of American Jews,--a racial loyalty
+not antagonistic to the American current of ideas, but rather in full
+unison with it. Internationalism itself furnishes motives for the
+activity of the noblest imaginations, and the true literature of
+internationalism has hardly yet begun. It is in the play and
+counterplay of these new forces that the American literature of the
+twentieth century must measure itself. Communal feelings novel to
+Americans bred under the accepted individualism will doubtless assert
+themselves in our prose and verse. But it is to be remembered that the
+best writing thus far produced on American soil has been a result of
+the old conditions: of the old "Reverences"; of the pioneer training of
+mind and body; of the slow tempering of the American spirit into an
+obstinate idealism. We do not know what course the ship may take in the
+future, but
+
+    "We know what Master laid thy keel,
+    What Workman wrought thy ribs of steel,
+    Who made each mast and sail and rope,
+    What anvil rang, what hammers beat,
+    In what a forge and what a heat
+    Were shaped the anchors of thy hope!"
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+Romance and Reaction
+
+
+The characteristic attitude of the American mind, as we have seen, is
+one of idealism. We may now venture to draw a smaller circle within
+that larger circle of idealistic impulses, and to label the smaller
+circle "romance." Here, too, as with the word "idealism," although we
+are to make abundant use of literary illustrations of national
+tendencies, we have no need of a severely technical definition of
+terms. When we say, "Tom is an idealist" and "Lorenzo is a romantic
+fellow," we convey at least one tolerably clear distinction between Tom
+and Lorenzo. The idealist has a certain characteristic habit of mind or
+inclination of spirit. When confronted by experience, he reacts in a
+certain way. In his individual and social impulses, in the travail of
+his soul, or in his commerce with his neighbors and the world, he
+behaves in a more or less well-defined fashion. The romanticist, when
+confronted by the same objects and experiences, exhibits another type
+of behavior. Lorenzo, though he be Tom's brother, is a different
+fellow; he is--in the opinion of his friends, at least--a rather more
+peculiar person, a creature of more varying moods, of heightened
+feelings, of stranger ways. Like Tom, he is a person of sentiment, but
+his sentiment attaches itself, not so much to everyday aspects of
+experience, as to that which is unusual or terrifying, lovely or far
+away; he possesses, or would like to possess, bodily or spiritual
+daring. He has the adventurous heart. He is of those who love to go
+down to the sea in ships and do business in great waters. Lorenzo the
+romanticist is made of no finer clay than Tom the idealist, but his
+nerves are differently tuned. Your deep-sea fisherman, after all, is
+only a fisherman at bottom. That is to say, he too is an idealist, but
+he wants to catch different species of fish from those which drop into
+the basket of the landsman. Precisely what he covets, perhaps he does
+not know. I was once foolish enough to ask an old Alsatian soldier who
+was patiently holding his rod over a most unpromising canal near
+Strassburg, what kind of fish he was fishing for. "All kinds," was his
+rebuking answer, and I took off my hat to the veteran romanticist.
+
+The words "romance" and "romanticism" have been repeated to the ears of
+our generation with wearisome iteration. Not the least of the good luck
+of Wordsworth and Coleridge lay in the fact that they scarcely knew
+that they were "romanticists." Middle-aged readers of the present day
+may congratulate themselves that in their youth they read Wordsworth
+and Coleridge simply because it was Wordsworth and Coleridge and not
+documents illustrating the history of the romantic movement. But the
+rising generation is sophisticated. For better or worse it has been
+taught to distinguish between the word "romance" on the one side, and
+the word "romanticism" on the other. "Romantic" is a useful but
+overworked adjective which attaches itself indiscriminately to both
+"romance" and "romanticism." Professor Vaughan, for example, and a
+hundred other writers, have pointed out that in the narrower and more
+usual sense, the words "romance" and "romanticism" point to a love of
+vivid coloring and strongly marked contrasts; to a craving for the
+unfamiliar, the marvellous, and the supernatural. In the wider and
+less definite sense, they signify a revolt from the purely intellectual
+view of man's nature; a recognition of the instincts and the passions,
+a vague intimation of sympathy between man and the world around
+him,--in one word, the sense of mystery. The narrower and the broader
+meanings pass into one another by imperceptible shades. They are
+affected by the well-known historic conditions for romantic feeling in
+the different European countries. The common factor, of course, is the
+man with the romantic world set in his heart. It is Gautier with his
+love of color, Victor Hugo enraptured with the sound of words, Heine
+with his self-destroying romantic irony, Novalis with his blue flower,
+and Maeterlinck with his _Blue Bird_.
+
+But these romantic men of letters, writing in epochs of romanticism,
+are by no means the only children of romance. Sir Humphrey Gilbert and
+Sir Walter Raleigh were as truly followers of "the gleam" as were
+Spenser or Marlowe. The spirit of romance is found wherever and
+whenever men say to themselves, as Don Quixote's niece said of her
+uncle, that "they wish better bread than is made of wheat," or when
+they look within their own hearts, and assert, as the poet Young said
+in 1759, long before the English romantic movement had begun, "there is
+more in the spirit of man than mere prose-reason can fathom."
+
+We are familiar, perhaps too remorsefully familiar, with the fact that
+romance is likely to run a certain course in the individual and then to
+disappear. Looking back upon it afterward, it resembles the upward and
+downward zigzag of a fever chart. It has in fact often been described
+as a measles, a disease of which no one can be particularly proud,
+although he may have no reason to blush for it. Southey said that he
+was no more ashamed of having been a republican than of having been a
+boy. Well, people catch Byronism, and get over it, much as Southey got
+over his republicanism. In fact Byron himself lived long enough--though
+he died at thirty-six--to outgrow his purely "Byronic" phase, and to
+smile at it as knowingly as we do. Coleridge's blossoming period as a
+romantic poet was tragically brief. Keats and Shelley had the good
+fortune to die in the fulness of their romantic glory. They did not
+outlive their own poetic sense of the wonder and mystery of the world.
+Yet many an old poet like Tennyson and Browning has preserved his
+romance to the end. Tennyson dies at eighty-three with the full
+moonlight streaming through the oriel window upon his bed, and with his
+fingers clasping Shakespeare's _Cymbeline_.
+
+With most of us commonplace persons, however, a reaction from the
+romantic is almost inevitable. The romantic temperament cannot long
+keep the pitch. Poe could indeed do it, although he hovered at times
+near the border of insanity. Hawthorne went for relief to his profane
+sea-captains and the carnal-minded superannuated employees of the Salem
+Custom House. "The weary weight of all this unintelligible world"
+presses too hard on most of those who stop to think about it. The
+simplest way of relief is to shrug one's shoulders and let the weight
+go. That is to say, we cease being poets, we are no longer the children
+of romance, although we may remain idealists. Perhaps it is external
+events that change, rather than we ourselves. The restoration of the
+Bourbons, the Revolutions of 1830 and 1848, make and unmake romantics.
+Often society catches up with the romanticist; he is no longer a
+soldier of revolt; he has become a "respectable." Or, while remaining a
+poet, he shifts his attention to some more familiar segment of the
+idealistic circle. He sings about his wife instead of the wife of
+somebody else. Like Wordsworth, he takes for his theme a Mary
+Hutchinson instead of the unknown and hauntingly alluring figure of
+Lucy. To put it differently, the high light, the mysterious color of
+dawn or sunset disappears from his picture of human life. Or, the high
+light may be diffused in a more tranquil radiance over the whole
+surface of experience. Such an artist may remain a true painter or
+poet, but he is not a romantic poet or painter any longer. He has, like
+the aging Emerson, taken in sail; the god Terminus has said to him, "no
+more."
+
+One must of course admit that the typical romanticist has often been
+characterized by certain intellectual and moral weaknesses. But the
+great romance men, like Edmund Spenser, for example, may not possess
+these weaknesses at all. Robert Louis Stevenson was passionately in
+love with the romantic in life and with romanticism in literature; but
+it did not make him eccentric, weak, or empty. His instinct for
+enduring romance was so admirably fine that it brought strength to the
+sinews of his mind, light and air and fire to his soul. Among the
+writers of our own day, it is Mr. Kipling who has written some of the
+keenest satire upon romantic foibles, while never ceasing to salute his
+real mistress, the true romance.
+
+    "Who wast, or yet the Lights were set,
+      A whisper in the void,
+    Who shalt be sung through planets young
+      When this is clean destroyed."
+
+What are the causes of American romance, the circumstances and
+qualities that have produced the romantic element in American life and
+character? Precisely as with the individual artist or man of letters,
+we touch first of all upon certain temperamental inclinations. It is a
+question again of the national mind, of the differentiation of the race
+under new climatic and physical conditions. We have to reckon with the
+headiness and excitability of youth. It was young men who emigrated
+hither, just as in the eighteen-sixties it was young men who filled the
+Northern and the Southern armies. The first generations of American
+immigration were made up chiefly of vigorous, imaginative, and daring
+youth. The incapables came later. It is, I think, safe to assert that
+the colonists of English stock, even as late as 1790,--when more than
+ninety per cent of the population of America had in their veins the
+blood of the British Isles,--were more responsive to romantic impulses
+than their English cousins. For that matter, an Irishman or a Welshman
+is more romantic than an Englishman to-day.
+
+From the very beginning of the American settlements, likewise, there
+were evidences of the weaker, the over-excitable side of the romantic
+temper. There were volatile men like Morton of Merrymount; there were
+queer women like Anne Hutchinson, admirable woman as she was; among the
+wives of the colonists there were plenty of Emily Dickinsons in the
+germ. Among the men, there were schemes that came to nothing. There
+were prototypes of Colonel Sellers; a temperamental tendency toward
+that recklessness and extravagance which later historical conditions
+stimulated and confirmed. The more completely one studies the history
+of our forefathers on American soil, the more deeply does one become
+conscious of the prevailing atmosphere of emotionalism.
+
+Furthermore, as one examines the historic conditions under which the
+spirit of American romance has been preserved and heightened from time
+to time, one becomes aware that although ours is rather a romance of
+wonder than of beauty, the spirit of beauty is also to be found. The
+first fervors of the romance of discovery were childlike in their
+eagerness. Hakluyt's _Voyages_, John Smith's _True Relation of
+Virginia_, Thomas Morton's _New England's Canaan_, all appeal to the
+sense of the marvellous.
+
+Listen to Morton's description of Cape Ann. I can never read it without
+thinking of Botticelli's picture of Spring, so naively does this
+picturesque rascal suffuse his landscape with the feeling for beauty:--
+
+     "In the Moneth of June, Anno Salutis 1622, it was my chaunce
+     to arrive in the parts of New England with 30. Servants, and
+     provision of all sorts fit for a plantation: and whiles our
+     howses were building, I did indeavour to take a survey of
+     the Country: The more I looked, the more I liked it. And
+     when I had more seriously considered of the bewty of the
+     place, with all her faire indowments, I did not thinke that
+     in all the knowne world it could be paralel'd, for so many
+     goodly groves of trees, dainty fine round rising hillucks,
+     delicate faire large plaines, sweete cristall fountaines,
+     and cleare running streames that twine in fine meanders
+     through the meads, making so sweete a murmering noise to
+     heare as would even lull the sences with delight a sleepe,
+     so pleasantly doe they glide upon the pebble stones, jetting
+     most jocundly where they doe meete and hand in hand runne
+     downe to Neptunes Court, to pay the yearely tribute which
+     they owe to him as soveraigne Lord of all the springs.
+     Contained within the volume of the Land, Fowles in
+     abundance, Fish in multitude; and discovered, besides,
+     Millions of Turtledoves on the greene boughes, which sate
+     pecking of the full ripe pleasant grapes that were supported
+     by the lusty trees, whose fruitful loade did cause the armes
+     to bend: while here and there dispersed, you might see
+     Lillies and the Daphnean-tree: which made the Land to mee
+     seeme paradice: for in mine eie t'was Natures Masterpeece;
+     Her cheifest Magazine of all where lives her store: if this
+     Land be not rich, then is the whole world poore."
+
+This is the Morton who, a few years later, settled at Merrymount. Let
+me condense the story of his settlement, from the narrative of the
+stout-hearted Governor William Bradford's _History of Plymouth
+Plantation_:--
+
+    "And Morton became lord of misrule, and maintained (as it
+    were) a schoole of Athisme. And after they had gott some good
+    into their hands, and gott much by trading with the Indeans,
+    they spent it as vainly, in quaffing & drinking both wine &
+    strong waters in great exsess, and, as some reported 10L.
+    worth in a morning. They allso set up a May-pole, drinking
+    and dancing aboute it many days togeather, inviting the
+    Indean women, for their consorts, dancing and frisking
+    togither, (like so many fairies, or furies rather,) and worse
+    practises. As if they had anew revived & celebrated the
+    feasts of the Roman Goddes Flora, or the beasly practieses of
+    the madd Bacchinalians. Morton likewise (to shew his poetrie)
+    composed sundry rimes & verses, some tending to
+    lasciviousnes, and others to the detraction & scandall of
+    some persons, which he affixed to this idle or idoll
+    May-polle. They chainged allso the name of their place, and
+    in stead of calling it Mounte Wollaston, they call it
+    Merie-mounte, as if this joylity would have lasted ever."
+
+But it did not last long. Bradford and other leaders of the plantations
+"agreed by mutual consent" to "suppress Morton and his consorts." "In a
+friendly and neighborly way" they admonished him. "Insolently he
+persisted." "Upon which they saw there was no way but to take him by
+force." "So they mutually resolved to proceed," and sent Captain
+Standish to summon him to yield. But, says Bradford, Morton and some of
+his crew came out, not to yield, but to shoot; all of them rather
+drunk; Morton himself, with a carbine almost half filled with powder
+and shot, had thought to have shot Captain Standish, "_but he stepped
+to him and put by his piece and took him_."
+
+It is not too fanciful to say that with those stern words of Governor
+Bradford the English Renaissance came to an end. The dream of a lawless
+liberty which has been dreamed and dreamed out so many times in the
+history of the world was over, for many a day. It was only a hundred
+years earlier that Rabelais had written over the doors of his ideal
+abbey, the motto "Do what thou wilt." It is true that Rabelais proposed
+to admit to his Abbey of Theleme only such men and women as were
+virtuously inclined. We do not know how many persons would have been
+able and willing to go into residence there. At any rate, two hundred
+years went by in New England after the fall of Morton before any
+notable spirit dared to cherish once more the old Renaissance ideal. At
+last, in Emerson's doctrine that all things are lawful because Nature
+is good and human nature is divine, we have a curious parallel to the
+doctrine of Rabelais. It was the old romance of human will under a new
+form and voiced in new accents. Yet in due time the hard facts of human
+nature reasserted themselves and put this romantic transcendentalism
+by, even as the implacable Myles Standish put by that heavily loaded
+fowling-piece of the drunken Morton.
+
+But men believed in miracles in the first century of colonization, and
+they will continue at intervals to believe in them until human nature
+is no more. The marvellous happenings recorded in Cotton Mather's
+_Magnalia_ no longer excite us to any "suspension of disbelief." We
+doubt the story of Pocahontas. The fresh romantic enthusiasm of a
+settler like Crevecoeur seems curiously juvenile to-day, as does the
+romantic curiosity of Chateaubriand concerning the Mississippi and the
+Choctaws, or the zeal of Wordsworth and Coleridge over their dream of a
+"panti-Socratic" community in the unknown valley of the
+musically-sounding Susquehanna. Inexperience is a perpetual feeder of
+the springs of romance. John Wesley, it will be remembered, went out to
+the colony of Georgia full of enthusiasm for converting the Indians;
+but as he naively remarks in his _Journal_, he "neither found or heard
+of any Indians on the continent of America, who had the least desire of
+being instructed." The sense of fact, in other words, supervenes, and
+the glory disappears from the face of romance. The humor of Mark
+Twain's _Innocents Abroad_ turns largely upon this sense of remorseless
+fact confronting romantic inexperience.
+
+American history, however, has been marked by certain great romantic
+passions that seem endowed with indestructible vitality. The romance of
+discovery, the fascination of the forest and sea, the sense of danger
+and mystery once aroused by the very word "redskin," have all moulded
+and will continue to mould the national imagination. How completely
+the romance of discovery may be fused with the glow of humanitarian
+and religious enthusiasm has been shown once for all in the brilliant
+pages of Parkman's story of the Jesuit missions in Canada. Pictorial
+romance can scarcely go further than this. In the crisis of
+Chateaubriand's picturesque and passionate tale of the American
+wilderness, no one can escape the thrilling, haunting sound of the bell
+from the Jesuit chapel, as it tolls in the night and storm that were
+fatal to the happiness of Atala. One scarcely need say that the romance
+of missions has never faded from the American mind. I have known a
+sober New England deacon aged eighty-five, who disliked to die because
+he thought he should miss the monthly excitement of reading the
+_Missionary Herald_. The deacon's eyes, like the eyes of many an old
+sea-captain in Salem or Newburyport, were literally upon the ends of
+the earth. No one can reckon how many starved souls, deprived of normal
+outlet for human feeling, have found in this passionate curiosity and
+concern for the souls of black and yellow men and women in the
+antipodes, a constant source of beneficent excitement.
+
+Nor is there any diminution of interest in the mere romance of
+adventure, in the stories of hunter and trapper, the journals of Lewis
+and Clarke, the narratives of Boone and Crockett. In writing his superb
+romances of the Northern Lakes, the prairie and the sea, Fenimore
+Cooper had merely to bring to an artistic focus sentiments that lay
+deep in the souls of the great mass of his American readers. Students
+of our social life have pointed out again and again how deeply our
+national temperament has been affected by the existence, during nearly
+three hundred years, of an alien aboriginal race forever lurking upon
+the borders of our civilization. "Playing Indian" has been immensely
+significant, not merely in stimulating the outdoor activity of
+generations of American boys, but in teaching them the perennial
+importance of certain pioneer qualities of observation,
+resourcefulness, courage, and endurance which date from the time when
+the Indians were a daily and nightly menace. Even when the Indian has
+been succeeded by the cowboy, the spirit of romance still lingers,--as
+any collection of cowboy ballads will abundantly prove. And when the
+cowboys pass, and the real-estate dealers take possession of the
+field, one is tempted to say that romance flourishes more than ever.
+
+In short, things are what we make them at the moment, what we believe
+them to be. In my grandfather's youth the West was in the neighborhood
+of Port Byron, New York, and when he journeyed thither from
+Massachusetts in the eighteen-twenties, the glory of adventure enfolded
+him as completely as the boys of the preceding generation had been
+glorified in the War of the Revolution, or the boys of the next
+generation when they went gold-seeking in California in 1849. The West,
+in short, means simply the retreating horizon, the beckoning finger of
+opportunity. Like Boston, it has been not a place, but a "state of
+mind."
+
+    "We must go, go, go away from here,
+    On the other side the world we're overdue."
+
+That is the song which sings itself forever in the heart of youth.
+Champlain and Cartier heard it in the sixteenth century, Bradford no
+less than Morton in the seventeenth. Some Eldorado has always been
+calling to the more adventurous spirits upon American soil. The
+passion of the forty-niner neither began nor ended with the discovery
+of gold in California. It is within us. It transmutes the harsh or
+drab-colored everyday routine into tissue of fairyland. It makes our
+"winning of the West" a magnificent national epic. It changes to-day
+the black belt of Texas, or the wheat-fields of Dakota, into pots of
+gold that lie at the end of rainbows, only that the pot of gold is
+actually there. The human hunger of it all, the gorgeous dream-like
+quality of it all, the boundlessness of the vast American spaces, the
+sense of forest and prairie and sky, are all inexplicably blended with
+our notion of the ideal America. Henry James once tried to explain the
+difference between Turgenieff and a typical French novelist by saying
+that the back door of the Russian's imagination was always open upon
+the endless Russian steppe. No one can understand the spirit of
+American romance if he is not conscious of this ever-present hinterland
+in which our spirits have, from the beginning, taken refuge and found
+solace.
+
+We have already noticed, in the chapter on idealism, how swiftly the
+American imagination modifies the prosaic facts of everyday
+experience. The idealistic glamour which falls upon the day's work
+changes easily, in the more emotional temperaments, and at times,
+indeed, in all of us, into the fervor of true romance. Then, the
+prosaic buying and selling becomes the "game." A combination of buyers
+and sellers becomes the "system." The place where these buyers and
+sellers most do congregate and concentrate becomes "Wall Street"--a
+sort of anthropomorphic monster which seems to buy and sell the bodies
+and souls of men. Seen half a continent away, through the mists of
+ignorance and prejudice and partisan passion, "Wall Street" has loomed
+like some vast Gibraltar. To the broker's clerk who earns his weekly
+salary in that street, the Nebraska notion of "Wall Street" is too
+grotesque for discussion.
+
+How easily every phase of American business life may take on the hues
+of romance is illustrated by the history of our railroads. No wonder
+that Bret Harte wrote a poem about the meeting of the eastward and
+westward facing engines when the two sections of the Union Pacific
+Railroad at last drew near each other on the interminable plains and
+the two engines could talk. Of course what they said was poetry. There
+was a time when even the Erie Canal was poetic. The Panama Canal
+to-day, in the eyes of most Americans, is something other than a mere
+feat of engineering. We are doing more than making "the dirt fly." The
+canal represents victory over hostile forces, conquest of unwilling
+Nature, achievement of what had long been deemed impossible, the making
+not of a ditch, but of History.
+
+So with all that American zest for camping, fishing, sailing, racing,
+which lies deep in the Anglo-Saxon, and which succeeds to the more
+primitive era of actual struggle against savage beasts or treacherous
+men or mysterious forests. It is at once an outlet and a nursery for
+romantic emotion. The out-of-doors movement which began with Thoreau's
+hut on Walden Pond, and which has gone on broadening and deepening to
+this hour, implies far more than mere variation from routine. It
+furnishes, indeed, a healthful escape from the terrific pressure of
+modern social and commercial exigencies. Yet its more important
+function is to provide for grown-ups a chance to "play Indian" too.
+
+But outdoors and indoors, after all, lie in the heart and mind, rather
+than in the realm of actual experience. The romantic imagination
+insists upon taking its holiday, whether the man who possesses it gets
+his holiday or not. I have never known a more truly romantic figure
+than a certain tin-pedler in Connecticut who, in response to the
+question, "Do you do a good business?" made this perfectly Stevensonian
+reply: "Well, I make a living selling crockery and tinware, but my
+_business_ is the propagation of truth."
+
+This wandering idealist may serve to remind us again of the difference
+between romance and romanticism. The true romance is of the spirit.
+Romanticism shifts and changes with external fortunes, with altering
+emotions, with the alternate play of light and shade over the vast
+landscape of human experience. The typical romanticist, as we have
+seen, is a man of moods. It is only a Poe who can keep the pitch
+through the whole concert of experience. But the deeper romance of the
+spirit is oblivious of these changes of external fortune, this rising
+or falling of the emotional temperature. The moral life of America
+furnishes striking illustrations of the steadfastness with which
+certain moral causes have been kept, as it were, in the focus of
+intense feeling. Poetry, undefeated and unwavering poetry, has
+transfigured such practical propaganda as the abolition of slavery, the
+emancipation of woman, the fight against the liquor traffic, the
+emancipation of the individual from the clutches of economic and
+commercial despotism. Men like Colonel Thomas Wentworth Higginson,
+women like Julia Ward Howe, fought for these causes throughout their
+lives. Colonel Higginson's attitude towards women was not merely
+chivalric (for one may be chivalrous without any marked predisposition
+to romance), but nobly romantic also. James Russell Lowell, poet as he
+was, outlived that particular phase of romantic moral reform which he
+had been taught by Maria White. But in other men and women bred in that
+old New England of the eighteen-forties, the moral fervor knew no
+restraint. Garrison, although in many respects a most unromantic
+personality, was engaged in a task which gave him all the inspiration
+of romance. A romantic "atmosphere," fully as highly colored as any of
+the romantic atmospheres that we are accustomed to mark in literature,
+surrounded as with a luminous mist the figures of the New England
+transcendentalists. They, too, as Heine said of himself, were soldiers.
+They felt themselves enlisted for a long but ultimately victorious
+campaign. They were willing to pardon, in their comrades and in
+themselves, those imaginative excesses which resemble the physical
+excesses of a soldier's camp. Transcendentalism was thus a militant
+philosophy and religion, with both a destructively critical and a
+positively constructive creed. Channing, Parker, Alcott, Margaret
+Fuller, were warrior-priests, poets and prophets of a gallant campaign
+against inherited darkness and bigotry, and for the light.
+
+The atmosphere of that score of years in New England was now
+superheated, now rarefied, thin, and cold; but it was never quite the
+normal atmosphere of every day. On the purely literary side, it is
+needless to say, these men and women sought inspiration in Coleridge
+and Carlyle and other English and German romanticists. In fact, the
+most enduring literature of New England between 1830 and 1865 was
+distinctly a romantic literature. It was rooted, however, not so much
+in those swift changes of historic condition, those startling
+liberations of the human spirit which gave inspiration to the
+romanticism of the Continent, as it was in the deep and vital fervor
+with which these New Englanders envisaged the problems of the moral
+life.
+
+Other illustrations of the American capacity for romance lie equally
+close at hand. Take, for instance, the stout volume in which Mr. Burton
+Stevenson has collected the _Poems of American History_. Here are
+nearly seven hundred pages of closely printed patriotic verse. While
+Stedman's _Anthology_ reveals no doubt national aspirations and
+national sentiment, as well as the emotional fervor of individuals, Mr.
+Stevenson's collection has the advantage of focussing this national
+feeling upon specific events. Stedman's _Anthology_ is an enduring
+document of American idealism, touching in the sincerity of its poetic
+moods, pathetic in its long lists of men and women who are known by one
+poem only, or who have never, for one reason or another, fulfilled
+their poetic promise. The thousand poems which it contains are more
+striking, in fact, for their promise than for their performance. They
+are intimations of what American men and women would have liked to do
+or to be. In this sense, it is a precious volume, but it is certainly
+not commensurate, either in passion or in artistic perfection, with the
+forces of that American life which it tries to interpret. Indeed, Mr.
+Stedman, after finishing his task of compilation, remarked to more than
+one of his friends that what this country needed was some "adult male
+verse."
+
+The _Poems of American History_ collected by Mr. Stevenson are at least
+vigorous and concrete. One aspect of our history which especially lends
+itself to Mr. Stevenson's purpose is the romance which attaches itself
+to war. It is scarcely necessary to say nowadays that all wars, even
+the noblest, have had their sordid, grimy, selfish, bestial aspect; and
+that the intelligence and conscience of our modern world are more and
+more engaged in the task of making future wars impossible. But the
+slightest acquaintance with American history reveals the immense
+reservoir of romantic emotion which has been drawn upon in our national
+struggles. War, of course, is an immemorial source of romantic feeling.
+William James's notable essay on "A Moral Substitute for War"
+endeavored to prove that our modern economic and social life, if
+properly organized, would give abundant outlet and satisfaction to
+those romantic impulses which formerly found their sole gratification
+in battle. Many of us believe that he was right; but for the moment we
+must look backward and not forward. We must remember the stern if rude
+poetry inspired by our Revolutionary struggle, the romantic halo that
+falls upon the youthful figure of Nathan Hale, the baleful light that
+touches the pale face of Benedict Arnold, the romance of the Bennington
+fight to the followers of Stark and Ethan Allen, the serene voice of
+the "little captain," John Paul Jones:--"We have not struck, we have
+just begun our part of the fighting." The colors of romance still drape
+the Chesapeake and the Shannon, Tecumseh and Tippecanoe. The hunters of
+Kentucky, the explorers of the Yellowstone and the Columbia, the
+emigrants who left their bones along the old Santa Fe Trail, are our
+Homeric men.
+
+The Mexican War affords pertinent illustration, not only of romance,
+but of reaction. The earlier phases of the Texan struggle for
+independence have much of the daring, the splendid rashness, the
+glorious and tragic catastrophes of the great romantic adventures of
+the Old World. It is not the Texans only who still "remember the
+Alamo," but when those brilliant and dramatic adventures of border
+warfare became drawn into the larger struggle for the extension of
+slavery, the poetic reaction began. The physical and moral pretence of
+warfare, the cheap splendors of epaulets and feathers, shrivelled at
+the single touch of the satire of the _Biglow Papers_. Lowell, writing
+at that moment with the instinct and fervor of a prophet, brought the
+whole vainglorious business back to the simple issue of right and
+wrong:
+
+    "'Taint your eppyletts an' feathers
+      Make the thing a grain more right;
+    'Taint afollerin' your bell-wethers
+      Will excuse ye in His sight;
+    Ef you take a sword an' dror it,
+      An' go stick a feller thru,
+    Guv'ment aint to answer for it,
+      God'll send the bill to you."
+
+But far more interesting is the revelation of the American capacity for
+romance which was made possible by the war between the States.
+Stevenson's _Poems of American History_ and Stedman's _Anthology_ give
+abundant illustration of almost every aspect of that epical struggle.
+The South was in a romantic mood from the very beginning. The North
+drifted into it after Sumter. I have already said that no one can
+examine a collection of Civil War verse without being profoundly moved
+by its evidence of American idealism. In specific phases of the
+struggle, in connection with certain battle-fields and certain leaders
+of both North and South, this idealism is heightened into pure romance,
+so that even our novelists feel that they can give no adequate picture
+of the war without using the colors of poetry. Most critics, no doubt,
+agree in feeling that we are still too near to that epoch-making crisis
+of our national existence to do it any justice in the terms of
+literature. Perhaps we must wait for the perfected romance of the years
+1861-65, until the men and the events of that struggle are as remote as
+the heroes of Greece and Troy. Certainly no one can pass a final
+judgment upon the verse occasioned by recent struggles in arms. Any one
+who has studied the English poetry inspired by the South-African War
+will be painfully conscious of the emotional and moral complexity of
+all such issues, of the bitter injustice which poets, as well as other
+men, render to one another, of the impossibility of transmuting into
+the pure gold of romance the emotions originating in the stock market,
+in race-hatred, and in national vainglory.
+
+We have lingered too long, perhaps, over these various evidences of the
+romantic temper of America. We must now glance at the forces of
+reaction, the recoil to fact. What is it which contradicts, inhibits,
+or negatives the romantic tendency? Among other forces, there is
+certainly humor. Humor and romance often go hand in hand, but humor is
+commonly fatal to romanticism. There is satire, which rebukes both
+romanticism and romance, which exposes the fallacies of the one, and
+punctures the exuberance of the other. More effective, perhaps, than
+either humor or satire as an antiseptic against romance, is the
+overmastering sense of fact. This is what Emerson called the instinct
+for the milk in the pan, an instinct which Emerson himself possessed
+extraordinarily on his purely Yankee side, and which a pioneer country
+is forced continually to develop and to recognize. Camping, for
+instance, develops both the romantic sense and the fact sense. Supper
+must be cooked, even at Walden Pond. There must be hewers of wood and
+drawers of water, and the dishes ought to be washed.
+
+On a higher plane, also, than this mere sense of physical necessity,
+there are forces limiting the influence of romance. Schiller put it all
+into one famous line:--
+
+    "Und was uns alle bandigt, das Gemeine."
+
+Or listen to Keats:--
+
+    "'T is best to remain aloof from people, and like their good
+    parts, without being eternally troubled with the dull process
+    of their everyday lives.... All I can say is that standing at
+    Charing Cross, and looking East, West, North and South, I can
+    see nothing but dullness."
+
+And Henry James, describing New York in his book, _The American Scene_,
+speaks of "the overwhelming preponderance of the unmitigated
+'business-man' face ... the consummate monotonous commonness of the
+pushing male crowd, moving in its dense mass--with the confusion
+carried to chaos for any intelligence, any perception; a welter of
+objects and sounds in which relief, detachment, dignity, meaning,
+perished utterly and lost all rights ... the universal _will to
+move_--to move, move, move, as an end in itself, an appetite at any
+price."
+
+One need not be a poet like Keats or an inveterate psychologist like
+Henry James, in order to become aware how the commonplaceness of the
+world rests like a fog upon the mind and heart. No one goes to his
+day's work and comes home again without a consciousness of contact with
+an unspiritual atmosphere, or incompletely spiritualized forces, not
+merely with indifference, to what Emerson would term "the over-soul,"
+but with a lack of any faith in the things which are unseen. Take those
+very forces which have limited the influence of Emerson throughout the
+United States; they illustrate the universal forces which clip the
+wings of romance. The obstacles in the path of Emerson's influence are
+not merely the religious and denominational differences which Dr.
+George A. Gordon portrayed in a notable article at the time of the
+Emerson Centenary. The real obstacles are more serious. It is true
+that Dr. Park of Andover, Dr. Bushnell of Hartford, and Dr. Hodge of
+Princeton, could say in Emerson's lifetime: "We know a better, a more
+Scriptural and certificated road toward the very things which Emerson
+is seeking for. We do not grant that we are less idealistic than he. We
+think him a dangerous guide, following wandering fires. It is better to
+journey safely with us."
+
+But I have known at least two livery-stable keepers and many college
+professors who would unite in saying: "Hodge and Park and Bushnell and
+Emerson are all following after something that does not exist. One is
+not much more mistaken than the others. We can get along perfectly well
+in our business without any of those ideas at all. Let us stick to the
+milk in the pan, the horse in the stall, the documents which you will
+find in the library."
+
+There exists, in other words, in all classes of American society
+to-day, just as there existed during the Revolution, during the
+transcendental movement, or the Civil War, an immense mass of
+unspiritualized, unvitalized American manhood and womanhood. No
+literature comes from it and no religion, though there is much human
+kindness, much material progress, and some indestructible residuum of
+that idealism which lifts man above the brute.
+
+Yet the curious and the endlessly fascinating thing about these forces
+of reaction is that they themselves shift and change. We have seen that
+external romance depending upon strangeness of scene, novelty of
+adventure, rich atmospheric distance of space or time, disappears with
+the changes of civilization. The farm expands over the wolf's den, the
+Indian becomes a blacksmith, but do the gross and material instincts
+ultimately triumph? He would be a hardy prophet who should venture to
+assert it. We must reckon always with the swing of the human pendulum,
+with the reaction against reaction. Here, for example, during the last
+decade, has been book after book written about the reaction against
+democracy. All over the world, it is asserted, there are unmistakable
+signs that democracy will not practically work in the face of the
+modern tasks to which the world has set itself. One reads these books,
+one persuades himself that the hour for democracy is passing, and then
+one goes out on the street and buys a morning newspaper and discovers
+that democracy has scored again. So is it with the experience of the
+individual. You may fancy that the romance of the seas passes, for you,
+with the passing of the square-sailed ship. If Mr. Kipling's poetry
+cannot rouse you from that mood of reaction, walk down to the end of
+the pier to-morrow and watch the ocean liner come up the harbor. If
+there is no romance there, you do not know romance when you see it!
+
+Take the case of the farmer; his prosaic life is the butt of the
+newspaper paragraphers from one end of the country to the other. But
+does romance disappear from the farm with machinery and scientific
+agriculture? There are farmers who follow Luther Burbank's experiments
+with plants, with all the fascination which used to attach to alchemy
+and astrology. The farmer has no longer Indians to fight or a
+wilderness to subdue, but the soils of his farm are analyzed at his
+state university by men who live in the daily atmosphere of the romance
+of science, and who say, as a professor in the University of Chicago
+said once, that "a flower is so wonderful that if you knew what was
+going on within its cell-structure, you would be afraid to stay alone
+with it in the dark."
+
+The reaction from romance, therefore, real as it is, and dead weight as
+it lies upon the soul of the nation, often breeds the very forces which
+destroy it. In other words, the reaction against one type of romance
+produces inevitably another type of romance, other aspects of wonder,
+terror, and beauty. Following the romance of adventure comes, after
+never so deep a trough in the sea, the romance of science, like the
+crest of another wave; and then comes what we call, for lack of a
+better word, the psychological romance, the old mystery and strangeness
+of the human soul, AEschylus and Job, as Victor Hugo says, in the poor
+crawfish gatherer on the rocks of Brittany.
+
+We must remember that we are endeavoring to measure great spaces and to
+take account of the "amplitude of time." The individual "fact-man," as
+Coleridge called him, remains perhaps a fact-man to the end, just as
+the dreamer may remain a dreamer. But no single generation is
+compounded all of fact or all of dream. Longfellow felt, no doubt, that
+there was an ideal United States, which Dickens did not discover
+during that first visit of 1842; he would have set the Cambridge which
+he knew over against the Cincinnati viewed by Mrs. Trollope; he would
+have asserted that the homes characterized by refinement, by
+cultivation, by pure and simple sentiment, made up the true America.
+But even among Longfellow's own contemporaries there was Whitman, who
+felt that the true America was something very different from that
+exquisitely tempered ideal of Longfellow. There was Thoreau, who, over
+in Concord, had been pushing forward the frontier of the mind and
+senses, who had opened his back-yard gate, as it were, upon the
+boundless and mysterious territory of Nature. There was Emerson, who
+was preaching an intellectual independence of the Old World which
+should correspond to the political and social independence of the
+Western Hemisphere. There was Parkman, whose hatred of philanthropy,
+whose lack of spirituality, is a striking illustration of the rebound
+of New England idealism against itself, of the reaction into stoicism.
+What different worlds these men lived in, and yet they were all
+inhabitants, so to speak, of the same parish; most of them met often
+around the same table! The lesson of their variety of experience and
+differences of gifts as workmen in that great palace of literature
+which is so variously built, is that no action and reaction in the
+imaginative world is ever final. Least of all do these actions and
+reactions affect the fortunes of true romance. The born dreamer may
+fall from one dream into another, but he still murmurs, in the famous
+line of William Ellery Channing,--
+
+     "If my bark sinks, 't is to another sea."
+
+No line in our literature is more truly American,--unless it be that
+other splendid metaphor, by David Wasson, which says the same thing in
+other words:--
+
+    "Life's gift outruns my fancies far,
+       And drowns the dream
+       In larger stream,
+     As morning drinks the morning-star."
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+Humor and Satire
+
+
+A distinguished professor in the Harvard Divinity School once began a
+lecture on Comedy by saying that the study of the comic had made him
+realize for the first time that a joke was one of the most solemn
+things in the world. The analysis of humor is no easy matter. It is
+hard to say which is the more dreary: an essay on humor illustrated by
+a series of jokes, or an exposition of humor in the technical terms of
+philosophy. No subject has been more constantly discussed. But it
+remains difficult to decide what humor is. It is easier to declare what
+seemed humorous to our ancestors, or what seems humorous to us to-day.
+For humor is a shifting thing. The well-known collections of the
+writings of American humorists surprise us by their revelation of the
+changes in public taste. Humor--or the sense of humor--alters while we
+are watching. What seemed a good joke to us yesterday seems but a poor
+joke to-day. And yet it is the same joke! What is true of the
+individual is all the more true of the national sense of humor. This
+vast series of kaleidoscopic changes which we call America; has it
+produced a humor of its own?
+
+Let us avoid for the moment the treacherous territory of definitions.
+Let us, rather, take one concrete example: a pair of men, a knight and
+his squire, who for three hundred years have ridden together down the
+broad highway of the world's imagination. Everybody sees that Don
+Quixote and Sancho Panza are humorous. Define them as you
+will--idealist and realist, knight and commoner, dreamer and
+proverb-maker--these figures represent to all the world two poles of
+human experience. A Frenchman once said that all of us are Don Quixotes
+on one day and Sancho Panzas on the next. Humor springs from this
+contrast. It is the electric flash between the two poles of experience.
+
+Most philosophers who have meditated upon the nature of the comic point
+out that it is closely allied with the tragic. Flaubert once compared
+our human idealism to the flight of a swallow; at one moment it is
+soaring toward the sunset, at the next moment some one shoots it and it
+tumbles into the mud with blood upon its glistening wings. The sudden
+poignant contrast between light, space, freedom, and the wounded
+bleeding bird in the mud, is of the very essence of tragedy. But
+something like that is always happening in comedy. There is the same
+element of incongruity, without the tragic consequence. It is only the
+humorist who sees things truly because he sees both the greatness and
+the littleness of mortals; but even he may not know whether to laugh or
+to cry at what he sees. Those collisions and contrasts out of which the
+stuff of tragedy is woven, such as the clash between the higher and
+lower nature of a man, between his past and his present, between one's
+duties to himself and to his family or the state, between, in a word,
+his character and his situation, are all illustrated in comedy as
+completely as in tragedy. The countryman in the city, the city man in
+the country, is in a comic situation. Here is a coward named Falstaff,
+and Shakespeare puts him into battle. Here is a vain person, and
+Malvolio is imprisoned and twitted by a clown. Here is an ignoramus,
+and Dogberry is placed on the judge's bench. These contrasts might,
+indeed, be tragic enough, but they are actually comic. Such characters
+are not ruled by fate but by a sportive chance. The gods connive at
+them. They are ruled, like tragic characters, by necessity and
+blindness; but the blindness, instead of leading to tragic ruin, leads
+only to being caught as in some harmless game of blind-man's-buff.
+There is retribution, but Falstaff is only pinched by the fairies.
+Comedy of intrigue and comedy of character lead to no real catastrophe.
+The end of it on the stage is not death but matrimony; and "home well
+pleased we go."
+
+A thousand definitions of humor lay stress upon this element of
+incongruity. Hazlitt begins his illuminating lectures on the Comic
+Writers by declaring, "Man is the only animal that laughs or weeps; for
+he is the only animal that is struck with the difference between what
+things are and what they ought to be." James Russell Lowell took the
+same ground. "Humor," he said once, "lies in the contrast of two ideas.
+It is the universal disenchanter. It is the sense of comic
+contradiction which arises from the perpetual comment which the
+understanding makes upon the impressions received through the
+imagination." If that sentence seems too abstract, all we need do is to
+think of Sancho Panza, the man of understanding, talking about Don
+Quixote, the man of imagination.
+
+We must not multiply quotations, but it is impossible not to remember
+the distinction made by Carlyle in writing about Richter. "True humor,"
+says Carlyle, "springs not more from the head than from the heart. It
+is not contempt; its essence is love." In other words, not merely the
+great humorists of the world's literature--Cervantes, Rabelais,
+Fielding, Thackeray, Dickens--but the writers of comic paragraphs for
+to-morrow's newspaper, all regard our human incongruities with a sort
+of affection. The comic spirit is essentially a social spirit. The
+great figures of tragedy are solitary. The immortal figures of comedy
+belong to a social group.
+
+No recent discussion of humor is more illuminating and more directly
+applicable to the conditions of American life than that of the
+contemporary French philosopher Bergson. Bergson insists throughout
+his brilliant little book on _Laughter_ that laughter is a social
+function. Life demands elasticity. Hence whatever is stiff, automatic,
+machine-like, excites a smile. We laugh when a person gives us the
+impression of being a thing,--a sort of mechanical toy. Every
+inadaptation of the individual to society is potentially comic. Thus
+laughter becomes a social initiation. It is a kind of hazing which we
+visit upon one another. But we do not isolate the comic personage as we
+do the solitary, tragic figure. The comic personage is usually a type;
+he is one of an absurd group; he is a miser, a pedant, a pretentious
+person, a doctor or a lawyer in whom the professional traits have
+become automatic so that he thinks more of his professional behavior
+than he does of human health and human justice. Of all these separatist
+tendencies, laughter is the great corrective. When the individual
+becomes set in his ways, obstinate, preoccupied, automatic, the rest of
+us laugh him out of it if we can. Of course all that we are thinking
+about at the moment is his ridiculousness. But nevertheless, by
+laughing we become the saviors of society.
+
+No one, I think, can help observing that this conception of humor as
+incongruity is particularly applicable to a new country. On the new
+soil and under the new sky, in new social groupings, all the
+fundamental contrasts and absurdities of our human society assume a new
+value. We see them under a fresh light. They are differently focussed.
+The broad humors of the camp, its swift and picturesque play of light
+and shade, its farce and caricature no less than its atmosphere of
+comradeship, of sentiment, and of daring, are all transferred to the
+humor of the newly settled country. The very word "humor" once meant
+singularity of character, "some extravagant habit, passion, or
+affection," says Dryden, "particular to some one person." Every newly
+opened country encourages, for a while, this oddness and incongruity of
+individual character. It fosters it, and at the same moment it laughs
+at it. It decides that such characters are "humorous." As the social
+conditions of such a country change, the old pioneer instinct for
+humor, and the pioneer forms of humor, may endure, though the actual
+frontier may have moved far westward.
+
+There is another conception of humor scarcely less famous than the
+notion of incongruity. It is the conception associated with the name of
+the English philosopher Hobbes, who thought that humor turned upon a
+sense of superiority. "The passion of laughter," said Hobbes, "is
+nothing else but sudden glory arising from some sudden conception of
+some eminency in ourselves by comparison with the inferiority of
+others, or with our own formerly." Too cynical a view, declare many
+critics, but they usually end by admitting that there is a good deal in
+it after all. I am inclined to think that Hobbes's famous definition is
+more applicable to wit than it is to humor. Wit is more purely
+intellectual than humor. It rejoices in its little triumphs. It
+requires, as has been remarked, a good head, while humor takes a good
+heart, and fun good spirits. If you take Carlyle literally when he says
+that humor is love, you cannot wholly share Hobbes's conviction that
+laughter turns upon a sense of superiority, and yet surely we all
+experience a sense of kindly amusement which turns upon the fact that
+we, the initiated, are superior, for the moment, to the unlucky person
+who is just having his turn in being hazed. It may be the play of
+intellect or the coarser play of animal spirits. One might venture to
+make a distinction between the low comedy of the Latin races and the
+low comedy of the Germanic races by pointing out that the superiority
+in the Latin comedy usually turns upon quicker wits, whereas the
+superiority in the Germanic farce is likely to turn upon stouter
+muscles. But whether it be a play of wits or of actual cudgelling, the
+element of superiority and inferiority is almost always there.
+
+I remember that some German, I dare say in a forgotten lecture-room,
+once illustrated the humor of superiority in this way. A company of
+strolling players sets up its tent in a country village. On the front
+seat is a peasant, laughing at the antics of the clown. The peasant
+flatters himself that he sees through those practical jokes on the
+stage; the clown ought to have seen that he was about to be tripped up,
+but he was too stupid. But the peasant saw that it was coming all the
+time. He laughs accordingly. Just behind the peasant sits the village
+shopkeeper. He has watched stage clowns many a time and he laughs, not
+at the humor of the farce, but at the naive laughter of the peasant in
+front of him. He, the shopkeeper, is superior to such broad and obvious
+humor as that. Behind the shopkeeper sits the schoolmaster. The
+schoolmaster is a pedant; he has probably lectured to his boys on the
+theory of humor, and he smiles in turn at the smile of superiority on
+the face of the shopkeeper. Well, peeping in at the door of the tent is
+a man of the world, who glances at the clown, then at the peasant, then
+at the shopkeeper, then at the schoolmaster, each one of whom is
+laughing at the others, and the man of the world laughs at them all!
+
+Let us take an even simpler illustration. We all know the comfortable
+sense of proprietorship which we experience after a few days' sojourn
+at a summer hotel. We know our place at the table; we call the head
+waiter by his first name; we are not even afraid of the clerk. Now into
+this hotel, where we sit throned in conscious superiority, comes a new
+arrival. He has not yet learned the exits and entrances. He starts for
+the kitchen door inadvertently when he should be headed for the
+drawing-room. We smile at him. Why? Precisely because that was what we
+did on the morning of our own arrival. We have been initiated, and it
+is now his turn.
+
+If it is true that a newly settled country offers endless opportunities
+for the humor which turns upon incongruity, it is also true that the
+new country offers countless occasions for the humor which turns upon
+the sudden glory of superiority. The backwoodsman is amusing to the man
+of the settlements, and the backwoodsman, in turn, gets his full share
+of amusement out of watching the "tenderfoot" in the woods. It is
+simply the case of the old resident versus the newcomer. The
+superiority need be in no sense a cruel or taunting superiority,
+although it often happens to be so. The humor of the pioneers is not
+very delicately polished. The joke of the frontier tavern or grocery
+store is not always adapted to a drawing-room audience, but it turns in
+a surprisingly large number of instances upon exactly the same
+intellectual or social superiority which gives point to the _bon mots_
+of the most cultivated and artificial society in the world.
+
+The humor arising from incongruity, then, and the humor arising from a
+sense of superiority, are both of them social in their nature. No less
+social, surely, is the function of satire. It is possible that satire
+may be decaying, that it is becoming, if it has not already become, a
+mere splendid or odious tradition. But let us call it a great tradition
+and, upon the whole, a splendid one. Even when debased to purely party
+or personal uses, the verse satire of a Dryden retains its magnificent
+resonance; "the ring," says Saintsbury, "as of a great bronze coin
+thrown down on marble." The malignant couplets of an Alexander Pope
+still gleam like malevolent jewels through the dust of two hundred
+years. The cynicism, the misanthropy, the mere adolescent badness of
+Byron are powerless to clip the wings of the wide-ranging, far-darting
+wit and humor and irony of _Don Juan_. The homely Yankee dialect, the
+provinciality, the "gnarly" flavor of the _Biglow Papers_ do not
+prevent our finding in that pungent and resplendent satire the powers
+of Lowell at full play; and, what is more than that, the epitome of the
+American spirit in a moral crisis.
+
+I take the names of those four satirists, Dryden, Pope, Byron, and
+Lowell, quite at random; but they serve to illustrate a significant
+principle; namely, that great satire becomes ennobled as it touches
+communal, not merely individual interests, as it voices social and not
+merely individual ideals. Those four modern satirists were steeped in
+the nationalistic political poetry of the Old Testament. They were
+familiar with its war anthems, dirges, and prophecies, its concern for
+the prosperity and adversity, the sin and the punishment, of a people.
+Here the writers of the Golden Age of English satire found their
+vocabulary and phrase-book, their grammar of politics and history,
+their models of good and evil kings; and in that Biblical school of
+political poetry, which has affected our literature from the
+Reformation down to Mr. Kipling, there has always been a class in
+satire! The satirical portraits, satirical lyrics, satirical parables
+of the Old Testament prophets are only less noteworthy than their
+audacity in striking high and hard. Their foes were the all-powerful:
+Babylon and Assyria and Egypt loom vast and terrible upon the canvases
+of Isaiah and Ezekiel; and poets of a later time have learned there the
+secrets of social and political idealism, and the signs of national
+doom.
+
+There are two familiar types of satire associated with the names of
+Horace and Juvenal. Both types are abundantly illustrated in English
+and American literature. When you meet a bore or a hypocrite or a plain
+rascal, is it better to chastise him with laughter or to flay him with
+shining fury? I shall take both horns of the dilemma and assert that
+both methods are admirable and socially useful. The minor English and
+American poets of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were never
+weary of speaking of satire as a terrific weapon which they were forced
+to wield as saviors of society. But whether they belonged to the urbane
+school of Horace, or to the severely moralistic school of Juvenal, they
+soon found themselves falling into one or the other of two modes of
+writing. They addressed either the little audience or the big audience,
+and they modified their styles accordingly. The great satirists of the
+Renaissance, for example, like More, Erasmus, and Rabelais, wrote
+simply for the persons who were qualified to understand them. More and
+Erasmus wrote their immortal satires in Latin. By so doing they
+addressed themselves to cultivated Europe. They ran no risk of being
+misunderstood by persons for whom the joke was not intended. All
+readers of Latin were like members of one club. Of course membership
+was restricted to the learned, but had not Horace talked about being
+content with a few readers, and was not Voltaire coming by and by with
+the advice to try for the "little public"?
+
+The typical wit of the eighteenth century, whether in London, Paris, or
+in Franklin's printing-shop in Philadelphia, had, of course, abandoned
+Latin. But it still addressed itself to the "little public," to the
+persons who were qualified to understand. The circulation of the
+_Spectator_, which represents so perfectly the wit, humor, and satire
+of the early eighteenth century in England, was only about ten thousand
+copies. This limited audience smiled at the urbane delicate touches of
+Mr. Steele and Mr. Addison. They understood the allusions. The fable
+concerned them and not the outsiders. It was something like Oliver
+Wendell Holmes reading his witty and satirical couplets to an audience
+of Harvard alumni. The jokes are in the vernacular, but in a vernacular
+as spoken in a certain social medium. It is all very delightful.
+
+But there is a very different kind of audience gathering all this while
+outside the Harvard gates. These two publics for the humorist we may
+call the invited and the uninvited; the inner circle and the outer
+circle: first, those who have tickets for the garden party, and who
+stroll over the lawn, decorously gowned and properly coated, conversing
+with one another in the accepted social accents and employing the
+recognized social adjectives; and second, the crowd outside the
+gates,--curious, satirical, good-natured in the main, straightforward
+of speech and quick to applaud a ready wit or a humor-loving eye or a
+telling phrase spoken straight from the heart of the mob.
+
+Will an author choose to address the selected guests or the casual
+crowd? Either way lies fame, if one does it well. Your uninvited men
+find themselves talking to the uninvited crowd. Before they know it
+they are famous too. They are fashioning another manner of speech.
+Defoe is there, with his saucy ballads selling triumphantly under his
+very pillory; with his _True-Born Englishman_ puncturing forever the
+fiction of the honorable ancestry of the English aristocracy; with his
+_Crusoe_ and _Moll Flanders_, written, as Lamb said long afterwards,
+for the servant-maid and the sailor. Swift is there, with his terrific
+_Drapier's Letters_, anonymous, aimed at the uneducated, with cold fury
+bludgeoning a government into obedience; with his _Gulliver's Travels_,
+so transparent upon the surface that a child reads the book with
+delight and remains happily ignorant that it is a satire upon humanity.
+And then, into the London of Defoe and Swift, and into the very centre
+of the middle-class mob, steps, in 1724, the bland Benjamin Franklin in
+search of a style "smooth, clear, and short," and for half a century,
+with consummate skill, shapes that style to his audience. His young
+friend Thomas Paine takes the style and touches it with passion, until
+he becomes the perfect pamphleteer, and his _Crisis_ is worth as much
+to our Revolution--men said--as the sword of Washington. After another
+generation the gaunt Lincoln, speaking that same plain prose of Defoe,
+Swift, Franklin, and Paine,--Lincoln who began his first Douglas
+debate, not like his cultivated opponent with the conventional "Ladies
+and Gentlemen," but with the ominously intimate, "My Fellow
+Citizens,"--Lincoln is saying, "I am not master of language; I have not
+a fine education; I am not capable of entering into a disquisition upon
+dialectics, as I believe you call it; but I do not believe the
+language I employed bears any such construction as Judge Douglas puts
+upon it. But I don't care about a quibble in regard to words. I know
+what I meant, and _I will not leave this crowd in doubt_, if I can
+explain it to them, what I really meant in the use of that paragraph."
+
+"_I will not leave this crowd in doubt_"; that is the final accent of
+our spoken prose, the prose addressed to one's fellow citizens, to the
+great public. This is the prose spoken in the humor and satire of
+Dickens. Dressed in a queer dialect, and put into satirical verse, it
+is the language of the _Biglow Papers_. Uttered with the accent of a
+Chicago Irishman, it is the prose admired by millions of the countrymen
+of "Mr. Dooley."
+
+Satire written to the "little public" tends toward the social type;
+that written to the "great public" to the political type. It is obvious
+that just as a newly settled country offers constant opportunity for
+the humor of incongruity and the humor arising from a sense of
+superiority, it likewise affords a daily stimulus to the use of satire.
+That moralizing Puritan strain of censure which lost none of its
+harshness in crossing the Atlantic Ocean found full play in the
+colonial satire of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. As the
+topics for satire grew wider and more political in their scope, the
+audiences increased. To-day the very oldest issues of the common life
+of that queer "political animal" named man are discussed by our popular
+newspaper satirists in the presence of a democratic audience that
+stretches from the Atlantic to the Pacific.
+
+Is there, then, a distinctly American type of humor and satire? I think
+it would be difficult to prove that our composite American nationality
+has developed a mode of humor and satire which is racially different
+from the humor and satire of the Old World. All racial lines in
+literature are extremely difficult to draw. If you attempt to analyze
+English humor, you find that it is mostly Scotch or Irish. If you put
+Scotch and Irish humor under the microscope, you discover that most of
+the best Scotch and Irish jokes are as old as the Greeks and the
+Egyptians. You pick up a copy of _Fliegende Blatter_ and you get keen
+amusement from its revelation of German humor. But how much of this
+humor, after all, is either essentially universal in its scope or else
+a matter of mere stage-setting and machinery? Without the Prussian
+lieutenant the _Fliegende Blatter_ would lose half its point; nor can
+one imagine a _Punch_ without a picture of the English policeman. The
+lieutenant and the policeman, however, are a part of the accepted
+social furniture of the two countries. They belong to the decorative
+background of the social drama. They heighten the effectiveness of
+local humor, but it may be questioned whether they afford any evidence
+of genuine racial differentiation as to the sense of the comic.
+
+What one can abundantly prove, however, is that the United States
+afford a new national field for certain types of humor and satire. Our
+English friends are never weary of writing magazine articles about
+Yankee humor, in which they explain the peculiarities of the American
+joke with a dogmatism which has sometimes been thought to prove that
+there is such a thing as national lack of humor, whether there be such
+a thing as national humor or not. One such article, I remember,
+endeavored to prove that the exaggeration often found in American
+humor was due to the vastness of the American continent. Our geography,
+that is to say, is too much for the Yankee brain. Mr. Birrell, an
+expert judge of humor, surely, thinks that the characteristic of
+American humor lies in its habit of speaking of something hideous in a
+tone of levity. Many Englishmen, in fact, have been as much impressed
+with this minimizing trick of American humor as with the converse trick
+of magnifying. Upon the Continent the characteristic trait of American
+humor has often been thought to be its exuberance of phrase. Many
+shrewd judges of our newspaper humor have pointed out that one of its
+most favorite methods is the suppression of one link in the chain of
+logical reasoning. Such generalizations as these are always
+interesting, although they may not take us very far.
+
+Yet it is clear that certain types of humor and satire have proved to
+be specially adapted to the American soil and climate. Whether or not
+these types are truly indigenous one may hesitate to say, yet it
+remains true that the well-known conditions of American life have
+stimulated certain varieties of humor into such a richness of
+manifestation as the Old World can scarcely show.
+
+Curiously enough, one of the most perfected types of American humor is
+that urbane Horatian variety which has often been held to be the
+exclusive possession of the cultivated and restricted societies of
+older civilization. Yet it is precisely this kind of humor which has
+been the delight of some of the most typical American minds. Benjamin
+Franklin, for example, modelled his style and his sense of the humorous
+on the papers of the _Spectator_. He produced humorous fables and
+apologues, choice little morsels of social and political persiflage,
+which were perfectly suited, not merely to the taste of London in the
+so-called golden age of English satire, but to the tone of the wittiest
+salons of Paris in the age when the old regime went tottering, talking,
+quoting, jesting to its fall. Read Franklin's charming and wise letter
+to Madame Brillon about giving too much for the whistle. It is the
+perfection of well-bred humor: a humor very American, very Franklinian,
+although its theme and tone and phrasing might well have been envied by
+Horace or Voltaire.
+
+The gentle humor of Irving is marked by precisely those traits of
+urbanity and restraint which characterize the parables of Franklin.
+Does not the _Autocrat of the Breakfast Table_ itself presuppose the
+existence of a truly cultivated society? Its tone--"As I was saying
+when I was interrupted"--is the tone of the intimate circle. There was
+so much genuine humanity in the gay little doctor that persons born
+outside the circle of Harvard College and the North Shore and Boston
+felt themselves at once initiated by the touch of his merry wand into a
+humanized, kindly theory of life. The humor of George William Curtis
+had a similarly mellow and ripened quality. It is a curious comment
+upon that theory of Americans which represents us primarily as a
+loud-voiced, assertive, headstrong people, to be thus made aware that
+many of the humorists whom we have loved best are precisely those whose
+writing has been marked by the most delicate restraint, whose theory of
+life has been the most highly urbane and civilized, whose work is
+indistinguishable in tone--though its materials are so different--from
+that of other humorous writers on the other side of the Atlantic. On
+its social side all this is a fresh proof of the extraordinary
+adaptability of the American mind. On the literary side it is one more
+evidence of the national fondness for neatness and perfection of
+workmanship.
+
+But we are something other than a nation of mere lovers and would-be
+imitators of Charles Lamb. The moralistic type of humor, the crack of
+Juvenal's whip, as well as the delicate Horatian playing around the
+heart-strings, has characterized our humor and satire from the
+beginning. At bottom the American is serious. Beneath the surface of
+his jokes there is moral earnestness, there is ethical passion. Take,
+for example, some of the apothegms of "Josh Billings." He failed with
+the public until he took up the trick of misspelling his words. When he
+had once gained his public he sometimes delighted them with sheer
+whimsical incongruity, like this:--
+
+    "There iz 2 things in this life for which we are never fully
+    prepared, and that iz twins."
+
+But more often the tone is really grave. It is only the spelling that
+is queer. The moralizing might be by La Bruyere or La Rochefoucauld.
+Take this:--
+
+    "Life iz short, but it iz long enuff to ruin enny man who
+    wants tew be ruined."
+
+Or this:--
+
+    "When a feller gits a goin doun hill, it dus seem as tho evry
+    thing had bin greased for the okashun." That is what writers
+    of tragedy have been showing, ever since the Greeks!
+
+Or finally, this, which has the perfect tone of the great French
+moralists:--
+
+    "It iz a verry delicate job to forgive a man without lowering
+    him in his own estimashun, and yures too."
+
+See how the moralistic note is struck in the field of political satire.
+It is 1866, and "Petroleum V. Nasby," writing from "Confedrit X Roads,"
+Kentucky, gives Deekin Pogram's views on education. "He didn't bleeve
+in edjucashun, generally speekin. The common people was better off
+without it, ez edjucashun hed a tendency to unsettle their minds. He
+had seen the evil effex ov it in niggers and poor whites. So soon ez a
+nigger masters the spellin book and gits into noosepapers, he becomes
+dissatisfied with his condishin, and hankers after a better cabin and
+more wages. He towunst begins to insist onto ownin land hisself, and
+givin his children edjucashun, and, ez a nigger, for our purposes, aint
+worth a soo markee."
+
+The single phrase, "ez a nigger," spells a whole chapter of American
+history.
+
+That quotation from "Petroleum V. Nasby" serves also to illustrate a
+species of American humor which has been of immense historical
+importance and which has never been more active than it is to-day: the
+humor, namely, of local, provincial, and sectional types. Much of this
+falls under Bergson's conception of humor as social censure. It rebukes
+the extravagance, the rigidity, the unawareness of the individual who
+fails to adapt himself to his social environment. It takes the place,
+in our categories of humor, of those types of class humor and satire in
+which European literature is so rich. The mobility of our population,
+the constant shifting of professions and callings, has prevented our
+developing fixed class types of humor. We have not even the lieutenant
+or the policeman as permanent members of our humorous stock company.
+The policeman of to-day may be mayor or governor to-morrow. The
+lieutenant may go back to his grocery wagon or on to his department
+store. But whenever and wherever such an individual fails to adapt
+himself to his new companions, fails to take on, as it were, the colors
+of his new environment, to speak in the new social accents, to follow
+the recognized patterns of behavior, then the kindly whip of the
+humorist is already cracking round his ears. The humor and satire of
+college undergraduate journalism turns mainly upon the recognized
+ability or inability of different individuals to adapt themselves to
+their changing pigeon-holes in the college organism. A freshman must
+behave like a freshman, or he is laughed at. Yet he must not behave as
+if he were nothing but the automaton of a freshman, or he will be
+laughed at more merrily still.
+
+One of the first discoveries of our earlier humorists was the Down-East
+Yankee. "I'm going to Portland whether or no," says Major Jack Downing,
+telling the story of his boyhood; "I'll see what this world is made of
+yet. So I tackled up the old horse and packed in a load of ax handles
+and a few notions, and mother fried me a few doughnuts ... for I told
+her I didn't know how long I should be gone,"--and off he goes to
+Portland, to see what the world is made of. It is a little like Defoe,
+and a good deal like the young Ulysses, bent upon knowing cities and
+men and upon getting the best of bargains.
+
+Each generation of Americans has known something like that trip to
+Portland. Each generation has had to measure its wits, its resources,
+its manners, against new standards of comparison. At every stage of the
+journey there are mishaps and ridiculous adventures; but everywhere,
+likewise, there is zest, conquest, initiation; the heart of a boy who
+"wants to know"--as the Yankees used to say; or, in more modern
+phrase,--
+
+            "to admire and for to see,
+    For to behold this world so wide."
+
+There is the same romance of adventure in the humor concerning the
+Irishman, the Negro, the Dutchman, the Dago, the farmer. Each in turn
+becomes humorous through failure to adapt himself to the prevalent
+type. A long-bearded Jew is not ridiculous in Russia, but he rapidly
+becomes ridiculous even on the East Side of New York. Underneath all
+this popular humor of the comic supplements one may catch glimpses of
+the great revolving wheels which are crushing the vast majority of our
+population into something like uniformity. It is a process of social
+attrition. The sharp edges of individual behavior get rounded off. The
+individual loses color and picturesqueness, precisely as he casts aside
+the national costume of the land from which he came. His speech, his
+gait, his demeanor, become as nearly as possible like the speech and
+carriage of all his neighbors. If he resists, he is laughed at; and if
+he does not personally heed the laughter, he may be sure that his
+children do. It is the children of our immigrants who catch the sly
+smiles of their school-fellows, who overhear jokes from the newspapers
+and on the street corners, who bring home to their foreign-born fathers
+and mothers the imperious childish demand to make themselves like unto
+everybody else.
+
+A similar social function is performed by that well-known mode of
+American humor which ridicules the inhabitants of certain states. Why
+should New Jersey, for example, be more ridiculous than Delaware? In
+the eyes of the newspaper paragrapher it unquestionably is, just as
+Missouri has more humorous connotations than Kentucky. We may think we
+understand why we smile when a man says that he comes from Kalamazoo
+or Oshkosh, but the smile when he says "Philadelphia" or "Boston" or
+"Brooklyn" is only a trifle more subtle. It is none the less real. Why
+should the suburban dweller of every city be regarded with humorous
+condescension by the man who is compelled to sleep within the city
+limits? No one can say, and yet without that humor of the suburbs the
+comic supplements of American newspapers would be infinitely less
+entertaining,--to the people who enjoy comic supplements.
+
+So it is with the larger divisions of our national life. Yankee,
+Southerner, Westerner, Californian, Texan, each type provokes certain
+connotations of humor when viewed by any of the other types. Each type
+in turn has its note of provinciality when compared with the norm of
+the typical American. It is quite possible to maintain that our
+literature, like our social life, has suffered by this ever-present
+American sense of the ridiculous. Our social consciousness might be far
+more various and richly colored, there might be more true provincial
+independence of speech and custom and imagination if we had not to
+reckon with this ever-present censure of laughter, this fear of
+finding ourselves, our city, our section, out of touch with the
+prevalent tone and temper of the country as a whole. It is one of the
+forfeits we are bound to pay when we play the great absorbing game of
+democracy.
+
+We are now ready to ask once more whether there is a truly national
+type of American humor. Viewed exclusively from the standpoint of
+racial characteristics, we have seen that this question as to a
+national type of humor is difficult to answer. But we have seen with
+equal clearness that the United States has offered a singularly rich
+field for the development of the sense of humor; and furthermore that
+there are certain specialized forms of humor which have flourished
+luxuriantly upon our soil. Our humorists have made the most of their
+native materials. Every pioneer trait of versatility, curiosity,
+shrewdness, has been turned somehow to humorous account. The very
+institutions of democracy, moulding day by day and generation after
+generation the habits and the mental characteristics of millions of
+men, have produced a social atmosphere in which humor is one of the
+most indisputable elements.
+
+I recall a notable essay by Mr. Charles Johnston on the essence of
+American humor in which he applies to the conditions of American life
+one familiar distinction between humor and wit. Wit, he asserts, scores
+off the other man, humor does not. Wit frequently turns upon tribal
+differences, upon tribal vanity. The mordant wit of the Jew, for
+example, from the literature of the Old Testament down to the raillery
+of Heine, has turned largely upon the sense of racial superiority, of
+intellectual and moral differences. But true humor, Mr. Johnston goes
+on to argue, has always a binding, a uniting quality. Thus Huckleberry
+Finn and Jim Hawkins, white man and black man, are afloat together on
+the Mississippi River raft and they are made brethren by the fraternal
+quality of Mark Twain's humor. Thus the levelling quality of Bret
+Harte's humor bridges social and moral chasms. It creates an atmosphere
+of charity and sympathy. In fact, the typical American humor, according
+to the opinion of Mr. Johnston, emphasizes the broad and humane side of
+our common nature. It reveals the common soul. It possesses a
+surplusage of power, of buoyancy and of conquest over circumstances.
+It means at its best a humanizing of our hearts.
+
+Some people will think that all this is too optimistic, but if you are
+not optimistic enough you cannot keep up with the facts. Certain it is
+that the pioneers of American national humor, the creators of what we
+may call the "all-American" type of humor, have possessed precisely the
+qualities which Mr. Johnston has pointed out. They are apparent in the
+productions of Artemus Ward. The present generation vaguely remembers
+Artemus Ward as the man who was willing to send all his wife's
+relatives to the war and who, standing by the tomb of Shakespeare,
+thought it "a success." But no one who turns to the almost forgotten
+pages of that kindly jester can fail to be impressed by his sunny
+quality, by the atmosphere of fraternal affection which glorifies his
+queer spelling and his somewhat threadbare witticisms. Mark Twain, who
+is universally recognized by Europeans as a representative of typical
+American humor, had precisely those qualities of pioneer curiosity,
+swift versatility, absolute democracy, which are characteristic of the
+national temper. His lively accounts of frontier experiences in
+_Roughing It_, his comments upon the old world in _Innocents Abroad_
+and _A Tramp Abroad_, his hatred of pretence and injustice, his scorn
+at sentimentality coupled with his insistence upon the rights of
+sentiment, in a word his persistent idealism, make Mark Twain one of
+the most representative of American writers. Largeness, freedom, human
+sympathy, are revealed upon every page.
+
+It is true that the dangers of American humor are no less in evidence
+there. There is the danger of extravagance, which in Mark Twain's
+earlier writings was carried to lengths of absurdity. There is the old
+danger of the professional humorist of fearing to fail to score his
+point, and so of underscoring it with painful reiteration. Mark Twain
+is frequently grotesque. Sometimes there is evidence of imperfect
+taste, or of bad taste. Sometimes there is actual vulgarity. In his
+earlier books particularly there is revealed that lack of discipline
+which has been such a constant accompaniment of American writing. Yet a
+native of Hannibal, Missouri, trained on a river steamboat and in a
+country printing-office and in mining-camps, can scarcely be expected
+to exhibit the finely balanced critical sense of a Matthew Arnold.
+Mark Twain was often accused in the first years of his international
+reputation of a characteristically American lack of reverence. He is
+often irreverent. But here again the boundaries of his irreverence are
+precisely those which the national instinct itself has drawn. The joke
+stops short of certain topics which the American mind holds sacred. We
+all have our favorite pages in the writings of this versatile and
+richly endowed humorist, but I think no one can read his description of
+the coyote in _Roughing It_, and Huckleberry Finn's account of his
+first visit to the circus, without realizing that in this fresh
+revelation of immemorial human curiosity, this vivid perception of
+incongruity and surprise, this series of lightning-like flashes from
+one pole of experience to the other, we have not only masterpieces of
+world humor, but a revelation of a distinctly American reaction to the
+facts presented by universal experience.
+
+The picturesque personality and the extraordinarily successful career
+of Mark Twain kept him, during the last twenty-five years of his life,
+in the focus of public attention. But no one can read the pages of the
+older American humorists,--or try to recall to mind the names of
+paragraphers who used to write comic matter for this or that
+newspaper,--without realizing how swiftly the dust of oblivion settles
+upon all the makers of mere jokes. It is enough, perhaps, that they
+caused a smile for the moment. Even those humorists who mark epochs in
+the history of American provincial and political satire, like Seba
+Smith with his _Major Jack Downing_, Newell with his _Papers of Orpheus
+C. Kerr_, "Petroleum V. Nasby's" _Letters from the Confedrit X Roads_,
+Shillaber's _Mrs. Partington_--all these have disappeared round the
+turn of the long road.
+
+    "Hans Breitman gife a barty--
+    Vhere ish dot barty now?"
+
+It seems as if the conscious humorists, the professional funny writers,
+had the shortest lease of literary life. They play their little comic
+parts before a well-disposed but restless audience which is already
+impatiently waiting for some other "turn." One of them makes a hit with
+a song or story, just as a draughtsman for a Sunday colored supplement
+makes a hit with his "Mutt and Jeff." For a few months everybody
+smiles and then comes the long oblivion. The more permanent American
+humor has commonly been written by persons who were almost unconscious,
+not indeed of the fact that they were creating humorous characters, but
+unconscious of the effort to provoke a laugh. The smile lasts longer
+than the laugh. Perhaps that is the secret. One smiles as one reads the
+delicate sketches of Miss Jewett. One smiles over the stories of Owen
+Wister and of Thomas Nelson Page. The trouble, possibly, with the
+enduring qualities of the brilliant humorous stories of "O. Henry" was
+that they tempt the reader to laugh too much and to smile too little.
+When one reads the _Legend of Sleepy Hollow_ or _Diedrich
+Knickerbocker's History of New York_, it is always with this gentle
+parting of the lips, this kindly feeling toward the author, his
+characters and the world. A humorous page which produces that effect
+for generation after generation, has the stamp of literature. One may
+doubt whether even the extraordinary fantasies of Mark Twain are more
+successful, judged by the mere vulgar test of concrete results, than
+the delicate humor of Charles Lamb. Our current newspaper and magazine
+humor is in no respect more fascinating than in its suggestion as to
+the permanent effectiveness of its comic qualities. Who could say, when
+he first read Mr. Finley P. Dunne's "Mr. Dooley" sketches, whether this
+was something that a whole nation of readers would instantly and
+instinctively rejoice over, would find a genial revelation of American
+characteristics, would recognize as almost the final word of kindly
+satire upon our overworked, over-excited, over-anxious,
+over-self-conscious generation?
+
+The range of this contemporary newspaper and magazine humor is
+well-nigh universal,--always saving, it is true, certain topics or
+states of mind which the American public cannot regard as topics for
+laughter. With these few exceptions nothing is too high or too low for
+it. The paragraphers joke about the wheel-barrow, the hen, the mule,
+the mother-in-law, the President of the United States. There is no
+ascending or descending scale of importance. Any of the topics can
+raise a laugh. If one examines a collection of American parodies, one
+will find that the happy national talent for fun-making finds full
+scope in the parody and burlesque of the dearest national sentiments.
+But no one minds; everybody believes that the sentiments endure while
+the jokes will pass. The jokes, intended as they are for an immense
+audience, necessarily lack subtlety. They tend to partake of the
+methods of pictorial caricature. Indeed, caricature itself, as Bergson
+has pointed out, emphasizes those "automatic, mechanical-toy" traits of
+character and behavior which isolate the individual and make him ill
+adapted for his function in society. Our verbal wit and humor, no less
+than the pencil of our caricaturists, have this constant note of
+exaggeration. "These violent delights have violent ends." But during
+their brief and laughing existence they serve to normalize society.
+They set up, as it were, a pulpit in the street upon which the comic
+spirit may mount and preach her useful sermon to all comers.
+
+Despite the universality of the objects of contemporary American humor,
+despite, too, its prevalent method of caricature, it remains true that
+its character is, on the whole, clean, easy-going, and kindly. The old
+satire of hatred has lost its force. No one knows why. "Satire has
+grown weak," says Mr. Chesterton, "precisely because belief has grown
+weak." That is one theory. The late Henry D. Lloyd, of Chicago,
+declared in one of his last books: "The world has outgrown the dialect
+and temper of hatred. The style of the imprecatory psalms and the
+denunciating prophets is out of date. No one knows these times if he is
+not conscious of this change." That is another theory. Again, party
+animosities are surely weaker than they were. Caricatures are less
+personally offensive; if you doubt it, look at any of the collections
+of caricatures of Napoleon, or of George the Fourth. Irony is less
+often used by pamphleteers and journalists. It is a delicate rhetorical
+weapon, and journalists who aim at the great public are increasingly
+afraid to use it, lest the readers miss the point. In the editorials in
+the Hearst newspapers, for instance, there is plenty of invective and
+innuendo, but rarely irony: it might not be understood, and the crowd
+must not be left in doubt.
+
+Possibly the old-fashioned satire has disappeared because the game is
+no longer considered worth the candle. To puncture the tire of
+pretence is amusing enough; but it is useless to stick tacks under the
+steam road-roller: the road-roller advances remorselessly and smooths
+down your mischievous little tacks and you too, indifferently. The huge
+interests of politics, trade, progress, override your passionate
+protest. "Shall gravitation cease when you go by?" I do not compare
+Colonel Roosevelt with gravitation, but have all the satirical squibs
+against our famous contemporary, from the "Alone in Cubia" to the
+"Teddy-see," ever cost him, in a dozen years, a dozen votes?
+
+Very likely Mr. Lloyd and Mr. Chesterton are right. We are less
+censorious than our ancestors were. Americans, on the whole, try to
+avoid giving pain through speech. The satirists of the golden age loved
+that cruel exercise of power. Perhaps we take things less seriously
+than they did; undoubtedly our attention is more distracted and
+dissipated. At any rate, the American public finds it easier to forgive
+and forget, than to nurse its wrath to keep it warm. Our characteristic
+humor of understatement, and our equally characteristic humor of
+overstatement, are both likely to be cheery at bottom, though the mere
+wording may be grim enough. No popular saying is more genuinely
+characteristic of American humor than the familiar "Cheer up. The worst
+is yet to come."
+
+Whatever else one may say or leave unsaid about American humor, every
+one realizes that it is a fundamentally necessary reaction from the
+pressure of our modern living. Perhaps it is a handicap. Perhaps we
+joke when we should be praying. Perhaps we make fun when we ought to be
+setting our shoulders to the wheel. But the deeper fact is that most
+American shoulders are set to the wheel too often and too long, and if
+they do not stop for the joke they are done for. I have always
+suspected that Mr. Kipling was thinking of American humor when he wrote
+in his well-known lines on "The American Spirit":--
+
+    "So imperturbable he rules
+      Unkempt, disreputable, vast--
+    And in the teeth of all the schools
+      I--I shall save him at the last."
+
+That is the very secret of the American sense of humor: the conviction
+that something is going to save us at the last. Otherwise there would
+be no joke! It is no accident, surely, that the man who is
+increasingly idolized as the most representative of all Americans, the
+burden-bearer of his people, the man of sorrows and acquainted with
+grief, should be our most inveterate humorist. Let Lincoln have his
+story and his joke, for he had faith in the saving of the nation; and
+while his Cabinet are waiting impatiently to listen to his Proclamation
+of Emancipation, give him another five minutes to read aloud to them
+that new chapter by Artemus Ward.
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+Individualism and Fellowship
+
+
+It would be difficult to find a clearer expression of the old doctrine
+of individualism than is uttered by Carlyle in his London lecture on
+"The Hero as Man of Letters." Listen to the grim child of Calvinism as
+he fires his "Annandale grapeshot" into that sophisticated London
+audience: "Men speak too much about the world.... The world's being
+saved will not save us; nor the world's being lost destroy us. We
+should look to ourselves.... For the saving of the world I will trust
+confidently to the Maker of the world; and look a little to my own
+saving, which I am more competent to!"
+
+Carlyle was never more soundly Puritanic, never more perfectly within
+the lines of the moral traditions of his race than in these injunctions
+to let the world go and to care for the individual soul.
+
+We are familiar with the doctrine on this side of the Atlantic. Here is
+a single phrase from Emerson's _Journal_ of September, 1833, written on
+his voyage home from that memorable visit to Europe where he first made
+Carlyle's acquaintance. "Back again to myself," wrote Emerson, as the
+five-hundred-ton sailing ship beat her way westward for a long month
+across the stormy North Atlantic:--"Back again to myself.--A man
+contains all that is needful to his government within himself. He is
+made a law unto himself. All real good or evil that can befall him must
+be from himself.... The purpose of life seems to be to acquaint a man
+with himself."
+
+In the following August he is writing:--
+
+    "Societies, parties, are only incipient stages, tadpole
+    states of men, as caterpillars are social, but the butterfly
+    not. The true and finished man is ever alone."
+
+On March 23, 1835:--
+
+    "Alone is wisdom. Alone is happiness. Society nowadays makes
+    us low-spirited, hopeless. Alone is Heaven."
+
+And once more:--
+
+    "If AEschylus is that man he is taken for, he has not yet
+    done his office when he has educated the learned of Europe
+    for a thousand years. He is now to approve himself a master
+    of delight to me. If he cannot do that, all his fame shall
+    avail him nothing. I were a fool not to sacrifice a thousand
+    AEschyluses to my intellectual integrity."
+
+These quotations have to do with the personal life. Let me next
+illustrate the individualism of the eighteen-thirties by the attitude
+of two famous individualists toward the prosaic question of paying
+taxes to the State. Carlyle told Emerson that he should pay taxes to
+the House of Hanover just as long as the House of Hanover had the
+physical force to collect them,--and not a day longer.
+
+Henry Thoreau was even more recalcitrant. Let me quote him:--
+
+    "I have paid no poll-tax for six years. I was put into a jail
+    once on this account, for one night; and, as I stood
+    considering the walls of solid stone, two or three feet
+    thick, the door of wood and iron, a foot thick, and the iron
+    grating which strained the light, I could not help being
+    struck with the foolishness of that institution which treated
+    me as if I were mere flesh and blood and bones, to be locked
+    up. I wondered that it should have concluded at length that
+    this was the best use it could put me to, and had never
+    thought to avail itself of my services in some way. I saw
+    that, if there was a wall of stone between me and my
+    townsmen, there was a still more difficult one to climb or
+    break through before they could get to be as free as I was. I
+    did not for a moment feel confined, and the walls seemed a
+    great waste of stone and mortar. I felt as if I alone of all
+    my townsmen had paid my tax. They plainly did not know how to
+    treat me, but behaved like persons who are underbred. In
+    every threat and in every compliment there was a blunder; for
+    they thought that my chief desire was to stand on the other
+    side of that stone wall. I could not but smile to see how
+    industriously they locked the door on my meditations, which
+    followed them out again without let or hindrance, and _they_
+    were really all that was dangerous. As they could not reach
+    me, they had resolved to punish my body; just as boys, if
+    they cannot come at some person against whom they have a
+    spite, will abuse his dog. I saw that the State was
+    half-witted, that it was timid as a lone woman with her
+    silver spoons, and that it did not know its friends from its
+    foes, and I lost all my remaining respect for it, and pitied
+    it."
+
+Here is Thoreau's attitude toward the problems of the inner life. The
+three quotations are from his _Walden_:--
+
+    "Probably I should not consciously and deliberately forsake
+    my particular calling to do the good which society demands of
+    me, to save the universe from annihilation."
+
+    "I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately,
+    to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could
+    not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die,
+    discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what
+    was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice
+    resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live
+    deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily
+    and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to
+    cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a
+    corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved
+    to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of
+    it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were
+    sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a
+    true account of it in my next excursion."
+
+    "It is said that the British Empire is very large and
+    respectable, and that the United States are a first-rate
+    power. We do not believe that a tide rises and falls behind
+    every man which can float the British Empire like a chip, if
+    he should ever harbor it in his mind."
+
+All of these quotations from Emerson and Thoreau are but various modes
+of saying "Let the world go." Everybody knows that in later crises of
+American history, both Thoreau and Emerson forgot their old preaching
+of individualism, or at least merged it in the larger doctrine of
+identification of the individual with the acts and emotions of the
+community. And nevertheless as men of letters they habitually laid
+stress upon the rights and duties of the private person. Upon a hundred
+brilliant pages they preached the gospel that society is in conspiracy
+against the individual manhood of every one of its members.
+
+They had a right to this doctrine. They came by it honestly through
+long lines of ancestral heritage. The republicanism of the seventeenth
+century in the American forests, as well as upon the floor of the
+English House of Commons, had asserted that private persons had the
+right to make and unmake kings. The republican theorists of the
+eighteenth century had insisted that life, liberty, and the pursuit of
+happiness were the birthright of each individual. This doctrine was
+related, of course, to the doctrine of equality. If republicanism
+teaches that "I am as good as others," democracy is forever hinting
+"Others are as good as I." Democracy has been steadily extending the
+notion of rights and duties. The first instinct, perhaps, is to ask
+what is right, just, lawful, for me? Next, what is right, just, lawful
+for my crowd? That is to say, my family, my clan, my race, my country.
+The third instinct bids one ask what is right and just and lawful, not
+merely for me, and for men like me, but for everybody. And when we get
+that third question properly answered, we can afford to close
+school-house and church and court-room, for this world's work will have
+ended.
+
+We have already glanced at various phases of colonial individualism. We
+have had a glimpse of Cotton Mather prostrate upon the dusty floor of
+his study, agonizing now for himself and now for the countries of
+Europe; we have watched Jonathan Edwards in his solitary ecstasies in
+the Northampton and the Stockbridge woods; we have seen Franklin
+preaching his gospel of personal thrift and of getting on in the world.
+Down to the very verge of the Revolution the American pioneer spirit
+was forever urging the individual to fight for his own hand. Each boy
+on the old farms had his own chores to do; each head of a family had to
+plan for himself. The most tragic failure of the individual in those
+days was the poverty or illness which compelled him to "go on the
+town." To be one of the town poor indicated that the individualistic
+battle had been fought and lost. No one ever dreamed, apparently, that
+a time for old-age pensions and honorable retiring funds was coming.
+The feeling against any form of community assistance was like the
+bitter hatred of the workhouse among English laborers of the
+eighteen-forties.
+
+The stress upon purely personal qualities gave picturesqueness, color,
+and vigor to the early life of the United States. Take the persons whom
+Parkman describes in his _Oregon Trail_. They have the perfect
+clearness of outline of the portraits by Walter Scott and the great
+Romantic school of novelists who loved to paint pictures of interesting
+individual men. There is the same stress upon individualistic
+portraiture in Irving's _Astoria_; in the humorous journals of early
+travellers in the Southern States. It is the secret of the curiosity
+with which we observe the gamblers and miners and stage-drivers
+described by Bret Harte. In the rural communities of to-day, in the
+older portions of the country, and in the remoter settlements of the
+West and Southwest, the individual man has a sort of picturesque, and,
+as it were, artistic value, which the life of cities does not allow.
+The gospel of self-reliance and of solitude is not preached more
+effectively by the philosophers of Concord than it is by the
+backwoodsmen, the spies, and the sailors of Fenimore Cooper.
+Individualism as a doctrine of perfection for the private person and
+individualism as a literary creed have thus gone hand in hand. "Produce
+great persons, the rest follows," cried Walt Whitman. He was thinking
+at the moment about American society and politics. But he believed that
+the same law held good in poetry. Once get your great man and let him
+abandon himself to poetry and the great poetry will be the result. It
+was almost precisely the same teaching as in Carlyle's lecture on "The
+Hero as Poet."
+
+Well, it is clear enough nowadays that both Whitman and Carlyle
+underrated the value of discipline. The lack of discipline is the chief
+obstacle to effective individualism. The private person must be well
+trained, or he cannot do his work; and as civilization advances, it
+becomes exceedingly difficult to train the individual without social
+cooperation. A Paul or a Mahomet may discipline his own soul in the
+Desert of Arabia; he may there learn the lessons that may later make
+him a leader of men. But for the average man and indeed for most of the
+exceptional men, the path to effectiveness lies through social and
+professional discipline. Here is where the frontier stage of our
+American life was necessarily weak. We have seen that our ancestors
+gained something, no doubt, from their spirit of unconventionally and
+freedom. But they also lost something through their dislike for
+discipline, their indifference to criticism, their ineradicable
+tendency, whether in business, in diplomacy, in art and letters and
+education, to go "across lots." A certain degree of physical
+orderliness was, indeed, imposed upon our ancestors by the conditions
+of pioneer life. The natural prodigality and recklessness of frontier
+existence was here and there sharply checked. Order is essential in a
+camp, and the thin line of colonies was all camping. A certain instinct
+for order underlay that resourcefulness which impresses every reader of
+our history. Did the colonist need a tool? He learned to make it
+himself. Isolation from the mother country was a stimulus to the
+inventive imagination. Before long they were maintaining public order
+in the same ingenious fashion in which they kept house. Appeals to
+London took too much time. "We send a complaint this year," ran the
+saying, "the next year they send to inquire, the third year the
+ministry is changed." No wonder that resourcefulness bred independent
+action, stimulated the Puritan taste for individualism, and led the way
+to self-government.
+
+Yet who does not know that the inherent instinct for political order
+may be accompanied by mental disorderliness? Even your modern
+Englishman--as the saying goes--"muddles through." The minds of our
+American forefathers were not always lucid. The mysticism of the New
+England Calvinists sometimes bred fanaticism. The practical and the
+theoretical were queerly blended. The essential unorderliness of the
+American mind is admirably illustrated by that "Father of all the
+Yankees," Benjamin Franklin. No student of Franklin's life fails to be
+impressed by its happy casualness, its cheerful flavor of the
+rogue-romance. Gil Blas himself never drifted into and out of an
+adventure with a more offhand and imperturbable adroitness. Franklin
+went through life with the joyous inventiveness of the amateur. He had
+the amateur's enthusiasm, coupled with a clairvoyant penetration into
+technical problems such as few amateurs have possessed. With all of his
+wonderful patience towards other men, Franklin had in the realm of
+scientific experiment something of the typical impatience of the mere
+dabbler. He was inclined to lose interest in the special problem before
+it was worked out. His large, tolerant intelligence was often as
+unorderly as his papers and accounts. He was a wonderful colonial
+Jack-of-all-trades; with a range of suggestion, a resourcefulness, a
+knack of assimilation, a cosmopolitan many-sidedness, which has left us
+perpetually his debtors. Under different surroundings, and disciplined
+by a more severe and orderly training, Franklin might easily have
+developed the very highest order of professional scientific
+achievement. His natural talent for organization of men and
+institutions, his "early projecting public spirit," his sense of the
+lack of formal educational advantages in the colonies, made him the
+founder of the Philadelphia Academy, the successful agitator for public
+libraries. Academicism, even in the narrow sense, owes much to this
+LL.D. of St. Andrews, D.C.L. of Oxford, and intimate associate of
+French academicians. But one smiles a little, after all, to see the
+bland printer in this academic company: he deserves his place there,
+indeed, but he is something more and other than his associates. He is
+the type of youthful, inexhaustible colonial America; reckless of
+precedent, self-taught, splendidly alive; worth, to his day and
+generation, a dozen born academicians; and yet suggesting by his very
+imperfections, that the Americans of a later day, working under
+different conditions, are bound to develop a sort of professional
+skill, of steady, concentrated, ordered intellectual activity, for
+which Franklin possessed the potential capacity rather than the
+opportunity and the desire.
+
+Yet there were latent lines of order, hints and prophecies of a coming
+fellowship, running deep and straight beneath the confused surface of
+the preoccupied colonial consciousness. In another generation we see
+the rude Western democracy asserting itself in the valley of the
+Mississippi. This breed of pioneers, like their fathers on the Atlantic
+coast line, could turn their hands to anything, because they must. "The
+average man," says Mr. Herbert Croly, "without any special bent or
+qualifications, was in the pioneer states the useful man. In that
+country it was sheer waste to spend much energy upon tasks which
+demanded skill, prolonged experience, high technical standards, or
+exclusive devotion.... No special equipment was required. The farmer
+was obliged to be all kinds of a rough mechanic. The business man was
+merchant, manufacturer, and storekeeper. Almost everybody was something
+of a politician. The number of parts which a man of energy played in
+his time was astonishingly large. Andrew Jackson was successively a
+lawyer, judge, planter, merchant, general, politician, and statesman;
+and he played most of these parts with conspicuous success. In such a
+society a man who persisted in one job, and who applied the most
+rigorous and exacting standards to his work, was out of place and
+really inefficient. His finished product did not serve its temporary
+purpose much better than did the current careless and hasty product,
+and his higher standards and peculiar ways constituted an implied
+criticism on the easy methods of his neighbors. He interfered with the
+rough good-fellowship which naturally arises among a group of men who
+submit good naturedly and uncritically to current standards. It is no
+wonder, consequently, that the pioneer Democracy viewed with distrust
+and aversion the man with a special vocation and high standards of
+achievement."
+
+The truth of this comment is apparent to everybody. It explains the
+still lingering popular suspicion of the "academic" type of man. But we
+are likely to forget that back of all that easy versatility and
+reckless variety of effort there was some sound and patient and
+constructive thinking. Lincoln used to describe himself humorously,
+slightingly, as a "mast-fed" lawyer, one who had picked up in the woods
+the scattered acorns of legal lore. It was a true enough description,
+but after all, there were very few college-bred lawyers in the Eighth
+Illinois Circuit or anywhere else who could hold their own, even in a
+purely professional struggle, with that long-armed logician from the
+backwoods.
+
+There was once a "mast-fed" novelist in this country, who scandalously
+slighted his academic opportunities, went to sea, went into the navy,
+went to farming, and then went into novel-writing to amuse himself. He
+cared nothing and knew nothing about conscious literary art; his style
+is diffuse, his syntax the despair of school-teachers, and many of his
+characters are bores. But once let him strike the trail of a story, and
+he follows it like his own Hawkeye; put him on salt water or in the
+wilderness, and he knows rope and paddle, axe and rifle, sea and forest
+and sky; and he knows his road home to the right ending of a story by
+an instinct as sure as an Indian's. Professional novelists like Balzac,
+professional critics like Sainte-Beuve, stand amazed at Fenimore
+Cooper's skill and power. The true engineering and architectural lines
+are there. They were not painfully plotted beforehand, like George
+Eliot's. Cooper took, like Scott, "the easiest path across country,"
+just as a bee-hunter seems to take the easiest path through the woods.
+But the bee-hunter, for all his apparent laziness, never loses sight of
+the air-drawn line, marked by the homing bee; and your _Last of the
+Mohicans_ will be instinctively, inevitably right, while your _Daniel
+Deronda_ will be industriously wrong.
+
+Cooper literally builded better than he knew. Obstinately unacademic in
+his temper and training, he has won the suffrages of the most
+fastidious and academic judges of excellence in his profession. The
+secret is, I suppose, that the lawlessness, the amateurishness, the
+indifference to standards were on the surface,--apparent to
+everybody,--the soundness and rightness of his practice were
+unconscious.
+
+Franklin and Lincoln and Cooper, therefore, may be taken as striking
+examples of individuals trained in the old happy-go-lucky way, and yet
+with marked capacities for socialization, for fellowship. They
+succeeded, even by the vulgar tests of success, in spite of their lack
+of discipline. But for most men the chief obstacle to effective labor
+even as individuals is the lack of thoroughgoing training.
+
+It is scarcely necessary to add that there are vast obstacles in the
+way of individualism as a working theory of society. Carlyle's theory
+of "Hero Worship" has fewer adherents than for half a century. It is
+picturesque,--that conception of a great, sincere man and of a world
+reverencing him and begging to be led by him. But the difficulty is
+that contemporary democracy does not say to the Hero, as Carlyle
+thought it must say, "Govern me! I am mad and miserable, and cannot
+govern myself!"
+
+Democracy says to the Hero, "Thank you very much, but this is our
+affair. Join us, if you like. We shall be glad of your company. But we
+are not looking for governors. We propose to govern ourselves."
+
+Even from the point of view of literature and art,--fields of activity
+where the individual performer has often been felt to be quite
+independent of his audience,--it is quite evident nowadays that the old
+theory of individualism breaks down. Even your lyric poet, who more
+than any other artist stands or sings alone, falls easily into mere
+lyric eccentricity if he is not bound to his fellows by wholesome and
+normal ties. In fact, this lyric eccentricity, weakness, wistfulness,
+is one of the notable defects of American poetry. We have always been
+lacking in the more objective forms of literary art, like epic and
+drama. Poe, and the imitators of Poe, have been regarded too often by
+our people as the normal type of poet. One must not forget the silent
+solitary ecstasies that have gone into the making of enduring lyric
+verse, but our literature proves abundantly how soon sweetness may turn
+to an Emily Dickinson strain of morbidness; how fatally the lovely
+becomes transformed into the queer. The history of the American short
+story furnishes many similar examples. The artistic intensity of a
+Hawthorne, his ethical and moral preoccupations, are all a part of the
+creed of individualistic art. But both Hawthorne and Poe would have
+written,--one dare not say better stories, but at least greater and
+broader and more human stories,--if they had not been forced to walk so
+constantly in solitary pathways. That fellowship in artistic creation
+which has characterized some of the greatest periods of art production
+was something wholly absent from the experience of these gifted and
+lonely men. Even Emerson and Thoreau wrote "whim" over their portals
+more often than any artist has the privilege to write it. Emerson never
+had any thorough training, either in philosophy, theology, or history.
+He admits it upon a dozen smiling pages. Perhaps it adds to his purely
+personal charm, just as Montaigne's confession of his intellectual and
+moral weaknesses heightens our fondness for the Prince of Essayists.
+But the deeper fact is that not only Emerson and Thoreau, Poe and
+Hawthorne, but practically every American writer and artist from the
+beginning has been forced to do his work without the sustaining and
+heartening touch of national fellowship and pride. Emerson himself felt
+the chilling poverty in the intellectual and emotional life of the
+country. He betrays it in this striking passage from his _Journal_,
+about the sculptor Greenough:--
+
+    "What interest has Greenough to make a good statue? Who cares
+    whether it is good? A few prosperous gentlemen and ladies;
+    but the Universal Yankee Nation roaring in the capitol to
+    approve or condemn would make his eye and hand and heart go
+    to a new tune."
+
+Those words were written in 1836, but we are still waiting for that new
+national anthem, sustaining the heart and the voice of the individual
+artist. Yet there are signs that it is coming.
+
+It is obvious that the day for the old individualism has passed.
+Whether one looks at art and literature or at the general activities of
+American society, it is clear that the isolated individual is
+incompetent to carry on his necessary tasks. This is not saying that we
+have outgrown the individual. We shall never outgrow the individual. We
+need for every page of literature and for every adequate performance of
+society more highly perfected individuals. Some one said of Edgar Allan
+Poe that he did not know enough to be a great poet. All around us and
+every day we find individuals who do not know enough for their specific
+job; men who do not love enough, men in whom the power of will is too
+feeble. Such men, as individuals, must know and love and will more
+adequately; and this not merely to perfect their functioning as
+individuals, but to fulfill their obligations to contemporary society.
+A true spiritual democracy will never be reached until highly trained
+individuals are united in the bonds of fraternal feeling. Every
+individual defect in training, defect in aspiration, defect in passion,
+becomes ultimately a defect in society.
+
+Let us turn, then, to those conditions of American society which have
+prepared the way for, and foreshadowed, a more perfect fellowship. We
+shall instantly perceive the relation of these general social
+conditions to the specific performances of our men of letters. We have
+repeatedly noted that our most characteristic literature is what has
+been called a citizen literature. It is the sort of writing which
+springs from a sense of the general needs of the community and which
+has had for its object the safe-guarding or the betterment of the
+community. Aside from a few masterpieces of lyric poetry, and aside
+from the short story as represented by such isolated artists as Poe and
+Hawthorne, our literature as a whole has this civic note. It may be
+detected in the first writings of the colonists. Captain John Smith's
+angry order at Jamestown, "He that will not work neither let him eat,"
+is one of the planks in the platform of democracy. Under the trying and
+depressing conditions of that disastrous settlement at Eden in _Martin
+Chuzzlewit_ it is the quick wits and the brave heart of Mark Tapley
+which prove him superior to his employer. The same sermon is preached
+in Mr. Barrie's play, _The Admirable Crichton_: cast away upon the
+desert island, the butler proves himself a better man than his master.
+This is the motive of a very modern play, but it may be illustrated a
+hundred times in the history of the seventeenth and eighteenth
+centuries in America. The practical experiences of the colonists
+confirmed them in their republican theories. It is true that they held
+to a doctrine of religious and political individualism. But the moment
+these theories were put to work in the wilderness a new order of things
+decreed that this individualism should be modified in the direction of
+fellowship. Calvinism itself, for all of its insistence upon the value
+of the individual soul, taught also the principle of the equality of
+all souls before God. It was thus that the _Institutes_ of Calvin
+became one of the charters of democracy. The democratic drift in the
+writings of Franklin and Jefferson is too well known to need any
+further comment. The triumph of the rebellious colonists of 1776 was a
+triumph of democratic principles; and although a Tory reaction came
+promptly, although Hamiltonianism came to stay as a beneficent check to
+over-radical, populistic theories, the history of the last century and
+a quarter has abundantly shown the vitality and the endurance of
+democratic ideas.
+
+One may fairly say that the decade in which American democracy revealed
+its most ugly and quarrelsome aspect was the decade of the
+eighteen-thirties. That was the decade when Washington Irving and
+Fenimore Cooper came home from long sojourns in Europe. They found
+themselves confronted at once by sensitive, suspicious neighbors who
+hated England and Europe and had a lurking or open hostility towards
+anything that savored of Old World culture. Yet in that very epoch
+when English visitors were passing their most harsh and censorious
+verdict upon American culture, Emerson was writing in his _Journal_
+(June 18, 1834) a singular prophecy to the effect that the evils of
+our democracy, so far as literature was concerned, were to be cured by
+the remedy of more democracy. Is it not striking that he turns away
+from the universities and the traditional culture of New England and
+looks towards the Jacksonism of the new West to create a new and native
+American literature? Here is the passage:--
+
+    "We all lean on England; scarce a verse, a page, a newspaper,
+    but is writ in imitation of English forms; our very manners
+    and conversation are traditional, and sometimes the life
+    seems dying out of all literature, and this enormous paper
+    currency of Words is accepted instead. I suppose the evil may
+    be cured by this rank rabble party, the Jacksonism of the
+    country, heedless of English and of all literature--a stone
+    cut out of the ground without hands;--they may root out the
+    hollow dilettantism of our cultivation in the coarsest way,
+    and the new-born may begin again to frame their own world
+    with greater advantage."
+
+From that raw epoch of the eighteen-thirties on to the Civil War, one
+may constantly detect in American writing the accents of democratic
+radicalism. Partly, no doubt, it was a heritage of the sentiment of the
+French Revolution. "My father," said John Greenleaf Whittier, "really
+believed in the Preamble of the Bill of Rights, which re-affirmed the
+Declaration of Independence." So did the son! Equally clear in the
+writings of those thirty years are echoes of the English radicalism
+which had so much in common with the democratic movement across the
+English Channel. The part which English thinkers and English agitators
+played in securing for America the fruits of her own democratic
+principles has never been adequately acknowledged.
+
+That the outcome of the Civil War meant a triumph of democratic ideas
+as against aristocratic privilege, no one can doubt. There were no
+stancher adherents of the democratic idea than our intellectual
+aristocrats. The best Union editorials at the time of the Civil War,
+says James Ford Rhodes, were written by scholars like Charles Eliot
+Norton and James Russell Lowell. I think it was Lowell who once said,
+in combatting the old aristocratic notion of white man supremacy, that
+no gentleman is willing to accept privileges that are inaccessible to
+other men. This is precisely like the famous sentence of Walt Whitman
+which first arrested the attention of "Golden Rule Jones," the mayor of
+Toledo, and which made him not only a Whitmaniac for the rest of his
+life but one of the most useful of American citizens. The line was, "I
+will accept nothing which all may not have their counterpart of on the
+same terms."
+
+This instinct of fellowship cannot be separated, of course, from the
+older instincts of righteousness and justice. It involves, however,
+more than giving the other man his due. It means feeling towards him as
+towards another "fellow." It involves the sentiment of partnership.
+Historians of early mining life in California have noted the new phase
+of social feeling in the mining-camps which followed upon the change
+from the pan--held and shaken by the solitary miner--to the cradle,
+which required the cooperation of at least two men. It was when the
+cradle came in that the miners first began to say "partner." As the
+cradle gave way to placer mining, larger and larger schemes of
+cooperation came into use. In fact, Professor Royce has pointed out in
+his _History of California_ that the whole lesson of California
+history is precisely the lesson most necessary to be learned by the
+country as a whole, namely, that the phase of individual gain-getting
+and individualistic power always leads to anarchy and reaction, and
+that it becomes necessary, even in the interests of effective
+individualism itself, to recognize the compelling and ultimate
+authority of society.
+
+What went on in California between 1849 and 1852 is precisely typical
+of what is going on everywhere to-day. American men and women are
+learning, as we say, "to get together." It is the distinctly
+twentieth-century programme. We must all learn the art of getting
+together, not merely to conserve the interests of literature and art
+and society, but to preserve the individual himself in his just rights.
+Any one who misunderstands the depth and the scope of the present
+political restlessness which is manifested in every section of the
+country, misunderstands the American instinct for fellowship. It is a
+law of that fellowship that what is right and legitimate for me is
+right and legitimate for the other fellow also. The American mind and
+the American conscience are becoming socialized before our very eyes.
+American art and literature must keep pace with this socialization of
+the intelligence and the conscience, or they will be no longer
+representative of the true America.
+
+Literary illustrations of this spirit of fraternalism lie close at
+hand. They are to be found here and there even in the rebellious,
+well-nigh anarchic, individualism of the Concord men. They are to be
+found throughout the prose and verse of Whittier. No one has preached a
+truer or more effective gospel of fellowship than Longfellow, whose
+poetry has been one of the pervasive influences in American democracy,
+although Longfellow had but little to say about politics and never
+posed in a slouch hat and with his trousers tucked into his boots.
+Fellowship is taught in the _Biglow Papers_ of Lowell and the stories
+of Mrs. Stowe. It is wholly absent from the prose and verse of Poe, and
+it imparts but a feeble warmth to the delicately written pages of
+Hawthorne. But in the books written for the great common audience of
+American men and women, like the novels of Winston Churchill; and in
+the plays which have scored the greatest popular successes, like those
+of Denman Thompson, Bronson Howard, Gillette, Augustus Thomas, the
+doctrine of fellowship is everywhere to be traced. It is in the poems
+of James Whitcomb Riley and of Sam Walter Foss; in the work of hundreds
+of lesser known writers of verse and prose who have echoed Foss's
+sentiment about living in a "house by the side of the road" and being a
+"friend of man."
+
+To many readers the supreme literary example of the gospel of American
+fellowship is to be found in Walt Whitman. One will look long before
+one finds a more consistent or a nobler doctrine of fellowship than is
+chanted in _Leaves of Grass_. It is based upon individualism; the
+strong body and the possessed soul, sure of itself amid the whirling of
+the "quicksand years"; but it sets these strong persons upon the "open
+road" in comradeship; it is the sentiment of comradeship which creates
+the indissoluble union of "these States"; and the States, in turn, in
+spite of every "alarmist," "partialist," or "infidel," are to stretch
+out unsuspicious and friendly hands of fellowship to the whole world.
+Anybody has the right to call _Leaves of Grass_ poor poetry, if he
+pleases; but nobody has the right to deny its magnificent Americanism.
+
+It is not merely in literature that this message of fellowship is
+brought to our generation. Let me quote a few sentences from the recent
+address of George Gray Barnard, the sculptor, in explaining the meaning
+of his marble groups now placed at the entrance to the Capitol of
+Pennsylvania. "I resolved," says Barnard, "that I would build such
+groups as should stand at the entrance to the People's temple ... the
+home of those visions of the ever-widening and broadening brotherhood
+that gives to life its dignity and its meaning. Life is told in terms
+of labor. It is fitting that labor, its triumphs, its message, should
+be told to those who gaze upon a temple of the people. The worker is
+the hope of all the future. The needs of the worker, his problems, his
+hopes, his untold longings, his sacrifices, his triumphs, all of these
+are the field of the art of the future. Slowly we are groping our way
+towards the new brotherhood, and when that day dawns, men will enter a
+world made a paradise by labor. Labor makes us kin. It is for this
+reason that there has been placed at the entrance of this great
+building the message of the Adam and Eve of the future, the message of
+labor and of fraternity."
+
+That there are defects in this gospel and programme of American
+fellowship, every one is aware. If the obstacle to effective
+individualism is lack of discipline, the obstacles to effective
+fellowship are vagueness, crankiness, inefficiency, and the relics of
+primal selfishness. Nobody in our day has preached the tidings of
+universal fellowship more fervidly and powerfully than Tolstoi. Yet
+when one asks the great Russian, "What am I to do as a member of this
+fellowship?" Tolstoi gives but a confused and impractical answer. He
+applies to the complex and contradictory facts of our contemporary
+civilization the highest test and standard known to him: namely, the
+principles of the New Testament. But if you ask him precisely how these
+principles are to be made the working programme of to-morrow, the
+Russian mysticism and fanaticism settle over him like a fog. We pass
+Tolstoians on the streets of our American cities every day; they have
+the eyes of dreamers, of those who would build, if they could, a new
+Heaven and a new Earth. But they do not know exactly how to go about
+it. Our practical Western minds seize upon some actual plan for
+constructive labor. Miss Jane Addams organizes her settlements in the
+slums; Booker Washington gives his race models of industrial education;
+President Eliot has a theory of university reform and then struggles
+successfully for forty years to put that theory into practice. Compared
+with the concrete performance of such social workers as these, the
+gospel according to Whitman and Tolstoi is bound to seem vague in its
+outlines, and ineffective in its concrete results. That such a gospel
+attracts cranks and eccentrics of all sorts is not to be wondered at.
+They come and go, but the deeper conceptions of fraternalism remain.
+
+A further obstacle to the progress of fellowship lies in selfishness.
+But let us see how even the coarser and rawer and cruder traits of the
+American character may be related to the spirit of common endeavor
+which is slowly transforming our society, and modifying, before our
+eyes, our contemporary art and literature.
+
+"The West," says James Bryce, "is the most American part of America,
+that is to say the part where those features which distinguish America
+from Europe come out in the strongest relief." We have already noted in
+our study of American romance how the call of the West represented for
+a while the escape from reality. The individual, following that
+retreating horizon which we name the West, found an escape from
+convention and from social law. Beyond the Mississippi or beyond the
+Rockies meant to him that "somewheres east of Suez" where the Ten
+Commandments are no longer to be found, where the individual has free
+rein. But by and by comes the inevitable reaction, the return to
+reality. The pioneer sobers down; he finds that "the Ten Commandments
+will not budge"; he sees the need of law and order; he organizes a
+vigilance committee; he impanels a jury, even though the old Spanish
+law does not recognize a jury. The new land settles to its rest. The
+output of the gold mines shrinks into insignificance when compared with
+the cash value of crops of hay and potatoes. The old picturesque
+individualism yields to a new social order, to the conception of the
+rights of the state. The story of the West is thus an epitome of the
+individual human life as well as the history of the United States.
+
+We have been living through a period where the mind of the West has
+seemed to be the typical national mind. We have been indifferent to
+traditions. We have overlooked the defective training of the
+individual, provided he "made good." We have often, as in the free
+silver craze, turned our back upon universal experience. We have been
+recklessly deaf to the teachings of history; we have spoken of the laws
+of literature and art as if they were mere conventions designed to
+oppress the free activity of the artist. Typical utterances of our
+writers are Jack London's "I want to get away from the musty grip of
+the past," and Frank Norris's "I do not want to write literature, I
+want to write life."
+
+The soul of the West, and a good deal of the soul of America, has been
+betrayed in words like those. Not to share this hopefulness of the
+West, its stress upon feeling rather than thinking, its superb
+confidence, is to be ignorant of the constructive forces of the nation.
+The humor of the West, its democracy, its rough kindness, its faith in
+the people, its generous notion of "the square deal for everybody,"
+its elevation of the man above the dollar, are all typical of the
+American way of looking at the world. Typical also, is its social
+solidarity, its swift emotionalism of the masses. It is the Western
+interest in the ethical aspect of social movements that is creating
+some of the moving forces in American society to-day. Experiment
+stations of all kinds flourish on that soil. Chicago newspapers are
+more alive to new ideas than the newspapers of New York or Boston. No
+one can understand the present-day America if he does not understand
+the men and women who live between the Allegheny Mountains and the
+Rocky Mountains. They have worked out, more successfully than the
+composite population of the East, a general theory of the relation of
+the individual to society; in other words, a combination of
+individualism with fellowship.
+
+To draw up an indictment against this typical section of our country is
+to draw up an indictment against our people as a whole. And yet one who
+studies the literature and art produced in the great Mississippi Valley
+will see, I believe, that the needs of the West are the real needs of
+America. Take that commonness of mind and tone, which friendly foreign
+critics, from De Tocqueville to Bryce, have indicated as one of the
+dangers of our democracy. This commonness of mind and tone is often one
+of the penalties of fellowship. It may mean a levelling down instead of
+a levelling up.
+
+Take the tyranny of the majority,--to which Mr. Bryce has devoted one
+of his most suggestive chapters. You begin by recognizing the rights of
+the majority. You end by believing that the majority must be right. You
+cease to struggle against it. In other words, you yield to what Mr.
+Bryce calls "the fatalism of the multitude." The individual has a sense
+of insignificance. It is vain to oppose the general current. It is
+easier to acquiesce and to submit. The sense of personal responsibility
+lessens. What is the use of battling for one's own opinions when one
+can already see that the multitude is on the other side? The greater
+your democratic faith in the ultimate rightness of the multitude, the
+less perhaps your individual power of will. The easier is it for you to
+believe that everything is coming out right, whether you put your
+shoulder to the wheel or not.
+
+The problem of overcoming these evils is nothing less than the problem
+of spiritualizing democracy. There are some of our hero-worshipping
+people who think that that vast result can still be accomplished by
+harking back to some such programme as the "great man" theory of
+Carlyle. Another theory of spiritualizing democracy, no less familiar
+to the student of nineteen-century literature, is what is called "the
+divine average" doctrine of Walt Whitman. The average man is to be
+taught the glory of his walk and trade. Round every head there is to be
+an aureole. "A common wave of thought and joy, lifting mankind again,"
+is to make us forget the old distinction between the individual and the
+social group. We are all to be the sons of the morning.
+
+We must not pause to analyze or to illustrate these two theories.
+Carlyle's theory seems to me to be outworn, and Whitman's theory is
+premature. But it is clear that they both admit that the mass of men
+are as yet incompletely spiritualized, not yet raised to their full
+stature. Unquestionably, our American life is, in European eyes at
+least, monotonously uniform. It is touched with self-complacency. It
+is too intent upon material progress. It confuses bigness with
+greatness. It is unrestful. It is marked by intellectual impatience.
+Our authors are eager to write life rather than literature. But they
+are so eager that they overlook the need of literary discipline. They
+do not learn to write literature and therefore most of them are
+incapable of interpreting life. They escape, perhaps, from "the musty
+grip of the past," but in so doing they refuse to learn the inexorable
+lessons of the past. Hence the fact that our books lack power, that
+they are not commensurate with the living forces of the country. The
+unconscious, moral, and spiritual life of the nation is not back of
+them, making "eye and hand and heart go to a new tune."
+
+If we could have that, we should ask no more, for we believe in the
+nation. I heard a doctor say, the other day, that a man's chief lesson
+was to pull his brain down into his spinal cord; that is to say, to
+make his activities not so much the result of conscious thought and
+volition, as of unconscious, reflex action; to stop thinking and
+willing, and simply _do_ what one has to do. May there not be a hint
+here of the ultimate relation of the individual to the social
+organism; the relation of our literature to our national character?
+There is a period, no doubt, when the individual must painfully
+question himself, test his powers, and acquire the sense of his own
+place in the world. But there also comes a more mature period when he
+takes that place unconsciously, does his work almost without thinking
+about it, as if it were not his work at all. The brain has gone down
+into the spinal cord; the man is functioning as apart of the organism
+of society; he has ceased to question, to plan, to decide; it is
+instinct that does his work for him.
+
+Literature and art, at their noblest, function in that instinctive way.
+They become the unconscious expression of a civilization. A nation
+passes out of its adolescent preoccupation with plans and with
+materials. It learns to do its work, precisely as Goethe bade the
+artist do his task, without talking about it. We, too, shall outgrow in
+time our questioning, our self-analysis, our futile comparison of
+ourselves with other nations, our self-conscious study of our own
+national character. We shall not forget the distinction between "each"
+and "all," but "all" will increasingly be placed at the service of
+"each." With fellowship based upon individualism, and with
+individualism ever leading to fellowship, America will perform its
+vital tasks, and its literature will be the unconscious and beautiful
+utterance of its inner life.
+
+
+THE END.
+
+
+The Riverside Press
+
+CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS
+
+U. S. A.
+
+
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Transcriber's Notes
+
+
+Pages 53, 141: Changed the oe ligature to oe in the name Crevecoeur:
+  (Settlers like Crevecoeur), (enthusiasm of a settler like Crevecoeur)
+
+Page 67: Changed compaign to campaign:
+  (Their compaign of "exposure," during the last decade,)
+
+Page 165: Retained the spaced 't is, to match original line of poetry:
+  ("If my bark sinks, 't is to another sea.")
+
+Page 222: Changed conciousness to consciousness:
+  (the preoccupied colonial conciousness.)
+
+Page 223: Changed explans to explains:
+  (It explans the still lingering popular suspicion)
+
+Page 232: Changed sojurns to sojourns:
+  (Fenimore Cooper came home from long sojurns in Europe.)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The American Mind, by Bliss Perry
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