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diff --git a/29952-h/29952-h.htm b/29952-h/29952-h.htm new file mode 100644 index 0000000..e26fbc5 --- /dev/null +++ b/29952-h/29952-h.htm @@ -0,0 +1,7299 @@ +<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" + "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd"> + +<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> + <head> + <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=iso-8859-1" /> + <title> + The Project Gutenberg eBook of The American Mind, by Bliss Perry. + </title> + <style type="text/css"> + + + p { margin-top: .75em; + text-align: justify; + margin-bottom: .75em; + } + h1 { text-align: center; line-height: 1.5; clear: both; } + + h2,h3,h4,h5,h6 { text-align: center; clear: both; } + + p.title { text-align: center; text-indent: 0; + font-weight: bold; + line-height: 1.4; margin-bottom: 3em; } + + hr { width: 33%; + margin-top: 2em; + margin-bottom: 2em; + margin-left: auto; + margin-right: auto; + clear: both; + } + + table {margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;} + + body{margin-left: 10%; + margin-right: 10%; + } + + .pagenum { /* uncomment the next line for invisible page numbers */ + /* visibility: hidden; */ + position: absolute; + left: 92%; + font-size: smaller; + text-align: right; + } /* page numbers */ + + .blockquot{margin-left: 5%; margin-right: 10%;} + + .bb {border-bottom: solid 2px;} + .bl {border-left: solid 2px;} + .bt {border-top: solid 2px;} + .br {border-right: solid 2px;} + .bbox {border: solid 2px; padding: 1em; width: 40%; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;} + + .center {text-align: center;} + .smcap {font-variant: small-caps;} + .u {text-decoration: underline;} + + .figcenter {margin: auto; text-align: center;} + + .author {text-align: right; margin-right: 5%; font-variant: small-caps;} + +dd, li {margin-top: 0.50em; margin-bottom: 0; + line-height: 1.2em; /* a bit closer than p's */} + +ul { list-style-type: none; + position: relative; + margin-right: 10%; + margin-left: 10%; } + +.lsoff { list-style-type: none; } + + ol.toc { /* styling the Table of Contents */ + list-style-type: upper-roman; + position: relative; /* makes a "container" for span.tocright */ + margin-right: 10%; /* pulls the page#s in a skosh */ + margin-left: 10%; } + +span.tocright { /* use absolute positioning to move page# right */ + position: absolute; right: 10%;} + + .poem {margin-left:5%; margin-right:10%; text-align: left;} + .poem br {display: none;} + .poem .stanza {margin: 1em 0em 1em 0em;} + .poem span.i0 {display: block; margin-left: 0em; padding-left: 3em; text-indent: -3em;} + .poem span.i2 {display: block; margin-left: 2em; padding-left: 3em; text-indent: -3em;} + .poem span.i4 {display: block; margin-left: 4em; padding-left: 3em; text-indent: -3em;} + + </style> + </head> +<body> + + +<pre> + +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 + + + + + + +</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—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.</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,—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,—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;—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—too physically frail +to be absorbed in the rude labor of the farm—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—latent no doubt in his ancestors—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"—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<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,—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<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,—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—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<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>,—the scene of which is laid in +Rome,—or <i>The House of the Seven Gables</i>,—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.</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,—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<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—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.</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—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.</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"—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,<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—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.</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—like an American +national game, or an American city—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—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.</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,—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, <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:—</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—if he can, +and knowing that the finer secrets are sure to +elude him!—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,—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<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—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 Crèvecœur +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,<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,—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,—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,—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,—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—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 <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—surely one of the worst<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_65" id="Page_65">[Pg 65]</a></span> +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.</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,—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,—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—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<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"—"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—though he may be more absurd!—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—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<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—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<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,"—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,—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—and tragedy, too—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,—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,—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."<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,—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. <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—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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_100" id="Page_100">[Pg 100]</a></span> +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.</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,—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—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—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.</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,—<br /></span> +<span class="i0">They go to church on Sunday;<br /></span> +<span class="i0">And many are afraid of God—<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,—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.</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,—particularly +in the half-century between +1830 and 1880,—our newspapers and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_112" id="Page_112">[Pg 112]</a></span> magazines,—particularly +the so-called "yellow" +newspapers and the illustrated magazines typified +by <i>Harper's Monthly</i>,—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—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.</p> + +<p>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<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—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.</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—of the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_116" id="Page_116">[Pg 116]</a></span> +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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_117" id="Page_117">[Pg 117]</a></span> +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.</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:—</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:—</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,—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<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—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.<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,—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—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<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,—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.</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:—</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>:—</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 & 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."</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 Crèvecœur +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,—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"—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:—"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:—</p> + +<blockquote><p>"Und was uns alle bändigt, das Gemeine."</p></blockquote> + +<p>Or listen to Keats:—</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—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>—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,—</p> + +<blockquote><p>"If my bark sinks, 't is to another sea."</p></blockquote> + +<p>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:—</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—or the sense of humor—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—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.</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—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.</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,—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,—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—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,<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—"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<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:—</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>—</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:—</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:—</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,"—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"—as the Yankees used to say; or, +in more modern phrase,—</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,—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,—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 +<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>—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—<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,—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":—</p> + +<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> +<span class="i0">"So imperturbable he rules<br /></span> +<span class="i2">Unkempt, disreputable, vast—<br /></span> +<span class="i0">And in the teeth of all the schools<br /></span> +<span class="i2">I—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:—"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."</p> + +<p>In the following August he is writing:—</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:—</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:—</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,—and not a day longer.</p> + +<p>Henry Thoreau was even more recalcitrant. +Let me quote him:—</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>:—</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—as the saying goes—"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,—apparent +to everybody,—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,—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,—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<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,—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<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:—</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:—</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—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."</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—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<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,—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 + +*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE AMERICAN MIND *** + +***** This file should be named 29952-h.htm or 29952-h.zip ***** +This and all associated files of various formats will be found in: + https://www.gutenberg.org/2/9/9/5/29952/ + +Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Diane Monico, and the Online +Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net + + +Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions +will be renamed. + +Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no +one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation +(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without +permission and without paying copyright royalties. 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