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diff --git a/29952.txt b/29952.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..41caa68 --- /dev/null +++ b/29952.txt @@ -0,0 +1,5123 @@ +The Project Gutenberg EBook of The American Mind, by Bliss Perry + +This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with +almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or +re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included +with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org + + +Title: The American Mind + The E. T. Earl Lectures + +Author: Bliss Perry + +Release Date: September 10, 2009 [EBook #29952] + +Language: English + +Character set encoding: ASCII + +*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE AMERICAN MIND *** + + + + +Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Diane Monico, and the Online +Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net + + + + + + + + + + + +THE AMERICAN MIND + +_The E. T. Earl Lectures_ + +1912 + + + + +By the Same Author + + +The American Mind +Park-Street Papers +John Greenleaf Whittier: A Memoir +Walt Whitman +The Amateur Spirit +A Study of Prose Fiction +The Powers at Play +The Plated City +Salem Kittredge and Other Stories +The Broughton House + + + + +The American Mind + +By Bliss Perry + +[Illustration: The Riverside Press] + +Boston and New York + +Houghton Mifflin Company + +1912 + + + + +COPYRIGHT, 1912, BY BLISS PERRY + +ALL RIGHTS RESERVED + +_Published October 1912_ + + + + +TO + +WALTER MORRIS HART + + + + +Preface + + +_The material for this book was delivered as the E. T. Earl Lectures +for 1912 at the Pacific Theological Seminary, Berkeley, California, and +I wish to take this opportunity to express to the President and Faculty +of that institution my appreciation of their generous hospitality._ + +_The lectures were also given at the Lowell Institute, Boston, the +Brooklyn Institute, and elsewhere, under the title "American Traits in +American Literature." In revising them for publication a briefer title +has seemed desirable, and I have therefore availed myself of +Jefferson's phrase "The American Mind," as suggesting, more accurately +perhaps than the original title, the real theme of discussion._ + + B. P. + +CAMBRIDGE, 1912. + + + + +Contents + + +I. RACE, NATION, AND BOOK 3 + +II. THE AMERICAN MIND 47 + +III. AMERICAN IDEALISM 86 + +IV. ROMANCE AND REACTION 128 + +V. HUMOR AND SATIRE 166 + +VI. INDIVIDUALISM AND FELLOWSHIP 209 + + + + +THE AMERICAN MIND + + + + +I + +Race, Nation, and Book + + +Many years ago, as a student in a foreign university, I remember +attacking, with the complacency of youth, a German history of the +English drama, in six volumes. I lost courage long before the author +reached the age of Elizabeth, but I still recall the subject of the +opening chapter: it was devoted to the physical geography of Great +Britain. Writing, as the good German professor did, in the triumphant +hour of Taine's theory as to the significance of place, period, and +environment in determining the character of any literary production, +what could be more logical than to begin at the beginning? Have not the +chalk cliffs guarding the southern coast of England, have not the +fatness of the midland counties and the soft rainy climate of a North +Atlantic island, and the proud, tenacious, self-assertive folk that are +bred there, all left their trace upon _A Midsummer Night's Dream_, and +_Every Man in his Humour_ and _She Stoops to Conquer_? Undoubtedly. +Latitude and longitude, soil and rainfall and food-supply, racial +origins and crossings, political and social and economic conditions, +must assuredly leave their marks upon the mental and artistic +productiveness of a people and upon the personality of individual +writers. + +Taine, who delighted to point out all this, and whose _English +Literature_ remains a monument of the defects as well as of the +advantages of his method, was of course not the inventor of the +climatic theory. It is older than Aristotle, who discusses it in his +treatise on _Politics_. It was a topic of interest to the scholars of +the Renaissance. Englishmen of the seventeenth century, with an unction +of pseudo-science added to their natural patriotism, discovered in the +English climate one of the reasons of England's greatness. Thomas +Sprat, writing in 1667 on the History of the Royal Society, waxes bold +and asserts: "If there can be a true character given of the Universal +Temper of any Nation under Heaven, then certainly this must be ascribed +to our countrymen, that they have commonly an unaffected sincerity, +that they love to deliver their minds with a sound simplicity, that +they have the middle qualities between the reserved, subtle southern +and the rough, unhewn northern people, that they are not extremely +prone to speak, that they are more concerned what others will think of +the strength than of the fineness of what they say, and that a +universal modesty possesses them. These qualities are so conspicuous +and proper to the soil that we often hear them objected to us by some +of our neighbor Satyrists in more disgraceful expressions.... Even the +position of our climate, the air, the influence of the heaven, the +composition of the English blood, as well as the embraces of the Ocean, +seem to join with the labours of the _Royal Society_ to render our +country a Land of Experimental Knowledge." + +The excellent Sprat was the friend and executor of the poet Cowley, who +has in the Preface to his _Poems_ a charming passage about the relation +of literature to the external circumstances in which it is written. + +"If _wit_ be such a _Plant_ that it scarce receives heat enough to keep +it alive even in the _summer_ of our cold _Clymate_, how can it choose +but wither in a long and a sharp _winter_? a warlike, various and a +tragical age is best to write _of_, but worst to write _in_." And he +adds this, concerning his own art of poetry: "There is nothing that +requires so much serenity and chearfulness of _spirit_; it must not be +either overwhelmed with the cares of _Life_, or overcast with the +_Clouds_ of _Melancholy_ and _Sorrow_, or shaken and disturbed with the +storms of injurious _Fortune_; it must, like the _Halcyon_, have fair +weather to breed in. The Soul must be filled with bright and delightful +_Idaeas_, when it undertakes to communicate delight to others, which is +the main end of _Poesie_. One may see through the stile of _Ovid de +Trist._, the humbled and dejected condition of _Spirit_ with which he +wrote it; there scarce remains any footstep of that _Genius_, _Quem nec +Jovis ira, nec ignes_, etc. The _cold_ of the country has strucken +through all his faculties, and benummed the very _feet_ of his +_Verses_." + +Madame de Stael's _Germany_, one of the most famous of the "national +character" books, begins with a description of the German landscape. +But though nobody, from Ovid in exile down to Madame de Stael, +questions the general significance of place, time, and circumstances as +affecting the nature of a literary product, when we come to the exact +and as it were mathematical demonstration of the precise workings of +these physical influences, our generation is distinctly more cautious +than were the literary critics of forty years ago. Indeed, it is a +hundred years since Fisher Ames, ridiculing the theory that climate +acts directly upon literary products, said wittily of Greece: "The figs +are as fine as ever, but where are the Pindars?" The theory of race, in +particular, has been sharply questioned by the experts. "Saxon" and +"Norman," for example, no longer seem to us such simple terms as +sufficed for the purpose of Scott's _Ivanhoe_ or of Thierry's _Norman +Conquest_, a book inspired by Scott's romance. The late Professor +Freeman, with characteristic bluntness, remarked of the latter book: +"Thierry says at the end of his work that there are no longer either +Normans or Saxons except in history.... But in Thierry's sense of the +word, it would be truer to say that there never were 'Normans' or +'Saxons' anywhere, save in the pages of romances like his own." + +There is a brutal directness about this verdict upon a rival historian +which we shall probably persist in calling "Saxon"; but it is no worse +than the criticisms of Matthew Arnold's essay on "The Celtic Spirit" +made to-day by university professors who happen to know Old Irish at +first hand, and consequently consider Arnold's opinion on Celtic +matters to be hopelessly amateurish. + +The wiser scepticism of our day concerning all hard-and-fast racial +distinctions has been admirably summed up by Josiah Royce. "A race +psychology," he declares, "is still a science for the future to +discover.... We do not scientifically know what the true racial +varieties of mental type really are. No doubt there are such varieties. +The judgment day, or the science of the future, may demonstrate what +they are. We are at present very ignorant regarding the whole matter." + +Nowhere have the extravagances of the application of racial theories to +intellectual products been more pronounced than in the fields of art +and literature. Audiences listen to a waltz which the programme +declares to be an adaptation of a Hungarian folk-song, and though they +may be more ignorant of Hungary than Shakespeare was of Bohemia, they +have no hesitation in exclaiming: "How truly Hungarian this is!" Or, +it may be, how truly "Japanese" is this vase which was made in +Japan--perhaps for the American market; or how intensely "Russian" is +this melancholy tale by Turgenieff. This prompt deduction of racial +qualities from works of art which themselves give the critic all the +information he possesses about the races in question,--or, in other +words, the enthusiastic assertion that a thing is like itself,--is one +of the familiar notes of amateur criticism. It is travelling in a +circle, and the corregiosity of Corregio is the next station. + +Blood tells, no doubt, and a masterpiece usually betrays some token of +the place and hour of its birth. A knowledge of the condition of +political parties in Athens in 416 B.C. adds immensely to the enjoyment +of the readers of Aristophanes; the fun becomes funnier and the daring +even more splendid than before. Moliere's training as an actor does +affect the dramaturgic quality of his comedies. All this is +demonstrable, and to the prevalent consciousness of it our generation +is deeply indebted to Taine and his pupils. But before displaying +dogmatically the inevitable brandings of racial and national traits on +a national literature, before pointing to this and that unmistakable +evidence of local or temporal influence on the form or spirit of a +masterpiece, we are now inclined to make some distinct reservations. +These reservations are not without bearing upon our own literature in +America. + +There are, for instance, certain artists who seem to escape the +influences of the time-spirit. The most familiar example is that of +Keats. He can no doubt be assigned to the George the Fourth period by a +critical examination of his vocabulary, but the characteristic +political and social movements of that epoch in England left him almost +untouched. Edgar Allan Poe might have written some of his tales in the +seventeenth century or in the twentieth; he might, like Robert Louis +Stevenson, have written in Samoa rather than in the Baltimore, +Philadelphia, or New York of his day; his description of the Ragged +Mountains of Virginia, within very sight of the university which he +attended, was borrowed, in the good old convenient fashion, from +Macaulay; in fact, it requires something of Poe's own ingenuity to find +in Poe, who is one of the indubitable assets of American literature, +anything distinctly American. + +Wholly aside from such spiritual insulation of the single writer, +there is the obvious fact that none of the arts, not even literature, +and not all of them together, can furnish a wholly adequate +representation of racial or national characteristics. It is well known +to-day that the so-called "classic" examples of Greek art, most of +which were brought to light and discoursed upon by critics from two to +four centuries ago, represent but a single phase of Greek feeling; and +that the Greeks, even in what we choose to call their most +characteristic period, had a distinctly "romantic" tendency which their +more recently discovered plastic art betrays. But even if we had all +the lost statues, plays, poems, and orations, all the Greek paintings +about which we know so little, and the Greek music about which we know +still less, does anybody suppose that this wealth of artistic +expression would furnish a wholly satisfactory notion of the racial and +psychological traits of the Greek people? + +One may go even further. Does a truly national art exist anywhere,--an +art, that is to say, which conveys a trustworthy and adequate +expression of the national temper as a whole? We have but to reflect +upon the European and American judgments, during the last thirty +years, concerning the representative quality of the art of Japan, and +to observe how many of those facile generalizations about the Japanese +character, deduced from vases and prints and enamel, were smashed to +pieces by the Russo-Japanese War. This may illustrate the blunders of +foreign criticism, perhaps, rather than any inadequacy in the racially +representative character of Japanese art. But it is impossible that +critics, and artists themselves, should not err, in the conscious +endeavor to pronounce upon the infinitely complex materials with which +they are called upon to deal. We must confess that the expression of +racial and national characteristics, by means of only one art, such as +literature, or by all the arts together, is at best imperfect, and is +always likely to be misleading unless corroborated by other evidence. + +For it is to be remembered that in literature, as in the other fields +of artistic activity, we are dealing with the question of form; of +securing a concrete and pleasurable embodiment of certain emotions. It +may well happen that literature not merely fails to give an adequate +report of the racial or national or personal emotions felt during a +given epoch, but that it fails to report these emotions at all. Not +only the "old, unhappy, far-off" things of racial experience, but the +new and delight-giving experiences of the hour, may lack their poet. +Widespread moods of public elation or wistfulness or depression have +passed without leaving a shadow upon the mirror of art. There was no +one to hold the mirror or even to fashion it. No note of Renaissance +criticism, whether in Italy, France, or England, is more striking, and +in a way more touching, than the universal feeling that in the +rediscovery of the classics men had found at last the "terms of art," +the rules and methods of a game which they had long wished to be +playing. Englishmen and Frenchmen of the sixteenth century will not +allow that their powers are less virile, their emotions less eager, +than those of the Greeks and Romans. Only, lacking the very terms of +art, they had not been able to arrive at fit expression; the soul had +found no body wherewith to clothe itself into beauty. As they avowed in +all simplicity, they needed schoolmasters; the discipline of Aristotle +and Horace and Virgil; a body of critical doctrine, to teach them how +to express the France and England or Italy of their day, and thus give +permanence to their fleeting vision of the world. Naive as may have +been the Renaissance expression of this need of formal training, blind +as it frequently was to the beauty which we recognize in the +undisciplined vernacular literatures of mediaeval Europe, those groping +scholars were essentially right. No one can paint or compose by nature. +One must slowly master an art of expression. + +Now through long periods of time, and over many vast stretches of +territory, as our own American writing abundantly witnesses, the whole +formal side of expression may be neglected. "Literature," in its +narrower sense, may not exist. In that restricted and higher meaning of +the term, literature has always been uncommon enough, even in Athens or +Florence. It demands not merely personal distinction or power, not +merely some uncommon height or depth or breadth of capacity and +insight, but a purely artistic training, which in the very nature of +the case is rare. Millions of Russians, perhaps, have felt about the +general problems of life much as Turgenieff felt, but they lacked the +sheer literary art with which the _Notes of a Sportsman_ was written. +Thousands of frontier lawyers and politicians shared Lincoln's hard +and varied and admirable training in the mastery of speech, but in his +hands alone was the weapon wrought to such perfection of temper and +weight and edge that he spoke and wrote literature without knowing it. + +Such considerations belong, I am aware, to the accepted +commonplaces,--perhaps to what William James used to call "the +unprofitable delineation of the obvious." Everybody recognizes that +literary gifts imply an exceptionally rich development of general human +capacities, together with a professional aptitude and training of which +but few men are capable. There is but one lumberman in camp who can +play the fiddle, though the whole camp can dance. Thus the great book, +we are forever saying, is truly representative of myriads of minds in a +certain degree of culture, although but one man could have written it. +The writing member of a family is often the one who acquires notoriety +and a bank account, but he is likely to have candid friends who admit, +though not always in his presence, that, aside from this one +professional gift and practice, he is not intellectually or emotionally +or spiritually superior to his brothers and sisters. Waldo Emerson +thought himself the intellectual inferior of his brother Charles; and +good observers loved to maintain that John Holmes was wittier than +Oliver Wendell, and Ezekiel Webster a better lawyer than Daniel. + +Applied to the literary history of a race, this principle is +suggestive. We must be slow to affirm that, because certain ideas and +feelings did not attain, in this or that age or place, to purely +literary expression, they were therefore not in existence. The men and +women of the colonial period in our own country, for instance, have +been pretty uniformly declared to have been deficient in the sense of +beauty. What is the evidence? It is mostly negative. They produced no +poetry, fiction, painting, sculpture, or music worthy of the name. They +were predominantly Puritan, and the whole world has been informed that +English Puritanism was hostile to Art. They were preoccupied with +material and moral concerns. Even if they had remained in England, +Professor Trent affirms, these contemporaries of Milton and Bunyan +would have produced no art or literature. Now it is quite true that for +nearly two hundred years after the date of the first settlement of the +American colonists, opportunities for cultivating the arts did not +exist. But that the sense of beauty was wholly atrophied, I, for one, +do not believe. The passionate eagerness with which the forefathers +absorbed the noblest of all poetry and prose in the pages of their one +book, the Bible; the unwearied curiosity and care with which those +farmers and fishermen and woodsmen read the signs of the sky; their awe +of the dark wilderness and their familiar traffic with the great deep; +the silences of lonely places; the opulence of primeval meadows by the +clear streams; the English flowers that were made to bloom again in +farmhouse windows and along garden walks; the inner visions, more +lovely still, of duty and of moral law; the spirit of sacrifice; the +daily walk with God, whether by green pastures of the spirit or through +ways that were dark and terrible;--is there in all this no discipline +of the soul in moral beauty, and no training of the eye to perceive the +exquisite harmonies of the visible earth? It is true that the Puritans +had no professional men of letters; it is true that doctrinal sermons +provided their chief intellectual sustenance; true that their lives +were stern, and that many of the softer emotions were repressed. But +beauty may still be traced in the fragments of their recorded speech, +in their diaries and letters and phrases of devotion. You will search +the eighteenth century of old England in vain for such ecstasies of +wonder at the glorious beauty of the universe as were penned by +Jonathan Edwards in his youthful _Diary_. There is every presumption, +from what we know of the two men, that Whittier's father and +grandfather were peculiarly sensitive to the emotions of home and +neighborhood and domesticity which their gifted descendant--too +physically frail to be absorbed in the rude labor of the farm--has +embodied in _Snow-Bound_. The Quaker poet knew that he surpassed his +forefathers in facility in verse-making, but he would have been amused +(as his _Margaret Smith's Journal_ proves) at the notion that his +ancestors were without a sense of beauty or that they lacked +responsiveness to the chords of fireside sentiment. He was simply the +only Whittier, except his sister Elizabeth, who had ever found leisure, +as old-fashioned correspondents used to say, "to take his pen in hand." +This leisure developed in him the sense--latent no doubt in his +ancestors--of the beauty of words, and the excitement of rhythm. +Emerson's _Journal_ in the eighteen-thirties glows with a Dionysiac +rapture over what he calls "delicious days"; but did the seven +generations of clergymen from whom Emerson descended have no delicious +and haughty and tender days that passed unrecorded? Formal literature +perpetuates and glorifies many aspects of individual and national +experience; but how much eludes it wholly, or is told, if at all, in +broken syllables, in Pentecostal tongues that seem to be our own and +yet are unutterably strange! + +To confess thus that literature, in the proper sense of the word, +represents but a narrow segment of personal or racial experience, is +very far from a denial of the genuineness and the significance of the +affirmations which literature makes. We recognize instinctively that +Whittier's _Snow-Bound_ is a truthful report, not merely of a certain +farmhouse kitchen in East Haverhill, Massachusetts, during the early +nineteenth century, but of a mode of thinking and feeling which is +widely diffused wherever the Anglo-Saxon race has wandered. Perhaps +_Snow-Bound_ lacks a certain universality of suggestiveness which +belongs to a still more famous poem, _The Cotter's Saturday Night_ of +Burns, but both of these portrayals of rustic simplicity and peace owe +their celebrity to their truly representative character. They are +evidence furnished by a single art, as to a certain mode and coloring +of human existence; but every corroboration of that evidence heightens +our admiration for the artistic sincerity and insight of the poet. To +draw an illustration from a more splendid epoch, let us remind +ourselves that the literature of the "spacious times of great +Elizabeth"--a period of strong national excitement, and one deeply +representative of the very noblest and most permanent traits of English +national character--was produced within startlingly few years and in a +local territory extremely limited. The very language in which that +literature is clothed was spoken only by the court, by a couple of +counties, and at the two universities. Its prose and verse were frankly +experimental. It is true that such was the emotional ferment of the +score of years preceding the Armada, that great captains and voyagers +who scarcely wrote a line were hailed as kings of the realm of +imagination, and that Puttenham, in phrases which that generation +could not have found extravagant, inscribes his book on Poetry to Queen +Elizabeth as the "most excellent Poet" of the age. Well, the glorified +political images may grow dim or tawdry with time, but the poetry has +endured, and it is everywhere felt to be a truly national, a deeply +racial product. Its time and place and hour were all local; but the +Canadian and the American, the South African and Australasian +Englishman feels that that Elizabethan poetry is his poetry still. + +When we pass, therefore, as we must shortly do, to the consideration of +this and that literary product of America, and to the scrutiny of the +really representative character of our books, we must bear in mind that +the questions concerning the race, the place, the hour, the +man,--questions so familiar to modern criticism,--remain valid and +indeed essential; but that in applying them to American writing there +are certain allowances, qualifications, adjustments of the scale of +values, which are no less important to an intelligent perception of the +quality of our literature. This task is less simple than the critical +assessment of a typical German or French or Scandinavian writer, where +the strain of blood is unmixed, the continuity of literary tradition +unbroken, the precise impact of historical and personal influences more +easy to estimate. I open, for example, any one of half a dozen French +studies of Balzac. Here is a many-sided man, a multifarious writer, a +personality that makes ridiculous the merely formal pigeon-holing and +labelling processes of professional criticism. And yet with what +perfect precision of method and certainty of touch do Le Breton, for +example, or Brunetiere, in their books on Balzac, proceed to indicate +those impulses of race and period and environment which affected the +character of Balzac's novels! The fact that he was born in Tours in +1799 results in the inevitable and inevitably expert paragraphs about +Gallic blood, and the physical exuberance of the Touraine surroundings +of his youth, and the post-revolutionary tendency to disillusion and +analysis. And so with Balzac's education, his removal to Paris in the +Restoration period, his ventures in business and his affairs of love, +his admiration for Shakespeare and for Fenimore Cooper; his mingled +Romanticism and Realism; his Titanism and his childishness; his +stupendous outline for the Human Comedy; and his scarcely less +astounding actual achievement. All this is discussed by his biographers +with the professional dexterity of critics trained intellectually in +the Latin traditions and instinctively aware of the claims of race, +biographers familiar with every page of French history, and profoundly +interested, like their readers, in every aspect of French life. Alas, +we may say, in despairing admiration of such workmanship, "they order +these things better in France." And they do; but racial unity, and long +lines of national literary tradition, make these things easier to order +than they are with us. The intellectual distinction of American +critical biographies like Lounsbury's _Cooper_ or Woodberry's +_Hawthorne_ is all the more notable because we possess such a slender +body of truly critical doctrine native to our own soil; because our +national literary tradition as to available material and methods is +hardly formed; because the very word "American" has a less precise +connotation than the word "New Zealander." + +Let us suppose, for instance, that like Professor Woodberry a few years +ago, we were asked to furnish a critical study of Hawthorne. The author +of _The Scarlet Letter_ is one of the most justly famous of American +writers. But precisely what national traits are to be discovered in +this eminent fellow-countryman of ours? We turn, like loyal disciples +of Taine and Sainte-Beuve, to his ancestral stock. We find that it is +English as far back as it can be traced; as purely English as the +ancestry of Dickens or Thackeray, and more purely English than the +ancestry of Browning or Burke or His Majesty George the Fifth. Was +Hawthorne, then, simply an Englishman living in America? He himself did +not think so,--as his _English Note-Books_ abundantly prove. But just +what subtle racial differentiation had been at work, since William +Hawthorne migrated to Massachusetts with Winthrop in 1630? Here we +face, unless I am mistaken, that troublesome but fascinating question +of Physical Geography. Climate, soil, food, occupation, religious or +moral preoccupation, social environment, Salem witchcraft and Salem +seafaring had all laid their invisible hands upon the physical and +intellectual endowment of the child born in 1804. Does this make +Nathaniel Hawthorne merely an "Englishman with a difference," as Mr. +Kipling, born in India, is an "Englishman with a difference"? +Hawthorne would have smiled, or, more probably, he would have sworn, at +such a question. He considered himself an American Democrat; in fact a +_contra mundum_ Democrat, for good or for ill. Is it, then, a political +theory, first put into full operation in this country a scant +generation before Hawthorne's birth, which made him un-English? We must +walk warily here. Our Canadian neighbors of English stock have much the +same climate, soil, occupations, and preoccupations as the inhabitants +of the northern territory of the United States. They have much the same +courts, churches, and legislatures. They read the same books and +magazines. They even prefer baseball to cricket. They are loyal +adherents of a monarchy, but they are precisely as free, as +self-governing, and--in the social sense of the word--as +"democratic"--in spite of the absence of a republican form of +government--as the citizens of that "land of the free and home of the +brave" which lies to the south of them. Yet Canadian literature, one +may venture to affirm, has remained to this hour a "colonial" +literature, or, if one prefers the phrase, a literature of "Greater +Britain." Was Hawthorne possibly right in his instinct that politics +did make a difference, and that in writing _The Marble Faun_,--the +scene of which is laid in Rome,--or _The House of the Seven +Gables_,--which is a story of Salem,--he was consistently engaged in +producing, not "colonial" or "Greater-British" but distinctly American +literature? We need not answer this question prematurely, if we wish to +reserve our judgment, but it is assuredly one of the questions which +the biographers and critics of our men of letters must ultimately face +and answer. + +Furthermore, the student of literature produced in the United States of +America must face other questions almost as complicated as this of +race. In fact, when we choose Hawthorne as a typical case in which to +observe the American refashioning of the English temper into something +not English, we are selecting a very simple problem compared with the +complexities which have resulted from the mingling of various European +stocks upon American soil. But take, for the moment, the mere obvious +matter of expanse of territory. We are obliged to reckon, not with a +compact province such as those in which many Old World literatures +have been produced, but with what our grandfathers considered a +"boundless continent." This vast national domain was long ago +"organized" for political purposes: but so far as literature is +concerned it remains unorganized to-day. We have, as has been +constantly observed, no literary capital, like London or Paris, to +serve as the seat of centralized authority; no code of literary +procedure and conduct; no "lawgivers of Parnassus"; no supreme court of +letters, whose judgments are recognized and obeyed. American public +opinion asserts itself with singular unanimity and promptness in the +field of politics. In literary matters we remain in the stage of +anarchic individualism, liable to be stampeded from time to time by +mob-excitement over a popular novel or moralistic tract, and then +disintegrating, as before, into an incoherent mass of individually +intelligent readers. + +The reader who has some personal acquaintance with the variations of +type in different sections of this immense territory of ours finds his +curiosity constantly stimulated by the presence of sectional and local +characteristics. There are sharply cut provincial peculiarities, of +course, in Great Britain and in Germany, in Italy and Spain, and in +all of the countries a corresponding "regional" literature has been +developed. Our provincial variations of accent and vocabulary, in +passing from North to South or East to West, are less striking, on the +whole, than the dialectical differences found in the various English +counties. But our general uniformity of grammar and the comparatively +slight variations in spoken accent cover an extraordinary variety of +local and sectional modes of thinking and feeling. The reader of +American short stories and lyrics must constantly ask himself: Is this +truth to local type consistent with the main trend of American +production? Is this merely a bit of Virginia or Texas or California, or +does it, while remaining no less Southern or Western in its local +coloring, suggest also the ampler light, the wide generous air of the +United States of America? + +The observer of this relationship between local and national types will +find some American communities where all the speech or habitual thought +is of the future. Foreigners usually consider such communities the most +typically "American," as doubtless they are; but there are other +sections, still more faithfully exploited by local writers, where the +mood is wistful and habitually regards the past. America, too, like the +Old World,--and in New England more than elsewhere,--has her note of +decadence, of disillusion, of autumnal brightness and transiency. Some +sections of the country, and notably the slave-holding states in the +forty years preceding the Civil War, have suffered widespread +intellectual blight. The best talent of the South, for a generation, +went into politics, in the passionately loyal endeavor to prop up a +doomed economic and social system; and the loss to the intellectual +life of the country cannot be reckoned. Over vast sections of our +prosperous and intelligent people of the Mississippi Basin to-day the +very genius of commonplaceness seems to hover. Take the great State of +Iowa, with its well-to-do and homogeneous population, its fortunate +absence of perplexing city-problems, its general air of prosperity and +content. It is a typical state of the most typically American portion +of the country; but it breeds no books. Yet in Indiana, another state +of the same general conditions as to population and prosperity, and +only one generation further removed than Iowa from primitive pioneer +conditions, books are produced at a rate which provokes a universal +American smile. I do not affirm that the literary critic is bound to +answer all such local puzzles as this. But he is bound at least to +reflect upon them, and to demand of every local literary product +throughout this varied expanse of states: Is the root of the +"All-American" plant growing here, or is it not? + +Furthermore, the critic must pursue this investigation of national +traits in our writing, not only over a wide and variegated territory, +but through a very considerable sweep of time. American literature is +often described as "callow," as the revelation of "national +inexperience," and in other similar terms. It is true that we had no +professional men of letters before Irving and that the blossoming time +of the notable New England group of writers did not come until nearly +the middle of the nineteenth century. But we have had time enough, +after all, to show what we wish to be and what we are. There have been +European books about America ever since the days of Columbus; it is +three hundred years since the first books were written in America. +Modern English prose, the language of journalism, of science, of social +intercourse, came into being only in the early eighteenth century, in +the age of Queen Anne. But Cotton Mather's _Magnalia_, a vast book +dealing with the past history of New England, was printed in 1702, only +a year later than Defoe's _True-Born Englishman_. For more than two +centuries the development of English speech and English writing on this +side of the Atlantic has kept measurable pace--now slower, now +swifter--with the speech of the mother country. When we recall the +scanty term of years within which was produced the literature of the +age of Elizabeth, it seems like special pleading to insist that America +has not yet had time to learn or recite her bookish lessons. + +This is not saying that we have had a continuous or adequate +development, either of the intellectual life, or of literary +expression. There are certain periods of strong intellectual movement, +of heightened emotion, alike in the colonial epoch and since the +adoption of our present form of government, in which it is natural to +search for revelations of those qualities which we now feel to be +essential to our national character. Certain epochs of our history, in +other words, have been peculiarly "American," and have furnished the +most ideal expression of national tendencies. + +If asked to select the three periods of our history which in this sense +have been most significant, most of us, I imagine, would choose the +first vigorous epoch of New England Puritanism, say from 1630 to 1676; +then, the epoch of the great Virginians, say from 1766 to 1789; and +finally the epoch of distinctly national feeling, in which New England +and the West were leaders, between 1830 and 1865. Those three +generations have been the most notable in the three hundred years since +the permanent settlements began. Each of them has revealed, in a noble +fashion, the political, ethical, and emotional traits of our people; +and although the first two of the three periods concerned themselves +but little with literary expression of the deep-lying characteristics +of our stock, the expression is not lacking. Thomas Hooker's sermon on +the "Foundation of Political Authority," John Winthrop's grave advice +on the "Nature of Liberty," Jefferson's "Declaration," Webster's "Reply +to Hayne," Lincoln's "Inaugurals," are all fundamentally American. +They are political in their immediate purpose, but, like the speeches +of Edmund Burke, they are no less literature because they are concerned +with the common needs and the common destiny. Hooker and Winthrop wrote +before our formal national existence began; Jefferson, at the hour of +the nation's birth; and Lincoln, in the day of its sharpest trial. Yet, +though separated from one another by long intervals of time, the +representative figures of the three epochs, English in blood and +American in feeling, are not so unlike as one might think. A thorough +grasp of our literature thus requires--and in scarcely less a degree +than the mastery of one of the literatures of Europe--a survey of a +long period, the search below the baffling or contradictory surface of +national experience for the main drift of that experience, and the +selection of the writers, of one generation after another, who have +given the most fit and permanent and personalized expression to the +underlying forces of the national life. + +There is another preliminary word which needs no less to be said. It +concerns the question of international influences upon national +literature. Our own generation has been taught by many events that no +race or country can any longer live "to itself." Internationalism is in +the very atmosphere: and not merely as regards politics in the narrowed +sense, but with reference to questions of economics, sociology, art, +and letters. The period of international isolation of the United +States, we are rather too fond of saying, closed with the +Spanish-American War. It would be nearer the truth to say that so far +as the things of the mind and the spirit are concerned, there has never +been any absolute isolation. The Middle West, from the days of Jackson +to Lincoln, that raw West described by Dickens and Mrs. Trollope, comes +nearer isolation than any other place or time. The period of the most +eloquent assertions of American independence in artistic and literary +matters was the epoch of New England Transcendentalism, which was +itself singularly cosmopolitan in its literary appetites. The letters +and journals of Emerson, Whitman, and Thoreau show the strong European +meat on which these men fed, just before their robust declarations of +our self-sufficiency. But there is no real self-sufficiency, and +Emerson and Whitman themselves, in other moods, have written most +suggestive passages upon our European inheritances and affiliations. + +The fortunes of the early New England colonies, in fact, were followed +by Protestant Europe with the keen solicitude and affection of kinsmen. +Oliver Cromwell signs his letter to John Cotton in 1651, "Your +affectionate friend to serve you." The settlements were regarded as +outposts of European ideas. Their Calvinism, so cheaply derided and so +superficially understood, even to-day, was the intellectual platform of +that portion of Europe which was mentally and morally awake to the vast +issues involved in individual responsibility and self-government. +Contemporary European democracy is hardly yet aware that Calvin's +_Institutes_ is one of its great charters. Continental Protestantism of +the seventeenth century, like the militant Republicanism of the English +Commonwealth, thus perused with fraternal interest the letters from +Massachusetts Bay. And if Europe watched America in those days, it was +no less true that America was watching Europe. Towards the end of the +century, Cotton Mather, "prostrate in the dust" before the Lord, as +his newly published _Diary_ tells us, is wrestling "on the behalf of +whole nations." He receives a "strong Persuasion that very overturning +Dispensations of Heaven will quickly befal the French Empire"; he +"lifts up his Cries for a mighty and speedy Revolution" there. "I +spread before the Lord the Condition of His Church abroad ... +especially in Great Britain and in France. And I prayed that the poor +Vaudois may not be ruined by the Peace now made between France and +Savoy. I prayed likewise for further Mortifications upon the Turkish +Empire." Here surely was one colonial who was trying, in Cecil Rhodes's +words, to "think continentally!" + +Furthermore, the leaders of those early colonies were in large measure +university men, disciplined in the classics, fit representatives of +European culture. It has been reckoned that between the years 1630 and +1690 there were in New England as many graduates of Cambridge and +Oxford as could be found in any population of similar size in the +mother country. At one time during those years there was in +Massachusetts and Connecticut alone a Cambridge graduate for every two +hundred and fifty inhabitants. Like the exiled Greeks in Matthew +Arnold's poem, they "undid their corded bales"--of learning, it is +true, rather than of merchandise--upon these strange and inhospitable +shores: and the traditions of Greek and Hebrew and Latin scholarship +were maintained with no loss of continuity. To the lover of letters +there will always be something fine in the thought of that narrow +seaboard fringe of faith in the classics, widening slowly as the +wilderness gave way, making its invisible road up the rivers, across +the mountains, into the great interior basin, and only after the Civil +War finding an enduring home in the magnificent state universities of +the West. Lovers of Greek and Roman literature may perhaps always feel +themselves pilgrims and exiles in this vast industrial democracy of +ours, but they have at least secured for us, and that from the very +first day of the colonies, some of the best fruitage of +internationalism. For that matter, what was, and is, that one Book--to +the eyes of the Protestant seventeenth century infallible and +inexpressively sacred--but the most potent and universal commerce of +ideas and spirit, passing from the Orient, through Greek and Roman +civilization, into the mind and heart of Western Europe and America? + + "Oh, East is East, and West is West, + And never the twain shall meet," + +declares a confident poet of to-day. But East and West met long ago in +the matchless phrases translated from Hebrew and Greek and Latin into +the English Bible; and the heart of the East there answers to the heart +of the West as in water face answereth to face. That the colonizing +Englishmen of the seventeenth century were Hebrews in spiritual +culture, and heirs of Greece and Rome without ceasing to be Anglo-Saxon +in blood, is one of the marvels of the history of civilization, and it +is one of the basal facts in the intellectual life of the United States +of to-day. + +Yet that life, as I have already hinted, is not so simple in its terms +as it might be if we had to reckon merely with the men of a single +stock, albeit with imaginations quickened by contact with an Oriental +religion, and minds disciplined, directly or indirectly, by the methods +and the literatures which the Revival of Learning imposed upon modern +Europe. American formal culture is, and has been, from the beginning, +predominantly English. Yet it has been colored by the influences of +other strains of race, and by alien intellectual traditions. Such +international influences as have reached us through German and +Scandinavian, Celtic and Italian, Russian and Jewish immigration, are +well marked in certain localities, although their traces may be +difficult to follow in the main trend of American writing. The presence +of Negro, Irishman, Jew, and German, has affected our popular humor and +satire, and is everywhere to be marked in the vocabulary and tone of +our newspapers. The cosmopolitan character of the population of such +cities as New York and Chicago strikes every foreign observer. Each one +of the manifold races now transplanted here and in process of +Americanization has for a while its own newspapers and churches and +social life carried on in a foreign dialect. But this stage of +evolution passes swiftly. The assimilative forces of American schools, +industry, commerce, politics, are too strong for the foreign immigrant +to resist. The Italian or Greek fruit pedler soon prefers to talk +English, and his children can be made to talk nothing else. This +extraordinary amalgamating power of English culture explains, no +doubt, why German and Scandinavian immigration--to take examples from +two of the most intelligent and educated races that have contributed to +the up-building of the country--have left so little trace, as yet, upon +our more permanent literature. + +But blood will have its say sooner or later. No one knows how +profoundly the strong mentality of the Jew, already evident enough in +the fields of manufacturing and finance, will mould the intellectual +life of the United States. The mere presence, to say nothing of the +rapid absorption, of these millions upon millions of aliens, as the +children of the Puritans regard them, is a constant evidence of the +subtle ways in which internationalism is playing its part in the +fashioning of the American temper. The moulding hand of the German +university has been laid upon our higher institutions of learning for +seventy years, although no one can demonstrate in set terms whether the +influence of Goethe, read now by three generations of American scholars +and studied by millions of youth in the schools, has left any real mark +upon our literature. Abraham Lincoln, in his store-keeping days, used +to sit under a tree outside the grocery store of Lincoln and Berry, +reading Voltaire. One would like to think that he then and there +assimilated something of the incomparable lucidity of style of the +great Frenchman. But Voltaire's influence upon Lincoln's style cannot +be proved, any more than Rousseau's direct influence upon Jefferson. +Tolstoi and Ibsen have, indeed, left unmistakable traces upon American +imaginative writing during the last quarter of a century. Frank Norris +was indebted to Zola for the scheme of that uncompleted trilogy, the +prose epic of the Wheat; and Owen Wister has revealed a not uncommon +experience of our younger writing men in confessing that the impulse +toward writing his Western stories came to him after reading the +delightful pages of a French romancer. But all this tells us merely +what we knew well enough before: that from colonial days to the present +hour the Atlantic has been no insuperable barrier between the thought +of Europe and the mind of America; that no one race bears aloft all the +torches of intellectual progress; and that a really vital writer of any +country finds a home in the spiritual life of every other country, even +though it may be difficult to find his name in the local directory. + +Finally, we must bear in mind that purely literary evidence as to the +existence of certain national traits needs corroboration from many +non-literary sources. If it is dangerous to judge modern Japan by the +characteristics of a piece of pottery, it is only less misleading to +select half a dozen excellent New England writers of fifty years ago as +sole witnesses to the qualities of contemporary America. We must +broaden the range of evidence. The historians of American literature +must ultimately reckon with all those sources of mental and emotional +quickening which have yielded to our pioneer people a substitute for +purely literary pleasures: they must do justice to the immense mass of +letters, diaries, sermons, editorials, speeches, which have served as +the grammar and phrase-book of national feeling. A history of our +literature must be flexible enough, as I have said elsewhere, to +include "the social and economic and geographical background of +American life; the zest of the explorer, the humor of the pioneer; the +passion of old political battles; the yearning after spiritual truth +and social readjustment; the baffled quest of beauty. Such a history +must be broad enough for the _Federalist_ and for Webster's oratory, +for Beecher's sermons and Greeley's editorials, and the Lincoln-Douglas +debates. It must picture the daily existence of our citizens from the +beginning; their working ideas, their phrases and shibboleths and all +their idols of the forum and the cave. It should portray the misspelled +ideals of a profoundly idealistic people who have been usually immersed +in material things." + +Our most characteristic American writing, as must be pointed out again +and again, is not the self-conscious literary performance of a Poe or a +Hawthorne. It is civic writing; a citizen literature, produced, like +the _Federalist_, and Garrison's editorials and Grant's _Memoirs_, +without any stylistic consciousness whatever; a sort of writing which +has been incidental to the accomplishment of some political, social, or +moral purpose, and which scarcely regards itself as literature at all. +The supreme example of it is the "Gettysburg Address." Homeliness, +simplicity, directness, preoccupation with moral issues, have here been +but the instrument of beauty; phrase and thought and feeling have a +noble fitness to the national theme. "Nothing of Europe here," we may +instinctively exclaim, and yet the profounder lesson of this citizen +literature of ours is in the universality of the fundamental questions +which our literature presents. The "Gettysburg Address" would not +to-day have a secure fame in Europe if it spoke nothing to the ear and +the heart of Europe. And this brings us back to our main theme. +Lincoln, like Franklin, like many another lesser master of our citizen +literature, is a typical American. In the writing produced by such men, +there cannot but be a revelation of American characteristics. We are +now to attempt an analysis of these national traits, as they have been +expressed by our representative writers. + +Simple as the problem seems, when thus stated, its adequate performance +calls for a constant sensitiveness to the conditions prevalent, during +a long period, in English and Continental society and literature. The +most rudimentary biographical sketch of such eminent contemporary +American authors as Mr. Henry James and Mr. Howells shows that Europe +is an essential factor in the intellectual life and in the artistic +procedure of these writers. Yet in their racial and national +relationships they are indubitably American. In their local variations +from type they demand from the critic an understanding of the culture +of the Ohio Valley, and of Boston and New York. The analysis of the +mingled racial, psychological, social, and professional traits in these +masters of contemporary American fiction presents to the critic a +problem as fascinating as, and I think more complex than, a +corresponding study of Meredith or Hardy, of Daudet or D'Annunzio. In +the three hundred years that have elapsed since Englishmen who were +trained under Queen Elizabeth settled at Jamestown, Virginia, we have +bred upon this soil many a master of speech. They have been men of +varied gifts: now of clear intelligence, now of commanding power; men +of rugged simplicity and of tantalizing subtlety; poets, novelists, +orators, essayists, and publicists, who have interpreted the soul of +America to the mind of the world. Our task is to exhibit the essential +Americanism of these spokesmen of ours, to point out the traits which +make them most truly representative of the instincts of the tongue-tied +millions who work and plan and pass from sight without the gift and +art of utterance; to find, in short, among the books which are +recognized as constituting our American literature, some vital and +illuminating illustrations of our national characteristics. For a truly +"American" book--like an American national game, or an American +city--is that which reveals, consciously or unconsciously, the American +mind. + + + + +II + +The American Mind + + +The origin of the phrase, "the American mind," was political. Shortly +after the middle of the eighteenth century, there began to be a +distinctly American way of regarding the debatable question of British +Imperial control. During the period of the Stamp Act agitation our +colonial-bred politicians and statesmen made the discovery that there +was a mode of thinking and feeling which was native--or had by that +time become a second nature--to all the colonists. Jefferson, for +example, employs those resonant and useful words "the American mind" to +indicate that throughout the American colonies an essential unity of +opinion had been developed as regards the chief political question of +the day. + +It is one of the most striking characteristics of the present United +States that this instinct of political unity should have endured, +triumphing over every temporary motive of division. The inhabitants of +the United States belong to a single political type. There is scarcely +a news-stand in any country of Continental Europe where one may not +purchase a newspaper openly or secretly opposed to the government,--not +merely attacking an unpopular administration or minister or ruler,--but +desiring and plotting the overthrow of the entire political system of +the country. It is very difficult to find such a newspaper anywhere in +the United States. I myself have never seen one. The opening sentence +of President Butler's admirable little book, _The American as He Is_, +originally delivered as lectures before the University of Copenhagen, +runs as follows: + + "The most impressive fact in American life is the substantial + unity of view in regard to the fundamental questions of + government and of conduct among a population so large, + distributed over an area so wide, recruited from sources so + many and so diverse, living under conditions so widely + different." + +But the American type of mind is evident in many other fields than that +of politics. The stimulating book from which I have just quoted, +attempts in its closing paragraph, after touching upon the more salient +features of our national activity, to define the typical American in +these words:-- + + "The typical American is he who, whether rich or poor, + whether dwelling in the North, South, East, or West, whether + scholar, professional man, merchant, manufacturer, farmer, or + skilled worker for wages, lives the life of a good citizen + and good neighbor; who believes loyally and with all his + heart in his country's institutions, and in the underlying + principles on which these institutions are built; who directs + both his private and his public life by sound principles; who + cherishes high ideals; and who aims to train his children for + a useful life and for their country's service." + +This modest and sensible statement indicates the existence of a +national point of view. We have developed in the course of time, as a +result of certain racial inheritances and historic experiences, a +national "temper" or "ethos"; a more or less settled way of considering +intellectual, moral, and social problems; in short, a peculiarly +national attitude toward the universal human questions. + +In a narrower sense, "the American mind" may mean the characteristics +of the American intelligence, as it has been studied by Mr. Bryce, De +Tocqueville, and other trained observers of our methods of thinking. It +may mean the specific achievements of the American intelligence in +fields like science and scholarship and history. In all these +particular departments of intellectual activity the methods and the +results of American workers have recently received expert and by no +means uniformly favorable assessment from investigators upon both sides +of the Atlantic. But the observer of literary processes and productions +must necessarily take a somewhat broader survey of national tendencies. +He must study what Nathaniel Hawthorne, with the instinct of a romance +writer, preferred to call the "heart" as distinguished from the mere +intellect. He must watch the moral and social and imaginative impulses +of the individual; the desire for beauty; the hunger for +self-expression; the conscious as well as the unconscious revelation of +personality; and he must bring all this into relation--if he can, and +knowing that the finer secrets are sure to elude him!--with the +age-long impulses of the race and with the mysterious tides of feeling +that flood or ebb with the changing fortunes of the nation. + +One way to begin to understand the typical American is to take a look +at him in Europe. It does not require a professional beggar or a +licensed guide to identify him. Not that the American in Europe need +recall in any particular the familiar pictorial caricature of "Uncle +Sam." He need not bear any outward resemblances to such stage types as +that presented in "The Man From Home." He need not even suggest, by +peculiarities of speech or manner, that he has escaped from the pages +of those novels of international observation in which Mr. James and Mr. +Howells long ago attained an unmatched artistry. Our "American Abroad," +at the present hour, may be studied without the aid of any literary +recollections whatever. There he is, with his wife and daughters, and +one may stare at him with all the frankness of a compatriot. He is +obviously well-to-do,--else he would not be there at all,--and the wife +and daughters seem very well-to-do indeed. He is kindly; +considerate--sometimes effusively considerate--of his fellow +travellers; patient with the ladies of his family, who in turn are +noticeably patient with him. He is genial--very willing to talk with +polyglot headwaiters and chauffeurs; in fact the wife and daughters are +also practised conversationalists, although their most loyal admirers +must admit that their voices _are_ a trifle sharp or flat. These ladies +are more widely read than "papa." He has not had much leisure for +Ruskin and Symonds and Ferrero. His lack of historical training limits +his curiosity concerning certain phases of his European surroundings; +but he uses his eyes well upon such general objects as trains, +hotel-service, and Englishmen. In spite of his habitual geniality, he +is rather critical of foreign ways, although this is partly due to his +lack of acquaintance with them. Intellectually, he is really more +modest and self-distrustful than his conversation or perhaps his +general bearing would imply; in fact, his wife and daughters, +emboldened very likely by the training of their women's clubs, have a +more commendable daring in assaulting new intellectual positions. + +Yet the American does not lack quickness, either of wits or emotion. +His humor and sentiment make him an entertaining companion. Even when +his spirits run low, his patriotism is sure to mount in proportion, and +he can always tell you with enthusiasm in just how many days he expects +to be back again in what he calls "God's country." + +This, or something like this, is the "American" whom the European +regards with curiosity, contempt, admiration, or envy, as the case may +be, but who is incontestably modifying Western Europe, even if he is +not, as many journalists and globe-trotters are fond of asserting, +"Americanizing" the world. Interesting as it is to glance at him +against that European background which adds picturesqueness to his +qualities, the "Man from Home" is still more interesting in his native +habitat. There he has been visited by hundreds of curious and observant +foreigners, who have left on record a whole literature of bewildered +and bewildering, irritating and flattering and amusing testimony +concerning the Americans. Settlers like Crevecoeur in the glowing dawn +of the Republic, poets like Tom Moore, novelists like Charles +Dickens,--other novelists like Mr. Arnold Bennett,--professional +travellers like Captain Basil Hall, students of contemporary sociology +like Paul Bourget and Mr. H. G. Wells, French journalists, German +professors, Italian admirers of Colonel Roosevelt, political theorists +like De Tocqueville, profound and friendly observers like Mr. Bryce, +have had, and will continue to have, their say. + +The reader who tries to take all this testimony at its face value, and +to reconcile its contradictions, will be a candidate for the insane +asylum. Yet the testimony is too amusing to be neglected and some of it +is far too important to be ignored. Mr. John Graham Brooks, after long +familiarity with these foreign opinions of America, has gathered some +of the most representative of them into a delightful and stimulating +volume entitled _As Others See Us_. There one may find examples of what +the foreigner has seen, or imagined he has seen, during his sojourn in +America, and what he has said about it afterwards. Mr. Brooks is too +charitable to our visitors to quote the most fantastic and highly +colored of their observations; but what remains is sufficiently +bizarre. + +The real service of such a volume is to train us in discounting the +remarks made about us in a particular period like the +eighteen-thirties, or from observations made in a special place, like +Newport, or under special circumstances, like a Bishop's private car. +It helps us to make allowances for the inevitable angle of nationality, +the equally inevitable personal equation. A recent ambitious book on +America, by a Washington journalist of long residence here, although of +foreign birth, declares that "the chief trait of the American people is +the love of gain and the desire of wealth acquired through commerce." +That is the opinion of an expert observer, who has had extraordinary +chances for seeing precisely what he has seen. I think it, +notwithstanding, a preposterous opinion, fully as preposterous as +Professor Muensterberg's notion that America has latterly grown more +monarchical in its tendencies,--but I must remember that, in my own +case, as in that of the journalist under consideration, there are +allowances to be made for race, and training, and natural idiosyncracy +of vision. + +The native American, it may be well to remember, is something of an +observer himself. If his observations upon the characteristics of his +countrymen are less piquant than the foreigner's, it is chiefly +because the American writes, upon the whole, less incisively than he +talks. But incisive native writing about American traits is not +lacking. If a missionary, say in South Africa, has read the New York +_Nation_ every week for the past forty years, he has had an +extraordinary "moving picture" of American tendencies, as interpreted +by independent, trenchant, and high-minded criticism. That a file of +the _Nation_ will convey precisely the same impression of American +tendencies as a file of the _Sun_, for instance, or the _Boston Evening +Transcript_, is not to be affirmed. The humor of the London _Punch_ and +the New York _Life_ does not differ more radically than the aspects of +American civilization as viewed by two rival journals in Newspaper Row. +The complexity of the material now collected and presented in daily +journalism is so great that adequate editorial interpretation is +obviously impossible. All the more insistently does this heterogeneous +picture of American life demand the impartial interpretation of the +historian, the imaginative transcription of the novelist. Humorist and +moralist, preacher and mob orator and social essayist, shop-talk and +talk over the tea-cup or over the pipe, and the far more illuminating +instruction of events, are fashioning day by day the infinitely +delicate processes of our national self-assessment. Scholars like Mr. +Henry Adams or Mr. James Ford Rhodes will explain to us American life +as it was during the administrations of Jefferson or in the +eighteen-fifties. Professor Turner will expound the significance of the +frontier in American history. Mr. Henry James will portray with +unrivalled psychological insight the Europeanized American of the +eighteen-seventies and eighties. Literary critics like Professor +Wendell or Professor Trent will deduce from our literature itself +evidence concerning this or that national quality; and all this mass of +American expert testimony, itself a result and a proof of national +self-awareness and self-respect, must be put into the scales to +balance, to confirm, or to outweigh the reports furnished by +foreigners. + +I do not pretend to be able, like an expert accountant, to draw up a +balance-sheet of national qualities, to credit or debit the American +character with this or that precise quantity of excellence or defect. +But having turned the pages of many books about the United States, and +listened to many conversations about its inhabitants in many states of +the Union, I venture to collect a brief list of the qualities which +have been assigned to us, together with a few, but not, I trust, too +many, of our admitted national defects. + +Like that excellent German who wrote the History of the English Drama +in six volumes, I begin with Physical Geography. The differentiation of +the physical characteristics of our branch of the English race is +admittedly due, in part, to climate. In spite of the immense range of +climatic variations as one passes from New England to New Orleans, from +the Mississippi Valley to the high plains of the Far West, or from the +rainy Oregon belt southward to San Diego, the settlers of English stock +find a prevalent atmospheric condition, as a result of which they +begin, in a generation or two, to change in physique. They grow thinner +and more nervous, they "lean forward," as has been admirably said of +them, while the Englishman "leans back"; they are less heavy and less +steady; their voices are higher, sharper; their athletes get more +easily "on edge"; they respond, in short, to an excessively +stimulating climate. An old-fashioned sea-captain put it all into a +sentence when he said that he could drink a bottle of wine with his +dinner in Liverpool and only a half a bottle in New York. Explain the +cause as we may, the fact seems to be that the body of John Bull +changes, in the United States, into the body of Uncle Sam. + +There are mental differences no less pronounced. No adjective has been +more frequently applied to the Anglo-Saxon than the word "dull." The +American mind has been accused of ignorance, superficiality, levity, +commonplaceness, and dozens of other defects, but "dulness" is not one +of them. "Smartness," rather, is the preferred epithet of derogation; +or, to rise a little in the scale of valuation, it is the word +"cleverness," used with that lurking contempt for cleverness which is +truly English and which long survived in the dialect of New England, +where the village ne'er-do-well or Jack-of-all-trades used to be +pronounced a "clever" fellow. The variety of employments to which the +American pioneers were obliged to betake themselves has done something, +no doubt, to produce a national versatility, a quick assimilation of +new methods and notions, a ready adaptability to novel emergencies. An +invaluable pioneer trait is curiosity; the settler in a new country, +like Moses in the wilderness of Arabia, must "turn aside to see"; he +must look into things, learn to read signs,--or else the Indians or +frost or freshet will soon put an end to his pioneering. That curiosity +concerning strangers which so much irritated Dickens and Mrs. Trollope +was natural to the children of Western emigrants to whom the difference +between Sioux and Pawnee had once meant life or death. "What's your +business, stranger, in these parts?" was an instinctive, because it had +once been a vital, question. That it degenerates into mere +inquisitiveness is true enough; just as the "acuteness," the +"awareness," essential to the existence of one generation becomes only +"cuteness," the typical tin-pedler's habit of mind, in the generation +following. + +American inexperience, the national rawness and unsophistication which +has impressed so many observers, has likewise its double significance +when viewed historically. We have exhibited, no doubt, the +amateurishness and recklessness which spring from relative isolation, +from ignorance as to how they manage elsewhere this particular sort of +thing,--the conservation of forests, let us say, or the government of +colonial dependencies. National smugness and conceit, the impatience +crystallized in the phrase, "What have we got to do with abroad?" have +jarred upon the nerves of many cultivated Americans. But it is no less +true that a nation of pioneers and settlers, like the isolated +individual, learns certain rough-and-ready Robinson Crusoe ways of +getting things done. A California mining-camp is sure to establish law +and order in due time, though never, perhaps, a law and order quite +according to Blackstone. In the most trying crises of American +political history, it was not, after all, a question of profiting by +European experience. Washington and Lincoln, in their sorest struggles, +had nothing to do with "abroad"; the problem had first to be thought +through, and then fought through, in American and not in European +terms. Not a half-dozen Englishmen understood the bearings of the +Kansas-Nebraska Bill, or, if they did, we were little the wiser. We had +to wait until a slow-minded frontier lawyer mastered it in all its +implications, and then patiently explained it to the farmers of +Illinois, to the United States, and to the world. + +It is true that the unsophisticated mode of procedure may turn out to +be sheer folly,--a "sixteen to one" triumph of provincial barbarism. +But sometimes it is the secret of freshness and of force. Your +cross-country runner scorns the highway, but that is because he has +confidence in his legs and loins, and he likes to take the fences. +Fenimore Cooper, when he began to write stories, knew nothing about the +art of novel-making as practised in Europe, but he possessed something +infinitely better for him, namely, instinct, and he took the right road +to the climax of a narrative as unerringly as the homing bee follows +its viewless trail. + +No one can be unaware how easily this superb American confidence may +turn to over-confidence, to sheer recklessness. We love to run past the +signals, in our railroading and in our thinking. Emerson will "plunge" +on a new idea as serenely as any stock-gambler ever "plunged" in Wall +Street, and a pretty school-teacher will tell you that she has become +an advocate of the "New Thought" as complacently as an old financier +will boast of having bought Calumet and Hecla when it was selling at +25. (Perhaps the school-teacher may get as good a bargain. I cannot +say.) Upon the whole, Americans back individual guesswork and pay +cheerfully when they lose. A great many of them, as it happens, have +guessed right. Even those who continue to guess wrong, like Colonel +Sellers, have the indefeasible romantic appetite for guessing again. +The American temperament and the chances of American history have +brought constant temptation to speculation, and plenty of our people +prefer to gamble upon what they love to call a "proposition," rather +than to go to the bottom of the facts. They would rather speculate than +know. + +Doubtless there are purely physical causes that have encouraged this +mental attitude, such as the apparently inexhaustible resources of a +newly opened country, the consciousness of youthful energy, the feeling +that any very radical mistake in pitching camp to-day can easily be +rectified when we pitch camp to-morrow. The habit of exaggeration +which was so particularly annoying to English visitors in the middle +of the last century--annoying even to Charles Dickens, who was himself +something of an expert in exuberance--is a physical and moral no less +than a mental quality. That monstrous braggadocio which Dickens +properly satirized in _Martin Chuzzlewit_ was partly, of course, the +product of provincial ignorance. Doubtless there were, and there are +still, plenty of Pograms who are convinced that Henry Clay and Daniel +Webster overtop all the intellectual giants of the Old World. But that +youthful bragging, and perhaps some of the later bragging as well, has +its social side. It is a perverted idealism. It springs from group +loyalty, from sectional fidelity. The settlement of "Eden" may be +precisely what Dickens drew it: a miasmatic mud-hole. Yet we who are +interested in the new town do not intend, as the popular phrase has it, +"to give ourselves away." We back our own "proposition," so that to +this day Chicago cannot tell the truth to St. Louis, nor Harvard to +Yale. Braggadocio thus gets glorified through its rootage in loyalty; +and likewise extravagance--surely one of the worst of American mental +vices--is often based upon a romantic confidence in individual opinion +or in the righteousness of some specific cause. Convince a blue-blooded +American like Wendell Phillips that the abolition of slavery is right, +and, straightway, words and even facts become to him mere weapons in a +splendid warfare. His statements grow rhetorical, reckless, virulent. +Proof seems to him, as it did to the contemporary Transcendentalist +philosophers, an impertinence. The sole question is, "Are you on the +Lord's side?" i.e., on the side of Wendell Phillips. + +Excuse as we may the faults of a gifted combatant in a moral crisis +like the abolition controversy, the fact remains that the intellectual +dangers of the oratorical temperament are typically American. What is +commonly called our "Fourth of July" period has indeed passed away. It +has few apologists, perhaps fewer than it really deserves. It is +possible to regret the disappearance of that old-fashioned assertion of +patriotism and pride, and to question whether historical pageants and a +"noiseless Fourth" will develop any better citizens than the fathers +were. But on the purely intellectual side, the influence of that +spread-eagle oratory was disastrous. Throughout wide-extended regions +of the country, and particularly in the South and West, the "orator" +grew to be, in the popular mind, the normal representative of +intellectual ability. Words, rather than things, climbed into the +saddle. Popular assemblies were taught the vocabulary and the logic of +passion, rather than of sober, lucid reasoning. The "stump" grew more +potent than school-house and church and bench; and it taught its +reckless and passionate ways to more than one generation. The +intellectual leaders of the newer South have more than once suffered +ostracism for protesting against this glorification of mere oratory. +But it is not the South alone that has suffered. Wherever a mob can +gather, there are still the dangers of the old demagogic vocabulary and +rhetoric. The mob state of mind is lurking still in the excitable +American temperament. + +The intellectual temptations of that temperament are revealed no less +in our popular journalism. This journalism, it is needless to say, is +extremely able, but it is reckless to the last degree. The +extravagance of its head-lines and the over-statements of its news +columns are direct sources of profit, since they increase the +circulation and it is circulation which wins advertising space. I think +it is fair to say that the American people, as a whole, like precisely +the sort of journalism which they get. The tastes of the dwellers in +cities control, more and more, the character of our newspapers. The +journals of New York, Chicago, and San Francisco are steadily gaining +in circulation, in resourcefulness, and in public spirit, but they are, +for the most part, unscrupulous in attack, sophistical, and passionate. +They outvie the popular pulpit in sentimentality. They play with fire. + +The note of exaggeration which is heard in American oratory and +journalism is struck again in the popular magazines. Their campaign of +"exposure," during the last decade, has been careless of individual and +corporate rights and reputations. Even the magazine sketches and short +stories are keyed up to a hysteric pitch. So universally is this +characteristic national tension displayed in our periodical literature +that no one is much surprised to read in his morning paper that some +one has called the President of the United States a liar,--or that some +one has been called a liar by the President of the United States. + +For an explanation of these defects, shall we fall back upon a +convenient maxim of De Tocqueville's and admit with him that "a +democracy is unsuited to meditation"? We are forced to do so. But then +comes the inevitable second thought that a democracy must needs have +other things than meditation to attend to. Athenian and Florentine and +Versailles types of political despotism have all proved highly +favorable to the lucubrations of philosophers and men of letters who +enjoyed the despot's approbation. For that matter, no scheme of life +was ever better suited to meditation than an Indian reservation in the +eighteen-seventies, with a Great Father in Washington to furnish +blankets, flour, and tobacco. Yet that is not quite the American ideal +of existence, and it even failed to produce the peaceable fruits of +meditation in the Indian himself. + +One may freely admit the shortcomings of the American intelligence; the +"commonness of mind and tone" which Mr. Bryce believes to be +inseparable from the presence of such masses of men associated under +modern democratic government; the frivolity and extravagance which +represent the gasconading of the romantic temper in face of the grey +practicalities of everyday routine; the provincial boastfulness and bad +taste which have resulted from intellectual isolation; the lack, in +short, of a code, whether for thought or speech or behavior. And +nevertheless, one's instinctive Americanism replies, May it not be +better, after all, to have gone without a code for a while, to have +lacked that orderly and methodized and socialized European +intelligence, and to have had the glorious sense of bringing things to +pass in spite of it? There is just one thing that would have been fatal +to our democracy. It is the feeling expressed in La Bruyere's famous +book: "Everything has been said, everything has been written, +everything has been done." Here in America everything was to do; we +were forced to conjugate our verbs in the future tense. No doubt our +existence has been, in some respects, one of barbarism, but it has been +the barbarism of life and not of death. A rawboned baby sprawling on +the mud floor of a Kentucky log cabin is a more hopeful spectacle than +a wholly civilized funeral. + +"Perhaps it is," rejoins the European critic, somewhat impatiently, +"but you are confusing the issue. We find certain grave defects in the +American mind, defects which, if you had not had what Thomas Carlyle +called 'a great deal of land for a very few people,' would long ago +have involved you in disaster. You admit the mental defects, but you +promptly shift the question to one of moral qualities, of practical +energy, of subduing your wilderness, and so forth. You have too often +absented yourself from the wedding banquet, from the European symposium +of wit and philosophy, from the polished and orderly and delightful +play and interplay of civilized mind,--and your excuse is the old one: +that you are trying your yoke of oxen and cannot come. We charge you +with intellectual sins, and you enter the plea of moral preoccupation. +If you will permit personal examples, you Americans have made ere now +your national heroes out of men whose reasoning powers remained those +of a college sophomore, who were unable to state an opponent's position +with fairness, who lacked wholly the judicial quality, who were +vainglorious and extravagant, who had, in short, the mind of an +exuberant barbarian; but you instantly forget their intellectual +defects in the presence of their abounding physical and moral energy, +their freedom from any taint of personal corruption, their whole-souled +desire and effort for the public good. Were not such heroes, impossible +as they would have been in any other civilized country, perfectly +illuminative of your national state of mind?" + +For one, I confess that I do not know what reply to make to my +imaginary European critic. I suspect that he is right. At any rate, we +stand here at the fork of the road. If we do not wish to linger any +longer over a catalogue of intellectual sins, let us turn frankly to +our moral preoccupations, comforting ourselves, if we like, as we +abandon the field of purely intellectual rivalry with Europe, in the +reflection that it is the muddle-headed Anglo-Saxon, after all, who is +the dominant force in the modern world. + +The moral temper of the American people has been analyzed no less +frequently than their mental traits. Foreign and native observers are +alike agreed in their recognition of the extraordinary American +energy. The sheer power of the American bodily machine, driven by the +American will, is magnificent. It is often driven too hard, and with +reckless disregard of anything save immediate results. It wears out +more quickly than the bodily machine of the Englishman. It is typical +that the best distance runners of Great Britain usually beat ours, +while we beat them in the sprints. Our public men are frequently--as +the athletes say--"all in" at sixty. Their energy is exhausted at just +the time that many an English statesman begins his best public service. +But after making every allowance for wasteful excess, for the restless +and impatient consumption of nervous forces which nature intended that +we should hold in reserve, the fact remains that American history has +demonstrated the existence of a dynamic national energy, physical and +moral, which is still unabated. Immigration has turned hitherward the +feet of millions upon millions of young men from the hardiest stocks of +Europe. They replenish the slackening streams of vigor. When the +northern New Englander cannot make a living on the old farm, the French +Canadian takes it off his hands, and not only improves the farm, but +raises big crops of boys. So with Italians, Swedes, Germans, Irish, +Jews, and Portuguese, and all the rest. We are a nation of immigrants, +a digging, hewing, building, breeding, bettering race, of mixed blood +and varying creeds, but of fundamental faith in the wages of going on; +a race compounded of materials crude but potent; raw, but with blood +that is red and bones that are big; a race that is accomplishing its +vital tasks, and, little by little, transmuting brute forces and +material energies into the finer play of mind and spirit. + +From the very beginning, the American people have been characterized by +idealism. It was the inner light of Pilgrim and Quaker colonists; it +gleams no less in the faces of the children of Russian Jew immigrants +to-day. American irreverence has been noted by many a foreign critic, +but there are certain subjects in whose presence our reckless or +cynical speech is hushed. Compared with current Continental humor, our +characteristic American humor is peculiarly reverent. The purity of +woman and the reality of religion are not considered topics for +jocosity. Cleanness of body and of mind are held by our young men to be +not only desirable but attainable virtues. There is among us, in +comparison with France or Germany, a defective reverence for the State +as such; and a positive irreverence towards the laws of the +Commonwealth, and towards the occupants of high political positions. +Mayor, Judge, Governor, Senator, or even President, may be the butt of +such indecorous ridicule as shocks or disgusts the foreigner; but +nevertheless the personal joke stops short of certain topics which +Puritan tradition disapproves. The United States is properly called a +Christian nation, not merely because the Supreme Court has so affirmed +it, but because the phrase "a Christian nation" expresses the +historical form which the religious idealism of the country has made +its own. The Bible is still considered, by the mass of the people, a +sacred book; oaths in courts of law, oaths of persons elected to great +office, are administered upon it. American faith in education, as all +the world knows, has from the beginning gone hand in hand with faith in +religion; the school-house was almost as sacred a symbol as the +meeting-house; and the munificence of American private benefactions to +the cause of education furnishes to-day one of the most striking +instances of idealism in the history of civilization. + +The ideal passions of patriotism, of liberty, of loyalty to home and +section, of humanitarian and missionary effort, have all burned with a +clear flame in the United States. The optimism which lies so deeply +embedded in the American character is one phase of the national mind. +Charles Eliot Norton once said to me, with his dry humor, that there +was an infallible test of the American authorship of any anonymous +article or essay: "Does it contain the phrase 'After all, we need not +despair'? If it does, it was written by an American." In spite of all +that is said about the practicality of the American, his love of gain +and his absorption in material interests, those who really know him are +aware how habitually he confronts his practical tasks in a spirit of +romantic enthusiasm. He marches downtown to his prosaic day's job and +calls it "playing the game"; to work as hard as he can is to "get into +the game," and to work as long as he can is to "stay in the game"; he +loves to win fully as much as the Jew and he hates to lose fully as +much as the Englishman, but losing or winning, he carries into his +business activity the mood of the idealist. + +It is easy to think of all this as self-deception as the emotional +effusiveness of the American temperament; but to refuse to see its +idealism is to mistake fundamentally the character of the American man. +No doubt he does deceive himself often as to his real motives: he is a +mystic and a bargain-hunter by turns. Divided aims, confused ideals, +have struggled for the mastery among us, ever since Challon's _Voyage_, +in 1606, announced that the purpose of the first colonists to Virginia +was "both to seek to convert the savages, as also to seek out what +benefits or commodities might be had in those parts." How that +"both"--"as also" keeps echoing in American history: "both" to +christianize the Negro and work him at a profit, "both" duty and +advantage in retaining the Philippines; "both" international good will +and increased armaments; "both" Sunday morning precepts and Monday +morning practice; "both" horns of a dilemma; "both God and mammon"; did +ever a nation possess a more marvellous water-tight compartment method +of believing and honoring opposites! But in all this unconscious +hypocrisy the American is perhaps not worse--though he may be more +absurd!--than other men. + +Another aspect of the American mind is found in our radicalism. "To be +an American," it has been declared, "is to be a radical." That +statement needs qualification. Intellectually the American is inclined +to radical views; he is willing to push certain social theories very +far; he will found a new religion, a new philosophy, a new socialistic +community, at the slightest notice or provocation; but he has at bottom +a fund of moral and political conservatism. Thomas Jefferson, one of +the greatest of our radical idealists, had a good deal of the English +squire in him after all. Jeffersonianism endures, not merely because it +is a radical theory of human nature, but because it expresses certain +facts of human nature. The American mind looks forward, not back; but +in practical details of land, taxes, and governmental machinery we are +instinctively cautious of change. The State of Connecticut knows that +her constitution is ill adapted to the present conditions of her +population, but the difficulty is to persuade the rural legislators to +amend it. Yet everybody admits that amendment will come "some day." +This admission is a characteristic note of American feeling; and every +now and then come what we call "uplift" movements, when radicalism is +in the very air, and a thousand good "causes" take fresh vigor. + +One such period was in the New England of the eighteen-forties. We are +moving in a similar--only this time a national--current of radicalism, +to-day. But a change in the weather or the crops has before now turned +many of our citizens from radicalism into conservatism. There is, in +fact, conservatism in our blood and radicalism in our brains, and now +one and now the other rules. Very typical of American radicalism is +that story of the old sea-captain who was ignorant, as was supposed, of +the science of navigation, and who cheerfully defended himself by +saying that he could work his vessel down to Boston Light without +knowing any navigation, and after that he could go where he "dum +pleased." I suspect the old fellow pulled his sextant and chronometer +out of his chest as soon as he really needed them. American radicalism +is not always as innocent of the world's experience as it looks. In +fact, one of the most interesting phases of this twentieth century +"uplift" movement is its respect and even glorification of expert +opinion. A German expert in city-planning electrifies an audience of +Chicago club-women by talking to them about drains, ash-carts, and +flower-beds. A hundred other experts, in sanitation, hygiene, +chemistry, conservation of natural resources, government by commission, +tariffs, arbitration treaties, are talking quite as busily; and they +have the attention of a national audience that is listening with +genuine modesty, and with a real desire to refashion American life on +wiser and nobler plans. In this national forward movement in which we +are living, radicalism has shown its beneficent aspect of constructive +idealism. + +No catalogue of American qualities and defects can exclude the trait of +individualism. We exalt character over institutions, says Mr. Brownell; +we like our institutions because they suit us, and not because we +admire institutions. "Produce great persons," declares Walt Whitman, +"the rest follows." Whether the rest follows or not, there can be no +question that Americans, from the beginning, have laid singular stress +upon personal qualities. The religion and philosophy of the Puritans +were in this respect at one with the gospel of the frontier. It was the +principle of "every man for himself"; solitary confrontation of his +God, solitary struggle with the wilderness. "He that will not work," +declared John Smith after that first disastrous winter at Jamestown, +"neither let him eat." The pioneer must clear his own land, harvest his +own crops, defend his own fireside; his temporal and eternal salvation +were strictly his own affair. He asked, and expected, no aid from the +community; he could at most "change works" in time of harvest, with a +neighbor, if he had one. It was the sternest school of self-reliance, +from babyhood to the grave, that human society is ever likely to +witness. It bred heroes and cranks and hermits; its glories and its +eccentricities are written in the pages of Emerson, Thoreau, and +Whitman; they are written more permanently still in the instinctive +American faith in individual manhood. Our democracy idolizes a few +individuals; it ignores their defective training, or, it may be, their +defective culture; it likes to think of an Andrew Jackson who was a +"lawyer, judge, planter, merchant, general, and politician," before he +became President; it asks only that the man shall not change his +individual character in passing from one occupation or position to +another; in fact, it is amused and proud to think of Grant hauling +cordwood to market, of Lincoln keeping store or Roosevelt rounding-up +cattle. The one essential question was put by Hawthorne into the mouth +of Holgrave in the _House of the Seven Gables_. Holgrave had been by +turns a schoolmaster, clerk in a store, editor, pedler, lecturer on +Mesmerism, and daguerreotypist, but "amid all these personal +vicissitudes," says Hawthorne, "he had never lost his identity.... He +had never violated the innermost man, but had carried his conscience +along with him." There speaks the local accent of Puritanism, but the +voice insisting upon the moral integrity of the individual is the +undertone of America. + +Finally, and surely not the least notable of American traits, is public +spirit. Triumphant individualism checks itself, or is rudely checked +in spite of itself, by considerations of the general good. How often +have French critics confessed, with humiliation, that in spite of the +superior socialization of the French intelligence, France has yet to +learn from America the art and habit of devoting individual fortunes to +the good of the community. Our American literature, as has been already +pointed out, is characteristically a citizen literature, responsive to +the civic note, the production of men who, like the writers of the +_Federalist_, applied a vigorous practical intelligence, a robust +common sense, to questions affecting the interest of everybody. The +spirit of fair play in our free democracy has led Americans to ask not +merely what is right and just for one, the individual, but what are +righteousness and justice and fair play for all. Democracy, as embodied +in such a leader as Lincoln, has meant Fellowship. Nothing finer can be +said of a representative American than to say of him, as Mr. Norton +said of Mr. Lowell, that he had a "most public soul." + +No one can present such a catalogue of American qualities as I have +attempted without realizing how much escapes his classification. +Conscious criticism and assessment of national characteristics is +essential to an understanding of them; but one feels somehow that the +net is not holding. The analysis of English racial inheritances, as +modified by historical conditions, yields much, no doubt; but what are +we to say of such magnificent embodiments of the American spirit as are +revealed in the Swiss immigrant Agassiz, the German exile Carl Schurz, +the native-born mulatto Booker Washington? The Americanism of +representative Americans is something which must be felt; it is to be +reached by imaginative perception and sympathy, no less than by the +process of formal analysis. It would puzzle the experts in racial +tendencies to find arithmetically the common denominator of such +American figures as Franklin, Washington, Jackson, Webster, Lee, +Lincoln, Emerson, and "Mark Twain"; yet the countrymen of those typical +Americans instinctively recognize in them a sort of largeness, +genuineness, naturalness, kindliness, humor, effectiveness, idealism, +which are indubitably and fundamentally American. + +There are certain sentiments of which we ourselves are conscious, +though we can scarcely translate them into words, and these vaguely +felt emotions of admiration, of effort, of fellowship and social faith +are the invisible America. Take, for a single example, the national +admiration for what we call a "self-made" man: here is a boy selling +candy and newspapers on a Michigan Central train; he makes up his mind +to be a lawyer; in twelve years from that day he is general counsel for +the Michigan Central road; he enters the Senate of the United States +and becomes one of its leading figures. The instinctive flush of +sympathy and pride with which Americans listen to such a story is far +more deeply based than any vulgar admiration for money-making +abilities. No one cares whether such a man is rich or poor. He has +vindicated anew the possibilities of manhood under American conditions +of opportunity; the miracle of our faith has in him come true once +more. + +No one can understand America with his brains. It is too big, too +puzzling. It tempts, and it deceives. But many an illiterate immigrant +has felt the true America in his pulses before he ever crossed the +Atlantic. The descendant of the Pilgrims still remains ignorant of our +national life if he does not respond to its glorious zest, its +throbbing energy, its forward urge, its uncomprehending belief in the +future, its sense of the fresh and mighty world just beyond to-day's +horizon. Whitman's "Pioneers, O Pioneers" is one of the truest of +American poems because it beats with the pulse of this onward movement, +because it is full of this laughing and conquering fellowship and of +undefeated faith. + + + + +III + +American Idealism + + +Our endeavor to state the general characteristics of the American mind +has already given us some indication of what Americans really care for. +The things or the qualities which they like, the objects of their +conscious or unconscious striving, are their ideals. "There is what I +call the American idea," said Theodore Parker in the Anti-Slavery +Convention of 1850. "This idea demands, as the proximate organization +thereof, a democracy--that is, a government of all the people, by all +the people, for all the people; of course, a government on the +principle of eternal justice, the unchanging law of God; for shortness' +sake, I will call it the idea of Freedom." That is one of a thousand +definitions of American idealism. Books devoted to the "Spirit of +America"--like the volume by Henry van Dyke which bears that very +title--give a programme of national accomplishments and aspirations. +But our immediate task is more specific. It is to point out how +adequately this idealistic side of the national temperament has been +expressed in American writing. Has our literature kept equal pace with +our thinking and feeling? + +We do not need, in attempting to answer this question, any definition +of idealism, in its philosophical or in its more purely literary sense. +There are certain fundamental human sentiments which lift men above +brutes, Frenchmen above "frog-eaters," and Englishmen above +"shop-keepers." These ennobling sentiments or ideals, while universal +in their essential nature, assume in each civilized nation a somewhat +specific coloring. The national literature reveals the myriad shades +and hues of private and public feeling, and the more truthful this +literary record, the more delicate and noble become the harmonies of +local and national thought or emotion with the universal instincts and +passions of mankind. On the other hand, when the literature of Spain, +for instance, or of Italy, fails, within a given period, in range and +depth of human interest, we are compelled to believe either that the +Spain or Italy of that age was wanting in the nobler ideals, or that +it lacked literary interpretation. + +In the case of America we are confronted by a similar dilemma. Since +the beginning of the seventeenth century this country has been, in a +peculiar sense, the home of idealism; but our literature has remained +through long periods thin and provincial, barren in cosmopolitan +significance; and the hard fact faces us to-day that only three or four +of our writers have aroused any strong interest in the cultivated +readers of continental Europe. Evidently, then, either the torch of +American idealism does not burn as brightly as we think, or else our +writers, with but few exceptions, have not hitherto possessed the +height and reach and grasp to hold up the torch so that the world could +see it. Let us look first at the flame, and then at the torch-bearers. + +Readers of Carlyle have often been touched by the humility with which +that disinherited child of Calvinism speaks of Goethe's doctrine of the +"Three Reverences," as set forth in _Wilhelm Meister_. Again and again, +in his correspondence and his essays, does Carlyle recur to that +teaching of the threefold Reverence: Reverence for what is above us, +for what is around us and for what is under us; that is to say, the +ethnic religion which frees us from debasing fear, the philosophical +religion which unites us with our comrades, and the Christian religion +which recognizes humility and poverty and suffering as divine. + +"To which of these religions do you specially adhere?" inquired +Wilhelm. + +"To all the three," replied the sages; "for in their union they produce +what may properly be called the true Religion. Out of those three +Reverences springs the highest Reverence, Reverence for Oneself." + +An admirable symbolism, surely; vaguer, no doubt, than the old symbols +which Carlyle had learned in the Kirk at Ecclefechan, but less vague, +in turn, than that doctrine of reverence for the Oversoul, which was +soon to be taught at Concord. + +As one meditates upon the idealism of the first colonists in America, +one is tempted to ask what their "reverences" were. Toward what +tangible symbols of the invisible did their eyes instinctively turn? + +For New England, at least, the answer is relatively simple. One form +of it is contained in John Adams's well-known prescription for +Virginia, as recorded in his _Diary_ for July 21, 1786. "Major +Langbourne dined with us again. He was lamenting the difference of +character between Virginia and New England. I offered to give him a +receipt for making a New England in Virginia. He desired it; and I +recommended to him town-meetings, training-days, town-schools, and +ministers." + +The "ministers," it will be noticed, come last on the Adams list. But +the order of precedence is unimportant. + +Here are four symbols, or, if you like, "reverences." Might not the +Virginia planters, loyal to their own specific symbol of the +"gentleman,"--no unworthy ideal, surely; one that had been glorified in +European literature ever since Castiligione wrote his _Courtier_, and +one that had been transplanted from England to Virginia as soon as Sir +Walter Raleigh's men set foot on the soil which took its name from the +Virgin Queen,--might not the Virginia gentlemen have pondered to their +profit over the blunt suggestion of the Massachusetts commoner? No +doubt; and yet how much picturesqueness and nobility--and tragedy, +too--we should have missed, if our history had not been full of these +varying symbols, clashing ideals, different Reverences! + +One Reverence, at least, was common to the Englishman of Virginia and +to the Englishman of Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay. They were joint +heirs of the Reformation, children of that waxing and puissant England +which was a nation of one book, the Bible; a book whose phrases color +alike the _Faerie Queen_ of Spenser and the essays of Francis Bacon; a +book rich beyond all others in human experience; full of poetry, +history, drama; the test of conduct; the manual of devotion; and above +all, and blinding all other considerations by the very splendor of the +thought, a book believed to be the veritable Word of the unseen God. +For these colonists in the wilderness, as for the Protestant Europe +which they had left irrevocably behind them, the Bible was the plainest +of all symbols of idealism: it was the first of the "Reverences." + +The Church was a symbol likewise, but to the greater portion of +colonial America the Church meant chiefly the tangible band of +militant believers within the limits of a certain township or parish, +rather than the mystical Bride of Christ. Except in Maryland and +Virginia, whither the older forms of Church worship were early +transplanted, there was scanty reverence for the Establishment. There +was neither clergyman nor minister on board the Mayflower. In Rufus +Choate's oration on the Pilgrims before the New England Society of New +York in 1843, occurred the famous sentence about "a church without a +bishop and a state without a King"; to which Dr. Wainwright, rector of +St. John's, replied wittily at the dinner following the oration that +there "can be no church without a bishop." This is perhaps a question +for experts; but Thomas Hooker, Thomas Shepard, and John Cotton would +have sided with Rufus Choate. The awe which had once been paid to the +Establishment was transferred, in the seventeenth-century New England, +to the minister. The minister imposed himself upon the popular +imagination, partly through sheer force of personal ascendency, and +partly as a symbol of the theocracy,--the actual governing of the +Commonwealth by the laws and spirit of the sterner Scriptures. The +minister dwelt apart as upon an awful Sinai. It was no mere romantic +fancy of Hawthorne that shadowed his countenance with a black veil. The +church organization, too,--though it may have lacked its bishop,--had a +despotic power over its communicants; to be cast out of its fellowship +involved social and political consequences comparable to those +following excommunication by the Church of Rome. Hawthorne and Whittier +and Longfellow--all of them sound antiquarians, though none of them in +sympathy with the theology of Puritanism--have described in fit terms +the bareness of the New England meeting-house. What intellectual +severity and strain was there; what prodigality of learning; what +blazing intensity of devotion; what pathos of women's patience, and of +children, prematurely old, stretched upon the rack of insoluble +problems! What dramas of the soul were played through to the end in +those barn-like buildings, where the musket, perhaps, stood in the +corner of the pew! "How aweful is this place!" must have been murmured +by the lips of all; though there were many who have added, "This is the +gate of Heaven." + +The gentler side of colonial religion is winningly portrayed in +Whittier's _Pennsylvania Pilgrim_ and in his imaginary journal of +Margaret Smith. There were sunnier slopes, warmer exposures for the +ripening of the human spirit, in the Southern colonies. Even in New +England there was sporadic revolt from the beginning. The number of +non-church-members increased rapidly after 1700; Franklin as a youth in +Boston admired Cotton Mather's ability, but he did not go to church, +"Sunday being my studying day." Doubtless there were always humorous +sceptics like Mrs. Stowe's delightful Sam Lawson in _Oldtown Folks_. +Lawson's comment on Parson Simpson's service epitomizes two centuries +of New England thinking. "Wal," said Sam, "Parson Simpson's a smart +man; but I tell ye, it's kind o' discouragin'. Why, he said our state +and condition by natur was just like this. We was clear down in a well +fifty feet deep, and the sides all round nothin' but glare ice; but we +was under immediate obligations to get out, 'cause we was free, +voluntary agents. But nobody ever had got out, and nobody would, unless +the Lord reached down and took 'em. And whether he would or not nobody +could tell; it was all sovereignty. He said there wan't one in a +hundred, not one in a thousand,--not one in ten thousand,--that would +be saved. Lordy massy, says I to myself, ef that's so they're any of +'em welcome to my chance. _And so I kind o' ris up and come out._" + +Mrs. Stowe's novel is fairly representative of a great mass of +derivative literature which draws its materials from the meeting-house +period of American history. But the direct literature of that period +has passed almost wholly into oblivion. Jonathan Edwards had one of the +finest minds of his century; no European standard of comparison is too +high for him; he belongs with Pascal, with Augustine, if you like, with +Dante. But his great treatises written in the Stockbridge woods are +known only to a few technical students of philosophy. One terrible +sermon, preached at Enfield in 1741, is still read by the curious; but +scarcely anybody knows of the ineffable tenderness, dignity, and pathos +of his farewell sermon to his flock at Northampton: and the Yale +Library possesses nearly twelve hundred of Edwards's sermons which have +never been printed at all. Nor does anybody, save here and there an +antiquarian, read Shepard and Hooker and Mayhew. And yet these +preachers and their successors furnished the emotional equivalents of +great prose and verse to generations of men. "That is poetry," says +Professor Saintsbury (in a dangerous latitudinarianism, perhaps!), +"which gives the reader the feeling of poetry." Here we touch one of +the fundamental characteristics of our national state of mind, in its +relation to literature. We are careless of form and type, yet we crave +the emotional stimulus. Milton, greatest of Puritan poets, was read and +quoted all too seldom in the Puritan colonies, and yet those colonists +were no strangers to the emotions of sublimity and awe and beauty. They +found them in the meeting-house instead of in a book; precisely as, in +a later day, millions of Americans experienced what was for them the +emotional equivalent of poetry in the sermons of Henry Ward Beecher and +Phillips Brooks. French pulpit oratory of the seventeenth century wins +recognition as a distinct type of literature; its great practitioners, +like Massillon, Bourdaloue, Bossuet, are appraised in all the histories +of the national literature and in books devoted to the evolution of +literary species. In the American colonies the great preachers +performed the functions of men of letters without knowing it. They have +been treated with too scant respect in the histories of American +literature. It is one of the penalties of Protestantism that the +audiences, after a while, outgrow the preacher. The development of the +historic sense, of criticism, of science, makes an impassable gulf +between Jonathan Edwards and the American churches of the twentieth +century. A sense of profound changes in theology has left our +contemporaries indifferent to the literature in which the old theology +was clothed. + +There is one department of American literary production, of which +Bossuet's famous sermon on Queen Henrietta Maria of England may serve +to remind us, which illustrates significantly the national idealism. I +mean the commemorative oration. The addresses upon the Pilgrim Fathers +by such orators as Everett, Webster, and Choate; the countless orations +before such organizations as the New England Society of New York and +the Phi Beta Kappa; the papers read before historical and patriotic +societies; the birthday and centenary discourses upon national figures +like Washington or Lincoln, have all performed, and are still +performing, an inestimable service in stimulating popular loyalty to +the idealism of the fathers. As literature, most of this production is +derivative: we listen to eloquence about the Puritans, but we do not +read the Puritans; the description of Arthur Dimmesdale's election +sermon in _The Scarlet Letter_, moving as it may be, tempts no one to +open the stout collections of election sermons in the libraries. Yet +the original literature of mediaeval chivalry is known only to a few +scholars: Tennyson's _Idylls_ outsell the _Mabinogion_ and Malory. The +actual world of literature is always shop-worn; a world chiefly of +second-hand books, of warmed-over emotions and it is not surprising +that many listeners to orations about Lincoln do not personally emulate +Lincoln, and that many of the most enthusiastic dealers in the +sentiment of the ancestral meeting-house do not themselves attend +church. + +The other ingredients of John Adams's ideal Commonwealth are no less +significant of our national disposition. Take the school-house. It was +planted in the wilderness for the training of boys and girls and for a +future "godly and learned ministry." The record of American education +is a long story of idealism which has touched literature at every turn. +The "red school-house" on the hill-top or at the cross-roads, the +"log-colleges" in forgotten hamlets, the universities founded by great +states, are all a record of the American faith--which has sometimes +been called a fetich--in education. In its origin, it was a part of the +essential programme of Calvinism to make a man able to judge for +himself upon the most momentous questions; a programme, too, of that +political democracy which lay embedded in the tenets of Calvinism, a +democracy which believes and must continue to believe that an educated +electorate can safeguard its own interests and train up its own +leaders. The poetry of the American school-house was written long ago +by Whittier, in describing Joshua Coffin's school under the big elm on +the cross-road in East Haverhill; its humor and pathos and drama have +been portrayed by innumerable story-writers and essayists. Mrs. Martha +Baker Dunn's charming sketches, entitled "Cicero in Maine" and "Virgil +in Maine," indicate the idealism once taught in the old rural +academies,--and it is taught there still. City men will stop wistfully +on the street, in the first week of September, to watch the boys and +girls go trudging off to their first day of school; men who believe in +nothing else at least believe in that! And school and college and +university remain, as in the beginning, the first garden-ground and the +last refuge of literature. + +That "town-meeting" which John Adams thought Virginia might do well to +adopt has likewise become a symbol of American idealism. Together with +the training-day, it represented the rights and duties and privileges +of free men; the machinery of self-government. It was democracy, rather +than "representative" government, under its purest aspect. Sentiments +of responsibility to the town, the political unit, and to the +Commonwealth, the group of units, were bred there. Likewise, it was a +training-school for sententious speech and weighty action; its roots, +as historians love to demonstrate, run back very far; and though the +modern drift to cities has made its machinery ineffective in the larger +communities, it remains a perpetual spring or feeding stream to the +broader currents of our national life. Without an understanding of the +town-meeting and its equivalents, our political literature loses much +of its significance. Like the school-house and meeting-house, it has +become glorified by our men of letters. John Fiske and other historians +have celebrated it in some of the most brilliant pages of our political +writing; and that citizen literature, so deeply characteristic of us, +found in the plain, forthright, and public-spirited tone of +town-meeting discussions its keynote. The spectacular debates of our +national history, the dramatic contests in the great arena of the +Senate Chamber, the discussions before huge popular audiences in the +West, have maintained the civic point of view, have developed and +dignified and enriched the prose style first employed by American +freemen in deciding their local affairs in the presence of their +neighbors. "I am a part of this people," said Lincoln proudly in one of +his famous debates of 1858; "I was raised just a little east of here"; +and this nearness to the audience, this directness and simplicity and +genuineness of our best political literature, its homely persuasiveness +and force, is an inheritance of the town-meeting. + +Bible and meeting-house, school-house and town-meeting, thus illustrate +concretely the responsiveness of the American character to idealistic +impulses. They are external symbols of a certain state of mind. It may +indeed be urged that they are primarily signs of a moral and social or +institutional trend, and are therefore non-literary evidence of +American idealism. Nevertheless, institutional as they may be deemed, +they lie close to that poetry of daily duty in which our literature has +not been poor. They are fundamentally related to that attitude of mind, +that habitual temper of the spirit, which has produced, in all +countries of settled use and wont, the literature of idealism. +Brunetiere said of Flaubert's most famous woman character that poor +Emma Bovary, the prey and the victim of Romantic desires, was after all +much like the rest of us except that she lacked the intelligence to +perceive the charm and poetry of the daily task. We have already +touched upon the purely romantic side of American energy and of +American imagination, and we must shortly look more closely still at +those impulses of daring, those moods of heightened feeling, that +intensified individualism, the quest of strangeness and terror and +wild beauty, which characterize our romantic writing. But this +romanticism is, as it were, a segment of the larger circle of idealism. +It is idealism accentuated by certain factors, driven to +self-expression by the passions of scorn or of desire; it exceeds, in +one way or another, the normal range of experience and emotion. Our +romantic American literature is doubtless our greatest. And yet some of +the most characteristic tendencies of American writing are to be found +in the poetry of daily experience, in the quiet accustomed light that +falls upon one's own doorway and garden, in the immemorial charm of +going forth to one's labor and returning in the evening,--poetry old as +the world. + + * * * * * + +Let us see how this glow of idealism touches some of the more intimate +aspects of human experience. "Out of the three Reverences," says +Wilhelm Meister, "springs the highest Reverence, Reverence for +Oneself." Open the pages of Hawthorne. Moving wholly within the +framework of established institutions, with no desire to shatter the +existing scheme of social order, choosing as its heroes men of the +meeting-house, town-meeting, and training-day, how intensely +nevertheless does the imagination of this fiction-writer illuminate the +Body and the Soul! + +Take first the Body. The inheritance of English Puritanism may be +traced throughout our American writing, in its reverence for physical +purity. The result is something unique in literary history. Continental +critics, while recognizing the intellectual and artistic powers +revealed in _The Scarlet Letter_, have seldom realized the awfulness, +to the Puritan mind, of the very thought of an adulterous minister. +That a priest in southern Europe should break his vows is indeed +scandalous; but the sin is regarded as a failure of the natural man to +keep a vow requiring supernatural grace for its fulfilment; it may be +that the priest had no vocation for his sacred office; he is unfrocked, +punished, forgotten, yet a certain mantle of human charity still covers +his offence. But in the Puritan scheme (and _The Scarlet Letter_, save +for that one treacherous, warm human moment in the woodland where "all +was spoken," lies wholly within the set framework of Puritanism) there +is no forgiveness for a sin of the flesh. There is only Law, Law +stretching on into infinitude until the mind shudders at it. Hawthorne +knew his Protestant New England through and through. _The Scarlet +Letter_ is the most striking example in our national literature of that +idealization of physical purity, but hundreds of other romances and +poems, less morbid if less great, assert in unmistakable terms the same +moral conviction, the same ideal. + +Yet, in spite of its theme, there was never a less adulterous novel +than this book which plays so artistically with the letter A. The body +is branded, is consumed, is at last, perhaps, transfigured by the +intense rays of light emitted from the suffering soul. + + "The soul is form and doth the body make." + +In this intense preoccupation with the Soul, Hawthorne's romance is in +unison with the more mystical and spiritual utterances of Catholicism +as well as of Protestantism. It was in part a resultant of that early +American isolation which contributed so effectively to the artistic +setting of _The Scarlet Letter_. But in his doctrine of spiritual +integrity, in the agonized utterance, "Be true--be true!" as well as +in his reverence for purity of the body, our greatest romancer was +typical of the imaginative literature of his countrymen. The restless +artistic experiments of Poe presented the human body in many a ghastly +and terrifying aspect of illness and decay, and distorted by all +passions save one. His imagination was singularly sexless. Pathological +students have pointed out the relation between this characteristic of +Poe's writing, and his known tendencies toward opium-eating, +alcoholism, and tuberculosis. But no such explanation is at hand to +elucidate the absence of sexual passion from the novels of the +masculine-minded Fenimore Cooper. One may say, indeed, that Cooper's +novels, like Scott's, lack intensity of spiritual vision; that their +tone is consonant with the views of a sound Church of England parson in +the eighteenth century; and that the absence of physical passion, like +the absence of purely spiritual insight, betrays a certain defect in +Cooper's imaginative grasp and depth. But it is better criticism, after +all, to remember that these three pioneers in American fiction-writing +were composing for an audience in which Puritan traditions or tastes +were predominant. Not one of the three men but would have instantly +sacrificed an artistic effect, legitimate in the eyes of Fielding or +Goethe or Balzac, rather than--in the phrase so often satirized--"bring +a blush to the cheek of innocence." In other words, the presence of a +specific audience, accustomed to certain Anglo-Saxon and Puritanic +restraint of topic and of speech, has from the beginning of our +imaginative literature cooperated with the instinct of our writers. +That Victorian reticence which is so plainly seen even in such +full-bodied writers as Dickens or Thackeray--a reticence which men like +Mr. Bernard Shaw and Mr. Galsworthy and Mr. Wells think so hypocritical +and dangerous to society and which they have certainly done their +utmost to abolish--has hitherto dominated our American writing. The +contemporary influence of great Continental writers to whom reticence +is unknown, combined with the influence of a contemporary opera and +drama to which reticence would be unprofitable, are now assaulting this +dominant convention. Very possibly it is doomed. But it is only within +recent years that its rule has been questioned. + +One result of it may, I think, be fairly admitted. While very few +writers of eminence, after all, in any country, wish to bring a "blush +to the cheek of innocence," they naturally wish, as Thackeray put it in +one of the best-known of his utterances, to be permitted to depict a +man to the utmost of their power. American literary conventions, like +English conventions, have now and again laid a restraining and +compelling hand upon the legitimate exercise of this artistic instinct; +and this fact has cooperated with many social, ethical, and perhaps +physiological causes to produce a thinness or bloodlessness in our +books. They are graceful, pleasing, but pale, like one of those cool +whitish uncertain skies of an American spring. They lack "body," like +certain wines. It is not often that we can produce a real Burgundy. We +have had many distinguished fiction-writers, but none with the physical +gusto of a Fielding, a Smollett, or even a Dickens, who, idealist and +romanticist as he was, and Victorian as were his artistic preferences, +has this animal life which tingles upon every page. We must confess +that there is a certain quality of American idealism which is covertly +suspicious or openly hostile to the glories of bodily sensation. +Emerson's thin high shoulders peep up reproachfully above the desk; +Lanier is playing his reproachful flute; Longfellow reads Fremont's +Rocky Mountain experiences while lying abed, and sighs "But, ah, the +discomforts!"; Irving's _Astoria_, superb as were the possibilities of +its physical background, tastes like parlor exploration. Even Dana's +_Before the Mast_ and Parkman's _Oregon Trail_, transcripts of robust +actual experience, and admirable books, reveal a sort of physical +paleness compared with Turgenieff's _Notes of a Sportsman_ and +Tolstoi's _Sketches_ of Sebastopol and the Crimea. They are Harvard +undergraduate writing, after all! + +These facts illustrate anew that standing temptation of the critic of +American literature to palliate literary shortcomings by the plea that +we possess certain admirable non-literary qualities. The dominant +idealism of the nation has levied, or seemed to levy, a certain tax +upon our writing. Some instincts, natural to the full-blooded utterance +of Continental literature, have been starved or eliminated here. Very +well. The characteristic American retort to this assertion would be: +Better our long record and habit of idealism than a few masterpieces +more or less. As a people, we have cheerfully accepted the Puritan +restraint of speech, we have respected the shamefaced conventions of +decent and social utterance. Like the men and women described in +Locker-Lampson's verses, Americans + + "eat, and drink, and scheme, and plod,-- + They go to church on Sunday; + And many are afraid of God-- + And more of Mrs. Grundy." + +Now Mrs. Grundy is assuredly not the most desirable of literary +divinities, but the student of classical literature can easily think of +other divinities, celebrated in exquisite Greek and Roman verse, who +are distinctly less desirable still. + +"Not passion, but sentiment," said Hawthorne, in a familiar passage of +criticism of his own _Twice-Told Tales_. How often must the student of +American literature echo that half-melancholy but just verdict, as he +surveys the transition from the spiritual intensity of a few of our +earlier writers to the sentimental qualities which have brought popular +recognition to the many. Take the word "soul" itself. Calvinism +shadowed and darkened the meaning, perhaps, and yet its spiritual +passion made the word "soul" sublime. The reaction against Calvinism +has made religion more human, natural, and possibly more Christlike, +but "soul" has lost the thrilling solemnity with which Edwards +pronounced the word. Emerson and Hawthorne, far as they had escaped +from the bonds of their ancestral religion, still utter the word "soul" +with awe. But in the popular sermon and hymn and story of our +day,--with their search after the sympathetic and the sentimental, +after what is called in magazine slang "heart-interest,"--the word has +lost both its intellectual distinction and its literary magic. It will +regain neither until it is pronounced once more with spiritual passion. + +But in literature, as in other things, we must take what we can get. +The great mass of our American writing is sentimental, because it has +been produced by, and for, an excessively sentimental people. The poems +in Stedman's carefully chosen _Anthology_, the prose and verse in the +two volume Stedman-Hutchinson collection of American Literature, the +Library of Southern Literature, and similar sectional anthologies, the +school Readers and Speakers,--particularly in the half-century between +1830 and 1880,--our newspapers and magazines,--particularly the +so-called "yellow" newspapers and the illustrated magazines typified by +_Harper's Monthly_,--are all fairly dripping with sentiment. American +oratory is notoriously the most sentimental oratory of the civilized +world. The _Congressional Record_ still presents such specimens of +sentiment--delivered or given leave to be printed, it is true, for +"home consumption" rather than to affect the course of legislation--as +are inexplicable to an Englishman or a Frenchman or an Italian. + +Immigrants as we all are, and migratory as we have ever been,--so much +so that one rarely meets an American who was born in the house built by +his grandfather,--we cling with peculiar fondness to the sentiment of +"Home." The best-known American poem, for decades, was Samuel +Woodworth's "Old Oaken Bucket," the favorite popular song was Stephen +Foster's "My Old Kentucky Home," the favorite play was Denman +Thompson's "Old Homestead." Without that appealing word "mother" the +American melodrama would be robbed of its fifth act. Without pictures +of "the child" the illustrated magazines would go into bankruptcy. No +country has witnessed such a production of periodicals and books for +boys and girls: France and Germany imitate in vain _The Youth's +Companion_ and _St. Nicholas_, as they did the stories of "Oliver +Optic" and _Little Women_ and _Little Lord Fauntleroy_. + +The sentimental attitude towards women and children, which is one of +the most typical aspects of American idealism, is constantly +illustrated in our short stories. Bret Harte, disciple of Dickens as he +was, and Romantic as was his fashion of dressing up his miners and +gamblers, was accurately faithful to the American feeling towards the +"kid" and the "woman." "Tennessee's Partner," "The Luck of Roaring +Camp," "Christmas at Sandy Bar," are obvious examples. Owen Wister's +stories are equally faithful and admirable in this matter. The American +girl still does astonishing things in international novels, as she has +continued to do since the eighteen-sixties, but they are astonishing +mainly to the European eye and against the conventionalized European +background. She does the same things at home, and neither she nor her +mother sees why she should not, so universal among us is the chivalrous +interpretation of actions and situations which amaze the European +observer. The popular American literature which recognizes and +encourages this position of the "young girl" in our social structure is +a literature primarily of sentiment. The note of passion--in the +European sense of that word--jars and shatters it. The imported +"problem-play," written for an adult public in Paris or London, +introduces social facts and intellectual elements almost wholly alien +to the experience of American matinee audiences. Disillusioned +historians of our literature have instanced this unsophistication as a +proof of our national inexperience; yet it is often a sort of radiant +and triumphant unsophistication which does not lose its innocence in +parting with its ignorance. + +That sentimental idealization of classes, whether peasant, bourgeois, +or aristocratic, which has long been a feature of Continental and +English poetry and fiction, is practically absent from American +literature. Whatever the future may bring, there have hitherto been no +fixed classes in American society. Webster was guilty of no +exaggeration when he declared that the whole North was made up of +laborers, and Lincoln spoke in the same terms in his well-known +sentences about "hired laborers": "twenty-five years ago I was a hired +laborer." The relative uniformity of economic and social conditions, +which prevailed until toward the close of the nineteenth century, made, +no doubt, for the happiness of the greatest number, but it failed, +naturally, to afford that picturesqueness of class contrast and to +stimulate that sentiment of class distinction, in which European +literature is so rich. + +Very interesting, in the light of contemporary economic conditions, is +the effort made by American poets in the middle of the last century to +glorify labor. They were not so much idealizing a particular laboring +class, as endeavoring, in Whitman's words, "To teach the average man +the glory of his walk and trade." Whitman himself sketched the American +workman in almost every attitude which appealed to his own sense of the +picturesque and heroic. But years before _Leaves of Grass_ was +published, Whittier had celebrated in his _Songs of Labor_ the +glorified images of lumberman and drover, shoemaker and fisherman. Lucy +Larcom and the authors of _The Lowell Offering_ portrayed the fine +idealism of the young women--of the best American stock--who went +enthusiastically to work in the cotton-mills of Lowell and Lawrence, or +who bound shoes by their own firesides on the Essex County farms. That +glow of enthusiasm for labor was chiefly moral, but it was poetical as +well. The changes which have come over the economic and social life of +America are nowhere more sharply indicated than in that very valley of +the Merrimac where, sixty and seventy years ago, one could "hear +America singing." There are few who are singing to-day in the +cotton-mills; the operators, instead of girls from the hill-farms, are +Greeks, Lithuanians, Armenians, Italians. Whittier's drovers have gone +forever; the lumbermen and deep-sea fishermen have grown fewer, and the +men who still swing the axes and haul the frozen cod-lines are mostly +aliens. The pride that once broke into singing has turned harsh and +silent. "Labor" looms vast upon the future political and social +horizon, but the songs of labor have lost the lyric note. They have +turned into the dramas and tragedies of labor, as portrayed with the +swift and fierce insistence of the short story, illustrated by the +Kodak. In the great agricultural sections of the West and South the +old bucolic sentiment still survives,--that simple joy of seeing the +"frost upon the pumpkin" and "the fodder in the stock" which Mr. James +Whitcomb Riley has sung with such charming fidelity to the type. But +even on the Western farms toil has grown less manual. It is more a +matter of expert handling of machinery. Reaping and binding may still +have their poet, but he needs to be a Kipling rather than a Burns. + +Our literature, then, reveals few traces of idealization of a class, +and but little idealization of trades or callings. Neither class nor +calling presents anything permanent to the American imagination, or +stands for anything ultimate in American experience. On the other hand, +our writing is rich in local sentiment and sectional loyalty. The short +story, which has seized so greedily the more dramatic aspects of +American energy, has been equally true to the quiet background of rural +scenery and familiar ways. American idealism, as shown in the +transformation of the lesser loyalties of home and countryside into the +larger loyalties of state and section, and the absorption of these, in +turn, into the emotions of nationalism, is particularly illustrated in +our political verse. A striking example of the imaginative +visualization of the political units of a state is the spirited +roll-call of the counties in Whittier's "Massachusetts to Virginia." +But the burden of that fine poem, after all, is the essential unity of +Massachusetts as a sovereign state, girding herself to repel the attack +of another sovereign state, Virginia. Now the evolution of our +political history, both local and national, has tended steadily, for +half a century, to the obliteration, for purposes of the imagination, +of county lines within state lines. At the last Republican state +convention held in Massachusetts, there were no county banners +displayed, for the first time in half a century. Many a city-dweller +to-day cannot tell in what county he is living unless he has happened +to make a transfer of real estate. State lines themselves are fading +away. The federal idea has triumphed. Doubtless the majority of the +fellow citizens of John Randolph of Roanoke were all the more proud of +him because the poet could say of him, in writing an admiring and +mournful epitaph:-- + + "Beyond Virginia's border line + His patriotism perished." + +The great collections of Civil War verse, which are lying almost +unread in the libraries, are store-houses of this ancient state pride +and jealousy, which was absorbed so fatally into the larger sectional +antagonism. "Maryland, my Maryland" gave place to "Dixie," just as +Whittier's "Massachusetts to Virginia" was forgotten when marching men +began to sing "John Brown's Body" and "The Battle Hymn of the +Republic." The literature of sectionalism still lingers in its more +lovable aspect in the verse and fiction which still celebrates the +fairer side of the civilization of the Old South: its ideals of +chivalry and local loyalty, its gracious women and gallant men. Our +literature needs to cultivate this provincial affection for the past, +as an offset to the barren uniformity which the federal scheme allows. +But the ultimate imaginative victory, like the actual political victory +of the Civil War, is with the thought and feeling of Nationalism. It is +foreshadowed in that passionate lyric cry of Lowell, which sums up so +much and, like all true passion, anticipates so much:-- + + "O Beautiful! my Country!" + +The literary record of American idealism thus illustrates how deeply +the conception of Nationalism has affected the imagination of our +countrymen. The literary record of the American conception of liberty +runs further back. Some historians have allowed themselves to think +that the American notion of liberty is essentially declamatory, a sort +of futile echo of Patrick Henry's "Give me Liberty or give me Death"; +and not only declamatory, but hopelessly theoretical and abstract. They +grant that it was a trumpet-note, no doubt, for agitators against the +Stamp Act, and for pamphleteers like Thomas Paine; that it may have +been a torch for lighting dark and weary ways in the Revolutionary War; +but they believe it likewise to be a torch which gleams with the fire +caught from France and which was passed back to France in turn when her +own great bonfire was ready for lighting. The facts, however, are +inconsistent with this picturesque theory of contemporary reactionists. +It is true that the word "liberty" has been full of temptation for +generations of American orators, that it has become an idol of the +forum, and often a source of heat rather than of light. But to treat +American Liberty as if she habitually wore the red cap is to nourish a +Francophobia as absurd as Edmund Burke's. The sober truth is that the +American working theory of Liberty is singularly like St. Paul's. "Ye +have been called unto liberty; only use not liberty for an occasion to +the flesh." A few sentences from John Winthrop, written in 1645, are +significant: "There is a twofold liberty, natural ... and civil or +federal. The first is common to man with beasts and other creatures. By +this, man, as he stands in relation to man simply, hath liberty to do +what he lists; it is a liberty to evil as well as to good. This liberty +is incompatible and inconsistent with authority.... The other kind of +liberty I call civil or federal, it may also be termed moral.... This +liberty is the proper end and object of authority, and cannot subsist +without it; and it is a liberty to that only which is good, just, and +honest. This liberty you are to stand for, with the hazard (not only of +your goods, but) of your lives, if need be.... This liberty is +maintained and exercised in a way of subjection to authority; it is of +the same kind of liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free." + +There speaks the governor, the man of affairs, the typical citizen of +the future republic. The liberty to do as one pleases is a dream of +the Renaissance; but out of dreamland it does not work. Nobody, even in +revolutionary France, imagines that it will work. Jefferson, who is +popularly supposed to derive his notion of liberty from French +theorists, is to all practical purposes nearer to John Winthrop than he +is to Rousseau. The splendid phrases of his "Declaration" are sometimes +characterized as abstractions. They are really generalizations from +past political experience. An arbitrary king, assuming a liberty to do +as he liked, had encroached upon the long-standing customs and +authority of the colonists. Jefferson, at the bidding of the +Continental Congress, served notice of the royal trespass, and +incidentally produced (as Lincoln said) a "standard maxim for free +society." + +It is true, no doubt, that the word "liberty" became in Jefferson's +day, and later, a mere partisan or national shibboleth, standing for no +reality, degraded to a catchword, a symbol of antagonism to Great +Britain. In the political debates and the impressive prose and verse of +the anti-slavery struggle, the word became once more charged with vital +meaning; it glowed under the heat and pressure of an idea. Towards the +end of the nineteenth century it went temporarily out of fashion. The +late Colonel Higginson, an ideal type of what Europeans call an "1848" +man, attended at the close of the century some sessions of the American +Historical Association. In his own address, at the closing dinner, he +remarked that there was one word for which he had listened in vain +during the reading of the papers by the younger men. It was the word +"liberty." One of the younger school retorted promptly that since we +had the thing liberty, we had no need to glorify the word. But Colonel +Higginson, stanch adherent as he was of the "good old cause," was not +convinced. Like many another lover of American letters, he thought that +William Vaughn Moody's "Ode in Time of Hesitation" deserved a place by +the side of Lowell's "Commemoration Ode," and that when the ultimate +day of reckoning comes for the whole muddled Imperialistic business, +the standard of reckoning must be "liberty" as Winthrop and Jefferson +and Lincoln and Lowell and Vaughn Moody understood the word. + +In the mean time we must confess that the history of our literature, +with a few noble exceptions, shows a surprising defect in the passion +for freedom. Tennyson's famous lines about "Freedom broadening slowly +down from precedent to precedent" are perfectly American in their +conservative tone; while it is Englishmen like Byron and Landor and +Shelley and Swinburne who have written the most magnificent republican +poetry. The "land of the free" turns to the monarchic mother country, +after all, for the glow and thunder and splendor of the poetry of +freedom. It is one of the most curious phenomena in the history of +literature. Shall we enter the preoccupation plea once more? Enjoying +the thing liberty, have we been therefore less concerned with the idea? +Or is it simply another illustration of the defective passion of +American literature? + +Yet there is one phase of political loyalty which has been cherished by +the imagination of Americans, and which has inspired noteworthy oratory +and noble political prose. It is the sentiment of Union. In one sense, +of course, this dates back to the period of Franklin's _bon mot_ about +our all hanging together, or hanging separately. It is found in +Hamilton's pamphlets, in Paine's _Crisis_, in the _Federalist_, in +Washington's "Farewell Address." It is peculiarly associated with the +name and fame of Daniel Webster, and, to a less degree, with the career +of Henry Clay. In the stress of the debate over slavery, many a +Northerner with abolitionist convictions, like the majority of +Southerners with slave-holding convictions, forgot the splendid +peroration of Webster's "Reply to Hayne" and were willing to "let the +Union go." But in the four tragic and heroic years that followed the +firing upon the American flag at Fort Sumter the sentiment of Union was +made sacred by such sacrifices as the patriotic imagination of a Clay +or a Webster had never dreamed. A new literature resulted. A lofty +ideal of indissoluble Union was preached in pulpits, pleaded for in +editorials, sung in lyrics, and woven into the web of fiction. Edward +Everett Hale's _Man Without a Country_ became one of the most +poignantly moving of American stories. In Walt Whitman's _Drum-Taps_ +and his later poems, the "Union of these States" became transfigured +with mystical significance: no longer a mere political compact, +dissoluble at will, but a spiritual entity, a new incarnation of the +soul of man. + +We must deal later with that American instinct of fellowship which +Whitman believed to have been finally cemented by the Civil War, and +which has such import for the future of our democracy. There are +likewise communal loyalties, glowing with the new idealism which has +come with the twentieth century: ethical, municipal, industrial, and +artistic movements which are full of promise for the higher life of the +country, but which have not yet had time to express themselves +adequately in literature. There are stirrings of racial loyalty among +this and that element of our composite population,--as for instance +among the gifted younger generation of American Jews,--a racial loyalty +not antagonistic to the American current of ideas, but rather in full +unison with it. Internationalism itself furnishes motives for the +activity of the noblest imaginations, and the true literature of +internationalism has hardly yet begun. It is in the play and +counterplay of these new forces that the American literature of the +twentieth century must measure itself. Communal feelings novel to +Americans bred under the accepted individualism will doubtless assert +themselves in our prose and verse. But it is to be remembered that the +best writing thus far produced on American soil has been a result of +the old conditions: of the old "Reverences"; of the pioneer training of +mind and body; of the slow tempering of the American spirit into an +obstinate idealism. We do not know what course the ship may take in the +future, but + + "We know what Master laid thy keel, + What Workman wrought thy ribs of steel, + Who made each mast and sail and rope, + What anvil rang, what hammers beat, + In what a forge and what a heat + Were shaped the anchors of thy hope!" + + + + +IV + +Romance and Reaction + + +The characteristic attitude of the American mind, as we have seen, is +one of idealism. We may now venture to draw a smaller circle within +that larger circle of idealistic impulses, and to label the smaller +circle "romance." Here, too, as with the word "idealism," although we +are to make abundant use of literary illustrations of national +tendencies, we have no need of a severely technical definition of +terms. When we say, "Tom is an idealist" and "Lorenzo is a romantic +fellow," we convey at least one tolerably clear distinction between Tom +and Lorenzo. The idealist has a certain characteristic habit of mind or +inclination of spirit. When confronted by experience, he reacts in a +certain way. In his individual and social impulses, in the travail of +his soul, or in his commerce with his neighbors and the world, he +behaves in a more or less well-defined fashion. The romanticist, when +confronted by the same objects and experiences, exhibits another type +of behavior. Lorenzo, though he be Tom's brother, is a different +fellow; he is--in the opinion of his friends, at least--a rather more +peculiar person, a creature of more varying moods, of heightened +feelings, of stranger ways. Like Tom, he is a person of sentiment, but +his sentiment attaches itself, not so much to everyday aspects of +experience, as to that which is unusual or terrifying, lovely or far +away; he possesses, or would like to possess, bodily or spiritual +daring. He has the adventurous heart. He is of those who love to go +down to the sea in ships and do business in great waters. Lorenzo the +romanticist is made of no finer clay than Tom the idealist, but his +nerves are differently tuned. Your deep-sea fisherman, after all, is +only a fisherman at bottom. That is to say, he too is an idealist, but +he wants to catch different species of fish from those which drop into +the basket of the landsman. Precisely what he covets, perhaps he does +not know. I was once foolish enough to ask an old Alsatian soldier who +was patiently holding his rod over a most unpromising canal near +Strassburg, what kind of fish he was fishing for. "All kinds," was his +rebuking answer, and I took off my hat to the veteran romanticist. + +The words "romance" and "romanticism" have been repeated to the ears of +our generation with wearisome iteration. Not the least of the good luck +of Wordsworth and Coleridge lay in the fact that they scarcely knew +that they were "romanticists." Middle-aged readers of the present day +may congratulate themselves that in their youth they read Wordsworth +and Coleridge simply because it was Wordsworth and Coleridge and not +documents illustrating the history of the romantic movement. But the +rising generation is sophisticated. For better or worse it has been +taught to distinguish between the word "romance" on the one side, and +the word "romanticism" on the other. "Romantic" is a useful but +overworked adjective which attaches itself indiscriminately to both +"romance" and "romanticism." Professor Vaughan, for example, and a +hundred other writers, have pointed out that in the narrower and more +usual sense, the words "romance" and "romanticism" point to a love of +vivid coloring and strongly marked contrasts; to a craving for the +unfamiliar, the marvellous, and the supernatural. In the wider and +less definite sense, they signify a revolt from the purely intellectual +view of man's nature; a recognition of the instincts and the passions, +a vague intimation of sympathy between man and the world around +him,--in one word, the sense of mystery. The narrower and the broader +meanings pass into one another by imperceptible shades. They are +affected by the well-known historic conditions for romantic feeling in +the different European countries. The common factor, of course, is the +man with the romantic world set in his heart. It is Gautier with his +love of color, Victor Hugo enraptured with the sound of words, Heine +with his self-destroying romantic irony, Novalis with his blue flower, +and Maeterlinck with his _Blue Bird_. + +But these romantic men of letters, writing in epochs of romanticism, +are by no means the only children of romance. Sir Humphrey Gilbert and +Sir Walter Raleigh were as truly followers of "the gleam" as were +Spenser or Marlowe. The spirit of romance is found wherever and +whenever men say to themselves, as Don Quixote's niece said of her +uncle, that "they wish better bread than is made of wheat," or when +they look within their own hearts, and assert, as the poet Young said +in 1759, long before the English romantic movement had begun, "there is +more in the spirit of man than mere prose-reason can fathom." + +We are familiar, perhaps too remorsefully familiar, with the fact that +romance is likely to run a certain course in the individual and then to +disappear. Looking back upon it afterward, it resembles the upward and +downward zigzag of a fever chart. It has in fact often been described +as a measles, a disease of which no one can be particularly proud, +although he may have no reason to blush for it. Southey said that he +was no more ashamed of having been a republican than of having been a +boy. Well, people catch Byronism, and get over it, much as Southey got +over his republicanism. In fact Byron himself lived long enough--though +he died at thirty-six--to outgrow his purely "Byronic" phase, and to +smile at it as knowingly as we do. Coleridge's blossoming period as a +romantic poet was tragically brief. Keats and Shelley had the good +fortune to die in the fulness of their romantic glory. They did not +outlive their own poetic sense of the wonder and mystery of the world. +Yet many an old poet like Tennyson and Browning has preserved his +romance to the end. Tennyson dies at eighty-three with the full +moonlight streaming through the oriel window upon his bed, and with his +fingers clasping Shakespeare's _Cymbeline_. + +With most of us commonplace persons, however, a reaction from the +romantic is almost inevitable. The romantic temperament cannot long +keep the pitch. Poe could indeed do it, although he hovered at times +near the border of insanity. Hawthorne went for relief to his profane +sea-captains and the carnal-minded superannuated employees of the Salem +Custom House. "The weary weight of all this unintelligible world" +presses too hard on most of those who stop to think about it. The +simplest way of relief is to shrug one's shoulders and let the weight +go. That is to say, we cease being poets, we are no longer the children +of romance, although we may remain idealists. Perhaps it is external +events that change, rather than we ourselves. The restoration of the +Bourbons, the Revolutions of 1830 and 1848, make and unmake romantics. +Often society catches up with the romanticist; he is no longer a +soldier of revolt; he has become a "respectable." Or, while remaining a +poet, he shifts his attention to some more familiar segment of the +idealistic circle. He sings about his wife instead of the wife of +somebody else. Like Wordsworth, he takes for his theme a Mary +Hutchinson instead of the unknown and hauntingly alluring figure of +Lucy. To put it differently, the high light, the mysterious color of +dawn or sunset disappears from his picture of human life. Or, the high +light may be diffused in a more tranquil radiance over the whole +surface of experience. Such an artist may remain a true painter or +poet, but he is not a romantic poet or painter any longer. He has, like +the aging Emerson, taken in sail; the god Terminus has said to him, "no +more." + +One must of course admit that the typical romanticist has often been +characterized by certain intellectual and moral weaknesses. But the +great romance men, like Edmund Spenser, for example, may not possess +these weaknesses at all. Robert Louis Stevenson was passionately in +love with the romantic in life and with romanticism in literature; but +it did not make him eccentric, weak, or empty. His instinct for +enduring romance was so admirably fine that it brought strength to the +sinews of his mind, light and air and fire to his soul. Among the +writers of our own day, it is Mr. Kipling who has written some of the +keenest satire upon romantic foibles, while never ceasing to salute his +real mistress, the true romance. + + "Who wast, or yet the Lights were set, + A whisper in the void, + Who shalt be sung through planets young + When this is clean destroyed." + +What are the causes of American romance, the circumstances and +qualities that have produced the romantic element in American life and +character? Precisely as with the individual artist or man of letters, +we touch first of all upon certain temperamental inclinations. It is a +question again of the national mind, of the differentiation of the race +under new climatic and physical conditions. We have to reckon with the +headiness and excitability of youth. It was young men who emigrated +hither, just as in the eighteen-sixties it was young men who filled the +Northern and the Southern armies. The first generations of American +immigration were made up chiefly of vigorous, imaginative, and daring +youth. The incapables came later. It is, I think, safe to assert that +the colonists of English stock, even as late as 1790,--when more than +ninety per cent of the population of America had in their veins the +blood of the British Isles,--were more responsive to romantic impulses +than their English cousins. For that matter, an Irishman or a Welshman +is more romantic than an Englishman to-day. + +From the very beginning of the American settlements, likewise, there +were evidences of the weaker, the over-excitable side of the romantic +temper. There were volatile men like Morton of Merrymount; there were +queer women like Anne Hutchinson, admirable woman as she was; among the +wives of the colonists there were plenty of Emily Dickinsons in the +germ. Among the men, there were schemes that came to nothing. There +were prototypes of Colonel Sellers; a temperamental tendency toward +that recklessness and extravagance which later historical conditions +stimulated and confirmed. The more completely one studies the history +of our forefathers on American soil, the more deeply does one become +conscious of the prevailing atmosphere of emotionalism. + +Furthermore, as one examines the historic conditions under which the +spirit of American romance has been preserved and heightened from time +to time, one becomes aware that although ours is rather a romance of +wonder than of beauty, the spirit of beauty is also to be found. The +first fervors of the romance of discovery were childlike in their +eagerness. Hakluyt's _Voyages_, John Smith's _True Relation of +Virginia_, Thomas Morton's _New England's Canaan_, all appeal to the +sense of the marvellous. + +Listen to Morton's description of Cape Ann. I can never read it without +thinking of Botticelli's picture of Spring, so naively does this +picturesque rascal suffuse his landscape with the feeling for beauty:-- + + "In the Moneth of June, Anno Salutis 1622, it was my chaunce + to arrive in the parts of New England with 30. Servants, and + provision of all sorts fit for a plantation: and whiles our + howses were building, I did indeavour to take a survey of + the Country: The more I looked, the more I liked it. And + when I had more seriously considered of the bewty of the + place, with all her faire indowments, I did not thinke that + in all the knowne world it could be paralel'd, for so many + goodly groves of trees, dainty fine round rising hillucks, + delicate faire large plaines, sweete cristall fountaines, + and cleare running streames that twine in fine meanders + through the meads, making so sweete a murmering noise to + heare as would even lull the sences with delight a sleepe, + so pleasantly doe they glide upon the pebble stones, jetting + most jocundly where they doe meete and hand in hand runne + downe to Neptunes Court, to pay the yearely tribute which + they owe to him as soveraigne Lord of all the springs. + Contained within the volume of the Land, Fowles in + abundance, Fish in multitude; and discovered, besides, + Millions of Turtledoves on the greene boughes, which sate + pecking of the full ripe pleasant grapes that were supported + by the lusty trees, whose fruitful loade did cause the armes + to bend: while here and there dispersed, you might see + Lillies and the Daphnean-tree: which made the Land to mee + seeme paradice: for in mine eie t'was Natures Masterpeece; + Her cheifest Magazine of all where lives her store: if this + Land be not rich, then is the whole world poore." + +This is the Morton who, a few years later, settled at Merrymount. Let +me condense the story of his settlement, from the narrative of the +stout-hearted Governor William Bradford's _History of Plymouth +Plantation_:-- + + "And Morton became lord of misrule, and maintained (as it + were) a schoole of Athisme. And after they had gott some good + into their hands, and gott much by trading with the Indeans, + they spent it as vainly, in quaffing & drinking both wine & + strong waters in great exsess, and, as some reported 10L. + worth in a morning. They allso set up a May-pole, drinking + and dancing aboute it many days togeather, inviting the + Indean women, for their consorts, dancing and frisking + togither, (like so many fairies, or furies rather,) and worse + practises. As if they had anew revived & celebrated the + feasts of the Roman Goddes Flora, or the beasly practieses of + the madd Bacchinalians. Morton likewise (to shew his poetrie) + composed sundry rimes & verses, some tending to + lasciviousnes, and others to the detraction & scandall of + some persons, which he affixed to this idle or idoll + May-polle. They chainged allso the name of their place, and + in stead of calling it Mounte Wollaston, they call it + Merie-mounte, as if this joylity would have lasted ever." + +But it did not last long. Bradford and other leaders of the plantations +"agreed by mutual consent" to "suppress Morton and his consorts." "In a +friendly and neighborly way" they admonished him. "Insolently he +persisted." "Upon which they saw there was no way but to take him by +force." "So they mutually resolved to proceed," and sent Captain +Standish to summon him to yield. But, says Bradford, Morton and some of +his crew came out, not to yield, but to shoot; all of them rather +drunk; Morton himself, with a carbine almost half filled with powder +and shot, had thought to have shot Captain Standish, "_but he stepped +to him and put by his piece and took him_." + +It is not too fanciful to say that with those stern words of Governor +Bradford the English Renaissance came to an end. The dream of a lawless +liberty which has been dreamed and dreamed out so many times in the +history of the world was over, for many a day. It was only a hundred +years earlier that Rabelais had written over the doors of his ideal +abbey, the motto "Do what thou wilt." It is true that Rabelais proposed +to admit to his Abbey of Theleme only such men and women as were +virtuously inclined. We do not know how many persons would have been +able and willing to go into residence there. At any rate, two hundred +years went by in New England after the fall of Morton before any +notable spirit dared to cherish once more the old Renaissance ideal. At +last, in Emerson's doctrine that all things are lawful because Nature +is good and human nature is divine, we have a curious parallel to the +doctrine of Rabelais. It was the old romance of human will under a new +form and voiced in new accents. Yet in due time the hard facts of human +nature reasserted themselves and put this romantic transcendentalism +by, even as the implacable Myles Standish put by that heavily loaded +fowling-piece of the drunken Morton. + +But men believed in miracles in the first century of colonization, and +they will continue at intervals to believe in them until human nature +is no more. The marvellous happenings recorded in Cotton Mather's +_Magnalia_ no longer excite us to any "suspension of disbelief." We +doubt the story of Pocahontas. The fresh romantic enthusiasm of a +settler like Crevecoeur seems curiously juvenile to-day, as does the +romantic curiosity of Chateaubriand concerning the Mississippi and the +Choctaws, or the zeal of Wordsworth and Coleridge over their dream of a +"panti-Socratic" community in the unknown valley of the +musically-sounding Susquehanna. Inexperience is a perpetual feeder of +the springs of romance. John Wesley, it will be remembered, went out to +the colony of Georgia full of enthusiasm for converting the Indians; +but as he naively remarks in his _Journal_, he "neither found or heard +of any Indians on the continent of America, who had the least desire of +being instructed." The sense of fact, in other words, supervenes, and +the glory disappears from the face of romance. The humor of Mark +Twain's _Innocents Abroad_ turns largely upon this sense of remorseless +fact confronting romantic inexperience. + +American history, however, has been marked by certain great romantic +passions that seem endowed with indestructible vitality. The romance of +discovery, the fascination of the forest and sea, the sense of danger +and mystery once aroused by the very word "redskin," have all moulded +and will continue to mould the national imagination. How completely +the romance of discovery may be fused with the glow of humanitarian +and religious enthusiasm has been shown once for all in the brilliant +pages of Parkman's story of the Jesuit missions in Canada. Pictorial +romance can scarcely go further than this. In the crisis of +Chateaubriand's picturesque and passionate tale of the American +wilderness, no one can escape the thrilling, haunting sound of the bell +from the Jesuit chapel, as it tolls in the night and storm that were +fatal to the happiness of Atala. One scarcely need say that the romance +of missions has never faded from the American mind. I have known a +sober New England deacon aged eighty-five, who disliked to die because +he thought he should miss the monthly excitement of reading the +_Missionary Herald_. The deacon's eyes, like the eyes of many an old +sea-captain in Salem or Newburyport, were literally upon the ends of +the earth. No one can reckon how many starved souls, deprived of normal +outlet for human feeling, have found in this passionate curiosity and +concern for the souls of black and yellow men and women in the +antipodes, a constant source of beneficent excitement. + +Nor is there any diminution of interest in the mere romance of +adventure, in the stories of hunter and trapper, the journals of Lewis +and Clarke, the narratives of Boone and Crockett. In writing his superb +romances of the Northern Lakes, the prairie and the sea, Fenimore +Cooper had merely to bring to an artistic focus sentiments that lay +deep in the souls of the great mass of his American readers. Students +of our social life have pointed out again and again how deeply our +national temperament has been affected by the existence, during nearly +three hundred years, of an alien aboriginal race forever lurking upon +the borders of our civilization. "Playing Indian" has been immensely +significant, not merely in stimulating the outdoor activity of +generations of American boys, but in teaching them the perennial +importance of certain pioneer qualities of observation, +resourcefulness, courage, and endurance which date from the time when +the Indians were a daily and nightly menace. Even when the Indian has +been succeeded by the cowboy, the spirit of romance still lingers,--as +any collection of cowboy ballads will abundantly prove. And when the +cowboys pass, and the real-estate dealers take possession of the +field, one is tempted to say that romance flourishes more than ever. + +In short, things are what we make them at the moment, what we believe +them to be. In my grandfather's youth the West was in the neighborhood +of Port Byron, New York, and when he journeyed thither from +Massachusetts in the eighteen-twenties, the glory of adventure enfolded +him as completely as the boys of the preceding generation had been +glorified in the War of the Revolution, or the boys of the next +generation when they went gold-seeking in California in 1849. The West, +in short, means simply the retreating horizon, the beckoning finger of +opportunity. Like Boston, it has been not a place, but a "state of +mind." + + "We must go, go, go away from here, + On the other side the world we're overdue." + +That is the song which sings itself forever in the heart of youth. +Champlain and Cartier heard it in the sixteenth century, Bradford no +less than Morton in the seventeenth. Some Eldorado has always been +calling to the more adventurous spirits upon American soil. The +passion of the forty-niner neither began nor ended with the discovery +of gold in California. It is within us. It transmutes the harsh or +drab-colored everyday routine into tissue of fairyland. It makes our +"winning of the West" a magnificent national epic. It changes to-day +the black belt of Texas, or the wheat-fields of Dakota, into pots of +gold that lie at the end of rainbows, only that the pot of gold is +actually there. The human hunger of it all, the gorgeous dream-like +quality of it all, the boundlessness of the vast American spaces, the +sense of forest and prairie and sky, are all inexplicably blended with +our notion of the ideal America. Henry James once tried to explain the +difference between Turgenieff and a typical French novelist by saying +that the back door of the Russian's imagination was always open upon +the endless Russian steppe. No one can understand the spirit of +American romance if he is not conscious of this ever-present hinterland +in which our spirits have, from the beginning, taken refuge and found +solace. + +We have already noticed, in the chapter on idealism, how swiftly the +American imagination modifies the prosaic facts of everyday +experience. The idealistic glamour which falls upon the day's work +changes easily, in the more emotional temperaments, and at times, +indeed, in all of us, into the fervor of true romance. Then, the +prosaic buying and selling becomes the "game." A combination of buyers +and sellers becomes the "system." The place where these buyers and +sellers most do congregate and concentrate becomes "Wall Street"--a +sort of anthropomorphic monster which seems to buy and sell the bodies +and souls of men. Seen half a continent away, through the mists of +ignorance and prejudice and partisan passion, "Wall Street" has loomed +like some vast Gibraltar. To the broker's clerk who earns his weekly +salary in that street, the Nebraska notion of "Wall Street" is too +grotesque for discussion. + +How easily every phase of American business life may take on the hues +of romance is illustrated by the history of our railroads. No wonder +that Bret Harte wrote a poem about the meeting of the eastward and +westward facing engines when the two sections of the Union Pacific +Railroad at last drew near each other on the interminable plains and +the two engines could talk. Of course what they said was poetry. There +was a time when even the Erie Canal was poetic. The Panama Canal +to-day, in the eyes of most Americans, is something other than a mere +feat of engineering. We are doing more than making "the dirt fly." The +canal represents victory over hostile forces, conquest of unwilling +Nature, achievement of what had long been deemed impossible, the making +not of a ditch, but of History. + +So with all that American zest for camping, fishing, sailing, racing, +which lies deep in the Anglo-Saxon, and which succeeds to the more +primitive era of actual struggle against savage beasts or treacherous +men or mysterious forests. It is at once an outlet and a nursery for +romantic emotion. The out-of-doors movement which began with Thoreau's +hut on Walden Pond, and which has gone on broadening and deepening to +this hour, implies far more than mere variation from routine. It +furnishes, indeed, a healthful escape from the terrific pressure of +modern social and commercial exigencies. Yet its more important +function is to provide for grown-ups a chance to "play Indian" too. + +But outdoors and indoors, after all, lie in the heart and mind, rather +than in the realm of actual experience. The romantic imagination +insists upon taking its holiday, whether the man who possesses it gets +his holiday or not. I have never known a more truly romantic figure +than a certain tin-pedler in Connecticut who, in response to the +question, "Do you do a good business?" made this perfectly Stevensonian +reply: "Well, I make a living selling crockery and tinware, but my +_business_ is the propagation of truth." + +This wandering idealist may serve to remind us again of the difference +between romance and romanticism. The true romance is of the spirit. +Romanticism shifts and changes with external fortunes, with altering +emotions, with the alternate play of light and shade over the vast +landscape of human experience. The typical romanticist, as we have +seen, is a man of moods. It is only a Poe who can keep the pitch +through the whole concert of experience. But the deeper romance of the +spirit is oblivious of these changes of external fortune, this rising +or falling of the emotional temperature. The moral life of America +furnishes striking illustrations of the steadfastness with which +certain moral causes have been kept, as it were, in the focus of +intense feeling. Poetry, undefeated and unwavering poetry, has +transfigured such practical propaganda as the abolition of slavery, the +emancipation of woman, the fight against the liquor traffic, the +emancipation of the individual from the clutches of economic and +commercial despotism. Men like Colonel Thomas Wentworth Higginson, +women like Julia Ward Howe, fought for these causes throughout their +lives. Colonel Higginson's attitude towards women was not merely +chivalric (for one may be chivalrous without any marked predisposition +to romance), but nobly romantic also. James Russell Lowell, poet as he +was, outlived that particular phase of romantic moral reform which he +had been taught by Maria White. But in other men and women bred in that +old New England of the eighteen-forties, the moral fervor knew no +restraint. Garrison, although in many respects a most unromantic +personality, was engaged in a task which gave him all the inspiration +of romance. A romantic "atmosphere," fully as highly colored as any of +the romantic atmospheres that we are accustomed to mark in literature, +surrounded as with a luminous mist the figures of the New England +transcendentalists. They, too, as Heine said of himself, were soldiers. +They felt themselves enlisted for a long but ultimately victorious +campaign. They were willing to pardon, in their comrades and in +themselves, those imaginative excesses which resemble the physical +excesses of a soldier's camp. Transcendentalism was thus a militant +philosophy and religion, with both a destructively critical and a +positively constructive creed. Channing, Parker, Alcott, Margaret +Fuller, were warrior-priests, poets and prophets of a gallant campaign +against inherited darkness and bigotry, and for the light. + +The atmosphere of that score of years in New England was now +superheated, now rarefied, thin, and cold; but it was never quite the +normal atmosphere of every day. On the purely literary side, it is +needless to say, these men and women sought inspiration in Coleridge +and Carlyle and other English and German romanticists. In fact, the +most enduring literature of New England between 1830 and 1865 was +distinctly a romantic literature. It was rooted, however, not so much +in those swift changes of historic condition, those startling +liberations of the human spirit which gave inspiration to the +romanticism of the Continent, as it was in the deep and vital fervor +with which these New Englanders envisaged the problems of the moral +life. + +Other illustrations of the American capacity for romance lie equally +close at hand. Take, for instance, the stout volume in which Mr. Burton +Stevenson has collected the _Poems of American History_. Here are +nearly seven hundred pages of closely printed patriotic verse. While +Stedman's _Anthology_ reveals no doubt national aspirations and +national sentiment, as well as the emotional fervor of individuals, Mr. +Stevenson's collection has the advantage of focussing this national +feeling upon specific events. Stedman's _Anthology_ is an enduring +document of American idealism, touching in the sincerity of its poetic +moods, pathetic in its long lists of men and women who are known by one +poem only, or who have never, for one reason or another, fulfilled +their poetic promise. The thousand poems which it contains are more +striking, in fact, for their promise than for their performance. They +are intimations of what American men and women would have liked to do +or to be. In this sense, it is a precious volume, but it is certainly +not commensurate, either in passion or in artistic perfection, with the +forces of that American life which it tries to interpret. Indeed, Mr. +Stedman, after finishing his task of compilation, remarked to more than +one of his friends that what this country needed was some "adult male +verse." + +The _Poems of American History_ collected by Mr. Stevenson are at least +vigorous and concrete. One aspect of our history which especially lends +itself to Mr. Stevenson's purpose is the romance which attaches itself +to war. It is scarcely necessary to say nowadays that all wars, even +the noblest, have had their sordid, grimy, selfish, bestial aspect; and +that the intelligence and conscience of our modern world are more and +more engaged in the task of making future wars impossible. But the +slightest acquaintance with American history reveals the immense +reservoir of romantic emotion which has been drawn upon in our national +struggles. War, of course, is an immemorial source of romantic feeling. +William James's notable essay on "A Moral Substitute for War" +endeavored to prove that our modern economic and social life, if +properly organized, would give abundant outlet and satisfaction to +those romantic impulses which formerly found their sole gratification +in battle. Many of us believe that he was right; but for the moment we +must look backward and not forward. We must remember the stern if rude +poetry inspired by our Revolutionary struggle, the romantic halo that +falls upon the youthful figure of Nathan Hale, the baleful light that +touches the pale face of Benedict Arnold, the romance of the Bennington +fight to the followers of Stark and Ethan Allen, the serene voice of +the "little captain," John Paul Jones:--"We have not struck, we have +just begun our part of the fighting." The colors of romance still drape +the Chesapeake and the Shannon, Tecumseh and Tippecanoe. The hunters of +Kentucky, the explorers of the Yellowstone and the Columbia, the +emigrants who left their bones along the old Santa Fe Trail, are our +Homeric men. + +The Mexican War affords pertinent illustration, not only of romance, +but of reaction. The earlier phases of the Texan struggle for +independence have much of the daring, the splendid rashness, the +glorious and tragic catastrophes of the great romantic adventures of +the Old World. It is not the Texans only who still "remember the +Alamo," but when those brilliant and dramatic adventures of border +warfare became drawn into the larger struggle for the extension of +slavery, the poetic reaction began. The physical and moral pretence of +warfare, the cheap splendors of epaulets and feathers, shrivelled at +the single touch of the satire of the _Biglow Papers_. Lowell, writing +at that moment with the instinct and fervor of a prophet, brought the +whole vainglorious business back to the simple issue of right and +wrong: + + "'Taint your eppyletts an' feathers + Make the thing a grain more right; + 'Taint afollerin' your bell-wethers + Will excuse ye in His sight; + Ef you take a sword an' dror it, + An' go stick a feller thru, + Guv'ment aint to answer for it, + God'll send the bill to you." + +But far more interesting is the revelation of the American capacity for +romance which was made possible by the war between the States. +Stevenson's _Poems of American History_ and Stedman's _Anthology_ give +abundant illustration of almost every aspect of that epical struggle. +The South was in a romantic mood from the very beginning. The North +drifted into it after Sumter. I have already said that no one can +examine a collection of Civil War verse without being profoundly moved +by its evidence of American idealism. In specific phases of the +struggle, in connection with certain battle-fields and certain leaders +of both North and South, this idealism is heightened into pure romance, +so that even our novelists feel that they can give no adequate picture +of the war without using the colors of poetry. Most critics, no doubt, +agree in feeling that we are still too near to that epoch-making crisis +of our national existence to do it any justice in the terms of +literature. Perhaps we must wait for the perfected romance of the years +1861-65, until the men and the events of that struggle are as remote as +the heroes of Greece and Troy. Certainly no one can pass a final +judgment upon the verse occasioned by recent struggles in arms. Any one +who has studied the English poetry inspired by the South-African War +will be painfully conscious of the emotional and moral complexity of +all such issues, of the bitter injustice which poets, as well as other +men, render to one another, of the impossibility of transmuting into +the pure gold of romance the emotions originating in the stock market, +in race-hatred, and in national vainglory. + +We have lingered too long, perhaps, over these various evidences of the +romantic temper of America. We must now glance at the forces of +reaction, the recoil to fact. What is it which contradicts, inhibits, +or negatives the romantic tendency? Among other forces, there is +certainly humor. Humor and romance often go hand in hand, but humor is +commonly fatal to romanticism. There is satire, which rebukes both +romanticism and romance, which exposes the fallacies of the one, and +punctures the exuberance of the other. More effective, perhaps, than +either humor or satire as an antiseptic against romance, is the +overmastering sense of fact. This is what Emerson called the instinct +for the milk in the pan, an instinct which Emerson himself possessed +extraordinarily on his purely Yankee side, and which a pioneer country +is forced continually to develop and to recognize. Camping, for +instance, develops both the romantic sense and the fact sense. Supper +must be cooked, even at Walden Pond. There must be hewers of wood and +drawers of water, and the dishes ought to be washed. + +On a higher plane, also, than this mere sense of physical necessity, +there are forces limiting the influence of romance. Schiller put it all +into one famous line:-- + + "Und was uns alle bandigt, das Gemeine." + +Or listen to Keats:-- + + "'T is best to remain aloof from people, and like their good + parts, without being eternally troubled with the dull process + of their everyday lives.... All I can say is that standing at + Charing Cross, and looking East, West, North and South, I can + see nothing but dullness." + +And Henry James, describing New York in his book, _The American Scene_, +speaks of "the overwhelming preponderance of the unmitigated +'business-man' face ... the consummate monotonous commonness of the +pushing male crowd, moving in its dense mass--with the confusion +carried to chaos for any intelligence, any perception; a welter of +objects and sounds in which relief, detachment, dignity, meaning, +perished utterly and lost all rights ... the universal _will to +move_--to move, move, move, as an end in itself, an appetite at any +price." + +One need not be a poet like Keats or an inveterate psychologist like +Henry James, in order to become aware how the commonplaceness of the +world rests like a fog upon the mind and heart. No one goes to his +day's work and comes home again without a consciousness of contact with +an unspiritual atmosphere, or incompletely spiritualized forces, not +merely with indifference, to what Emerson would term "the over-soul," +but with a lack of any faith in the things which are unseen. Take those +very forces which have limited the influence of Emerson throughout the +United States; they illustrate the universal forces which clip the +wings of romance. The obstacles in the path of Emerson's influence are +not merely the religious and denominational differences which Dr. +George A. Gordon portrayed in a notable article at the time of the +Emerson Centenary. The real obstacles are more serious. It is true +that Dr. Park of Andover, Dr. Bushnell of Hartford, and Dr. Hodge of +Princeton, could say in Emerson's lifetime: "We know a better, a more +Scriptural and certificated road toward the very things which Emerson +is seeking for. We do not grant that we are less idealistic than he. We +think him a dangerous guide, following wandering fires. It is better to +journey safely with us." + +But I have known at least two livery-stable keepers and many college +professors who would unite in saying: "Hodge and Park and Bushnell and +Emerson are all following after something that does not exist. One is +not much more mistaken than the others. We can get along perfectly well +in our business without any of those ideas at all. Let us stick to the +milk in the pan, the horse in the stall, the documents which you will +find in the library." + +There exists, in other words, in all classes of American society +to-day, just as there existed during the Revolution, during the +transcendental movement, or the Civil War, an immense mass of +unspiritualized, unvitalized American manhood and womanhood. No +literature comes from it and no religion, though there is much human +kindness, much material progress, and some indestructible residuum of +that idealism which lifts man above the brute. + +Yet the curious and the endlessly fascinating thing about these forces +of reaction is that they themselves shift and change. We have seen that +external romance depending upon strangeness of scene, novelty of +adventure, rich atmospheric distance of space or time, disappears with +the changes of civilization. The farm expands over the wolf's den, the +Indian becomes a blacksmith, but do the gross and material instincts +ultimately triumph? He would be a hardy prophet who should venture to +assert it. We must reckon always with the swing of the human pendulum, +with the reaction against reaction. Here, for example, during the last +decade, has been book after book written about the reaction against +democracy. All over the world, it is asserted, there are unmistakable +signs that democracy will not practically work in the face of the +modern tasks to which the world has set itself. One reads these books, +one persuades himself that the hour for democracy is passing, and then +one goes out on the street and buys a morning newspaper and discovers +that democracy has scored again. So is it with the experience of the +individual. You may fancy that the romance of the seas passes, for you, +with the passing of the square-sailed ship. If Mr. Kipling's poetry +cannot rouse you from that mood of reaction, walk down to the end of +the pier to-morrow and watch the ocean liner come up the harbor. If +there is no romance there, you do not know romance when you see it! + +Take the case of the farmer; his prosaic life is the butt of the +newspaper paragraphers from one end of the country to the other. But +does romance disappear from the farm with machinery and scientific +agriculture? There are farmers who follow Luther Burbank's experiments +with plants, with all the fascination which used to attach to alchemy +and astrology. The farmer has no longer Indians to fight or a +wilderness to subdue, but the soils of his farm are analyzed at his +state university by men who live in the daily atmosphere of the romance +of science, and who say, as a professor in the University of Chicago +said once, that "a flower is so wonderful that if you knew what was +going on within its cell-structure, you would be afraid to stay alone +with it in the dark." + +The reaction from romance, therefore, real as it is, and dead weight as +it lies upon the soul of the nation, often breeds the very forces which +destroy it. In other words, the reaction against one type of romance +produces inevitably another type of romance, other aspects of wonder, +terror, and beauty. Following the romance of adventure comes, after +never so deep a trough in the sea, the romance of science, like the +crest of another wave; and then comes what we call, for lack of a +better word, the psychological romance, the old mystery and strangeness +of the human soul, AEschylus and Job, as Victor Hugo says, in the poor +crawfish gatherer on the rocks of Brittany. + +We must remember that we are endeavoring to measure great spaces and to +take account of the "amplitude of time." The individual "fact-man," as +Coleridge called him, remains perhaps a fact-man to the end, just as +the dreamer may remain a dreamer. But no single generation is +compounded all of fact or all of dream. Longfellow felt, no doubt, that +there was an ideal United States, which Dickens did not discover +during that first visit of 1842; he would have set the Cambridge which +he knew over against the Cincinnati viewed by Mrs. Trollope; he would +have asserted that the homes characterized by refinement, by +cultivation, by pure and simple sentiment, made up the true America. +But even among Longfellow's own contemporaries there was Whitman, who +felt that the true America was something very different from that +exquisitely tempered ideal of Longfellow. There was Thoreau, who, over +in Concord, had been pushing forward the frontier of the mind and +senses, who had opened his back-yard gate, as it were, upon the +boundless and mysterious territory of Nature. There was Emerson, who +was preaching an intellectual independence of the Old World which +should correspond to the political and social independence of the +Western Hemisphere. There was Parkman, whose hatred of philanthropy, +whose lack of spirituality, is a striking illustration of the rebound +of New England idealism against itself, of the reaction into stoicism. +What different worlds these men lived in, and yet they were all +inhabitants, so to speak, of the same parish; most of them met often +around the same table! The lesson of their variety of experience and +differences of gifts as workmen in that great palace of literature +which is so variously built, is that no action and reaction in the +imaginative world is ever final. Least of all do these actions and +reactions affect the fortunes of true romance. The born dreamer may +fall from one dream into another, but he still murmurs, in the famous +line of William Ellery Channing,-- + + "If my bark sinks, 't is to another sea." + +No line in our literature is more truly American,--unless it be that +other splendid metaphor, by David Wasson, which says the same thing in +other words:-- + + "Life's gift outruns my fancies far, + And drowns the dream + In larger stream, + As morning drinks the morning-star." + + + + +V + +Humor and Satire + + +A distinguished professor in the Harvard Divinity School once began a +lecture on Comedy by saying that the study of the comic had made him +realize for the first time that a joke was one of the most solemn +things in the world. The analysis of humor is no easy matter. It is +hard to say which is the more dreary: an essay on humor illustrated by +a series of jokes, or an exposition of humor in the technical terms of +philosophy. No subject has been more constantly discussed. But it +remains difficult to decide what humor is. It is easier to declare what +seemed humorous to our ancestors, or what seems humorous to us to-day. +For humor is a shifting thing. The well-known collections of the +writings of American humorists surprise us by their revelation of the +changes in public taste. Humor--or the sense of humor--alters while we +are watching. What seemed a good joke to us yesterday seems but a poor +joke to-day. And yet it is the same joke! What is true of the +individual is all the more true of the national sense of humor. This +vast series of kaleidoscopic changes which we call America; has it +produced a humor of its own? + +Let us avoid for the moment the treacherous territory of definitions. +Let us, rather, take one concrete example: a pair of men, a knight and +his squire, who for three hundred years have ridden together down the +broad highway of the world's imagination. Everybody sees that Don +Quixote and Sancho Panza are humorous. Define them as you +will--idealist and realist, knight and commoner, dreamer and +proverb-maker--these figures represent to all the world two poles of +human experience. A Frenchman once said that all of us are Don Quixotes +on one day and Sancho Panzas on the next. Humor springs from this +contrast. It is the electric flash between the two poles of experience. + +Most philosophers who have meditated upon the nature of the comic point +out that it is closely allied with the tragic. Flaubert once compared +our human idealism to the flight of a swallow; at one moment it is +soaring toward the sunset, at the next moment some one shoots it and it +tumbles into the mud with blood upon its glistening wings. The sudden +poignant contrast between light, space, freedom, and the wounded +bleeding bird in the mud, is of the very essence of tragedy. But +something like that is always happening in comedy. There is the same +element of incongruity, without the tragic consequence. It is only the +humorist who sees things truly because he sees both the greatness and +the littleness of mortals; but even he may not know whether to laugh or +to cry at what he sees. Those collisions and contrasts out of which the +stuff of tragedy is woven, such as the clash between the higher and +lower nature of a man, between his past and his present, between one's +duties to himself and to his family or the state, between, in a word, +his character and his situation, are all illustrated in comedy as +completely as in tragedy. The countryman in the city, the city man in +the country, is in a comic situation. Here is a coward named Falstaff, +and Shakespeare puts him into battle. Here is a vain person, and +Malvolio is imprisoned and twitted by a clown. Here is an ignoramus, +and Dogberry is placed on the judge's bench. These contrasts might, +indeed, be tragic enough, but they are actually comic. Such characters +are not ruled by fate but by a sportive chance. The gods connive at +them. They are ruled, like tragic characters, by necessity and +blindness; but the blindness, instead of leading to tragic ruin, leads +only to being caught as in some harmless game of blind-man's-buff. +There is retribution, but Falstaff is only pinched by the fairies. +Comedy of intrigue and comedy of character lead to no real catastrophe. +The end of it on the stage is not death but matrimony; and "home well +pleased we go." + +A thousand definitions of humor lay stress upon this element of +incongruity. Hazlitt begins his illuminating lectures on the Comic +Writers by declaring, "Man is the only animal that laughs or weeps; for +he is the only animal that is struck with the difference between what +things are and what they ought to be." James Russell Lowell took the +same ground. "Humor," he said once, "lies in the contrast of two ideas. +It is the universal disenchanter. It is the sense of comic +contradiction which arises from the perpetual comment which the +understanding makes upon the impressions received through the +imagination." If that sentence seems too abstract, all we need do is to +think of Sancho Panza, the man of understanding, talking about Don +Quixote, the man of imagination. + +We must not multiply quotations, but it is impossible not to remember +the distinction made by Carlyle in writing about Richter. "True humor," +says Carlyle, "springs not more from the head than from the heart. It +is not contempt; its essence is love." In other words, not merely the +great humorists of the world's literature--Cervantes, Rabelais, +Fielding, Thackeray, Dickens--but the writers of comic paragraphs for +to-morrow's newspaper, all regard our human incongruities with a sort +of affection. The comic spirit is essentially a social spirit. The +great figures of tragedy are solitary. The immortal figures of comedy +belong to a social group. + +No recent discussion of humor is more illuminating and more directly +applicable to the conditions of American life than that of the +contemporary French philosopher Bergson. Bergson insists throughout +his brilliant little book on _Laughter_ that laughter is a social +function. Life demands elasticity. Hence whatever is stiff, automatic, +machine-like, excites a smile. We laugh when a person gives us the +impression of being a thing,--a sort of mechanical toy. Every +inadaptation of the individual to society is potentially comic. Thus +laughter becomes a social initiation. It is a kind of hazing which we +visit upon one another. But we do not isolate the comic personage as we +do the solitary, tragic figure. The comic personage is usually a type; +he is one of an absurd group; he is a miser, a pedant, a pretentious +person, a doctor or a lawyer in whom the professional traits have +become automatic so that he thinks more of his professional behavior +than he does of human health and human justice. Of all these separatist +tendencies, laughter is the great corrective. When the individual +becomes set in his ways, obstinate, preoccupied, automatic, the rest of +us laugh him out of it if we can. Of course all that we are thinking +about at the moment is his ridiculousness. But nevertheless, by +laughing we become the saviors of society. + +No one, I think, can help observing that this conception of humor as +incongruity is particularly applicable to a new country. On the new +soil and under the new sky, in new social groupings, all the +fundamental contrasts and absurdities of our human society assume a new +value. We see them under a fresh light. They are differently focussed. +The broad humors of the camp, its swift and picturesque play of light +and shade, its farce and caricature no less than its atmosphere of +comradeship, of sentiment, and of daring, are all transferred to the +humor of the newly settled country. The very word "humor" once meant +singularity of character, "some extravagant habit, passion, or +affection," says Dryden, "particular to some one person." Every newly +opened country encourages, for a while, this oddness and incongruity of +individual character. It fosters it, and at the same moment it laughs +at it. It decides that such characters are "humorous." As the social +conditions of such a country change, the old pioneer instinct for +humor, and the pioneer forms of humor, may endure, though the actual +frontier may have moved far westward. + +There is another conception of humor scarcely less famous than the +notion of incongruity. It is the conception associated with the name of +the English philosopher Hobbes, who thought that humor turned upon a +sense of superiority. "The passion of laughter," said Hobbes, "is +nothing else but sudden glory arising from some sudden conception of +some eminency in ourselves by comparison with the inferiority of +others, or with our own formerly." Too cynical a view, declare many +critics, but they usually end by admitting that there is a good deal in +it after all. I am inclined to think that Hobbes's famous definition is +more applicable to wit than it is to humor. Wit is more purely +intellectual than humor. It rejoices in its little triumphs. It +requires, as has been remarked, a good head, while humor takes a good +heart, and fun good spirits. If you take Carlyle literally when he says +that humor is love, you cannot wholly share Hobbes's conviction that +laughter turns upon a sense of superiority, and yet surely we all +experience a sense of kindly amusement which turns upon the fact that +we, the initiated, are superior, for the moment, to the unlucky person +who is just having his turn in being hazed. It may be the play of +intellect or the coarser play of animal spirits. One might venture to +make a distinction between the low comedy of the Latin races and the +low comedy of the Germanic races by pointing out that the superiority +in the Latin comedy usually turns upon quicker wits, whereas the +superiority in the Germanic farce is likely to turn upon stouter +muscles. But whether it be a play of wits or of actual cudgelling, the +element of superiority and inferiority is almost always there. + +I remember that some German, I dare say in a forgotten lecture-room, +once illustrated the humor of superiority in this way. A company of +strolling players sets up its tent in a country village. On the front +seat is a peasant, laughing at the antics of the clown. The peasant +flatters himself that he sees through those practical jokes on the +stage; the clown ought to have seen that he was about to be tripped up, +but he was too stupid. But the peasant saw that it was coming all the +time. He laughs accordingly. Just behind the peasant sits the village +shopkeeper. He has watched stage clowns many a time and he laughs, not +at the humor of the farce, but at the naive laughter of the peasant in +front of him. He, the shopkeeper, is superior to such broad and obvious +humor as that. Behind the shopkeeper sits the schoolmaster. The +schoolmaster is a pedant; he has probably lectured to his boys on the +theory of humor, and he smiles in turn at the smile of superiority on +the face of the shopkeeper. Well, peeping in at the door of the tent is +a man of the world, who glances at the clown, then at the peasant, then +at the shopkeeper, then at the schoolmaster, each one of whom is +laughing at the others, and the man of the world laughs at them all! + +Let us take an even simpler illustration. We all know the comfortable +sense of proprietorship which we experience after a few days' sojourn +at a summer hotel. We know our place at the table; we call the head +waiter by his first name; we are not even afraid of the clerk. Now into +this hotel, where we sit throned in conscious superiority, comes a new +arrival. He has not yet learned the exits and entrances. He starts for +the kitchen door inadvertently when he should be headed for the +drawing-room. We smile at him. Why? Precisely because that was what we +did on the morning of our own arrival. We have been initiated, and it +is now his turn. + +If it is true that a newly settled country offers endless opportunities +for the humor which turns upon incongruity, it is also true that the +new country offers countless occasions for the humor which turns upon +the sudden glory of superiority. The backwoodsman is amusing to the man +of the settlements, and the backwoodsman, in turn, gets his full share +of amusement out of watching the "tenderfoot" in the woods. It is +simply the case of the old resident versus the newcomer. The +superiority need be in no sense a cruel or taunting superiority, +although it often happens to be so. The humor of the pioneers is not +very delicately polished. The joke of the frontier tavern or grocery +store is not always adapted to a drawing-room audience, but it turns in +a surprisingly large number of instances upon exactly the same +intellectual or social superiority which gives point to the _bon mots_ +of the most cultivated and artificial society in the world. + +The humor arising from incongruity, then, and the humor arising from a +sense of superiority, are both of them social in their nature. No less +social, surely, is the function of satire. It is possible that satire +may be decaying, that it is becoming, if it has not already become, a +mere splendid or odious tradition. But let us call it a great tradition +and, upon the whole, a splendid one. Even when debased to purely party +or personal uses, the verse satire of a Dryden retains its magnificent +resonance; "the ring," says Saintsbury, "as of a great bronze coin +thrown down on marble." The malignant couplets of an Alexander Pope +still gleam like malevolent jewels through the dust of two hundred +years. The cynicism, the misanthropy, the mere adolescent badness of +Byron are powerless to clip the wings of the wide-ranging, far-darting +wit and humor and irony of _Don Juan_. The homely Yankee dialect, the +provinciality, the "gnarly" flavor of the _Biglow Papers_ do not +prevent our finding in that pungent and resplendent satire the powers +of Lowell at full play; and, what is more than that, the epitome of the +American spirit in a moral crisis. + +I take the names of those four satirists, Dryden, Pope, Byron, and +Lowell, quite at random; but they serve to illustrate a significant +principle; namely, that great satire becomes ennobled as it touches +communal, not merely individual interests, as it voices social and not +merely individual ideals. Those four modern satirists were steeped in +the nationalistic political poetry of the Old Testament. They were +familiar with its war anthems, dirges, and prophecies, its concern for +the prosperity and adversity, the sin and the punishment, of a people. +Here the writers of the Golden Age of English satire found their +vocabulary and phrase-book, their grammar of politics and history, +their models of good and evil kings; and in that Biblical school of +political poetry, which has affected our literature from the +Reformation down to Mr. Kipling, there has always been a class in +satire! The satirical portraits, satirical lyrics, satirical parables +of the Old Testament prophets are only less noteworthy than their +audacity in striking high and hard. Their foes were the all-powerful: +Babylon and Assyria and Egypt loom vast and terrible upon the canvases +of Isaiah and Ezekiel; and poets of a later time have learned there the +secrets of social and political idealism, and the signs of national +doom. + +There are two familiar types of satire associated with the names of +Horace and Juvenal. Both types are abundantly illustrated in English +and American literature. When you meet a bore or a hypocrite or a plain +rascal, is it better to chastise him with laughter or to flay him with +shining fury? I shall take both horns of the dilemma and assert that +both methods are admirable and socially useful. The minor English and +American poets of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were never +weary of speaking of satire as a terrific weapon which they were forced +to wield as saviors of society. But whether they belonged to the urbane +school of Horace, or to the severely moralistic school of Juvenal, they +soon found themselves falling into one or the other of two modes of +writing. They addressed either the little audience or the big audience, +and they modified their styles accordingly. The great satirists of the +Renaissance, for example, like More, Erasmus, and Rabelais, wrote +simply for the persons who were qualified to understand them. More and +Erasmus wrote their immortal satires in Latin. By so doing they +addressed themselves to cultivated Europe. They ran no risk of being +misunderstood by persons for whom the joke was not intended. All +readers of Latin were like members of one club. Of course membership +was restricted to the learned, but had not Horace talked about being +content with a few readers, and was not Voltaire coming by and by with +the advice to try for the "little public"? + +The typical wit of the eighteenth century, whether in London, Paris, or +in Franklin's printing-shop in Philadelphia, had, of course, abandoned +Latin. But it still addressed itself to the "little public," to the +persons who were qualified to understand. The circulation of the +_Spectator_, which represents so perfectly the wit, humor, and satire +of the early eighteenth century in England, was only about ten thousand +copies. This limited audience smiled at the urbane delicate touches of +Mr. Steele and Mr. Addison. They understood the allusions. The fable +concerned them and not the outsiders. It was something like Oliver +Wendell Holmes reading his witty and satirical couplets to an audience +of Harvard alumni. The jokes are in the vernacular, but in a vernacular +as spoken in a certain social medium. It is all very delightful. + +But there is a very different kind of audience gathering all this while +outside the Harvard gates. These two publics for the humorist we may +call the invited and the uninvited; the inner circle and the outer +circle: first, those who have tickets for the garden party, and who +stroll over the lawn, decorously gowned and properly coated, conversing +with one another in the accepted social accents and employing the +recognized social adjectives; and second, the crowd outside the +gates,--curious, satirical, good-natured in the main, straightforward +of speech and quick to applaud a ready wit or a humor-loving eye or a +telling phrase spoken straight from the heart of the mob. + +Will an author choose to address the selected guests or the casual +crowd? Either way lies fame, if one does it well. Your uninvited men +find themselves talking to the uninvited crowd. Before they know it +they are famous too. They are fashioning another manner of speech. +Defoe is there, with his saucy ballads selling triumphantly under his +very pillory; with his _True-Born Englishman_ puncturing forever the +fiction of the honorable ancestry of the English aristocracy; with his +_Crusoe_ and _Moll Flanders_, written, as Lamb said long afterwards, +for the servant-maid and the sailor. Swift is there, with his terrific +_Drapier's Letters_, anonymous, aimed at the uneducated, with cold fury +bludgeoning a government into obedience; with his _Gulliver's Travels_, +so transparent upon the surface that a child reads the book with +delight and remains happily ignorant that it is a satire upon humanity. +And then, into the London of Defoe and Swift, and into the very centre +of the middle-class mob, steps, in 1724, the bland Benjamin Franklin in +search of a style "smooth, clear, and short," and for half a century, +with consummate skill, shapes that style to his audience. His young +friend Thomas Paine takes the style and touches it with passion, until +he becomes the perfect pamphleteer, and his _Crisis_ is worth as much +to our Revolution--men said--as the sword of Washington. After another +generation the gaunt Lincoln, speaking that same plain prose of Defoe, +Swift, Franklin, and Paine,--Lincoln who began his first Douglas +debate, not like his cultivated opponent with the conventional "Ladies +and Gentlemen," but with the ominously intimate, "My Fellow +Citizens,"--Lincoln is saying, "I am not master of language; I have not +a fine education; I am not capable of entering into a disquisition upon +dialectics, as I believe you call it; but I do not believe the +language I employed bears any such construction as Judge Douglas puts +upon it. But I don't care about a quibble in regard to words. I know +what I meant, and _I will not leave this crowd in doubt_, if I can +explain it to them, what I really meant in the use of that paragraph." + +"_I will not leave this crowd in doubt_"; that is the final accent of +our spoken prose, the prose addressed to one's fellow citizens, to the +great public. This is the prose spoken in the humor and satire of +Dickens. Dressed in a queer dialect, and put into satirical verse, it +is the language of the _Biglow Papers_. Uttered with the accent of a +Chicago Irishman, it is the prose admired by millions of the countrymen +of "Mr. Dooley." + +Satire written to the "little public" tends toward the social type; +that written to the "great public" to the political type. It is obvious +that just as a newly settled country offers constant opportunity for +the humor of incongruity and the humor arising from a sense of +superiority, it likewise affords a daily stimulus to the use of satire. +That moralizing Puritan strain of censure which lost none of its +harshness in crossing the Atlantic Ocean found full play in the +colonial satire of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. As the +topics for satire grew wider and more political in their scope, the +audiences increased. To-day the very oldest issues of the common life +of that queer "political animal" named man are discussed by our popular +newspaper satirists in the presence of a democratic audience that +stretches from the Atlantic to the Pacific. + +Is there, then, a distinctly American type of humor and satire? I think +it would be difficult to prove that our composite American nationality +has developed a mode of humor and satire which is racially different +from the humor and satire of the Old World. All racial lines in +literature are extremely difficult to draw. If you attempt to analyze +English humor, you find that it is mostly Scotch or Irish. If you put +Scotch and Irish humor under the microscope, you discover that most of +the best Scotch and Irish jokes are as old as the Greeks and the +Egyptians. You pick up a copy of _Fliegende Blatter_ and you get keen +amusement from its revelation of German humor. But how much of this +humor, after all, is either essentially universal in its scope or else +a matter of mere stage-setting and machinery? Without the Prussian +lieutenant the _Fliegende Blatter_ would lose half its point; nor can +one imagine a _Punch_ without a picture of the English policeman. The +lieutenant and the policeman, however, are a part of the accepted +social furniture of the two countries. They belong to the decorative +background of the social drama. They heighten the effectiveness of +local humor, but it may be questioned whether they afford any evidence +of genuine racial differentiation as to the sense of the comic. + +What one can abundantly prove, however, is that the United States +afford a new national field for certain types of humor and satire. Our +English friends are never weary of writing magazine articles about +Yankee humor, in which they explain the peculiarities of the American +joke with a dogmatism which has sometimes been thought to prove that +there is such a thing as national lack of humor, whether there be such +a thing as national humor or not. One such article, I remember, +endeavored to prove that the exaggeration often found in American +humor was due to the vastness of the American continent. Our geography, +that is to say, is too much for the Yankee brain. Mr. Birrell, an +expert judge of humor, surely, thinks that the characteristic of +American humor lies in its habit of speaking of something hideous in a +tone of levity. Many Englishmen, in fact, have been as much impressed +with this minimizing trick of American humor as with the converse trick +of magnifying. Upon the Continent the characteristic trait of American +humor has often been thought to be its exuberance of phrase. Many +shrewd judges of our newspaper humor have pointed out that one of its +most favorite methods is the suppression of one link in the chain of +logical reasoning. Such generalizations as these are always +interesting, although they may not take us very far. + +Yet it is clear that certain types of humor and satire have proved to +be specially adapted to the American soil and climate. Whether or not +these types are truly indigenous one may hesitate to say, yet it +remains true that the well-known conditions of American life have +stimulated certain varieties of humor into such a richness of +manifestation as the Old World can scarcely show. + +Curiously enough, one of the most perfected types of American humor is +that urbane Horatian variety which has often been held to be the +exclusive possession of the cultivated and restricted societies of +older civilization. Yet it is precisely this kind of humor which has +been the delight of some of the most typical American minds. Benjamin +Franklin, for example, modelled his style and his sense of the humorous +on the papers of the _Spectator_. He produced humorous fables and +apologues, choice little morsels of social and political persiflage, +which were perfectly suited, not merely to the taste of London in the +so-called golden age of English satire, but to the tone of the wittiest +salons of Paris in the age when the old regime went tottering, talking, +quoting, jesting to its fall. Read Franklin's charming and wise letter +to Madame Brillon about giving too much for the whistle. It is the +perfection of well-bred humor: a humor very American, very Franklinian, +although its theme and tone and phrasing might well have been envied by +Horace or Voltaire. + +The gentle humor of Irving is marked by precisely those traits of +urbanity and restraint which characterize the parables of Franklin. +Does not the _Autocrat of the Breakfast Table_ itself presuppose the +existence of a truly cultivated society? Its tone--"As I was saying +when I was interrupted"--is the tone of the intimate circle. There was +so much genuine humanity in the gay little doctor that persons born +outside the circle of Harvard College and the North Shore and Boston +felt themselves at once initiated by the touch of his merry wand into a +humanized, kindly theory of life. The humor of George William Curtis +had a similarly mellow and ripened quality. It is a curious comment +upon that theory of Americans which represents us primarily as a +loud-voiced, assertive, headstrong people, to be thus made aware that +many of the humorists whom we have loved best are precisely those whose +writing has been marked by the most delicate restraint, whose theory of +life has been the most highly urbane and civilized, whose work is +indistinguishable in tone--though its materials are so different--from +that of other humorous writers on the other side of the Atlantic. On +its social side all this is a fresh proof of the extraordinary +adaptability of the American mind. On the literary side it is one more +evidence of the national fondness for neatness and perfection of +workmanship. + +But we are something other than a nation of mere lovers and would-be +imitators of Charles Lamb. The moralistic type of humor, the crack of +Juvenal's whip, as well as the delicate Horatian playing around the +heart-strings, has characterized our humor and satire from the +beginning. At bottom the American is serious. Beneath the surface of +his jokes there is moral earnestness, there is ethical passion. Take, +for example, some of the apothegms of "Josh Billings." He failed with +the public until he took up the trick of misspelling his words. When he +had once gained his public he sometimes delighted them with sheer +whimsical incongruity, like this:-- + + "There iz 2 things in this life for which we are never fully + prepared, and that iz twins." + +But more often the tone is really grave. It is only the spelling that +is queer. The moralizing might be by La Bruyere or La Rochefoucauld. +Take this:-- + + "Life iz short, but it iz long enuff to ruin enny man who + wants tew be ruined." + +Or this:-- + + "When a feller gits a goin doun hill, it dus seem as tho evry + thing had bin greased for the okashun." That is what writers + of tragedy have been showing, ever since the Greeks! + +Or finally, this, which has the perfect tone of the great French +moralists:-- + + "It iz a verry delicate job to forgive a man without lowering + him in his own estimashun, and yures too." + +See how the moralistic note is struck in the field of political satire. +It is 1866, and "Petroleum V. Nasby," writing from "Confedrit X Roads," +Kentucky, gives Deekin Pogram's views on education. "He didn't bleeve +in edjucashun, generally speekin. The common people was better off +without it, ez edjucashun hed a tendency to unsettle their minds. He +had seen the evil effex ov it in niggers and poor whites. So soon ez a +nigger masters the spellin book and gits into noosepapers, he becomes +dissatisfied with his condishin, and hankers after a better cabin and +more wages. He towunst begins to insist onto ownin land hisself, and +givin his children edjucashun, and, ez a nigger, for our purposes, aint +worth a soo markee." + +The single phrase, "ez a nigger," spells a whole chapter of American +history. + +That quotation from "Petroleum V. Nasby" serves also to illustrate a +species of American humor which has been of immense historical +importance and which has never been more active than it is to-day: the +humor, namely, of local, provincial, and sectional types. Much of this +falls under Bergson's conception of humor as social censure. It rebukes +the extravagance, the rigidity, the unawareness of the individual who +fails to adapt himself to his social environment. It takes the place, +in our categories of humor, of those types of class humor and satire in +which European literature is so rich. The mobility of our population, +the constant shifting of professions and callings, has prevented our +developing fixed class types of humor. We have not even the lieutenant +or the policeman as permanent members of our humorous stock company. +The policeman of to-day may be mayor or governor to-morrow. The +lieutenant may go back to his grocery wagon or on to his department +store. But whenever and wherever such an individual fails to adapt +himself to his new companions, fails to take on, as it were, the colors +of his new environment, to speak in the new social accents, to follow +the recognized patterns of behavior, then the kindly whip of the +humorist is already cracking round his ears. The humor and satire of +college undergraduate journalism turns mainly upon the recognized +ability or inability of different individuals to adapt themselves to +their changing pigeon-holes in the college organism. A freshman must +behave like a freshman, or he is laughed at. Yet he must not behave as +if he were nothing but the automaton of a freshman, or he will be +laughed at more merrily still. + +One of the first discoveries of our earlier humorists was the Down-East +Yankee. "I'm going to Portland whether or no," says Major Jack Downing, +telling the story of his boyhood; "I'll see what this world is made of +yet. So I tackled up the old horse and packed in a load of ax handles +and a few notions, and mother fried me a few doughnuts ... for I told +her I didn't know how long I should be gone,"--and off he goes to +Portland, to see what the world is made of. It is a little like Defoe, +and a good deal like the young Ulysses, bent upon knowing cities and +men and upon getting the best of bargains. + +Each generation of Americans has known something like that trip to +Portland. Each generation has had to measure its wits, its resources, +its manners, against new standards of comparison. At every stage of the +journey there are mishaps and ridiculous adventures; but everywhere, +likewise, there is zest, conquest, initiation; the heart of a boy who +"wants to know"--as the Yankees used to say; or, in more modern +phrase,-- + + "to admire and for to see, + For to behold this world so wide." + +There is the same romance of adventure in the humor concerning the +Irishman, the Negro, the Dutchman, the Dago, the farmer. Each in turn +becomes humorous through failure to adapt himself to the prevalent +type. A long-bearded Jew is not ridiculous in Russia, but he rapidly +becomes ridiculous even on the East Side of New York. Underneath all +this popular humor of the comic supplements one may catch glimpses of +the great revolving wheels which are crushing the vast majority of our +population into something like uniformity. It is a process of social +attrition. The sharp edges of individual behavior get rounded off. The +individual loses color and picturesqueness, precisely as he casts aside +the national costume of the land from which he came. His speech, his +gait, his demeanor, become as nearly as possible like the speech and +carriage of all his neighbors. If he resists, he is laughed at; and if +he does not personally heed the laughter, he may be sure that his +children do. It is the children of our immigrants who catch the sly +smiles of their school-fellows, who overhear jokes from the newspapers +and on the street corners, who bring home to their foreign-born fathers +and mothers the imperious childish demand to make themselves like unto +everybody else. + +A similar social function is performed by that well-known mode of +American humor which ridicules the inhabitants of certain states. Why +should New Jersey, for example, be more ridiculous than Delaware? In +the eyes of the newspaper paragrapher it unquestionably is, just as +Missouri has more humorous connotations than Kentucky. We may think we +understand why we smile when a man says that he comes from Kalamazoo +or Oshkosh, but the smile when he says "Philadelphia" or "Boston" or +"Brooklyn" is only a trifle more subtle. It is none the less real. Why +should the suburban dweller of every city be regarded with humorous +condescension by the man who is compelled to sleep within the city +limits? No one can say, and yet without that humor of the suburbs the +comic supplements of American newspapers would be infinitely less +entertaining,--to the people who enjoy comic supplements. + +So it is with the larger divisions of our national life. Yankee, +Southerner, Westerner, Californian, Texan, each type provokes certain +connotations of humor when viewed by any of the other types. Each type +in turn has its note of provinciality when compared with the norm of +the typical American. It is quite possible to maintain that our +literature, like our social life, has suffered by this ever-present +American sense of the ridiculous. Our social consciousness might be far +more various and richly colored, there might be more true provincial +independence of speech and custom and imagination if we had not to +reckon with this ever-present censure of laughter, this fear of +finding ourselves, our city, our section, out of touch with the +prevalent tone and temper of the country as a whole. It is one of the +forfeits we are bound to pay when we play the great absorbing game of +democracy. + +We are now ready to ask once more whether there is a truly national +type of American humor. Viewed exclusively from the standpoint of +racial characteristics, we have seen that this question as to a +national type of humor is difficult to answer. But we have seen with +equal clearness that the United States has offered a singularly rich +field for the development of the sense of humor; and furthermore that +there are certain specialized forms of humor which have flourished +luxuriantly upon our soil. Our humorists have made the most of their +native materials. Every pioneer trait of versatility, curiosity, +shrewdness, has been turned somehow to humorous account. The very +institutions of democracy, moulding day by day and generation after +generation the habits and the mental characteristics of millions of +men, have produced a social atmosphere in which humor is one of the +most indisputable elements. + +I recall a notable essay by Mr. Charles Johnston on the essence of +American humor in which he applies to the conditions of American life +one familiar distinction between humor and wit. Wit, he asserts, scores +off the other man, humor does not. Wit frequently turns upon tribal +differences, upon tribal vanity. The mordant wit of the Jew, for +example, from the literature of the Old Testament down to the raillery +of Heine, has turned largely upon the sense of racial superiority, of +intellectual and moral differences. But true humor, Mr. Johnston goes +on to argue, has always a binding, a uniting quality. Thus Huckleberry +Finn and Jim Hawkins, white man and black man, are afloat together on +the Mississippi River raft and they are made brethren by the fraternal +quality of Mark Twain's humor. Thus the levelling quality of Bret +Harte's humor bridges social and moral chasms. It creates an atmosphere +of charity and sympathy. In fact, the typical American humor, according +to the opinion of Mr. Johnston, emphasizes the broad and humane side of +our common nature. It reveals the common soul. It possesses a +surplusage of power, of buoyancy and of conquest over circumstances. +It means at its best a humanizing of our hearts. + +Some people will think that all this is too optimistic, but if you are +not optimistic enough you cannot keep up with the facts. Certain it is +that the pioneers of American national humor, the creators of what we +may call the "all-American" type of humor, have possessed precisely the +qualities which Mr. Johnston has pointed out. They are apparent in the +productions of Artemus Ward. The present generation vaguely remembers +Artemus Ward as the man who was willing to send all his wife's +relatives to the war and who, standing by the tomb of Shakespeare, +thought it "a success." But no one who turns to the almost forgotten +pages of that kindly jester can fail to be impressed by his sunny +quality, by the atmosphere of fraternal affection which glorifies his +queer spelling and his somewhat threadbare witticisms. Mark Twain, who +is universally recognized by Europeans as a representative of typical +American humor, had precisely those qualities of pioneer curiosity, +swift versatility, absolute democracy, which are characteristic of the +national temper. His lively accounts of frontier experiences in +_Roughing It_, his comments upon the old world in _Innocents Abroad_ +and _A Tramp Abroad_, his hatred of pretence and injustice, his scorn +at sentimentality coupled with his insistence upon the rights of +sentiment, in a word his persistent idealism, make Mark Twain one of +the most representative of American writers. Largeness, freedom, human +sympathy, are revealed upon every page. + +It is true that the dangers of American humor are no less in evidence +there. There is the danger of extravagance, which in Mark Twain's +earlier writings was carried to lengths of absurdity. There is the old +danger of the professional humorist of fearing to fail to score his +point, and so of underscoring it with painful reiteration. Mark Twain +is frequently grotesque. Sometimes there is evidence of imperfect +taste, or of bad taste. Sometimes there is actual vulgarity. In his +earlier books particularly there is revealed that lack of discipline +which has been such a constant accompaniment of American writing. Yet a +native of Hannibal, Missouri, trained on a river steamboat and in a +country printing-office and in mining-camps, can scarcely be expected +to exhibit the finely balanced critical sense of a Matthew Arnold. +Mark Twain was often accused in the first years of his international +reputation of a characteristically American lack of reverence. He is +often irreverent. But here again the boundaries of his irreverence are +precisely those which the national instinct itself has drawn. The joke +stops short of certain topics which the American mind holds sacred. We +all have our favorite pages in the writings of this versatile and +richly endowed humorist, but I think no one can read his description of +the coyote in _Roughing It_, and Huckleberry Finn's account of his +first visit to the circus, without realizing that in this fresh +revelation of immemorial human curiosity, this vivid perception of +incongruity and surprise, this series of lightning-like flashes from +one pole of experience to the other, we have not only masterpieces of +world humor, but a revelation of a distinctly American reaction to the +facts presented by universal experience. + +The picturesque personality and the extraordinarily successful career +of Mark Twain kept him, during the last twenty-five years of his life, +in the focus of public attention. But no one can read the pages of the +older American humorists,--or try to recall to mind the names of +paragraphers who used to write comic matter for this or that +newspaper,--without realizing how swiftly the dust of oblivion settles +upon all the makers of mere jokes. It is enough, perhaps, that they +caused a smile for the moment. Even those humorists who mark epochs in +the history of American provincial and political satire, like Seba +Smith with his _Major Jack Downing_, Newell with his _Papers of Orpheus +C. Kerr_, "Petroleum V. Nasby's" _Letters from the Confedrit X Roads_, +Shillaber's _Mrs. Partington_--all these have disappeared round the +turn of the long road. + + "Hans Breitman gife a barty-- + Vhere ish dot barty now?" + +It seems as if the conscious humorists, the professional funny writers, +had the shortest lease of literary life. They play their little comic +parts before a well-disposed but restless audience which is already +impatiently waiting for some other "turn." One of them makes a hit with +a song or story, just as a draughtsman for a Sunday colored supplement +makes a hit with his "Mutt and Jeff." For a few months everybody +smiles and then comes the long oblivion. The more permanent American +humor has commonly been written by persons who were almost unconscious, +not indeed of the fact that they were creating humorous characters, but +unconscious of the effort to provoke a laugh. The smile lasts longer +than the laugh. Perhaps that is the secret. One smiles as one reads the +delicate sketches of Miss Jewett. One smiles over the stories of Owen +Wister and of Thomas Nelson Page. The trouble, possibly, with the +enduring qualities of the brilliant humorous stories of "O. Henry" was +that they tempt the reader to laugh too much and to smile too little. +When one reads the _Legend of Sleepy Hollow_ or _Diedrich +Knickerbocker's History of New York_, it is always with this gentle +parting of the lips, this kindly feeling toward the author, his +characters and the world. A humorous page which produces that effect +for generation after generation, has the stamp of literature. One may +doubt whether even the extraordinary fantasies of Mark Twain are more +successful, judged by the mere vulgar test of concrete results, than +the delicate humor of Charles Lamb. Our current newspaper and magazine +humor is in no respect more fascinating than in its suggestion as to +the permanent effectiveness of its comic qualities. Who could say, when +he first read Mr. Finley P. Dunne's "Mr. Dooley" sketches, whether this +was something that a whole nation of readers would instantly and +instinctively rejoice over, would find a genial revelation of American +characteristics, would recognize as almost the final word of kindly +satire upon our overworked, over-excited, over-anxious, +over-self-conscious generation? + +The range of this contemporary newspaper and magazine humor is +well-nigh universal,--always saving, it is true, certain topics or +states of mind which the American public cannot regard as topics for +laughter. With these few exceptions nothing is too high or too low for +it. The paragraphers joke about the wheel-barrow, the hen, the mule, +the mother-in-law, the President of the United States. There is no +ascending or descending scale of importance. Any of the topics can +raise a laugh. If one examines a collection of American parodies, one +will find that the happy national talent for fun-making finds full +scope in the parody and burlesque of the dearest national sentiments. +But no one minds; everybody believes that the sentiments endure while +the jokes will pass. The jokes, intended as they are for an immense +audience, necessarily lack subtlety. They tend to partake of the +methods of pictorial caricature. Indeed, caricature itself, as Bergson +has pointed out, emphasizes those "automatic, mechanical-toy" traits of +character and behavior which isolate the individual and make him ill +adapted for his function in society. Our verbal wit and humor, no less +than the pencil of our caricaturists, have this constant note of +exaggeration. "These violent delights have violent ends." But during +their brief and laughing existence they serve to normalize society. +They set up, as it were, a pulpit in the street upon which the comic +spirit may mount and preach her useful sermon to all comers. + +Despite the universality of the objects of contemporary American humor, +despite, too, its prevalent method of caricature, it remains true that +its character is, on the whole, clean, easy-going, and kindly. The old +satire of hatred has lost its force. No one knows why. "Satire has +grown weak," says Mr. Chesterton, "precisely because belief has grown +weak." That is one theory. The late Henry D. Lloyd, of Chicago, +declared in one of his last books: "The world has outgrown the dialect +and temper of hatred. The style of the imprecatory psalms and the +denunciating prophets is out of date. No one knows these times if he is +not conscious of this change." That is another theory. Again, party +animosities are surely weaker than they were. Caricatures are less +personally offensive; if you doubt it, look at any of the collections +of caricatures of Napoleon, or of George the Fourth. Irony is less +often used by pamphleteers and journalists. It is a delicate rhetorical +weapon, and journalists who aim at the great public are increasingly +afraid to use it, lest the readers miss the point. In the editorials in +the Hearst newspapers, for instance, there is plenty of invective and +innuendo, but rarely irony: it might not be understood, and the crowd +must not be left in doubt. + +Possibly the old-fashioned satire has disappeared because the game is +no longer considered worth the candle. To puncture the tire of +pretence is amusing enough; but it is useless to stick tacks under the +steam road-roller: the road-roller advances remorselessly and smooths +down your mischievous little tacks and you too, indifferently. The huge +interests of politics, trade, progress, override your passionate +protest. "Shall gravitation cease when you go by?" I do not compare +Colonel Roosevelt with gravitation, but have all the satirical squibs +against our famous contemporary, from the "Alone in Cubia" to the +"Teddy-see," ever cost him, in a dozen years, a dozen votes? + +Very likely Mr. Lloyd and Mr. Chesterton are right. We are less +censorious than our ancestors were. Americans, on the whole, try to +avoid giving pain through speech. The satirists of the golden age loved +that cruel exercise of power. Perhaps we take things less seriously +than they did; undoubtedly our attention is more distracted and +dissipated. At any rate, the American public finds it easier to forgive +and forget, than to nurse its wrath to keep it warm. Our characteristic +humor of understatement, and our equally characteristic humor of +overstatement, are both likely to be cheery at bottom, though the mere +wording may be grim enough. No popular saying is more genuinely +characteristic of American humor than the familiar "Cheer up. The worst +is yet to come." + +Whatever else one may say or leave unsaid about American humor, every +one realizes that it is a fundamentally necessary reaction from the +pressure of our modern living. Perhaps it is a handicap. Perhaps we +joke when we should be praying. Perhaps we make fun when we ought to be +setting our shoulders to the wheel. But the deeper fact is that most +American shoulders are set to the wheel too often and too long, and if +they do not stop for the joke they are done for. I have always +suspected that Mr. Kipling was thinking of American humor when he wrote +in his well-known lines on "The American Spirit":-- + + "So imperturbable he rules + Unkempt, disreputable, vast-- + And in the teeth of all the schools + I--I shall save him at the last." + +That is the very secret of the American sense of humor: the conviction +that something is going to save us at the last. Otherwise there would +be no joke! It is no accident, surely, that the man who is +increasingly idolized as the most representative of all Americans, the +burden-bearer of his people, the man of sorrows and acquainted with +grief, should be our most inveterate humorist. Let Lincoln have his +story and his joke, for he had faith in the saving of the nation; and +while his Cabinet are waiting impatiently to listen to his Proclamation +of Emancipation, give him another five minutes to read aloud to them +that new chapter by Artemus Ward. + + + + +VI + +Individualism and Fellowship + + +It would be difficult to find a clearer expression of the old doctrine +of individualism than is uttered by Carlyle in his London lecture on +"The Hero as Man of Letters." Listen to the grim child of Calvinism as +he fires his "Annandale grapeshot" into that sophisticated London +audience: "Men speak too much about the world.... The world's being +saved will not save us; nor the world's being lost destroy us. We +should look to ourselves.... For the saving of the world I will trust +confidently to the Maker of the world; and look a little to my own +saving, which I am more competent to!" + +Carlyle was never more soundly Puritanic, never more perfectly within +the lines of the moral traditions of his race than in these injunctions +to let the world go and to care for the individual soul. + +We are familiar with the doctrine on this side of the Atlantic. Here is +a single phrase from Emerson's _Journal_ of September, 1833, written on +his voyage home from that memorable visit to Europe where he first made +Carlyle's acquaintance. "Back again to myself," wrote Emerson, as the +five-hundred-ton sailing ship beat her way westward for a long month +across the stormy North Atlantic:--"Back again to myself.--A man +contains all that is needful to his government within himself. He is +made a law unto himself. All real good or evil that can befall him must +be from himself.... The purpose of life seems to be to acquaint a man +with himself." + +In the following August he is writing:-- + + "Societies, parties, are only incipient stages, tadpole + states of men, as caterpillars are social, but the butterfly + not. The true and finished man is ever alone." + +On March 23, 1835:-- + + "Alone is wisdom. Alone is happiness. Society nowadays makes + us low-spirited, hopeless. Alone is Heaven." + +And once more:-- + + "If AEschylus is that man he is taken for, he has not yet + done his office when he has educated the learned of Europe + for a thousand years. He is now to approve himself a master + of delight to me. If he cannot do that, all his fame shall + avail him nothing. I were a fool not to sacrifice a thousand + AEschyluses to my intellectual integrity." + +These quotations have to do with the personal life. Let me next +illustrate the individualism of the eighteen-thirties by the attitude +of two famous individualists toward the prosaic question of paying +taxes to the State. Carlyle told Emerson that he should pay taxes to +the House of Hanover just as long as the House of Hanover had the +physical force to collect them,--and not a day longer. + +Henry Thoreau was even more recalcitrant. Let me quote him:-- + + "I have paid no poll-tax for six years. I was put into a jail + once on this account, for one night; and, as I stood + considering the walls of solid stone, two or three feet + thick, the door of wood and iron, a foot thick, and the iron + grating which strained the light, I could not help being + struck with the foolishness of that institution which treated + me as if I were mere flesh and blood and bones, to be locked + up. I wondered that it should have concluded at length that + this was the best use it could put me to, and had never + thought to avail itself of my services in some way. I saw + that, if there was a wall of stone between me and my + townsmen, there was a still more difficult one to climb or + break through before they could get to be as free as I was. I + did not for a moment feel confined, and the walls seemed a + great waste of stone and mortar. I felt as if I alone of all + my townsmen had paid my tax. They plainly did not know how to + treat me, but behaved like persons who are underbred. In + every threat and in every compliment there was a blunder; for + they thought that my chief desire was to stand on the other + side of that stone wall. I could not but smile to see how + industriously they locked the door on my meditations, which + followed them out again without let or hindrance, and _they_ + were really all that was dangerous. As they could not reach + me, they had resolved to punish my body; just as boys, if + they cannot come at some person against whom they have a + spite, will abuse his dog. I saw that the State was + half-witted, that it was timid as a lone woman with her + silver spoons, and that it did not know its friends from its + foes, and I lost all my remaining respect for it, and pitied + it." + +Here is Thoreau's attitude toward the problems of the inner life. The +three quotations are from his _Walden_:-- + + "Probably I should not consciously and deliberately forsake + my particular calling to do the good which society demands of + me, to save the universe from annihilation." + + "I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, + to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could + not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, + discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what + was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice + resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live + deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily + and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to + cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a + corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved + to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of + it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were + sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a + true account of it in my next excursion." + + "It is said that the British Empire is very large and + respectable, and that the United States are a first-rate + power. We do not believe that a tide rises and falls behind + every man which can float the British Empire like a chip, if + he should ever harbor it in his mind." + +All of these quotations from Emerson and Thoreau are but various modes +of saying "Let the world go." Everybody knows that in later crises of +American history, both Thoreau and Emerson forgot their old preaching +of individualism, or at least merged it in the larger doctrine of +identification of the individual with the acts and emotions of the +community. And nevertheless as men of letters they habitually laid +stress upon the rights and duties of the private person. Upon a hundred +brilliant pages they preached the gospel that society is in conspiracy +against the individual manhood of every one of its members. + +They had a right to this doctrine. They came by it honestly through +long lines of ancestral heritage. The republicanism of the seventeenth +century in the American forests, as well as upon the floor of the +English House of Commons, had asserted that private persons had the +right to make and unmake kings. The republican theorists of the +eighteenth century had insisted that life, liberty, and the pursuit of +happiness were the birthright of each individual. This doctrine was +related, of course, to the doctrine of equality. If republicanism +teaches that "I am as good as others," democracy is forever hinting +"Others are as good as I." Democracy has been steadily extending the +notion of rights and duties. The first instinct, perhaps, is to ask +what is right, just, lawful, for me? Next, what is right, just, lawful +for my crowd? That is to say, my family, my clan, my race, my country. +The third instinct bids one ask what is right and just and lawful, not +merely for me, and for men like me, but for everybody. And when we get +that third question properly answered, we can afford to close +school-house and church and court-room, for this world's work will have +ended. + +We have already glanced at various phases of colonial individualism. We +have had a glimpse of Cotton Mather prostrate upon the dusty floor of +his study, agonizing now for himself and now for the countries of +Europe; we have watched Jonathan Edwards in his solitary ecstasies in +the Northampton and the Stockbridge woods; we have seen Franklin +preaching his gospel of personal thrift and of getting on in the world. +Down to the very verge of the Revolution the American pioneer spirit +was forever urging the individual to fight for his own hand. Each boy +on the old farms had his own chores to do; each head of a family had to +plan for himself. The most tragic failure of the individual in those +days was the poverty or illness which compelled him to "go on the +town." To be one of the town poor indicated that the individualistic +battle had been fought and lost. No one ever dreamed, apparently, that +a time for old-age pensions and honorable retiring funds was coming. +The feeling against any form of community assistance was like the +bitter hatred of the workhouse among English laborers of the +eighteen-forties. + +The stress upon purely personal qualities gave picturesqueness, color, +and vigor to the early life of the United States. Take the persons whom +Parkman describes in his _Oregon Trail_. They have the perfect +clearness of outline of the portraits by Walter Scott and the great +Romantic school of novelists who loved to paint pictures of interesting +individual men. There is the same stress upon individualistic +portraiture in Irving's _Astoria_; in the humorous journals of early +travellers in the Southern States. It is the secret of the curiosity +with which we observe the gamblers and miners and stage-drivers +described by Bret Harte. In the rural communities of to-day, in the +older portions of the country, and in the remoter settlements of the +West and Southwest, the individual man has a sort of picturesque, and, +as it were, artistic value, which the life of cities does not allow. +The gospel of self-reliance and of solitude is not preached more +effectively by the philosophers of Concord than it is by the +backwoodsmen, the spies, and the sailors of Fenimore Cooper. +Individualism as a doctrine of perfection for the private person and +individualism as a literary creed have thus gone hand in hand. "Produce +great persons, the rest follows," cried Walt Whitman. He was thinking +at the moment about American society and politics. But he believed that +the same law held good in poetry. Once get your great man and let him +abandon himself to poetry and the great poetry will be the result. It +was almost precisely the same teaching as in Carlyle's lecture on "The +Hero as Poet." + +Well, it is clear enough nowadays that both Whitman and Carlyle +underrated the value of discipline. The lack of discipline is the chief +obstacle to effective individualism. The private person must be well +trained, or he cannot do his work; and as civilization advances, it +becomes exceedingly difficult to train the individual without social +cooperation. A Paul or a Mahomet may discipline his own soul in the +Desert of Arabia; he may there learn the lessons that may later make +him a leader of men. But for the average man and indeed for most of the +exceptional men, the path to effectiveness lies through social and +professional discipline. Here is where the frontier stage of our +American life was necessarily weak. We have seen that our ancestors +gained something, no doubt, from their spirit of unconventionally and +freedom. But they also lost something through their dislike for +discipline, their indifference to criticism, their ineradicable +tendency, whether in business, in diplomacy, in art and letters and +education, to go "across lots." A certain degree of physical +orderliness was, indeed, imposed upon our ancestors by the conditions +of pioneer life. The natural prodigality and recklessness of frontier +existence was here and there sharply checked. Order is essential in a +camp, and the thin line of colonies was all camping. A certain instinct +for order underlay that resourcefulness which impresses every reader of +our history. Did the colonist need a tool? He learned to make it +himself. Isolation from the mother country was a stimulus to the +inventive imagination. Before long they were maintaining public order +in the same ingenious fashion in which they kept house. Appeals to +London took too much time. "We send a complaint this year," ran the +saying, "the next year they send to inquire, the third year the +ministry is changed." No wonder that resourcefulness bred independent +action, stimulated the Puritan taste for individualism, and led the way +to self-government. + +Yet who does not know that the inherent instinct for political order +may be accompanied by mental disorderliness? Even your modern +Englishman--as the saying goes--"muddles through." The minds of our +American forefathers were not always lucid. The mysticism of the New +England Calvinists sometimes bred fanaticism. The practical and the +theoretical were queerly blended. The essential unorderliness of the +American mind is admirably illustrated by that "Father of all the +Yankees," Benjamin Franklin. No student of Franklin's life fails to be +impressed by its happy casualness, its cheerful flavor of the +rogue-romance. Gil Blas himself never drifted into and out of an +adventure with a more offhand and imperturbable adroitness. Franklin +went through life with the joyous inventiveness of the amateur. He had +the amateur's enthusiasm, coupled with a clairvoyant penetration into +technical problems such as few amateurs have possessed. With all of his +wonderful patience towards other men, Franklin had in the realm of +scientific experiment something of the typical impatience of the mere +dabbler. He was inclined to lose interest in the special problem before +it was worked out. His large, tolerant intelligence was often as +unorderly as his papers and accounts. He was a wonderful colonial +Jack-of-all-trades; with a range of suggestion, a resourcefulness, a +knack of assimilation, a cosmopolitan many-sidedness, which has left us +perpetually his debtors. Under different surroundings, and disciplined +by a more severe and orderly training, Franklin might easily have +developed the very highest order of professional scientific +achievement. His natural talent for organization of men and +institutions, his "early projecting public spirit," his sense of the +lack of formal educational advantages in the colonies, made him the +founder of the Philadelphia Academy, the successful agitator for public +libraries. Academicism, even in the narrow sense, owes much to this +LL.D. of St. Andrews, D.C.L. of Oxford, and intimate associate of +French academicians. But one smiles a little, after all, to see the +bland printer in this academic company: he deserves his place there, +indeed, but he is something more and other than his associates. He is +the type of youthful, inexhaustible colonial America; reckless of +precedent, self-taught, splendidly alive; worth, to his day and +generation, a dozen born academicians; and yet suggesting by his very +imperfections, that the Americans of a later day, working under +different conditions, are bound to develop a sort of professional +skill, of steady, concentrated, ordered intellectual activity, for +which Franklin possessed the potential capacity rather than the +opportunity and the desire. + +Yet there were latent lines of order, hints and prophecies of a coming +fellowship, running deep and straight beneath the confused surface of +the preoccupied colonial consciousness. In another generation we see +the rude Western democracy asserting itself in the valley of the +Mississippi. This breed of pioneers, like their fathers on the Atlantic +coast line, could turn their hands to anything, because they must. "The +average man," says Mr. Herbert Croly, "without any special bent or +qualifications, was in the pioneer states the useful man. In that +country it was sheer waste to spend much energy upon tasks which +demanded skill, prolonged experience, high technical standards, or +exclusive devotion.... No special equipment was required. The farmer +was obliged to be all kinds of a rough mechanic. The business man was +merchant, manufacturer, and storekeeper. Almost everybody was something +of a politician. The number of parts which a man of energy played in +his time was astonishingly large. Andrew Jackson was successively a +lawyer, judge, planter, merchant, general, politician, and statesman; +and he played most of these parts with conspicuous success. In such a +society a man who persisted in one job, and who applied the most +rigorous and exacting standards to his work, was out of place and +really inefficient. His finished product did not serve its temporary +purpose much better than did the current careless and hasty product, +and his higher standards and peculiar ways constituted an implied +criticism on the easy methods of his neighbors. He interfered with the +rough good-fellowship which naturally arises among a group of men who +submit good naturedly and uncritically to current standards. It is no +wonder, consequently, that the pioneer Democracy viewed with distrust +and aversion the man with a special vocation and high standards of +achievement." + +The truth of this comment is apparent to everybody. It explains the +still lingering popular suspicion of the "academic" type of man. But we +are likely to forget that back of all that easy versatility and +reckless variety of effort there was some sound and patient and +constructive thinking. Lincoln used to describe himself humorously, +slightingly, as a "mast-fed" lawyer, one who had picked up in the woods +the scattered acorns of legal lore. It was a true enough description, +but after all, there were very few college-bred lawyers in the Eighth +Illinois Circuit or anywhere else who could hold their own, even in a +purely professional struggle, with that long-armed logician from the +backwoods. + +There was once a "mast-fed" novelist in this country, who scandalously +slighted his academic opportunities, went to sea, went into the navy, +went to farming, and then went into novel-writing to amuse himself. He +cared nothing and knew nothing about conscious literary art; his style +is diffuse, his syntax the despair of school-teachers, and many of his +characters are bores. But once let him strike the trail of a story, and +he follows it like his own Hawkeye; put him on salt water or in the +wilderness, and he knows rope and paddle, axe and rifle, sea and forest +and sky; and he knows his road home to the right ending of a story by +an instinct as sure as an Indian's. Professional novelists like Balzac, +professional critics like Sainte-Beuve, stand amazed at Fenimore +Cooper's skill and power. The true engineering and architectural lines +are there. They were not painfully plotted beforehand, like George +Eliot's. Cooper took, like Scott, "the easiest path across country," +just as a bee-hunter seems to take the easiest path through the woods. +But the bee-hunter, for all his apparent laziness, never loses sight of +the air-drawn line, marked by the homing bee; and your _Last of the +Mohicans_ will be instinctively, inevitably right, while your _Daniel +Deronda_ will be industriously wrong. + +Cooper literally builded better than he knew. Obstinately unacademic in +his temper and training, he has won the suffrages of the most +fastidious and academic judges of excellence in his profession. The +secret is, I suppose, that the lawlessness, the amateurishness, the +indifference to standards were on the surface,--apparent to +everybody,--the soundness and rightness of his practice were +unconscious. + +Franklin and Lincoln and Cooper, therefore, may be taken as striking +examples of individuals trained in the old happy-go-lucky way, and yet +with marked capacities for socialization, for fellowship. They +succeeded, even by the vulgar tests of success, in spite of their lack +of discipline. But for most men the chief obstacle to effective labor +even as individuals is the lack of thoroughgoing training. + +It is scarcely necessary to add that there are vast obstacles in the +way of individualism as a working theory of society. Carlyle's theory +of "Hero Worship" has fewer adherents than for half a century. It is +picturesque,--that conception of a great, sincere man and of a world +reverencing him and begging to be led by him. But the difficulty is +that contemporary democracy does not say to the Hero, as Carlyle +thought it must say, "Govern me! I am mad and miserable, and cannot +govern myself!" + +Democracy says to the Hero, "Thank you very much, but this is our +affair. Join us, if you like. We shall be glad of your company. But we +are not looking for governors. We propose to govern ourselves." + +Even from the point of view of literature and art,--fields of activity +where the individual performer has often been felt to be quite +independent of his audience,--it is quite evident nowadays that the old +theory of individualism breaks down. Even your lyric poet, who more +than any other artist stands or sings alone, falls easily into mere +lyric eccentricity if he is not bound to his fellows by wholesome and +normal ties. In fact, this lyric eccentricity, weakness, wistfulness, +is one of the notable defects of American poetry. We have always been +lacking in the more objective forms of literary art, like epic and +drama. Poe, and the imitators of Poe, have been regarded too often by +our people as the normal type of poet. One must not forget the silent +solitary ecstasies that have gone into the making of enduring lyric +verse, but our literature proves abundantly how soon sweetness may turn +to an Emily Dickinson strain of morbidness; how fatally the lovely +becomes transformed into the queer. The history of the American short +story furnishes many similar examples. The artistic intensity of a +Hawthorne, his ethical and moral preoccupations, are all a part of the +creed of individualistic art. But both Hawthorne and Poe would have +written,--one dare not say better stories, but at least greater and +broader and more human stories,--if they had not been forced to walk so +constantly in solitary pathways. That fellowship in artistic creation +which has characterized some of the greatest periods of art production +was something wholly absent from the experience of these gifted and +lonely men. Even Emerson and Thoreau wrote "whim" over their portals +more often than any artist has the privilege to write it. Emerson never +had any thorough training, either in philosophy, theology, or history. +He admits it upon a dozen smiling pages. Perhaps it adds to his purely +personal charm, just as Montaigne's confession of his intellectual and +moral weaknesses heightens our fondness for the Prince of Essayists. +But the deeper fact is that not only Emerson and Thoreau, Poe and +Hawthorne, but practically every American writer and artist from the +beginning has been forced to do his work without the sustaining and +heartening touch of national fellowship and pride. Emerson himself felt +the chilling poverty in the intellectual and emotional life of the +country. He betrays it in this striking passage from his _Journal_, +about the sculptor Greenough:-- + + "What interest has Greenough to make a good statue? Who cares + whether it is good? A few prosperous gentlemen and ladies; + but the Universal Yankee Nation roaring in the capitol to + approve or condemn would make his eye and hand and heart go + to a new tune." + +Those words were written in 1836, but we are still waiting for that new +national anthem, sustaining the heart and the voice of the individual +artist. Yet there are signs that it is coming. + +It is obvious that the day for the old individualism has passed. +Whether one looks at art and literature or at the general activities of +American society, it is clear that the isolated individual is +incompetent to carry on his necessary tasks. This is not saying that we +have outgrown the individual. We shall never outgrow the individual. We +need for every page of literature and for every adequate performance of +society more highly perfected individuals. Some one said of Edgar Allan +Poe that he did not know enough to be a great poet. All around us and +every day we find individuals who do not know enough for their specific +job; men who do not love enough, men in whom the power of will is too +feeble. Such men, as individuals, must know and love and will more +adequately; and this not merely to perfect their functioning as +individuals, but to fulfill their obligations to contemporary society. +A true spiritual democracy will never be reached until highly trained +individuals are united in the bonds of fraternal feeling. Every +individual defect in training, defect in aspiration, defect in passion, +becomes ultimately a defect in society. + +Let us turn, then, to those conditions of American society which have +prepared the way for, and foreshadowed, a more perfect fellowship. We +shall instantly perceive the relation of these general social +conditions to the specific performances of our men of letters. We have +repeatedly noted that our most characteristic literature is what has +been called a citizen literature. It is the sort of writing which +springs from a sense of the general needs of the community and which +has had for its object the safe-guarding or the betterment of the +community. Aside from a few masterpieces of lyric poetry, and aside +from the short story as represented by such isolated artists as Poe and +Hawthorne, our literature as a whole has this civic note. It may be +detected in the first writings of the colonists. Captain John Smith's +angry order at Jamestown, "He that will not work neither let him eat," +is one of the planks in the platform of democracy. Under the trying and +depressing conditions of that disastrous settlement at Eden in _Martin +Chuzzlewit_ it is the quick wits and the brave heart of Mark Tapley +which prove him superior to his employer. The same sermon is preached +in Mr. Barrie's play, _The Admirable Crichton_: cast away upon the +desert island, the butler proves himself a better man than his master. +This is the motive of a very modern play, but it may be illustrated a +hundred times in the history of the seventeenth and eighteenth +centuries in America. The practical experiences of the colonists +confirmed them in their republican theories. It is true that they held +to a doctrine of religious and political individualism. But the moment +these theories were put to work in the wilderness a new order of things +decreed that this individualism should be modified in the direction of +fellowship. Calvinism itself, for all of its insistence upon the value +of the individual soul, taught also the principle of the equality of +all souls before God. It was thus that the _Institutes_ of Calvin +became one of the charters of democracy. The democratic drift in the +writings of Franklin and Jefferson is too well known to need any +further comment. The triumph of the rebellious colonists of 1776 was a +triumph of democratic principles; and although a Tory reaction came +promptly, although Hamiltonianism came to stay as a beneficent check to +over-radical, populistic theories, the history of the last century and +a quarter has abundantly shown the vitality and the endurance of +democratic ideas. + +One may fairly say that the decade in which American democracy revealed +its most ugly and quarrelsome aspect was the decade of the +eighteen-thirties. That was the decade when Washington Irving and +Fenimore Cooper came home from long sojourns in Europe. They found +themselves confronted at once by sensitive, suspicious neighbors who +hated England and Europe and had a lurking or open hostility towards +anything that savored of Old World culture. Yet in that very epoch +when English visitors were passing their most harsh and censorious +verdict upon American culture, Emerson was writing in his _Journal_ +(June 18, 1834) a singular prophecy to the effect that the evils of +our democracy, so far as literature was concerned, were to be cured by +the remedy of more democracy. Is it not striking that he turns away +from the universities and the traditional culture of New England and +looks towards the Jacksonism of the new West to create a new and native +American literature? Here is the passage:-- + + "We all lean on England; scarce a verse, a page, a newspaper, + but is writ in imitation of English forms; our very manners + and conversation are traditional, and sometimes the life + seems dying out of all literature, and this enormous paper + currency of Words is accepted instead. I suppose the evil may + be cured by this rank rabble party, the Jacksonism of the + country, heedless of English and of all literature--a stone + cut out of the ground without hands;--they may root out the + hollow dilettantism of our cultivation in the coarsest way, + and the new-born may begin again to frame their own world + with greater advantage." + +From that raw epoch of the eighteen-thirties on to the Civil War, one +may constantly detect in American writing the accents of democratic +radicalism. Partly, no doubt, it was a heritage of the sentiment of the +French Revolution. "My father," said John Greenleaf Whittier, "really +believed in the Preamble of the Bill of Rights, which re-affirmed the +Declaration of Independence." So did the son! Equally clear in the +writings of those thirty years are echoes of the English radicalism +which had so much in common with the democratic movement across the +English Channel. The part which English thinkers and English agitators +played in securing for America the fruits of her own democratic +principles has never been adequately acknowledged. + +That the outcome of the Civil War meant a triumph of democratic ideas +as against aristocratic privilege, no one can doubt. There were no +stancher adherents of the democratic idea than our intellectual +aristocrats. The best Union editorials at the time of the Civil War, +says James Ford Rhodes, were written by scholars like Charles Eliot +Norton and James Russell Lowell. I think it was Lowell who once said, +in combatting the old aristocratic notion of white man supremacy, that +no gentleman is willing to accept privileges that are inaccessible to +other men. This is precisely like the famous sentence of Walt Whitman +which first arrested the attention of "Golden Rule Jones," the mayor of +Toledo, and which made him not only a Whitmaniac for the rest of his +life but one of the most useful of American citizens. The line was, "I +will accept nothing which all may not have their counterpart of on the +same terms." + +This instinct of fellowship cannot be separated, of course, from the +older instincts of righteousness and justice. It involves, however, +more than giving the other man his due. It means feeling towards him as +towards another "fellow." It involves the sentiment of partnership. +Historians of early mining life in California have noted the new phase +of social feeling in the mining-camps which followed upon the change +from the pan--held and shaken by the solitary miner--to the cradle, +which required the cooperation of at least two men. It was when the +cradle came in that the miners first began to say "partner." As the +cradle gave way to placer mining, larger and larger schemes of +cooperation came into use. In fact, Professor Royce has pointed out in +his _History of California_ that the whole lesson of California +history is precisely the lesson most necessary to be learned by the +country as a whole, namely, that the phase of individual gain-getting +and individualistic power always leads to anarchy and reaction, and +that it becomes necessary, even in the interests of effective +individualism itself, to recognize the compelling and ultimate +authority of society. + +What went on in California between 1849 and 1852 is precisely typical +of what is going on everywhere to-day. American men and women are +learning, as we say, "to get together." It is the distinctly +twentieth-century programme. We must all learn the art of getting +together, not merely to conserve the interests of literature and art +and society, but to preserve the individual himself in his just rights. +Any one who misunderstands the depth and the scope of the present +political restlessness which is manifested in every section of the +country, misunderstands the American instinct for fellowship. It is a +law of that fellowship that what is right and legitimate for me is +right and legitimate for the other fellow also. The American mind and +the American conscience are becoming socialized before our very eyes. +American art and literature must keep pace with this socialization of +the intelligence and the conscience, or they will be no longer +representative of the true America. + +Literary illustrations of this spirit of fraternalism lie close at +hand. They are to be found here and there even in the rebellious, +well-nigh anarchic, individualism of the Concord men. They are to be +found throughout the prose and verse of Whittier. No one has preached a +truer or more effective gospel of fellowship than Longfellow, whose +poetry has been one of the pervasive influences in American democracy, +although Longfellow had but little to say about politics and never +posed in a slouch hat and with his trousers tucked into his boots. +Fellowship is taught in the _Biglow Papers_ of Lowell and the stories +of Mrs. Stowe. It is wholly absent from the prose and verse of Poe, and +it imparts but a feeble warmth to the delicately written pages of +Hawthorne. But in the books written for the great common audience of +American men and women, like the novels of Winston Churchill; and in +the plays which have scored the greatest popular successes, like those +of Denman Thompson, Bronson Howard, Gillette, Augustus Thomas, the +doctrine of fellowship is everywhere to be traced. It is in the poems +of James Whitcomb Riley and of Sam Walter Foss; in the work of hundreds +of lesser known writers of verse and prose who have echoed Foss's +sentiment about living in a "house by the side of the road" and being a +"friend of man." + +To many readers the supreme literary example of the gospel of American +fellowship is to be found in Walt Whitman. One will look long before +one finds a more consistent or a nobler doctrine of fellowship than is +chanted in _Leaves of Grass_. It is based upon individualism; the +strong body and the possessed soul, sure of itself amid the whirling of +the "quicksand years"; but it sets these strong persons upon the "open +road" in comradeship; it is the sentiment of comradeship which creates +the indissoluble union of "these States"; and the States, in turn, in +spite of every "alarmist," "partialist," or "infidel," are to stretch +out unsuspicious and friendly hands of fellowship to the whole world. +Anybody has the right to call _Leaves of Grass_ poor poetry, if he +pleases; but nobody has the right to deny its magnificent Americanism. + +It is not merely in literature that this message of fellowship is +brought to our generation. Let me quote a few sentences from the recent +address of George Gray Barnard, the sculptor, in explaining the meaning +of his marble groups now placed at the entrance to the Capitol of +Pennsylvania. "I resolved," says Barnard, "that I would build such +groups as should stand at the entrance to the People's temple ... the +home of those visions of the ever-widening and broadening brotherhood +that gives to life its dignity and its meaning. Life is told in terms +of labor. It is fitting that labor, its triumphs, its message, should +be told to those who gaze upon a temple of the people. The worker is +the hope of all the future. The needs of the worker, his problems, his +hopes, his untold longings, his sacrifices, his triumphs, all of these +are the field of the art of the future. Slowly we are groping our way +towards the new brotherhood, and when that day dawns, men will enter a +world made a paradise by labor. Labor makes us kin. It is for this +reason that there has been placed at the entrance of this great +building the message of the Adam and Eve of the future, the message of +labor and of fraternity." + +That there are defects in this gospel and programme of American +fellowship, every one is aware. If the obstacle to effective +individualism is lack of discipline, the obstacles to effective +fellowship are vagueness, crankiness, inefficiency, and the relics of +primal selfishness. Nobody in our day has preached the tidings of +universal fellowship more fervidly and powerfully than Tolstoi. Yet +when one asks the great Russian, "What am I to do as a member of this +fellowship?" Tolstoi gives but a confused and impractical answer. He +applies to the complex and contradictory facts of our contemporary +civilization the highest test and standard known to him: namely, the +principles of the New Testament. But if you ask him precisely how these +principles are to be made the working programme of to-morrow, the +Russian mysticism and fanaticism settle over him like a fog. We pass +Tolstoians on the streets of our American cities every day; they have +the eyes of dreamers, of those who would build, if they could, a new +Heaven and a new Earth. But they do not know exactly how to go about +it. Our practical Western minds seize upon some actual plan for +constructive labor. Miss Jane Addams organizes her settlements in the +slums; Booker Washington gives his race models of industrial education; +President Eliot has a theory of university reform and then struggles +successfully for forty years to put that theory into practice. Compared +with the concrete performance of such social workers as these, the +gospel according to Whitman and Tolstoi is bound to seem vague in its +outlines, and ineffective in its concrete results. That such a gospel +attracts cranks and eccentrics of all sorts is not to be wondered at. +They come and go, but the deeper conceptions of fraternalism remain. + +A further obstacle to the progress of fellowship lies in selfishness. +But let us see how even the coarser and rawer and cruder traits of the +American character may be related to the spirit of common endeavor +which is slowly transforming our society, and modifying, before our +eyes, our contemporary art and literature. + +"The West," says James Bryce, "is the most American part of America, +that is to say the part where those features which distinguish America +from Europe come out in the strongest relief." We have already noted in +our study of American romance how the call of the West represented for +a while the escape from reality. The individual, following that +retreating horizon which we name the West, found an escape from +convention and from social law. Beyond the Mississippi or beyond the +Rockies meant to him that "somewheres east of Suez" where the Ten +Commandments are no longer to be found, where the individual has free +rein. But by and by comes the inevitable reaction, the return to +reality. The pioneer sobers down; he finds that "the Ten Commandments +will not budge"; he sees the need of law and order; he organizes a +vigilance committee; he impanels a jury, even though the old Spanish +law does not recognize a jury. The new land settles to its rest. The +output of the gold mines shrinks into insignificance when compared with +the cash value of crops of hay and potatoes. The old picturesque +individualism yields to a new social order, to the conception of the +rights of the state. The story of the West is thus an epitome of the +individual human life as well as the history of the United States. + +We have been living through a period where the mind of the West has +seemed to be the typical national mind. We have been indifferent to +traditions. We have overlooked the defective training of the +individual, provided he "made good." We have often, as in the free +silver craze, turned our back upon universal experience. We have been +recklessly deaf to the teachings of history; we have spoken of the laws +of literature and art as if they were mere conventions designed to +oppress the free activity of the artist. Typical utterances of our +writers are Jack London's "I want to get away from the musty grip of +the past," and Frank Norris's "I do not want to write literature, I +want to write life." + +The soul of the West, and a good deal of the soul of America, has been +betrayed in words like those. Not to share this hopefulness of the +West, its stress upon feeling rather than thinking, its superb +confidence, is to be ignorant of the constructive forces of the nation. +The humor of the West, its democracy, its rough kindness, its faith in +the people, its generous notion of "the square deal for everybody," +its elevation of the man above the dollar, are all typical of the +American way of looking at the world. Typical also, is its social +solidarity, its swift emotionalism of the masses. It is the Western +interest in the ethical aspect of social movements that is creating +some of the moving forces in American society to-day. Experiment +stations of all kinds flourish on that soil. Chicago newspapers are +more alive to new ideas than the newspapers of New York or Boston. No +one can understand the present-day America if he does not understand +the men and women who live between the Allegheny Mountains and the +Rocky Mountains. They have worked out, more successfully than the +composite population of the East, a general theory of the relation of +the individual to society; in other words, a combination of +individualism with fellowship. + +To draw up an indictment against this typical section of our country is +to draw up an indictment against our people as a whole. And yet one who +studies the literature and art produced in the great Mississippi Valley +will see, I believe, that the needs of the West are the real needs of +America. Take that commonness of mind and tone, which friendly foreign +critics, from De Tocqueville to Bryce, have indicated as one of the +dangers of our democracy. This commonness of mind and tone is often one +of the penalties of fellowship. It may mean a levelling down instead of +a levelling up. + +Take the tyranny of the majority,--to which Mr. Bryce has devoted one +of his most suggestive chapters. You begin by recognizing the rights of +the majority. You end by believing that the majority must be right. You +cease to struggle against it. In other words, you yield to what Mr. +Bryce calls "the fatalism of the multitude." The individual has a sense +of insignificance. It is vain to oppose the general current. It is +easier to acquiesce and to submit. The sense of personal responsibility +lessens. What is the use of battling for one's own opinions when one +can already see that the multitude is on the other side? The greater +your democratic faith in the ultimate rightness of the multitude, the +less perhaps your individual power of will. The easier is it for you to +believe that everything is coming out right, whether you put your +shoulder to the wheel or not. + +The problem of overcoming these evils is nothing less than the problem +of spiritualizing democracy. There are some of our hero-worshipping +people who think that that vast result can still be accomplished by +harking back to some such programme as the "great man" theory of +Carlyle. Another theory of spiritualizing democracy, no less familiar +to the student of nineteen-century literature, is what is called "the +divine average" doctrine of Walt Whitman. The average man is to be +taught the glory of his walk and trade. Round every head there is to be +an aureole. "A common wave of thought and joy, lifting mankind again," +is to make us forget the old distinction between the individual and the +social group. We are all to be the sons of the morning. + +We must not pause to analyze or to illustrate these two theories. +Carlyle's theory seems to me to be outworn, and Whitman's theory is +premature. But it is clear that they both admit that the mass of men +are as yet incompletely spiritualized, not yet raised to their full +stature. Unquestionably, our American life is, in European eyes at +least, monotonously uniform. It is touched with self-complacency. It +is too intent upon material progress. It confuses bigness with +greatness. It is unrestful. It is marked by intellectual impatience. +Our authors are eager to write life rather than literature. But they +are so eager that they overlook the need of literary discipline. They +do not learn to write literature and therefore most of them are +incapable of interpreting life. They escape, perhaps, from "the musty +grip of the past," but in so doing they refuse to learn the inexorable +lessons of the past. Hence the fact that our books lack power, that +they are not commensurate with the living forces of the country. The +unconscious, moral, and spiritual life of the nation is not back of +them, making "eye and hand and heart go to a new tune." + +If we could have that, we should ask no more, for we believe in the +nation. I heard a doctor say, the other day, that a man's chief lesson +was to pull his brain down into his spinal cord; that is to say, to +make his activities not so much the result of conscious thought and +volition, as of unconscious, reflex action; to stop thinking and +willing, and simply _do_ what one has to do. May there not be a hint +here of the ultimate relation of the individual to the social +organism; the relation of our literature to our national character? +There is a period, no doubt, when the individual must painfully +question himself, test his powers, and acquire the sense of his own +place in the world. But there also comes a more mature period when he +takes that place unconsciously, does his work almost without thinking +about it, as if it were not his work at all. The brain has gone down +into the spinal cord; the man is functioning as apart of the organism +of society; he has ceased to question, to plan, to decide; it is +instinct that does his work for him. + +Literature and art, at their noblest, function in that instinctive way. +They become the unconscious expression of a civilization. A nation +passes out of its adolescent preoccupation with plans and with +materials. It learns to do its work, precisely as Goethe bade the +artist do his task, without talking about it. We, too, shall outgrow in +time our questioning, our self-analysis, our futile comparison of +ourselves with other nations, our self-conscious study of our own +national character. We shall not forget the distinction between "each" +and "all," but "all" will increasingly be placed at the service of +"each." With fellowship based upon individualism, and with +individualism ever leading to fellowship, America will perform its +vital tasks, and its literature will be the unconscious and beautiful +utterance of its inner life. + + +THE END. + + +The Riverside Press + +CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS + +U. S. A. + + + + + * * * * * + +Transcriber's Notes + + +Pages 53, 141: Changed the oe ligature to oe in the name Crevecoeur: + (Settlers like Crevecoeur), (enthusiasm of a settler like Crevecoeur) + +Page 67: Changed compaign to campaign: + (Their compaign of "exposure," during the last decade,) + +Page 165: Retained the spaced 't is, to match original line of poetry: + ("If my bark sinks, 't is to another sea.") + +Page 222: Changed conciousness to consciousness: + (the preoccupied colonial conciousness.) + +Page 223: Changed explans to explains: + (It explans the still lingering popular suspicion) + +Page 232: Changed sojurns to sojourns: + (Fenimore Cooper came home from long sojurns in Europe.) + + + + + + + + +End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The American Mind, by Bliss Perry + +*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE AMERICAN MIND *** + +***** This file should be named 29952.txt or 29952.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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