t\)t 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 The E. T. Earl Lectures 1912 The American Mind By Bliss ferry Boston and New York Houghton Mifflin Company 1912 pf COPYRIGHT, 1912, BY BLISS PERRY ALL RIGHTS RESERVED Published October zqia TO WALTER MORRIS HART 250630 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 ap preciation 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 pub lication 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 Race, Nation, and Book MANY years ago, as a student in a foreign uni versity, I remember attacking, with the com placency of youth, a German history of the English drama, in six volumes. I lost courage long before the author reached the age of Eliz abeth, 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 professordid,inthe 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 [3] ::/: >:";/." jT|ij& AMERICAN MIND Every Man in bis Humour and She Stoops to Con quer? 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 Re naissance. Englishmen of the seventeenth cent ury, with an unction of pseudo-science added to their natural patriotism, discovered in the Eng lish 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 de- [4] RACE, NATION, AND BOOK liver their minds with a sound simplicity, that they have the middle qualities between the re served, 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 uni versal 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 ex pressions. . . . Even the position of our cli mate, 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 coun try a Land of Experimental Knowledge. * The excellent Sprat was the friend and exec utor of the poet Cowley, who has in the Preface to his Poems a charming passage about the rela tion 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 [ 5] THE AMERICAN MIND 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 re quires 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 delight ful Idaeas, when it undertakes to communicate delight to others, which is the main end ofPoe- sie. One may see through the stile of Ovid de *Trist., the humbled and dejected condition of Spirit with which he wrote it ; there scarce re mains any footstep of that Genius, )uem nee Jovis ira, nee ignes, etc. The cold of the coun try has strucken through all his faculties, and benummed the very feet of his Verses" Madame de StaeTs Germany, one of the most famous ofthe" 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 sig nificance of place, time, and circumstances as affecting the nature of a literary product, when [6] RACE, NATION, AND BOOK we come to the exact and as it were mathemati cal demonstration of the precise workings of these physical influences, our generation is dis tinctly more cautious than were the literary crit ics 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 ques tioned by the experts. " Saxon " and " Norman," for example, no longer seem to us such simple terms as sufficed for the purpose of Scott s Ivan- hoe or of Thierry s Norman Conquest, a book inspired by Scott s romance. The late Profes sor Freeman, with characteristic bluntness, remarked of the latter book : " Thierry says at the end of his work that there are no longer ei ther Normans or Saxons except in history. . . . But in Thierry s sense of the word, it would be truer to say that there never were c Nor mans or c Saxons anywhere, save in the pages of romances like his own." There is a brutal directness about this ver dict upon a rival historian which we shall pro bably persist in calling " Saxon " ; but it is no [7] THE AMERICAN MIND 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 con sider 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 ad mirably summed up by Josiah Royce. "A race psychology," he declares, " is still a science for the future to discover. . . . We do not scien tifically 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 ap plication of racial theories to intellectual pro ducts been more pronounced than in the fields of art and literature. Audiences listen to a waltz which the programme declares to be an adapta tion of a Hungarian folk-song, and though they may be more ignorant of Hungary than Shake speare was of Bohemia, they have no hesitation in exclaiming : " How truly Hungarian this [8] RACE, NATION, AND BOOK is ! " Or, it may be, how truly <c Japanese " is this vase which was made in Japan perhaps for the American market; or how intensely " Russian " is this melancholy tale by Turge- nieff. 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 en thusiastic 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 us ually 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 im mensely to the enjoyment of the readers of Aris tophanes ; the fun becomes funnier and the dar ing even more splendid than before. Moliere s training as an actor does affect the dramaturgic quality of his comedies. All this is demonstra ble, 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 [9] THE AMERICAN MIND and that unmistakable evidence of local or tem poral influence on the form or spirit of a master piece, we are now inclined to make some distinct reservations. These reservations are not with out 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 Foe 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 liter ature, anything distinctly American. Wholly aside from such spiritual insulation RACE, NATION, AND BOOK 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 dis tinctly "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 fur nish 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 THE AMERICAN MIND 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 blun ders 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 char acteristics, by means of only one art, such as lit erature, or by all the arts together, is at best im perfect, 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 cer tain emotions. It may well happen that litera ture 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 re- [ i*] RACE, NATION, AND BOOK port 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 de pression 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 longwished 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 tfot 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 Aris totle 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 THE AMERICAN MIND thus give permanence to their fleeting vision of the world. Naive as may have been the Renais sance expression of this need of formal training, blind as it frequently was to the beauty which we recognize in the undisciplined vernacular lit eratures 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 ne glected. " 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 Flor ence. It demands not merely personal distinc tion or power, not merely some uncommon height or depth or breadth of capacity and in sight, but a purely artistic training, which in the very nature of the case is rare. M illions of Rus sians, perhaps, have felt about the general pro blems of life much as Turgenieff felt, but they lacked the sheer literary art with which the Notes of a Sportsman was written. Thousands of [ H] RACE, NATION, AND BOOK 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 tem per 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." Every body recog nizes that literary gifts imply an exceptionally rich development of general human capacities, together with a professional aptitude and train- ing of which but few men are capable. There is but one lumberman in camp who can play the riddle, 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 fam ily is often the one who acquires notoriety and a bank account, but he is likely to have can did friends who admit, though not always in his presence, that, aside from this one professional gift and practice, he is not intellectually or emo tionally or spiritually superior to his brothers [ si THE AMERICAN MIND and sisters. Waldo Emerson thought him self 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. j Applied to the literary history of a race, this principle is suggestive. We must be slow to af firm 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 evi dence ? 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 Eng land, Professor Trent affirms, these contempo raries of Milton and Bunyan would have pro duced no art or literature. Now it is quite true that for nearly two hundred years after the date [ 16] RACE, NATION, AND BOOK of the first settlementof 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 pas sionate eagerness with which the forefathers ab sorbed the noblest of all poetry and prose in the pages oftheirone book, the Bible; theunwearied 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 farm house 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 ter rible ; is there in all this no discipline of the soul in moral beauty, and no trainingof the eye to perceive the exquisite harmonies of the visi ble earth ? It is true that the Puritans had no professional men of letters ; it is true that doc trinal sermons provided their chief intellectual sustenance ; true that their lives were stern, and [ 17] THE AMERICAN MIND 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 Jona than Edwards in his youthful Diary. There is every presumption, from what we know of the two men, that Whittier s father andgrandfather 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 hewould have been a.mused(as\\is Margaret Smith s Journalproves] at the notion that his ancestors were without a sense of beauty or that they lacked responsive ness 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 [ 18] RACE, NATION, AND BOOK of the beauty of words, and the excitement of rhythm. Emerson s Journal m 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 unre corded ? 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 Pente costal 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 seg ment 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 Whit- tier s Snow-Bound is a truthful report, not merely of a certain farmhouse kitchen in East Haver- hill, 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 [ 19] THE AMERICAN MIND 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 amore 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 char acter 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 cou ple 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 im agination, and that Puttenham, in phrases which [-i 20 j RACE, NATION, AND BOOK that generation could not have found extrava gant, 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 Ca nadian 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, ques tions so familiar to modern criticism, remain valid and indeed essential; but that in apply ing them to American writing there are cer tain 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 crit ical assessment of a typical German or French or Scandinavian writer, where the strain of blood THE AMERICAN MIND 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 in evitable 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 Real ism ; his Titanism and his childishness ; his stu pendous outline for the Human Comedy; and RACE, NATION, AND BOOK his scarcely less astounding actual achievement. All this is discussed by his biographers with the professional dexterity of critics trained intellec tually in the Latin traditions and instinctively aware of the claims of race, biographers familiar with every page of French history, and pro foundly 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 Wood- berry s Hawthorne is all the more notable be cause 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 Pro fessor 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 THE AMERICAN MIND most justly famous of American writers. But precisely what national traits are to be discov ered 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, sim ply 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 fascinat ing question of Physical Geography. Climate, soil, food, occupation, religious or moral pre occupation, social environment, Salem witch craft and Salem seafaring had all laid their in visible 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. Kip ling, born in India, is an " Englishman with a RACE, NATION, AND BOOK difference"? Hawthorne would have smiled, or, more probably, he would have sworn, at such a question. He considered himself an Ameri can Democrat; in fact a contra mundum Demo crat, 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 inhabit ants 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 base ball 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 ab sence of a republican form of government as the citizens of that C 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 litera ture of " Greater Britain." Was Hawthorne [25 ] THE AMERICAN MIND 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 consist ently engaged in producing, not "colonial" or " Greater-British " but distinctly American literature ? We need not answer this ques tion prematurely, if we wish to reserve our judg ment, 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 pro duced in the United States of America must face other questions almost as complicated as this of race. In fact, when wechoose Hawthorne as a typical case in which to observe the Ameri can refashioning of the English temper into something not English, we are selecting a very simple problem compared with the complex ities 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 RACE, NATION, AND BOOK have been produced, but with what our grand fathers considered a " boundless continent." This vast national domain was long ago " or ganized " for political purposes : but so far as literature is concerned it remains unorganized to-day. We have, as has been constantly ob served, 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-ex citement 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 acquaint ance with the variations of type in different sec tions 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, THE AMERICAN MIND in Great Britain and in Germany, in Italy and Spain, and in all of the countries a correspond ing " regional " literature has been developed. Our provincial variations of accent and vocabu lary, 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 vari ations 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 Ameri can communities where all the speech or habit ual thought is of the future. Foreigners usually consider such communities the most typically "American," as doubtless they are; but there [28] RACE, NATION, AND BOOK 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 trans iency. Some sections of the country, and not ably the slave-holding states in the forty years preceding the Civil War, have suffered wide spread 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 can not be reckoned. Over vast sections of our prosperous and intelligent people of the Miss issippi Basin to-day the very genius of com- monplaceness seems to hover. Take the great State of Iowa, with its well-to-do and homo geneous population, its fortunate absence of perplexing city-problems, its general air of pro sperity 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 pop ulation and prosperity, and only one generation [*9 J THE AMERICAN MIND further removed than Iowa from primitive pio neer 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 through out 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 in vestigation 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 " cal low," as the revelation of " national inexperi ence," 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 not able 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 [30] RACE, NATION, AND BOOK 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 De foe 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 withthespeechof themothercountry. 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 in sist that America has not yet had time to learn or recite her bookish lessons. This is not saying that we have had a con tinuous 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 nat ural to search for revelations of those qualities which we now feel to be essential to our national [31 ] THE AMERICAN MIND 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 sig nificant, most of us, I imagine, would choose the first vigorous epoch of New England Puri tanism, say from 1630 to 1676 ; then, the epoch of the great Virginians, say from 1766 to 1789 ; and finally the epoch of distinctly national feel ing, 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 settle ments began. Each of them has revealed, in a noble fashion, the political, ethical, and emo tional traits of our people ; and although the first two of the three periods concerned them selves 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 Au thority," John Winthrop s grave advice on the " Nature of Liberty," Jefferson s " Declara tion," Webster s "Reply to Hayne," Lincoln s RACE, NATION, AND BOOK "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 des tiny. 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 separ ated from one another by long intervals of time, the representative figures of the three epochs, English in blood and American in feel ing, 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 per manent and personalized expression to the un derlying forces of the national life. There is another preliminary word which needs no less to be said. It concerns the ques tion of international influences upon national [33] THE AMERICAN MIND 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 iso lation of the United States, we are rather too fond of saying, closed with the Spanish-Amer ican 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 Trans cendentalism, which was itself singularly cos mopolitan in its literary appetites. The letters and journals of Emerson, Whitman, and Tho- reau show the strong European meat on which these men fed, just before their robust declar ations of our self-sufficiency. But there is no real self-sufficiency, and Emerson and Whit- [34] RACE, NATION, AND BOOK man themselves, in other moods, have written most suggestive passages upon our European inheritances and affiliations. The fortunes of the early New England colo nies, in fact, were followed by Protestant Eu rope 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 re garded as outposts of European ideas. Their Calvinism, so cheaply derided and so super ficially understood, even to-day, was the intel lectual platform of that portion of Europe which was mentally and morally awake to the vast issues involved in individual respon sibility 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 Massachu setts 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 C 35 ] THE AMERICAN MIND dust " before the Lord, as his newly published Diary tells us, is wrestling " on the behalf of whole nations." He receives a " strong Persua sion that very overturning Dispensations of Heaven will quickly befal the French Em pire"; 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 Mor tifications 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 col onies 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 Cam bridge and Oxford as could be found in any population of similar size in the mother coun try. At one time during those years there was in Massachusetts and Connecticut alone a Cambridge graduate for every two hundred and [36] : RACE, NATION, AND BOOK 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 invis ible 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, [37] THE AMERICAN MIND 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 colo nizing 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 his tory 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 im posed upon modern Europe. American formal [38 ] RACE, NATION, AND BOOK culture is, and has been, from the beginning, pre dominantly 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 mani fold races now transplanted here and in process of Americanization has for a while its own news papers and churches and social life carried on in a foreign dialect. But this stage of evolution passes swiftly. The assimilative forces of Amer ican 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 amal- [39] THE AMERICAN MIND gamating power of English culture explains, no doubt, why German and Scandinavian im migration 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 learn ing 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 markupon our literature. Abraham Lincoln, in his store- [40] RACE, NATION, AND BOOK keeping days, used to sit under a tree outside the grocery store of Lincoln and Berry, read ing Voltaire.) One would like to think that he then and there assimilated something of the in comparable lucidity of style of the great French man. But Voltaire s influence upon Lincoln s style cannot be proved, any more than Rous seau 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 in debted to Zola for the scheme of that uncom pleted trilogy, the prose epic of the Wheat ; and Owen Wister has revealed a not uncommon ex perience of our younger writing men in confess ing 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 be tween 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 [41 ] THE AMERICAN MIND 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 Amer ican literature must ultimately reckon with all those sources of mental and emotional quick ening which have yielded to our pioneer peo ple 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 lit erature 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 pio neer; the passion of old political battles; the yearning after spiritual truth and social read- RACE, NATION, AND BOOK justment ; the baffled quest of beauty. Such a history must be broad enough for the Federal ist and for Webster s oratory, for Beecher s ser mons and Greeley s editorials, and the Lin coln-Douglas debates. It must picture thedaily existence of our citizens from the beginning ; their working ideas, their phrases and shibbo leths 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, with out any stylistic consciousness whatever ; a sort of writing which has been incidental to the ac complishment 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, sim plicity, directness, preoccupation with moral issues, have here been but the instrument of beauty ; phrase and thought and feeling have a [43] THE AMERICAN MIND 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 pre sents. 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 typ- . ical American. In the writing produced by such men, there cannot but be a revelation of Amer ican 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 preva lent, during a long period, in English and Con tinental society and literature. The most rudi mentary 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 [44] RACE, NATION, AND BOOK in their racial and national relationships they are indubitably American. In their local vari ations 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 Annun- zio. 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 in terpreted 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 [45] THE AMERICAN MIND pass from sight without the gift and art of utterance ; to find, in short, among the books which are recognized as constituting our Amer ican literature, some vital and illuminating il lustrations 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 eightee rrrtTcentury, there began to be a distinctly American way of regarding the de batable 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 n American mind " to indicate that throughout // the American colonies an essential unity of jj S 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 [47 ] THE AMERICAN MIND 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 admin istration or minister or ruler, but desiring and plotting the overthrow of the entire polit ical 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 y 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 Jthe fundamental questions of government and of conduct among a population so large, dis tributed 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 evi dent in many other fields than that of politics. The stimulating book from which I have just [48 ] THE AMERICAN MIND quoted, attempts in its closing paragraph, after touching upon the more salient features of our national activity, to define the typical Amer ican in these words : " The typical American is he who, whether rich or poor, whether dwelling in the North, South, East, or West, whether scholar, pro fessional 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 use ful 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 expe riences, a national "temper" or "ethos"; a more or less settled way of considering intel-? ; lectual, moral, and social problems; in shorty4 peculiarly national attitude toward the versal human questions. [49] THE AMERICAN MIND In a narrower sense, "the American mind" may mean the characteristics of the American in telligence, 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 intelli gence 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 ex pert and by no means uniformly favorable as sessment from investigators upon both sides of the Atlantic. But the observer of literary pro cesses and productions must necessarily take a somewhat broader survey of national tenden cies. He must study what Nathaniel Haw thorne, 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 THE AMERICAN MIND 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 partic ular the familiar pictorial caricature of " Uncle Sam." He need not bear any outward resem blances 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 at tained 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 daugh ters, 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 [51 ] THE AMERICAN MIND 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 con versationalists, although their most loyal ad mirers must admit that their voices are a trifle sharp or flat. These ladies are more widely read than "papa." He has not had much lei sure for Ruskin and Symonds and Ferrero. His lack of historical training limits his curi osity 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 gen iality, he is rather critical of foreign ways, although this is partly due to his lack of ac quaintance 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 sen- [ s^] THE AMERICAN MIND timent make him an entertaining companion. Even when his spirits run low, his patriotism is sure to mount in proportion, and he can al ways 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 "Ameri can " whom the European regards with curios ity, 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 assert ing, "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 observ ant foreigners, who have left on record a whole literature of bewildered and bewildering, irritat ing and flattering and amusing testimony con cerning 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, [ 53] THE AMERICAN MIND students of contemporary sociology like Paul Bourget and Mr. H. G. Wells, French jour nalists, 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 testi mony at its face value, and to reconcile its con tradictions, 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 repre sentative of them into a delightful and stimu lating 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 char itable to our visitors to quote the most fan tastic 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 [54] THE AMERICAN MIND 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 allow ances 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 J7i desire of wealth acquired through commerce." / That is the opinion of an expert observer, who has had extraordinary chances for seeing pre cisely what he has seen. I think it, notwith standing, a preposterous opinion, fully as pre posterous as Professor Muensterberg s notion that America has latterly grown more monarch ical 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 idiosyn- cracy of vision. The native American, it may be well to re member, is something of an observer himself. If his observations upon the characteristics of his countrymen are less piquant than the [ss] THE AMERICAN MIND foreigner s, it is chiefly because the American writes, upon the whole, less incisively than he talks. But incisive native writing about Ameri can 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 Amer ican tendencies, as interpreted by indepen dent, 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. Hu morist and moralist, preacher and mob orator and social essayist, shop-talk and talk over the [56] THE AMERICAN MIND tea-cup or over the pipe, and the far more il luminating 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 theeighteen- fifties. Professor Turner will expound the sig nificance of the frontier in American history. Mr. Henry James will portray with unrivalled psychological insight the Europeanized Amer ican of the eighteen-seventies and eighties. Lit erary critics like Professor Wendell or Professor Trent will deduce from our literature itself evi dence concerning this or that national quality; and all this mass of American expert testimony, itself a result and a proof of national self-aware ness and self-respect, must be put into the scales to balance, to confirm, or to outweigh the re ports furnished by foreigners. I do not pretend to be able, like an expert accountant, to draw up a balance-sheet of na tional qualities, to credit or debit the Amer ican character with this or that precise quantity of excellence or defect. But having turned the pages of many books about the United States, [ 57] THE AMERICAN MIND and listened to many conversations about its inhabitants in many states of the Union, I ven ture 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 differ- yentiation of the physical characteristics of our ^ branch of the English race is admittedly due, part, to climate. In spite of the immense range of climatic variations as one passes from New England to New Orleans, from the Miss issippi Valley to the high plains of the Far West, or from the rainy Oregon belt south ward 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 for ward," 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 exces- [ 58] THE AMERICAN MIND sively 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 pro nounced. No adjective has been more fre quently applied to the Anglo-Saxon than the word " dull." The American mind has been accused of ignorance, superficiality, levity,com- monplaceness, 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 employment to which the American pioneers were oblige* to betake themselves has done something, doubt, to produce a national versatility, a quid [ 59] THE AMERICAN MIND 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 concern ing 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 degen erates into mere inquisitiveness is true enough ; just as the "acuteness," the "awareness," es sential to- the existence of one generation be comes 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 sig nificance when viewed historically. We have ^exhibited, no doubt, the amateurishness and "recklessness which spring from relative isola- THE AMERICAN MIND tion, from ignorance as to how they manage elsewhere this particular sort of thing, trjs conservation of forests, let us say, or the gov ernment of colonial dependencies. National"^ smugness and conceit, the impatience crystal-^ lized in the phrase, " What have we got to do s , with abroad ? " have jarred upon the nerves of many cultivated Americans. But it is no lessj 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 accord ing to Blackstone. In the most trying crises of American political history, it was not, after all, a question of profiting by European experi ence. 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 English men 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 implica- [61 ] THE AMERICAN MIND tions, 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 bar barism. But sometimes it is the secret of fresh ness 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 Eu rope, 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 view less trail. No one can be unaware how easily this puperb 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 THE AMERICAN MIND advocate of the " New Thought " as compla cently as an old financier will boast of having bought Calumet and Hecla when it was sell ing 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 indefeas ible romantic appetite for guessing again. The American temperament and the chances of American history have brought constant tempt ation 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 spec ulate 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 conscious ness 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 THE AMERICAN MIND was so particularly annoying to English vis itors in the middle of the last century annoy ing even to Charles Dickens, who was him self 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 Chuz- zlewit 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 Web ster overtop all the intellectual giants of the Old World. But that youthful bragging, and >erhaps some of the later bragging as well, has ts social side. It is a perverted idealism. It >rings from group loyalty, from sectional idelity. 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 glori fied through its rootage in loyalty; and like wise extravagance surely one of the worst THE AMERICAN MIND of American mental vices is often based upon a romantic confidence in individual opin ion 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, reck less, virulent. Proof seems to him, as it did to the contemporary Transcendentalist philoso phers, 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 intel lectual dangers of the oratorical temperament are typically American. What is common ly 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 [65] THE AMERICAN MIND 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 pop ular mind, the normal representative of intel lectual 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 glorifica tion 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 temper ament are revealed no less in our popular jour nalism. This journalism, it is needless to say, is extremely able, but it is reckless to the last [66] THE AMERICAN MIND 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 com- paign 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 character istic national tension displayed in our period ical literature that no one is much surprised to THE AMERICAN MIND 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 de mocracy 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 eigh teen-seven ties, with a Great Father in Washington to fur nish 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 [68] THE AMERICAN MIND to be inseparable from the presence of such masses of men associated under modern de mocratic government ; the frivolity and extra vagance which represent the gasconading of the romantic temper in face of the grey practical ities of everyday routine; the provincial boast- fulness and bad taste which have resulted from intellectual isolation ; the lack, in short, of a code, whether for thought or speech or beha vior. And nevertheless, one s instinctive Amer icanism 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 fu ture 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 THE AMERICAN MIND 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 per sonal 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 oppo nent s position with fairness, who lacked wholly [70] THE AMERICAN MIND 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, impossi ble as they would have been in any other civ ilized 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 preoccu pations, 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 extra- THE AMERICAN MIND I ordinary 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 any thing save immediate results. It wears out more quickly than the bodily machine of the English man. 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 fre quently 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 allow ance for wasteful excess, for the restless and im patient consumption of nervous forces which \ nature intended that we should hold in reserve, the fact remains that American history has de monstrated the existence of a dynamic national fcnergy, physical and moral, which is still un abated. Immigration has turned hitherward the feet of millions upon millions of young men from the hardiest stocks of Europe. They re plenish 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 E?^ ] THE AMERICAN MINI? the farm, but raises big crops of boy s. 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 ma terials 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. v j From the very beginning, the American X I people have been characterized by idealism. It] was the inner light of Pilgrim and Quaker col onists ; it gleams no less in the faces of the child ren of Russian Jew immigrants to-day. Amer ican irreverence has been noted by many a for eign 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 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 [73] THE AMERICAN MIND but attainable virtues. There is among us, in comparison with France or Germany, a defect ive 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, Gov ernor, 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 1 properly called a Christian nation, V not merely because the Supreme Court has so affirmed it, but because the phrase "a Christ ian 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 benefac tions to the cause of education furnishes to- [74] THE AMERICAN MIND day one of the most striking instances of ideal ism in the history of civilization. The ideal passions of patriotism, of liberty, y of loyalty to home and section, of humanitarian and missionary effort, have all burned with a clear flame in the United States. The optim ism which lies so deeply embedded in the / American character is one phase of the na- * tional 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 con tain the phrase After all, we need not des pair* ? If it does, it was written by an Amer ican." 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 [75] THE AMERICAN MIND losing or winning, he carries into his business activity the mood of the idealist. It is easy to think of all this as self-decep tion ; as the emotipnal effusiveness of the American temperament ; but Jo 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 mo tives : 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 1 606, 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 Amer ican 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 arma ments ; " 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 [76] THE AMERICAN MIND and honoring opposites ! But in all this un conscious 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 Amer- \, ican," it has been declared, "is to be a radical/ That statement needs qualification. Intellect ually 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 con servatism. Thomas Jefferson, one of the great est of our radical idealists, had a good deal of the English squire in him after all. Jefferson- ianism endures, not merely because it is a rad ical theory of human nature, but because it expresses certain facts of humar^ nature. The American mind looks forward, not back ; but in practical details of land, taxes, and govern- mental machinery we are instinctively cautious of change. The State of Connecticut knows that her constitution is ill adapted to the pre sent conditions of her population, but the dif- [77] THE AMERICAN MIND ficulty is to persuade the rural legislators to amend it. Yet everybody admits that amend ment 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 con servatism. There is, in fact, conservatism in our blood and radicalism in our brains, and now one and now the other rules. Very typ ical of American radicalism is that story of the old sea-captain who was ignorant, as was sup posed, 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 sus pect the old fellow pulled his sextant and chronometer out of his chest as soon as he [78 ] THE AMERICAN MIND really needed them. American radicalism is\ not always as innocent of the world s expe- 1 rience as it looks. In fact, one of the most< \J interesting phases of this twentieth century) " uplift " movement is its respect and even! glorification of expert opinion. A German ex pert 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, chemis try, conservation of natural resources, govern ment by commission, tariffs, arbitration treat ies, 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 move ment in which we are living, radicalism has shown its beneficent aspect of constructive idealism. No catalogue of American qualities and de fects 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 Whit- [79] THE AMERICAN MIND man, " the rest follows." Whether the rest fol lows or not, there can be no question that Americans, from the beginning, have laid sin gular stress upon personal qualities. The relig ion and philosophy of the Puritans were in this respect at one with the gospel of the fron tier. 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 com munity; 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 he roes 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 instinct ive American faith in individual manhood. [so] THE AMERICAN MIND 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," be fore 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 round- ing-up cattle. The one essential question was put by Hawthorne into the mouth of Holgravc 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 con science along with him." There speaks the local accent of Puritanism, but the voice insist ing 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 [81 ] THE AMERICAN MIND individualism checks itself, or is rudely checked in spite of itself, by considerations of the gen eral good. How often have French critics con fessed, 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 vig orous 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 /I what is right and just for one, the individual, V| 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 pub lic soul." No one can present such a catalogue of American qualities as I have attempted without [8a] THE AMERICAN MIND 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 in heritances, as modified by historical conditions, yields much, no doubt ; but what are we to say of such magnificent embodiments of the Amer ican spirit as are revealed in the Swiss immi grant 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 sym pathy, 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 Frank- o lin, Washington, Jackson, Webster, Lee, Lin coln, Emerson, and "Mark Twain* ; yet the countrymen of those typical Americans instinct ively 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 [83 ] THE AMERICAN MIND A ourselves are conscious, though we can scarcely translate them into words, and these vaguely felt emotions of admiration, of effort, of fellow ship and social faith are the invisible America. Take, for a single example, the national admira tion 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 in stinctive 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 Amer ican 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 immi grant has felt the true America in his pulses before he ever crossed the Atlantic. The de scendant of the Pilgrims still remains ignorant [84] THE AMERICAN MIND 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 " Pio neers, 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. Ill American Idealism OUR endeavor to state the general character istics 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 un conscious striving, are their ideals. "There is what I call the American idea," said Theo dore Parker in the Anti-Slavery Convention of 1850. "This idea demands, as the proxim ate organization thereof, a democracy that is, a government of all the people, by all the people, for all the people ; of course, a govern ment 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 [86] AMERICAN IDEALISM 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, French men above " frog-eaters," and Englishmen above " shop-keepers/ These ennobling senti ments or ideals, while universal in their essen tial nature, assume in each civilized nation a somewhat specific coloring. The national lit erature reveals the myriad shades and hues of private and public feeling, and the more truth ful this literary record, the more delicate and noble become the harmonies of local and na tional 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 THE AMERICAN MIND 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 writ ers, 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 Wil- helm Meister. Again and again, in his corre spondence and his essays, does Carlyle recur to that teaching of the threefold Reverence : [88] AMERICAN IDEALISM 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 de basing 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 speci ally 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 rever ence 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 [ 89] THE AMERICAN MIND 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 char acter between Virginia and New England. I offered to give him a receipt for making a New England in Virginia. He desired it; and I re commended to him town-meetings, training- days, town-schools, and ipinisters." The " ministers," it will be noticed, come last on the Adams list. But the order of pre cedence is unimportant. Here are four symbols, or, if you like, cc re verences. * Might not the Virginia planters, loyal to their own specific symbol of the " gen tleman," 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 com moner ? No doubt ; and yet how much pictur- [ 90 ] AMERICAN IDEALISM esqueness 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 >ueen of Spen ser and the essays of Francis Bacon; a book rich beyond all others in human experience; full of poetry, history, drama; the test of con duct ; 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 irrevo cably 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 [91 ] THE AMERICAN MIND militant believers within the limits of a certain township or parish, rather than the mystical Bride of Christ. Except in Maryland and Vir ginia, whither the older forms of Church wor ship 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 sen tence about " a church without a bishop and a state without a King " ; to which Dr. Wain- wright, 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 ascend ency, and partly as a symbol of the theocracy, the actual governing of the Commonwealth by the laws and spirit of the sterner Scriptures. AMERICAN IDEALISM The minister dwelt apart as upon an awful Sinai. It was no mere romantic fancy of Haw thorne 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 fol lowing excommunication by the Church of Rome. Hawthorne and Whittier and Long fellow 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, prema turely 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/ [93] THE AMERICAN MIND 4 The gentler side of colonial religion is win- ningly portrayed in Whittier s Pennsylvania Pilgrim and in his imaginary journal of Mar garet Smith. There were sunnier slopes, warmer exposures for the ripening of the human spirit, in the Southern colonies. Even in New Eng land there was sporadic revolt from the begin ning. The number of non-church-members in creased 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 delight ful Sam Lawson in Oldtown Folks. Lawson s comment on Parson Simpson s service epitom izes two centuries of New England thinking. "Wai," 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 ob ligations to get out, cause we was free, volun tary agents. But nobody ever had got out, and nobody would, unless the Lord reached down and took em. And whether he would or not [94] AMERICAN IDEALISM 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 J 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 lit erature 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 North ampton : and the Yale Library possesses nearly twelve hundred of Edwards s sermons which have never been printed at all. Nor does any body, save here and there an antiquarian, read [95 ] THE AMERICAN MIND 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 lat- itudinarianism, 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 litera ture. 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 Ameri cans experienced what was for them the emo tional equivalent of poetry in the sermons of Henry Ward Beecher and Phillips Brooks. French pulpit oratory of the seventeenth cent ury wins recognition as a distinct type of liter ature; 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 [96] AMERICAN IDEALISM the American colonies the great preachers per formed the functions of men of letters without knowing it. They have been treated with too scant respect in the histories of American lit erature. It is one of the penalties of Protest antism that the audiences, after a while, out grow 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 theo logy has left our contemporaries indifferent to the literature in which the old theology was clothed. There is one department of American liter ary production, of which Bossuet s famous ser mon on Queen Henrietta Maria of England may serve to remind us, which illustrates sig nificantly 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^ew England Society of New York and the Phi Beta Kappa; the papers read before historical and patriotic societies ; the birthday and centenary discourses [97] THE AMERICAN MIND upon national figures like Washington or Lin coln, have all performed, and are still perform ing, an inestimable service in stimulating popu lar 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 liter ature 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 emo tions ; and it is not surprising that many listen ers to orations about Lincoln do not personally emulate Lincoln, and that many of the most enthusiastic dealers in the sentiment of the an cestral meeting-house do not themselves attend church. The other iagredients of John Adams s ideal Commonwealm are no less significant of our national disposition. Take the school-house. It was planted in the wilderness for the training [ 98 ] AMERICAN IDEALISM 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 c< 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 pro gramme 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 elect orate can safeguard its own interests and train up its own leaders. The poetry of the Ameri can school-house was written long ago by Whit- tier, in describing Joshua Coffin s school under the big elm on the cross-road in East Haver- hill ; its humor and pathos and drama have been portrayed by innumerable story-writers and es sayists. Mrs. Martha Baker Dunn s charming sketches, entitled " Cicero in Maine " and " Vir gil in Maine, indicate the idealism once taught [99] THE AMERICAN MIND 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 liter ature. That "town-meeting" which John Adams thought Virginia might do well to adopt has likewise become a symbol of American ideal ism. Together with the training-day, it repre sented 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 demon strate, run back very far ; and though the modern drift to cities has made its machinery ineffective in the larger communities, it remains a perpet ual spring or feeding stream to the broader cur- AMERICAN IDEALISM rents of our national life. Without an under standing of the town-meeting and its equiv alents, our political literature loses much of its significance. Like the school-house and meet ing-house, it has become glorified by our men of letters. John Fiske and other historians have celebrated it in some of the most bril liant pages of our political writing ; and that citizen literature, so deeply characteristic of us, found in the plain, forthright, and public-spir ited tone of town-meeting discussions its key note. 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 main tained 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 neigh bors. " I am a part of this people, * said Lin coln 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 andgenuineness of ourbest polit ical literature, its homely persuasiveness and force, is an inheritance of the town-meeting. THE AMERICAN MIND 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 there fore non-literary evidence of American ideal ism. 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 atti tude of mind, that habitual temper of the spirit, which has produced, in all countries of settled use and wont, the literature of idealism. Bru- netiere 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 imagina tion, and we must shortly look more closely still at those impulses of daring, those moods of heightened feeling, that intensified individ- AMERICAN IDEALISM ualism, 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 char acteristic 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 return ing 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 ex perience. " Out of the three Reverences," says Wilhelm Meister, " springs the highest Re- verence, 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 THE AMERICAN MIND meeting-house, town-meeting, and training- day, how intensely nevertheless does the imag ination 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 phys ical purity. The result is something unique in literary history. Continental critics, while re cognizing the intellectual and artistic powers revealed in he 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 re garded as a failure of the natural man to keep a vow requiring supernatural grace for its ful filment; it may be that the priest had no voca tion for his sacred office ; he is unfrocked, pun ished, forgotten, yet a certain mantle of human charity still covers his offence. But in the Pur itan 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 Puritan ism) there* is no forgiveness for a sin of the [ I0 4 ] AMERICAN IDEALISM 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 hun dreds of other romances and poems, less mor bid 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, trans figured 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 Cath olicism as well as of Protestantism. It was in part a resultant of that early American isola tion which contributed so effectively to the art istic setting of The Scarlet Letter. But in his doctrine of spiritual integrity, in the agonized utterance, "Be true be true !" as well as in THE AMERICAN MIND his reverence for purity of the body, our great est romancer was typical of the imaginative lit erature of his countrymen. The restless artistic experiments of Poe presented the human body in many a ghastly and terrifying aspect of ill ness and decay, and distorted by all passions save one. His imagination was singularly sex less. Pathological students have pointed out the relation between this characteristic of Poe s writing, and his known tendencies toward opi um-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 pas sion, 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 [ 106] AMERICAN IDEALISM 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 in stinct 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 hypocrit ical 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 Conti nental 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 ad- [ , 07 ] THE AMERICAN MIND mitted. 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 com pelling hand upon the legitimate exercise of this artistic instinct ; and this fact has cooperated with many social, ethical, and perhaps physio logical causes to produce a thinness or blood- lessness in our books. They are graceful, pleas ing, 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 hadmany distinguished fiction-writers, but none with the physical gusto of a Fielding, a Smol lett, or even a Dickens, who, idealist and ro manticist 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 [ 108 ] AMERICAN IDEALISM high shoulders peep up reproachfully above the desk ; Lanier is playing his reproachful flute ; Longfellow reads Fremont s Rocky Mountain experiences whilelyingabed,andsighs " But, ah, the discomforts!"; living 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 T^rail^ transcripts of robust actual experience, and ad mirable books, reveal a sort of physical paleness compared with TurgenierFs Notes of a Sports man 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 writ ing. Some instincts, natural to the full-blooded utterance of Continental literature, have been starved or eliminated here. Very well. The char acteristic American retort to this assertion would be: Better our long record and habit of ideal ism than a few masterpieces more or less. As a [ I0 9 ] THE AMERICAN MIND people, we have cheerfully accepted the Puritan restraintof speech, we have respected the shame faced conventions of decentand 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." NowMrs.Grundy is assuredly not the most de sirable of literary divinities, but the student of classical literature can easily think of other di vinities, celebrated in exquisite Greek and Ro man verse, who are distinctly less desirable still. " Not passion, but sentiment/ said Haw thorne, in a familiar passage of criticism of his own Twice-Told Tales. H ow 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 fewof 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 Calvin- AMERICAN IDEALISM ism 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 Haw thorne, far as they had escaped from the bonds of their ancestral religion, still utter the word "soul "with awe. But in the popular ser mon and hymn and story of our day, with their search after the sympathetic and the senti mental, 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 senti mental people. The poems in Stedman s care fully chosen Anthology^ the prose and verse in the two volume Stedman-Hutchinson col lection of American Literature, the Library of Southern Literature, and similar sectional an thologies, the school Readers and Speakers, -particularly in the half-century between 1830 and 1880, our newspapers and maga- THE AMERICAN MIND zines, particularly the so-called "yellow" newspapers and the illustrated magazines typi fied by Harper s Monthly, are all fairly drip ping with sentiment. American oratory is noto riously the most sentimental oratory of the civilized world. The Congressional Record still presents such specimens of sentiment de livered 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 C ] AMERICAN IDEALISM such a production of periodicals and books for boys and girls : France and Germany imitate in vain The Toutb 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 as pects of American idealism, is constantly illus trated in our short stories. Bret Harte, disci ple of Dickens as he was, and Romantic as was his fashion of dressing up his miners and gam blers, was accurately faithful to the American feeling towards the "kid" and the "woman." "Tennessee s Partner," " The Luck of Roar ing Camp," " Christmas at Sandy Bar," are ob vious 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 back ground. She does the same things at home, and neither she nor her mother sees why she should not, so universal among us is the chiv alrous interpretation of actions and situations [ "3 ] THE AMERICAN MIND which amaze the European observer. The pop ular 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 Eu ropean 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 unsophistica- tion as a proof of our national inexperience ; yet it is often a sort of radiant and triumphant unsophistication which does not lose its inno cence 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 [ "4] AMERICAN IDEALISM 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 num ber, but it failed, naturally, to afford that pic- turesqueness of class contrast and to stimulate that sentiment of class distinction, in which European literature is so rich. Very interesting, in the light of contempo rary economic conditions, is the effort made by American poets in the middle of the last cent ury to glorify labor. They were not^o much idealizing a particular laboring class, as en- , deavoring, in Whitman s words, " To teach the average man the glory of his walk and trade." Whitman himself sketched the American work man 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 [ 5 1 THE AMERICAN MIND best American stock who went enthusiastic ally 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 Amer ica are nowhere more sharply indicated than in that very valley of the Merrimac where, sixty and seventy years ago, one could " hear Amer ica singing." There are few who are singing to day in the cotton-mills; the operators, instead of girls from the hill-farms, are Greeks, Lithu anians, 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 [ "6] AMERICAN IDEALISM old bucolic sentiment still survives, that sim ple 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. Reap ing 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 j. writing is rich in local sentiment and sectional loyalty. The short story, which has seized so greedily the more dramatic aspects of Amer ican energy, has been equally true to the quiet background of rural scenery and familiar ways. American idealism, as shown in the transform ation of the lesser loyalties of home and coun tryside 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 [ 117] THE AMERICAN MIND 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 lo cal 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 them selves are fading away. The federal idea has triumphed. Doubtless the majority of the fel low 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 AMERICAN IDEALISM 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 Mary land" 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 cul tivate this provincial affection for the past, as an offset to the barren uniformity which the fed eral scheme allows. But the ultimate imagina tive victory, like the actual political victory of the Civil War, is with the thought and feeling of Nationalism. It is foreshadowed in that pas sionate 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 C "9] THE AMERICAN MIND Nationalism has affected the imagination of our countrymen. ^The literary record of,the American conception of liberty runs &UliLT back. Some historians have allowed them selves to think that the American notion of liberty is essentially declamatory, a sort of fu tile 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 pam phleteers 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, how ever, are inconsistent with this picturesque theory of contemporary reactionists. It is true that the word "liberty" has been full of tempt ation 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 AMERICAN IDEALISM absurd as Edmund Burke s.nThe sober truth is that the American working theory of Lib erty 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 signifi cant: "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 incom patible 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 C THE AMERICAN MIND 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 pop ularly supposed to derive his notion of liberty from French theorists, is to all practical pur poses nearer to John Winthrop than he is to Rousseau. The splendid phrases of his " Decla ration " are sometimes characterized as abstrac tions. They are really generalizations from past political experience. An arbitrary king, assum ing 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 par tisan 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 AMERICAN IDEALISM the end of the nineteenth century it went temp orarily out of fashion. The late Colonel Hig- ginson, an ideal type of what Europeans call an " 1848 " man, attended at the close of the cen tury 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 read ing 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 c< Commemoration Ode," and that when the ultimate day of reck oning comes for the whole muddled Imperial istic business, the standard of reckoning must be "liberty" as Winthrop and Jefferson and Lincoln and Lowell and Vaughn Moody un derstood the word. In the mean time we must confess that the history of our literature, with a few noble excep- THE AMERICAN MIND tions, shows a surprising defect in the passion for freedom. Tennyson^ famous lines about "Free dom 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 repub lican 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 phe nomena in the history of literature. Shall we enter the preoccupation plea once more ? En joying 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 sent iment 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 sep arately. It is found in Hamilton s pamphlets, in Paine s Crisis, in the Federalist, in Washing- [ "4 ] AMERICAN IDEALISM ton s " Farewell Address." It is peculiarly as sociated with the name and fame of Daniel Web ster, 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 splen did peroration of Webster s " Reply to Hay ne " 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 Sum- ter 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 indisso luble Union was preached in pulpits, pleaded for in editorials, sung in lyrics, and woven into the web of fiction. Edward Everett H ale 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 long er a mere political compact, dissoluble at will, but a spiritual entity, a new incarnation of the soul of man. THE AMERICAN MIND We must deal later with that American in stinct 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 loy alties, glowing with the new idealism which has come with the twentieth century: ethical, mun icipal, industrial, and artistic movements which are fullofpromise forthe higher lifeof the coun try, 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 an tagonistic 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 feel ings novel to Americans bred under the ac cepted individualism will doubtless assert them selves in our prose and verse. But it is to be [ 1*6] AMERICAN IDEALISM remembered that the best writing thus far pro duced 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 obstin ate 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 with in 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 useof literary illustrations of national tendencies, we have no need of a se verely technical definition of terms. When we say, " Tom is an idealist " and " Lorenzo is a romantic fellow," we convey at least one toler ably clear distinction between Tom and Lo renzo. 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 roman- [ 118 ] ROMANCE AND REACTION ticist, 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 height ened feelings, of stranger ways. Like Tom, he is a person of sentiment, but his sentiment at taches itself, not so much to everyday aspects of experience, as to that which is unusual or ter rifying, 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 busi ness 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 bot tom. 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 lands man. 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 offish he was fishing for. [ I2 9 ] THE AMERICAN MIND kinds," was his rebuking answer, and I took off my hat to the veteran romanticist. The words " romance " and " romanticism " I have been repeated to the ears of our genera tion 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 "rom ance" 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 markedcontrasts ;toacraving fortheunfamiliar, the marvellous, and the supernatural. In the [ 130 ] ROMANCE AND REACTION wider and less definite sense, they signify a revolt from the purely intellectual view of man s na ture; a recognition of the instincts and the pas sions, 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 im perceptible 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 wher ever 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 [131 ] THE AMERICAN MIND - 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 de scribed 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 know ingly 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 c ROMANCE AND REACTION poet like Tennyson and Browning has pre served his romance to the end. Tennyson dies at eighty-three with the full moonlight stream ing through the oriel window upon his bed, and with his fingers clasping Shakespeare s Cymbeline. With most of us commonplace persons, how ever, 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 su perannuated employees of the Salem Custom House. " The weary weight of all this unin telligible world " presses too hard on most of those who stop to think about it. The sim plest 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 Bour bons, the Revolutions of 1830 and 1 848, make , and unmake romantics. Often society catches I up with the romanticist ; he is no longer a ( [ 33 ] THE AMERICAN MIND soldier of revolt; he has become a " respectable." Or, while remaining a poet, he shifts his atten tion to some more familiar segment of the ideal istic circle. He sings about his wife instead of the wife of somebody else. Like Wordsworth, he takes for his theme a Mary Hutchinson in stead 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 tran quil radiance over the whole surface of experi ence. 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 cer tain 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 ro manticism in literature ; but it did not make him eccentric, weak, or empty. His instinct for en- [ 134] ROMANCE AND REACTION during 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 pro duced the romantic element in American life j and character? Precisely as with the individ- r\ ual 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, [ 135] THE AMERICAN MIND 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 ro mantic 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 his torical 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 pre vailing atmosphere of emotionalism. [ 136] ROMANCE AND REACTION 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 al though 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 Botti celli s picture of Spring, so naively does this picturesque rascal suffuse his landscape with the feeling for beauty : "IntheMonethof June, AnnoSalutis 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 seri ously 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, [ 137 3 . THE AMERICAN MIND 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 de light 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 mul titude; and discovered, besides, Millions of Turtledoves on thegreene 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 Na tures 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 [ 38] ROMANCE AND REACTION 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 Inde- ans, they spent it as vainly, in quaffing & drink ing both wine & strong waters in great exsess, and, as some reported io. worth in a morning. They allso set up a May-pole, drinking and dancingaboute it many daystogeather, 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 per sons, 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 Wol- laston, they call it Merie-mounte, as if this joylity would have lasted ever." C T 39 ] THE AMERICAN MIND But it did not last long. Bradford and other leaders of the plantations " agreed by mutual consent " to " suppress Morton and his con sorts. " " In a friendly and neighborly way " they admonished him. " Insolently he per sisted." " Upon which they saw there was no way but to take him by force." " So they mu tually 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 ROMANCE AND REACTION 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 par allel 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 them selves 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 cen tury of colonization, and they will continue at intervals to believe in them until human nature is no more. The marvellous happenings re corded 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 Creve- cceur seems curiously juvenile to-day, as does THE AMERICAN MIND the romantic curiosity of Chateaubriand con cerning 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-sound ing 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 In dians 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 hu mor of Mark Twain s Innocents Abroad turns largely upon this sense of remorseless fact con fronting romantic inexperience. American history, however, has been marked by certain great romantic passions that seem endowed with indestructible vitality. The ro mance of discovery, the fascination of the for est 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 [ 142 ] ROMANCE AND REACTION 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 Chateau briand 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 excite ment of reading the Missionary Herald. The deacon s eyes, like the eyes of many an old sea- captain in Salem or Newburyport, were liter ally 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. [ 143] THE AMERICAN MIND 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 North ern 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 aborig inal race forever lurking upon the borders of our civilization. " Playing Indian " has been immensely significant, not merely in stimulat ing the outdoor activity of generations of American boys, but in teaching them the per ennial 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 abun dantly prove. And when the cowboys pass, [ 44 ] ROMANCE AND REACTION 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 Massachu setts in the eighteen-twenties, the glory of ad venture 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-seek ing in California in 1849. The West, in short, means simply the retreating horizon, the beck oning 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 C THE AMERICAN MIND 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 in explicably 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 hinter land in which our spirits have, from the begin ning, taken refuge and found solace. We have already noticed, in the chapter on idealism, how swiftly the American imagina tion modifies the prosaic facts of everyday [ 146] ROMANCE AND REACTION 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 ro mance. Then, the prosaic buying and selling becomes the " game. * A combination of buy ers 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 acontinent 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 busi ness 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 fac ing engines when the two sections of the Union Pacific Railroad at last drew near each other on the interminable plains and the two engines C -47] THE AMERICAN MIND 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 for ests. It is at once an outlet and a nursery for romantic emotion. The out-of-doors move ment which began with Thoreau s hut on Wai- den 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 pres sure of modern social and commercial exigen cies. Yet its more important function is to pro vide for grown-ups a chance to " play Indian " too. ROMANCE AND REACTION 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 Steven- sonian 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 alter nate play of light and shade over the vast land scape of human experience. The typical ro manticist, 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 THE AMERICAN MIND steadfastness with which certain moral causes have been kept, as it were, in the focus of in tense feeling. Poetry, undefeated and unwa vering 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 Went- worth 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 predisposi tion 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 fer vor 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 "atmo sphere," fully as highly colored as any of the romantic atmospheres that we are accustomed ROMANCE AND REACTION 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 im aginative excesses which resemble the physical excesses ofa soldier s camp. Transcendentalism was thus a militant philosophy and religion, with both a destructively critical and a posi tively 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 endur ing literature of New England between 1830 and 1865 was distinctly a romantic literature. THE AMERICAN MIND It was rooted, however, not so much in those swift changes of historic condition, those start ling liberations of the human spirit which gave inspiration to the romanticism of the Conti nent, 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. Bur ton Stevenson has collected the Poems of Ameri can 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. Stev enson s collection has the advantage of focus sing 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 [ is*] ROMANCE AND REACTION 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 fin ishing 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 con crete. One aspect of our history which espe cially 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 intel ligence and conscience of our modern world are more and more engaged in the task of mak ing 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 [ 153] THE AMERICAN MIND 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 in spired by our Revolutionary struggle, the ro mantic 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, Te- cumseh and Tippecanoe. The hunters of Ken tucky, 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 illustra tion, not only of romance, but of reaction. The [ 154] ROMANCE AND REACTION earlier phases of the Texan struggle for inde pendence 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 bril liant and dramatic adventures of border war fare became drawn into the larger struggle for the extension of slavery, the poetic reaction be gan. The physical and moral pretence of war fare, the cheap splendors of epaulets and feath ers, shrivelled at the single touch of the satire of the Biglow Papers. Lowell, writing at that moment with the instinct and fervor of a pro phet, 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 11 send the bill to you." But far more interesting is the revelation of the American capacity for romance which was [ 155 ] THE AMERICAN MIND 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 with out being profoundly moved by its evidence of American idealism. I n 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 per fected romance of the years 1 861-65, until the men and the events of that struggle are as remote as the heroes of Greece and Troy. Cer tainly no one can pass a final judgment upon the verse occasioned by recent struggles in arms. Any one who has studied the English [ 56] ROMANCE AND REACTION poetry inspired by the South-African War will be painfully conscious of the emotional and moral complexity of all such issues, of the bit ter 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 tem per 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 re bukes 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 an tiseptic 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 extraordi narily on his purely Yankee side, and which a [ 157] THE AMERICAN MIND pioneer country is forced continually to develop and to recognize. Camping, for instance, de velops both the romantic sense and the fact sense. Supper must be cooked, even at Wai- den 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 every day 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, ^he American Scene > speaks of "the overwhelming preponderance of the unmiti gated c business-man face . . . the consum mate monotonous commonness of the pushing male crowd, moving in its dense- mass with [ 158 ] ROMANCE AND REACTION the confusion carried to chaos for any intelli gence, 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 in veterate psychologist like Henry James, in or der 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 ancT" comes home again without a consciousness of contact with an unspiritual atmosphere, or in completely 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 re ligious and denominational differences which Dr. George A. Gordon portrayed in a notable article at the time of the Emerson Centenary. [ 159] THE AMERICAN MIND 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 bet ter, a more Scriptural and certificated road to ward 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, fol lowing 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 Bush nell and Emerson are all following after some thing 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 transcenden tal movement, or the Civil War, an immense mass of unspiritualized, unvitalized Ameri can manhood and womanhood. No literature [ 160] ROMANCE AND REACTION comes from it and no religion, though there is much human kindness, much material progress, and some indestructible residuum of that ideal ism 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 strange ness of scene, novelty of adventure, rich atmo spheric distance of space or time, disappears with the changes of civilization. The farm ex pands 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 re action. Here, for example, during the last de cade, 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 per suades himself that the hour for democracy is passing, and then one goes out on the street [ 161 ] THE AMERICAN MIND 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 ro mance 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 machin ery and scientific agriculture ? There are far mers who follow Luther Burbank s experi ments 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 profes sor in the University of Chicago said once, that "a flower is so wonderful that if you knew [ 162] ROMANCE AND REACTION 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 inevita bly another type of romance, other aspects of wonder, terror, and beauty. Following the ro mance of ad venture 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 psycho logical romance, the old mystery and strange ness of the human soul, ^schylus 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 THE AMERICAN MIND was an ideal United States, which Dickens did not discover during that first visit of 1 842 ; 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 cultiva tion, by pure and simple sentiment, made up the true America. But even among Longfel low 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 Hemi sphere. 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 ROMANCE AND REACTION 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 litera ture 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 Ameri can, unless it be that other splendid meta phor, 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 Com edy 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 es say 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 [ 166] HUMOR AND SATIRE 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 treacher ous 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 hu morous. 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 experi ence. A Frenchman once said that all of us are Don Quixotes on one day and Sancho Panzas on the next. Humor springs from this con trast. 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 T THE AMERICAN MIND 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, free dom, and the wounded bleeding bird in the mud, is of the very essence of tragedy. But something like that is always happening in com edy. 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 mor tals; but even he may not know whether to laugh or to cry at what he sees. Those colli sions 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 Shake-, speare puts him into battle. Here is a vain per son, and Malvolio is imprisoned and twitted by [ 68 ] HUMOR AND SATIRE a clown. Here is an ignoramus, and Dogberry is placed on thejudge 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. Com edy 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 be gins his illuminating lectures on the Comic Writers by declaring, "Man is the only ani mal 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 THE AMERICAN MIND arises from the perpetual comment which the understanding makes upon the impressions re ceived through the imagination." If that sen tence seems too abstract, all we need do is to think of Sancho Panza, the man of understand ing, 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, Field ing, 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 be long to a social group. No recent discussion of humor is more il luminating and more directly applicable to the conditions of American life than that of the contemporary French philosopher Bergson. [ 170] HUMOR AND SATIRE Bergson insists throughout his brilliant little book on Laughter that laughter is a social func tion. 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 iso late 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 cor rective. 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 never theless, by laughing we become the saviors of society. THE AMERICAN MIND No one, I think, can help observing that this conception of humor as incongruity is par ticularly 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 senti ment, and of daring, are all transferred to the humor of the newly settled country. The very word "humor" once meant singularity of char acter, "some extravagant habit, passion, or af fection," says Dryden, "particular to some one person." Every newly opened country en courages, for a while, this oddness and incon gruity of individual character. It fosters it, and at the same moment it laughs at it. It de cides 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 [ HUMOR AND SATIRE scarcely less famous than the notion of incon gruity. 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 ap plicable 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 re marked, 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 con viction 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 [ 173 ] - THE AMERICAN MIND play of intellect or the coarser play of animal spirits. One might venture to make a distinc tion 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 cud gelling, the element of superiority and inferi ority 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 coun try village. On the front seat is a peasant, laughing at the antics of the clown. The peas ant 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 [ 174] HUMOR AND SATIRE of the peasant in front of him. He, the shop keeper, 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 shop keeper. 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 shop-keeper, 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 proprietor ship which we experience after a few days so journ 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 con scious 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 [ 175] THE AMERICAN MIND 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 thue newcomer. The superior ity need be in no sense a cruel or taunting su periority, although it often happens to be so. The humor of the pioneers is not very deli cately polished. The joke of the frontier tavern or grocery store is not always adapted to a drawing-room audience, but it turns in a sur prisingly large number of instances upon ex actly 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 supe riority, are both of them social in their nature. [ 176] HUMOR AND SATIRE 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 hun dred years. The cynicism, the misanthropy, the mere adolescent badness of Byron are pow erless 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, Dry- den, Pope, Byron, and Lowell, quiteat random; but they serve to illustrate a significant principle; namely, that great satire becomes ennobled as [ 177] THE AMERICAN MIND it touches communal, not merely individual interests, as it voices social and not merely in dividual ideals. Those four modern satirists were steeped in the nationalistic political poetry of the OldTestament. They were familiar with its war anthems, dirges, and prophecies, its con cern 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 po litical idealism, and the signs of national doom. There are two familiar types of satire asso ciated with the names of Horace and Juvenal. [ 78 ] HUMOR AND SATIRE Both types are abundantly illustrated in Eng lish and American literature. When you meet a bore or a hypocrite or a plain rascal, is it bet ter 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 ad- mirableand socially useful. The minor English and American poets of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were neverweary of speak ing 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 ac cordingly. The great satirists of the Renais sance, 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 [ 79 ] THE AMERICAN MIND like members of one club. Of course member ship 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 cen tury in England, was only about ten thousand copies. This limited audience smiled at the ur bane 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 de lightful. But there is a very different kind of audience gathering all this while outside the Harvard [ 180] HUMOR AND SATIRE gates. These two publics for the humorist we may call the invited and the uninvited ; the in ner 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, satir ical, 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 trium phantly under his very pillory ; with his True- Born Englishman puncturing forever the fiction of the honorable ancestry of the English aris tocracy ; with his Crusoe and Moll Flanders, written, as Lamb said long afterwards, for the servant-maid and the sailor. Swift is there, with THE AMERICAN MIND his terrific Drapiers Letters^ anonymous, aimed at the uneducated, with cold fury bludgeoning a government into obedience ; with his Gulli ver 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 con summate 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 v/orth as much to our Revolution men said as the sword of Washington. After another gen eration 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 con ventional " Ladies and Gentlemen," but with the ominously intimate, " My Fellow Citizens, * - Lincoln is saying, " I am not master of lan guage; I have not a fine education; I am not capable of entering into a disquisition upon dia- [ 82] HUMOR AND SATIRE lectics, 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 / will not leave this crowd in doubt, if I can explain it to them, what I really meant in the use of that paragraph." "/ 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 dia lect, and put into satirical verse, it is the lan guage 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 ob vious that just as a newly settled country offers constant opportunity for the humor of incon gruity and the humor arising from a sense of superiority, it likewise affords a daily stimulus to the use of satire. That moralizing Puritan THE AMERICAN MIND strain of censure which lost none of its harsh ness in crossing the Atlantic Ocean found full play in the colonial satire of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. As the topics for sat ire grew wider and more political in their scope, the audiences increased. To-day the very old est issues of the common life of that queer " political animal " named man are discussed by our popular newspaper satirists in the pre sence 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 nation ality has developed a mode of humor and sat ire 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 micro scope, 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 [ 184] HUMOR AND SATIRE much of this humor, after all, is either essen tially 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 po liceman. The lieutenant and the policeman, however, are a part of the accepted social furni ture 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 mag azine 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 [ 85 j THE AMERICAN MIND humor was due to the vastness of the Amer ican continent. Our geography, that is to say, is too much for the Yankee brain. Mr. Bir- 4- rell, 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 min imizing trick of American humor as with the converse trick of magnifying. Upon the Con tinent the characteristic trait of American humor has often been thought to be its ex uberance of phrase. Many shrewd judges of our newspaper humor have pointed out that one of its most favorite methods is the sup pression 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 stim ulated certain varieties of humor into such a [ 186] HUMOR AND SATIRE richness of manifestation as the Old World can scarcely show. Curiously enough, one of the most perfected types of American humor is that urbane Ho- ratian 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 Amer ican minds. Benjamin Franklin, for example, modelled his style and his sense of the humor ous on the papers of the Spectator. He pro duced 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 let ter 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 Hor ace or Voltaire. [ 187] THE AMERICAN MIND 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 able itself presuppose the existence of a truly culti vated society? Its tone "As I was saying when I was interrupted " is the tone of the in timate circle. There was so much genuine hu manity 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 hu mor 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, as sertive, headstrong people, to be thus made aware that many of the humorists whom we have loved best are precisely those whose writ ing has been marked by the most delicate re straint, whose theory of life has been the most highly urbane and civi4ized, whose work is in distinguishable in tone though its materials are so different from that of other humorous writers on the other side of the Atlantic. On [ 88 ] HUMOR AND SATIRE its social side all this is a fresh proof of the ex traordinary adaptability of the American mind. On the literary side it is one more evidence of the national fondness for neatness and per fection 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 Ho- ratian playing around the heart-strings, has characterized our humor and satire from the beginning. At bottom the American is serious. t Beneath the surface of his jokes there is moral ^earnestness, there is ethical passion y 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 some times delighted them with sheer whimsical in congruity, 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 moral izing might be by La Bruyere or La Roche foucauld. Take this : THE AMERICAN MIND " 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 "Pe troleum V. Nasby," writing from " Confedrit X Roads/ Kentucky, gives Deekin Pogram s views on education. " He did n 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 to- wunst begins to insist onto ownin land hisself, HUMOR AND SATIRE and givin his children edjucashun,and,ez a nig ger, 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 environ ment. 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 pre vented 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 THE AMERICAN MIND 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 sat ire 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 or ganism. A freshman must behave like a fresh man, or he is laughed at. Yet he must not be have 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 boy hood ; " I 11 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 mo ther fried me a few doughnuts ... for I told her I did n t know how long I should begone, * and off he goes to Portland, to see what the [ 192] HUMOR AND SATIRE 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 re sources, 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, con quest, initiation ; the heart of a boy who cc 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 pop ular humor of the comic supplements one may catch glimpses of the great revolving wheels THE AMERICAN MIND 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, pre cisely as he casts aside the national costume of the land from which he came. His speech, his gait, his demeanor, become as nearly as pos sible 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 child ren of our immigrants who catch the sly smiles of their s-chool-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 ridi culous than Delaware ? In the eyes of the news paper paragrapher it unquestionably is, just as Missouri has more humorous connotations than Kentucky. We may think we understand why [ 194 ] HUMOR AND SATIRE we smile when a man says that he comes from Kalamazoo or Oshkosh, but the smile when he says " Philadelphia " or " Boston " or " Brook lyn " is only a trifle more subtle. It is none the less real. Why should the suburban dweller of every city be regarded with humorous c^nde- scension 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 na tional 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 independ ence of speech and custom and imagination if we had not to reckon with this ever-present cen- C 195] THE AMERICAN MIND sure of laughter, this fear of rinding ourselves, our city, our section, out of touch with the pre valent 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 hu mor. Viewed exclusively from the standpoint of racial characteristics, we have seen that this question as to a national type of humor is diffi cult 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 some how to humorous account. The very institu tions 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. [ 196] HUMOR AND SATIRE I recall a notable essay by Mr. Charles John ston 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, hu mor does not. Wit frequently turns upon tri bal differences, upon tribal vanity. The mor dant 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. John ston 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 Amrrirrp. hiimni^ niiTiHinrr to the opinion of Mr. Johnston, emphasizes the broad and hu mane side of j)ur common nature. It reveals the common souLIt possesses a surplusage of power, oFbuoyancy and of conquest over cir- [ 97 ] THE AMERICAN MIND cumstances. 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 hu mor, the creators of what we may call the "all- American" type of humor, have possessed pre cisely the qualities which Mr. Johnston has pointed out. They are apparent in the pro ductions of Artemus Ward. The present gen eration 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 im pressed by his sunny quality, by the atmosphere of fraternal affection which glorifies his queer spelling and his somewhat threadbare witti cisms. Mark Twain, who is universally re cognized 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 [ 198 ] HUMOR AND SATIRE frontier experiences in Roughing //, his com ments 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 Amer ican writers. Largeness, freedom, human sym pathy, are revealed upon^every page. It is true that the dangers of American hu mor are no less in evidence there. There is the danger of extravagance, which in Mark Twain s earlier writings was carried to lengths of ab surdity. There is the old danger of the profes sional humorist of fearing to fail to score his point, and so of underscoring it with painful reiteration. Mark Twain is frequently gro tesque. Sometimes there is evidence of imper fect taste, or of bad taste. Sometimes there is actual vulgarity. In his earlier books particu larly there is revealed that lack of discipline which has been such a constant accompaniment of American writing. Yet a native of Hanni bal, Missouri, trained on a river steamboat and in a country printing-office and in mining- camps, can scarcely be expected to exhibit the THE AMERICAN MIND finely balanced critical sense of a Matthew Ar nold. 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 realiz ing that in this fresh revelation of immemorial human curiosity, this vivid perception of in congruity 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 Amer ican reaction to the facts presented by univer sal experience. The picturesque personality and the extra ordinarily successful career of Mark Twain kept him, during the last twenty-five years of his life, in the focus of public attention. But [ 200 ] HUMOR AND SATIRE no one can read the pages of the older Amer ican 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 set tles 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 y " Petroleum V. Nasby s " Letters from the Confedrit X Roads, Shillaber s Mrs. Par ting ton, 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 audi ence 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 every- THE AMERICAN MIND body 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 Diedricb Knickerbocker s History of New Tork, it is always with this gentle part ing of the lips, this kindly feeling toward the author, his characters and the world. A humor ous page which produces that effect for gener ation after generation, has thestamp of literature. One may doubt whether even the extraordi nary fantasies of Mark Twain are more suc cessful, judged by the mere vulgar test of con crete results, than the delicate humor of Charles Lamb. Our current newspaper and magazine [ 202 ] HUMOR AND SATIRE humor is in no respect more fascinating than in its suggestion as to the permanent effect iveness 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 character istics, would recognize as almost the final word of kindly satire upon our overworked, over excited, over-anxious, over-self-conscious gen eration? 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 import ance. Any of the topics can raise a laugh. If one examines a collection of American paro dies, one will find that the happy national talent for fun-making finds full scope in the parody [ 203 ] THE AMERICAN MIND and burlesque of the dearest national senti ments. 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 pic torial caricature. Indeed, caricature itself, as Bergson has pointed out, emphasizes those "automatic, mechanical-toy" traits of charac ter 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 vio lent 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 ser mon 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, eas^-^going, and kindly. The old satire of hatred has lost its force. No one knows why. " Satire [ 204 ] HUMOR AND SATIRE has grown weak/ says Mr. Chesterton, " pre cisely 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 tem per 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 per sonally 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 in nuendo, but rarely irony: it might not be un derstood, and the crowd must not be left in doubt. Possibly the old-fashioned satire has dis appeared because the game is no longer consid ered worth the candle. To puncture the tire of THE AMERICAN MIND 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 poli tics, trade, progress, override your passion ate 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 an cestors were. ftVmericans, on the whole, try to A/avoid giving pain through speech} The sat irists of the golden age loved that cruel exer cise of power. Perhaps we take things less seriously than they did ; undoubtedly our at tention 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 v understatement, and our equally characteristic humor of overstatement, are both likely to be cheery at bottom, though the mere wording [ 206 ] HUMOR AND SATIRE may be grim enough. No popular saying is more genuinely characteristic of American hu mor 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, [ 207 ] THE AMERICAN MIND that the man who is increasingly idolized as the most representative of all Americans, the bur den-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 expres sion 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 " Annan- dale 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 in junctions to let the world go and to care for the individual soul. [ 209 ] THE AMERICAN MIND 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 mem orable visit to Europe where he first made Carlyle s acquaintance. " Back again to my self," 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 him self. 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 ^Eschylus is that man he is taken for, INDIVIDUALISM AND FELLOWSHIP he has not yet done his office when he has edu cated 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 /Eschyluses to my in tellectual integrity." These quotations have to do with the per sonal life. Let me next illustrate the individ ualism 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 [211 ] THE AMERICAN MIND 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 towns men, 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 con fined, and the walls seemed a great waste of stone and mortar. I felt as if I alone of all my towns men had paid my tax. They plainly did not know how to treat me, but behaved like per sons 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 pun ish 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 INDIVIDUALISM AND FELLOWSHIP with her silver spoons, and that it did not know its friends from its foes, and I lost all my re maining respect for it, and pitied it." Here is Thoreau s attitude toward the pro blems of the inner life. The three quotations are from his Walden : " Probably I should not consciously and de liberately 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, [213 ] THE AMERICAN MIND 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 indi vidualism, 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 con spiracy 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 INDIVIDUALISM AND FELLOWSHIP 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 areas 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 coun try. 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 an swered, 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 THE AMERICAN MIND 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 fam ily 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 in dicated that the individualistic battle had been fought and lost. No one ever dreamed, ap parently, that a time for old-age pensions and honorable retiring funds was coming. The feel ing 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 per sons whom Parkman describes in his Oregon iL They have the perfect clearness of out- [216] INDIVIDUALISM AND FELLOWSHIP line 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 humor ous 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 por tions of the country, and in the remoter settle ments of the West and Southwest, the indi vidual 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 indi vidualism as a literary creed have thus gone hand in hand. " Produce great persons, the rest follows/ cried Walt Whitman. He was think ing 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 THE AMERICAN MIND 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 lec ture 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 pri vate person must be well trained, or he cannot do his work ; and as civilization advances, it becomes exceedingly difficult to train the indi vidual without social cooperation. A Paul or a Mahomet may discipline his own soul in the Desert of Arabia ; he may there learn the les sons 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 effective ness lies through social and professional dis cipline. 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 unconventionality and freedom. But they also lost something through their dislike for discipline, their indif ference to criticism, their ineradicable tendency, whether in business, in diplomacy, in art and INDIVIDUALISM AND FELLOWSHIP letters and education, to go "across lots." A certain degree of physical orderliness was, in deed, imposed upon our ancestors by the condi tions 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 under lay that resourcefulness which impresses every reader of our history. Did the colonist need a tool ? He learned to make it himself. Isola tion 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, stim ulated 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 disorderlinessP Even your modern Englishman as the saying goes "muddles THE AMERICAN MIND through. * The minds of our American fore fathers were not always lucid. The mysticism of the New England Calvinists sometimes bred fanaticism. The practical and the theoretical were queerly blended. The essential unorder- liness of the American mind is admirably illus trated by that " Father of all the Yankees," Benjamin Franklin. No student of Franklin s life fails to be impressed by its happy casual- ness, its cheerful flavor of the rogue-romance. Gil Bias himself never drifted into and out of an adventure with a more offhand and imper turbable 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 prob lems such as few amateurs have possessed. With all of his wonderful patience towards other men, Franklin had in the realm of scientific experi ment something of the typical impatience of the mere dabbler. He was inclined to lose in terest 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, INDIVIDUALISM AND FELLOWSHIP a knack of assimilation, a cosmopolitan many- sidedness, which has left us perpetually his debt ors. Under different surroundings, and disci plined by a more severe and orderly training, Franklin might easily have developed the very highest order of professional scientific achieve ment. His natural talent for organization of men and institutions, his " early projecting pub lic spirit," his sense of the lack of formal edu cational advantages in the colonies, made him the founder of the Philadelphia Academy, the successful agitator for public libraries. Acade micism, 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 Amer ica; reckless of precedent, self-taught, splen didly 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 condi tions, are bound to develop a sort of profes- THE AMERICAN MIND sional skill, of steady, concentrated, ordered in tellectual activity, for which Franklin possessed the potential capacity rather than the opportu nity 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 conciousness. In an other generation we see the rude Western de mocracy asserting itself in the valley of the Mis sissippi. 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 en ergy upon tasks which demanded skill, pro longed 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 poli tician. The number of parts which a man of energy played in his time was astonishingly [ 222 ] INDIVIDUALISM AND FELLOWSHIP large. Andrew Jackson was successively a law- y er, j udge, planter, merchant, general, politician, and statesman ; and he played most of these parts with conspicuous success. In such a so ciety a man who persisted in one job, and who applied the most rigorous and exacting stand ards to his work, was out of place and really in efficient. 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 uncriti cally to current standards. It is no wonder, con sequently, that the pioneer Democracy viewed with distrust and aversion the man with a spe cial vocation and high standards of achieve ment." The truth of this comment is apparent to everybody. It explans the still lingering popu lar 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 construe- ] THE AMERICAN MIND tive thinking. Lincoln used to describe himself humorously, slightingly, as a "mast-fed " law yer, 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 Illi nois Circuit or anywhere else who could hold their own, even in a purely professional strug gle, 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 no thing and knew nothing about conscious liter ary 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. Profes sional novelists like Balzac, professional critics [ 224 ] INDIVIDUALISM AND FELLOWSHIP like Sainte-Beuve, stand amazed at Fenimore Cooper s skill and power. The true engineer ing 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 ap parent laziness, never loses sight of the air- drawn line, marked by the homing bee; and jour 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 indif ference to standards were on the surface, ap parent to everybody, the soundness and rightness of his practice were unconscious. Franklin and Lincoln and Cooper, there fore, may be taken as striking examples of in dividuals trained in the old happy-go-lucky way, and yet with marked capacities for social- THE AMERICAN MIND ization, 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 contempo rary 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 individ ual performer has often been felt to be quite independent of his audience, it is quite evi dent nowadays that the old theory of individ- INDIVIDUALISM AND FELLOWSHIP ualism 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 de fects of American poetry. We have always been lacking in the more objective forms of literary art, like epic and drama. Poe, and the imita tors 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 abun dantly 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 Haw thorne 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 C 227 ] THE AMERICAN MIND solitary pathways. That fellowship in artistic creation which has characterized some of the greatest periods of art production was some thing 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 in tellectual and moral weaknesses heightens our fondness for the Prince of Essayists. But the deeper fact is that not only Emerson and Tho reau, Poe and Hawthorne, but practically every American writer and artist from the beginning has been forced to do his work without the sus taining and heartening touch of national fel lowship and pride. Emerson himself felt the chilling poverty in the intellectual and emo tional 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 ? 228 INDIVIDUALISM AND FELLOWSHIP 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 indi vidual artist. Yet there are signs that it is com ing. It is obvious that the day for the old indi vidualism has passed. Whether one looks at art and literature or at the general activities of American society, it is clear that the isolated in dividual is incompetent to carry on his neces sary tasks. This is not saying that we have outgrown the individual. We shall never out grow the individual. We need for every page of literature and for every adequate perform ance of society more highly perfected individ uals. 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 individ uals who do not know enough for their speci fic 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 [ 229 ] THE AMERICAN MIND will more adequately ; and this not merely to perfect their functioning as individuals, but to fulfill their obligations to contemporary soci ety. 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 aspira tion, 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 fellow ship. We shall instantly perceive the relation of these general social conditions to the speci fic performances of our men of letters. We have repeatedly noted that our most characteristic literature is what has been called a citizen liter ature. It is the sort of writing which springs from a sense of the general needs of the com munity and which has had foritsobject 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 INDIVIDUALISM AND FELLOWSHIP 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 plat form of democracy. Under the trying and de pressing conditions of that disastrous settle ment at Eden in Martin Cbuzzlewit it is the quick wits and the brave heart of Mark Tap- ley which prove him superior to his employer. The same sermon is preached in Mr. Barrie s play, T be Admirable Crichton : cast away upon the desert island, the butler proves himself a better man than his master. This is the mo tive of a very modern play, but it may be il lustrated a hundred times in the history of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Amer ica. 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 wilder ness a new order of things decreed that this in dividualism should be modified in the direction of fellowship. Calvinism itself, for all of its in sistence upon the value of the individual soul, taught also the principle of the equality of all souls before God. It was thus that the Insti- [331 ] THE AMERICAN MIND tutes of Calvin became one of the charters of democracy. The democratic drift in the writ ings of Franklin and Jefferson is too well known to need any further comment. The triumph of the rebellious colonists of 1776 was a tri umph of democratic principles ; and although a Tory reaction came promptly, although H am- iltonianism 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 demo cratic 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 Irvingand Fenimore Cooper came home from long sojurns in Europe. They found themselves confronted at once by sensi tive, suspicious neighbors who hated England and Europe and had a lurking or open hostil ity towards anything thatsavored of Old World culture. Yet in that very epoch when English visitors were passing their most harsh and cen sorious verdict upon American culture, Emer son was writing in his Journal (June 18, 1834) INDIVIDUALISM AND FELLOWSHIP a singular prophecy to the effect that the evils of our democracy, so far as literature was con cerned, 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 conver sation 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 liter ature a stone cut out of the ground without hands ; they may root out the hollow dilet tantism 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 THE AMERICAN MIND 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 ade quately acknowledged. That the outcome of the Civil War meant a triumph of democratic ideas as against aristo cratic 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 schol ars 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 [ 234 ] INDIVIDUALISM AND FELLOWSHIP 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." ji This instinct of fellowship cannot be sepa rated, of course, from the older instincts of righteousness and justice. It involves, how ever, more than giving the other man his due. It means feeling towards him as towards an other " 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 THE AMERICAN MIND 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,|fthat 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 to gether." It is the distinctly twentieth-century programme. We must all learn the art of get ting together, not merely to conserve the in terests 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 restless ness 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 [236 ] INDIVIDUALISM AND FELLOWSHIP 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 repre sentative of the true America. Literary illustrations of this spirit of frater- nalism 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 demo cracy, although J^ongfellow 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 del icately 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 [ 23? ] THE AMERICAN MIND those of Denman Thompson, Bronson How ard, 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." [j To many readers the supreme literary ex ample 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. tJLt-is based upon individualism ; the strong body and the pos sessed soul, sure of itself amid the whirling of the " quicksand years " ; but it sets these strong persons upon the "open road" in comrade ship ; it is the sentiment of comradeship which creates the indissolubleunion 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.^jAnybody has the right to call Leaves of Gfass poor poetry, [ 238 ] INDIVIDUALISM AND FELLOWSHIP if he pleases ; but nobody has the right to deny its magnificent AmericanisnO It is not merely in literature that this mes sage 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-wid ening 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 tri umphs, 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 un told 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 THE AMERICAN MIND 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 individual ism is lack of discipline, the obstacles to effect ive fellowship are vagueness, crankiness, in efficiency, and the relics of primal selfishness. Nobody in our day has preached the tidings of universal fellowship more fervidly and pow erfully than Tolstoi. Yet when one asks the great Russian, " What am I to do as a member of this fellowship ? " Tolstoi gives but a con fused 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 prin ciples 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 [ 240 ] INDIVIDUALISM AND FELLOWSHIP a new Earth. But they do not know exactly how to go about it. Our practical Western minds seize upon some actual plan for con structive labor. Miss Jane Addams organizes her settlements in the slums; Booker Wash ington gives his race models of industrial edu cation; President Eliot has a theory of univer sity 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 accord ing to Whitman and Tolstoi is bound to seem vague in its outlines, and ineffective in its con crete 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 con ceptions of fraternalism remain\ A further obstacle to the progress of fellow ship 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, be fore our eyes, our contemporary art and liter ature. " The West," says James Bryce, " is the C *4i ] THE AMERICAN MIND most American part of America, that is to say the part where those features which distinguish America from Europe come out in the strong est 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 hori zon 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 so cial order, to the conception of the rights of the state. The story of the West is thus an [ 242 ] INDIVIDUALISM AND FELLOWSHIP 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 indiffer ent to traditions. We have overlooked the de fective training of the individual, provided he * " made good." We have often, as in the free silver craze, turned our back upon universal I 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 ac tivity 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 think ing, its superb confidence, is to be ignorant of the constructive forces of the nation. The hu mor of the West, its democracy, its rough kind ness, its faith in the people, its generous notion THE AMERICAN MIND I of" the square deal for everybody," its eleva tion of the man above the dollar, are all typi cal 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 4 interest in the ethical aspect of social move- I ments that is creating some of the moving forces f in American society to-day. Experiment sta- tions 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 pop- t ulation 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 typi cal section of our country is to draw up an in dictment against our people as a whole. And yet one who studies the literature and art pro duced in the great Mississippi Valley will see, I believe, that the needs of the West are the [ 244 ] INDIVIDUALISM AND FELLOWSHIP 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 sug gestive 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 in significance. 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 opin ions when one can already see that the multi tude is on the other side ? The greater your democratic faith in the ultimate Tightness of the multitude, the less perhaps your individual power of will. The easier is it for you to be lieve that everything is coming out right, whe ther you put your shoulder to the wheel or not. [ *4S 1 THE AMERICAN MIND \ The problem of overcoming these evils is nothing less than the problem of spiritualizing democracy. There are some of our hero-wor shipping 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 spiritu alizing democracy, no less familiar to the stu dent 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 illus trate 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 incom pletely spiritualized, not yet raised to their full stature. Unquestionably, our American life is, in European eyes at least, monotonously uni form. It is touched with self-complacency. It [a 4 6] INDIVIDUALISM AND FELLOWSHIP 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, per haps, 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 commen surate with the living forces of the country. The unconscious, moral, and spiritual life of the nation is not back of them, making cc 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 les son 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 [>47] THE AMERICAN MIND 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 ally 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 un conscious expression of a civilization. A na tion 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 for get the distinction between " each" and " all," but " all " will increasingly be placed at the ser- INDIVIDUALISM AND FELLOWSHIP vice 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, CAMBRIDGE . MASSACHUSETTS U . S . A RETURN CIRCULATION DEPARTMENT 202 Main Librar- LOAN PERIOD 1 HOME USE 4" ALL BOOKS MAY BE RECALLED AFTER 7 DAYS Renewals and Recharges may be made 4 days prior to the due . Books may be Renewed by calling 642-3405. DUE AS STAMPED BELOW FORM NO. DD6 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKEL BERKELEY, CA 94720 CD3127M7S3 250<o3O THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY