Part 2 (1/2)
The moral temper of the American people has been a.n.a.lyzed no less frequently than their mental traits. Foreign and native observers are alike agreed in their recognition of the extraordinary American energy. The sheer power of the American bodily machine, driven by the American will, is magnificent. It is often driven too hard, and with reckless disregard of anything save immediate results. It wears out more quickly than the bodily machine of the Englishman. It is typical that the best distance runners of Great Britain usually beat ours, while we beat them in the sprints. Our public men are frequently--as the athletes say--”all in” at sixty. Their energy is exhausted at just the time that many an English statesman begins his best public service.
But after making every allowance for wasteful excess, for the restless and impatient consumption of nervous forces which nature intended that we should hold in reserve, the fact remains that American history has demonstrated the existence of a dynamic national energy, physical and moral, which is still unabated. Immigration has turned hitherward the feet of millions upon millions of young men from the hardiest stocks of Europe. They replenish the slackening streams of vigor. When the northern New Englander cannot make a living on the old farm, the French Canadian takes it off his hands, and not only improves the farm, but raises big crops of boys. So with Italians, Swedes, Germans, Irish, Jews, and Portuguese, and all the rest. We are a nation of immigrants, a digging, hewing, building, breeding, bettering race, of mixed blood and varying creeds, but of fundamental faith in the wages of going on; a race compounded of materials crude but potent; raw, but with blood that is red and bones that are big; a race that is accomplis.h.i.+ng its vital tasks, and, little by little, trans.m.u.ting brute forces and material energies into the finer play of mind and spirit.
From the very beginning, the American people have been characterized by idealism. It was the inner light of Pilgrim and Quaker colonists; it gleams no less in the faces of the children of Russian Jew immigrants to-day. American irreverence has been noted by many a foreign critic, but there are certain subjects in whose presence our reckless or cynical speech is hushed. Compared with current Continental humor, our characteristic American humor is peculiarly reverent. The purity of woman and the reality of religion are not considered topics for jocosity. Cleanness of body and of mind are held by our young men to be not only desirable but attainable virtues. There is among us, in comparison with France or Germany, a defective reverence for the State as such; and a positive irreverence towards the laws of the Commonwealth, and towards the occupants of high political positions.
Mayor, Judge, Governor, Senator, or even President, may be the b.u.t.t of such indecorous ridicule as shocks or disgusts the foreigner; but nevertheless the personal joke stops short of certain topics which Puritan tradition disapproves. The United States is properly called a Christian nation, not merely because the Supreme Court has so affirmed it, but because the phrase ”a Christian nation” expresses the historical form which the religious idealism of the country has made its own. The Bible is still considered, by the ma.s.s of the people, a sacred book; oaths in courts of law, oaths of persons elected to great office, are administered upon it. American faith in education, as all the world knows, has from the beginning gone hand in hand with faith in religion; the school-house was almost as sacred a symbol as the meeting-house; and the munificence of American private benefactions to the cause of education furnishes to-day one of the most striking instances of idealism in the history of civilization.
The ideal pa.s.sions of patriotism, of liberty, of loyalty to home and section, of humanitarian and missionary effort, have all burned with a clear flame in the United States. The optimism which lies so deeply embedded in the American character is one phase of the national mind.
Charles Eliot Norton once said to me, with his dry humor, that there was an infallible test of the American authors.h.i.+p of any anonymous article or essay: ”Does it contain the phrase 'After all, we need not despair'? If it does, it was written by an American.” In spite of all that is said about the practicality of the American, his love of gain and his absorption in material interests, those who really know him are aware how habitually he confronts his practical tasks in a spirit of romantic enthusiasm. He marches downtown to his prosaic day's job and calls it ”playing the game”; to work as hard as he can is to ”get into the game,” and to work as long as he can is to ”stay in the game”; he loves to win fully as much as the Jew and he hates to lose fully as much as the Englishman, but losing or winning, he carries into his business activity the mood of the idealist.
It is easy to think of all this as self-deception as the emotional effusiveness of the American temperament; but to refuse to see its idealism is to mistake fundamentally the character of the American man.
No doubt he does deceive himself often as to his real motives: he is a mystic and a bargain-hunter by turns. Divided aims, confused ideals, have struggled for the mastery among us, ever since Challon's _Voyage_, in 1606, announced that the purpose of the first colonists to Virginia was ”both to seek to convert the savages, as also to seek out what benefits or commodities might be had in those parts.” How that ”both”--”as also” keeps echoing in American history: ”both” to christianize the Negro and work him at a profit, ”both” duty and advantage in retaining the Philippines; ”both” international good will and increased armaments; ”both” Sunday morning precepts and Monday morning practice; ”both” horns of a dilemma; ”both G.o.d and mammon”; did ever a nation possess a more marvellous water-tight compartment method of believing and honoring opposites! But in all this unconscious hypocrisy the American is perhaps not worse--though he may be more absurd!--than other men.
Another aspect of the American mind is found in our radicalism. ”To be an American,” it has been declared, ”is to be a radical.” That statement needs qualification. Intellectually the American is inclined to radical views; he is willing to push certain social theories very far; he will found a new religion, a new philosophy, a new socialistic community, at the slightest notice or provocation; but he has at bottom a fund of moral and political conservatism. Thomas Jefferson, one of the greatest of our radical idealists, had a good deal of the English squire in him after all. Jeffersonianism endures, not merely because it is a radical theory of human nature, but because it expresses certain facts of human nature. The American mind looks forward, not back; but in practical details of land, taxes, and governmental machinery we are instinctively cautious of change. The State of Connecticut knows that her const.i.tution is ill adapted to the present conditions of her population, but the difficulty is to persuade the rural legislators to amend it. Yet everybody admits that amendment will come ”some day.”
This admission is a characteristic note of American feeling; and every now and then come what we call ”uplift” movements, when radicalism is in the very air, and a thousand good ”causes” take fresh vigor.
One such period was in the New England of the eighteen-forties. We are moving in a similar--only this time a national--current of radicalism, to-day. But a change in the weather or the crops has before now turned many of our citizens from radicalism into conservatism. There is, in fact, conservatism in our blood and radicalism in our brains, and now one and now the other rules. Very typical of American radicalism is that story of the old sea-captain who was ignorant, as was supposed, of the science of navigation, and who cheerfully defended himself by saying that he could work his vessel down to Boston Light without knowing any navigation, and after that he could go where he ”dum pleased.” I suspect the old fellow pulled his s.e.xtant and chronometer out of his chest as soon as he really needed them. American radicalism is not always as innocent of the world's experience as it looks. In fact, one of the most interesting phases of this twentieth century ”uplift” movement is its respect and even glorification of expert opinion. A German expert in city-planning electrifies an audience of Chicago club-women by talking to them about drains, ash-carts, and flower-beds. A hundred other experts, in sanitation, hygiene, chemistry, conservation of natural resources, government by commission, tariffs, arbitration treaties, are talking quite as busily; and they have the attention of a national audience that is listening with genuine modesty, and with a real desire to refas.h.i.+on American life on wiser and n.o.bler plans. In this national forward movement in which we are living, radicalism has shown its beneficent aspect of constructive idealism.
No catalogue of American qualities and defects can exclude the trait of individualism. We exalt character over inst.i.tutions, says Mr. Brownell; we like our inst.i.tutions because they suit us, and not because we admire inst.i.tutions. ”Produce great persons,” declares Walt Whitman, ”the rest follows.” Whether the rest follows or not, there can be no question that Americans, from the beginning, have laid singular stress upon personal qualities. The religion and philosophy of the Puritans were in this respect at one with the gospel of the frontier. It was the principle of ”every man for himself”; solitary confrontation of his G.o.d, solitary struggle with the wilderness. ”He that will not work,”
declared John Smith after that first disastrous winter at Jamestown, ”neither let him eat.” The pioneer must clear his own land, harvest his own crops, defend his own fireside; his temporal and eternal salvation were strictly his own affair. He asked, and expected, no aid from the community; he could at most ”change works” in time of harvest, with a neighbor, if he had one. It was the sternest school of self-reliance, from babyhood to the grave, that human society is ever likely to witness. It bred heroes and cranks and hermits; its glories and its eccentricities are written in the pages of Emerson, Th.o.r.eau, and Whitman; they are written more permanently still in the instinctive American faith in individual manhood. Our democracy idolizes a few individuals; it ignores their defective training, or, it may be, their defective culture; it likes to think of an Andrew Jackson who was a ”lawyer, judge, planter, merchant, general, and politician,” before he became President; it asks only that the man shall not change his individual character in pa.s.sing from one occupation or position to another; in fact, it is amused and proud to think of Grant hauling cordwood to market, of Lincoln keeping store or Roosevelt rounding-up cattle. The one essential question was put by Hawthorne into the mouth of Holgrave in the _House of the Seven Gables_. Holgrave had been by turns a schoolmaster, clerk in a store, editor, pedler, lecturer on Mesmerism, and daguerreotypist, but ”amid all these personal vicissitudes,” says Hawthorne, ”he had never lost his ident.i.ty.... He had never violated the innermost man, but had carried his conscience along with him.” There speaks the local accent of Puritanism, but the voice insisting upon the moral integrity of the individual is the undertone of America.
Finally, and surely not the least notable of American traits, is public spirit. Triumphant individualism checks itself, or is rudely checked in spite of itself, by considerations of the general good. How often have French critics confessed, with humiliation, that in spite of the superior socialization of the French intelligence, France has yet to learn from America the art and habit of devoting individual fortunes to the good of the community. Our American literature, as has been already pointed out, is characteristically a citizen literature, responsive to the civic note, the production of men who, like the writers of the _Federalist_, applied a vigorous practical intelligence, a robust common sense, to questions affecting the interest of everybody. The spirit of fair play in our free democracy has led Americans to ask not merely what is right and just for one, the individual, but what are righteousness and justice and fair play for all. Democracy, as embodied in such a leader as Lincoln, has meant Fellows.h.i.+p. Nothing finer can be said of a representative American than to say of him, as Mr. Norton said of Mr. Lowell, that he had a ”most public soul.”
No one can present such a catalogue of American qualities as I have attempted without realizing how much escapes his cla.s.sification.
Conscious criticism and a.s.sessment of national characteristics is essential to an understanding of them; but one feels somehow that the net is not holding. The a.n.a.lysis of English racial inheritances, as modified by historical conditions, yields much, no doubt; but what are we to say of such magnificent embodiments of the American spirit as are revealed in the Swiss immigrant Aga.s.siz, the German exile Carl Schurz, the native-born mulatto Booker Was.h.i.+ngton? The Americanism of representative Americans is something which must be felt; it is to be reached by imaginative perception and sympathy, no less than by the process of formal a.n.a.lysis. It would puzzle the experts in racial tendencies to find arithmetically the common denominator of such American figures as Franklin, Was.h.i.+ngton, Jackson, Webster, Lee, Lincoln, Emerson, and ”Mark Twain”; yet the countrymen of those typical Americans instinctively recognize in them a sort of largeness, genuineness, naturalness, kindliness, humor, effectiveness, idealism, which are indubitably and fundamentally American.
There are certain sentiments of which we ourselves are conscious, though we can scarcely translate them into words, and these vaguely felt emotions of admiration, of effort, of fellows.h.i.+p and social faith are the invisible America. Take, for a single example, the national admiration for what we call a ”self-made” man: here is a boy selling candy and newspapers on a Michigan Central train; he makes up his mind to be a lawyer; in twelve years from that day he is general counsel for the Michigan Central road; he enters the Senate of the United States and becomes one of its leading figures. The instinctive flush of sympathy and pride with which Americans listen to such a story is far more deeply based than any vulgar admiration for money-making abilities. No one cares whether such a man is rich or poor. He has vindicated anew the possibilities of manhood under American conditions of opportunity; the miracle of our faith has in him come true once more.
No one can understand America with his brains. It is too big, too puzzling. It tempts, and it deceives. But many an illiterate immigrant has felt the true America in his pulses before he ever crossed the Atlantic. The descendant of the Pilgrims still remains ignorant of our national life if he does not respond to its glorious zest, its throbbing energy, its forward urge, its uncomprehending belief in the future, its sense of the fresh and mighty world just beyond to-day's horizon. Whitman's ”Pioneers, O Pioneers” is one of the truest of American poems because it beats with the pulse of this onward movement, because it is full of this laughing and conquering fellows.h.i.+p and of undefeated faith.
III
American Idealism
Our endeavor to state the general characteristics of the American mind has already given us some indication of what Americans really care for.
The things or the qualities which they like, the objects of their conscious or unconscious striving, are their ideals. ”There is what I call the American idea,” said Theodore Parker in the Anti-Slavery Convention of 1850. ”This idea demands, as the proximate organization thereof, a democracy--that is, a government of all the people, by all the people, for all the people; of course, a government on the principle of eternal justice, the unchanging law of G.o.d; 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 d.y.k.e which bears that very t.i.tle--give a programme of national accomplishments and aspirations.
But our immediate task is more specific. It is to point out how adequately this idealistic side of the national temperament has been expressed in American writing. Has our literature kept equal pace with our thinking and feeling?
We do not need, in attempting to answer this question, any definition of idealism, in its philosophical or in its more purely literary sense.
There are certain fundamental human sentiments which lift men above brutes, Frenchmen above ”frog-eaters,” and Englishmen above ”shop-keepers.” These enn.o.bling sentiments or ideals, while universal in their essential nature, a.s.sume in each civilized nation a somewhat specific coloring. The national literature reveals the myriad shades and hues of private and public feeling, and the more truthful this literary record, the more delicate and n.o.ble become the harmonies of local and national thought or emotion with the universal instincts and pa.s.sions of mankind. On the other hand, when the literature of Spain, for instance, or of Italy, fails, within a given period, in range and depth of human interest, we are compelled to believe either that the Spain or Italy of that age was wanting in the n.o.bler ideals, or that it lacked literary interpretation.
In the case of America we are confronted by a similar dilemma. Since the beginning of the seventeenth century this country has been, in a peculiar sense, the home of idealism; but our literature has remained through long periods thin and provincial, barren in cosmopolitan significance; and the hard fact faces us to-day that only three or four of our writers have aroused any strong interest in the cultivated readers of continental Europe. Evidently, then, either the torch of American idealism does not burn as brightly as we think, or else our writers, with but few exceptions, have not hitherto possessed the height and reach and grasp to hold up the torch so that the world could see it. Let us look first at the flame, and then at the torch-bearers.
Readers of Carlyle have often been touched by the humility with which that disinherited child of Calvinism speaks of Goethe's doctrine of the ”Three Reverences,” as set forth in _Wilhelm Meister_. Again and again, in his correspondence and his essays, does Carlyle recur to that teaching of the threefold Reverence: Reverence for what is above us, for what is around us and for what is under us; that is to say, the ethnic religion which frees us from debasing fear, the philosophical religion which unites us with our comrades, and the Christian religion which recognizes humility and poverty and suffering as divine.
”To which of these religions do you specially adhere?” inquired Wilhelm.