I
Is it, as Henry Adams suggests, a fiction that society educates itself
or aims at a conscious purpose? In Europe at all events, as he points
out, society has not done so. European society at the present time
is old. Its youth was not more conscious than that of the average
man whose character is formed by the blows and punches of fate. But
in America society is young and at least self-conscious. Comparative
peace surrounds it: experience of similarly thinking nations is at its
service. With these advantages can it consciously form a new and finer
civilization within itself, with new values from the experience of the
old European civilization and values, now of doubtful worth? America,
intellectually, is of European descent. Her language, her law, are
not alien to those of the old world. When, therefore, one asks if her
society can educate itself toward a conscious purpose, one must not
answer that question with the experiences of Asiatic civilizations in
mind.
Since 1914, it has been very clear that a new energy has begun to stir
in America. It is as if the mass of the people has begun to realize
itself not as a congregation of settlers, farmers and prospectors,
but as a nation capable of an ideal somewhat different in spirit from
those which, as it can perceive from its newspapers, animate the
nations of Europe. In other words, America has begun to realize that
she is capable of at any rate desiring an independent ideal worthy of
attainment.
It is not in the works of such writers as Emerson, Whitman, Henry
Adams, and Edwin Arlington Robinson, nor in the works of the younger
writers who seek inspiration outside the sphere of American life, that
one finds this realization actively leading American public thought. It
is in such, at first sight, unusual forms of philosophical expression
as acts of law, social customs, and even newspaper articles. There one
hears the voice of the American nation beginning to assert that the old
codes which it inherited from Europe have come under its criticism.
This criticism, one feels, arises from a definite and conscious
comparison of an inherited ideal with one which is being gradually
formulated by the whole nation.
In order to follow an ideal of this particular and, one might say,
personal kind, it is necessary that the nation which seeks after it
should, in the first place, attempt to know itself. One sees that, in
every way, America today tries by self-expression to realize her own
character. In the East, in the West, particularly in the Middle West,
every individual who is not wholly absorbed in making money or in
furthering the material welfare of his country attempts at some time
during his life to say what he thinks of the world as he sees it. His
world is not an old world of traditions. There is no traditional way of
expressing his thoughts about it ready to his hand, nor is every man
a great literary artist. He has had, therefore, to invent a form of
expression that is not too great a tax upon his powers.
Few men or women are capable of sustaining their energies through
the length of a novel or of a work of philosophy, and fewer have the
gift of poetry. It would seem, therefore, that almost of necessity
the American people has adopted the short story as its particular
form of art: not the sketch nor the episodic tale, but a fairly long
and systematically constructed piece of writing in which primarily
it liberates its own feelings, and by which secondarily it tells a
tale. The American short story, therefore, has an immense and peculiar
interest and value. One feels in it the striving of a nation to express
itself, and thereby to come to a knowledge of its own character, in
order completely and consciously to follow an ideal which it hopes to
set before itself.
But whether through the evolutions of human life it is possible to
follow a fixed ideal, whether it is possible for a whole nation
consciously to mould its future, whether even it is possible for a
people to realize its own character clearly enough to be able to impose
a philosophy upon it, only the future can tell. One is inclined
to think that it is impossible, but that does not detract from the
extraordinary interest which the phenomenon of a nation seeking
self-realization arouses.
Whatever the result of America’s conscious attempt at self-education
may be, the record of it, in the form at any rate of the short
story, whether good or bad, will be of the greatest value to future
generations.