approval or disapproval, they have depicted for us a society which
presents such marked divergencies from our own manners and customs that
there is not one of us but comes to America believing that his best or
worst hopes will be confirmed. It is, therefore, somewhat disconcerting
to confess that neither presentment has been realized. To have passed
from Continental Europe to New York, via London, is to deprive oneself
of that social and intellectual shock which is responsible for the
uniformly profound impression which transatlantic conditions make
upon the European mind. So many continentals enjoy in the United
States their first direct contact with Anglo-Saxon institutions and
modes of thought that the revelation cannot fail to stimulate them.
Their writings frequently testify to a naïve ignorance of the prior
existence in England of what excites their dismay or admiration in
America. If it be asked why, then, have Englishmen similarly reacted
to the same stimuli, if acquaintance with England blunts the fine
edge of perception, the reply must be: the quality of their emotion
is different. The impression made upon a mind formed by purely Latin
traditions necessarily differs from that received by a mind previously
subjected to Anglo-Saxon influences. Consequently, the student of
American life who has neither the motive of what might be called
family jealousy, in the Englishman, nor the mentality, wholly innocent
of alien culture, of the Latin, would seem well equipped to view the
subject from another angle.
To the good European the most striking characteristic of the United
States is a widespread intellectual anæmia. So far from exhibiting
those traits of freedom and progress which harrow the souls of
sensitive aristocrats in Europe, the American people alarm the outsider
in search of stimulating ideas by their devotion to conventions
and formulæ. As soon as one has learnt to discount those lesser
manifestations of independence, whose perilous proximity to discourtesy
gives them an exaggerated importance in the eyes of superficial
critics, the conventionality of the American becomes increasingly
evident. So many foreigners have been misled--mainly because of an
apparent rudeness--by this show of equality, this ungraciousness
in matters of service, that one hesitates at first to dismiss the
unconventional American as a myth closely related to that of the
“immoral Frenchman.” It is only when prolonged association has revealed
the timid respectability beneath this veneer of informality that it
becomes possible to understand the true position of America. From
questioning individuals one proceeds to an examination of the public
utterances of prominent men, and the transition from the press to
literature is easily made. At length comes the discovery that mentally
the United States is a generation or two behind Western Europe. The
rude and vigorous young democracy, cited by its admirers in extenuation
of æsthetic sins of omission and commission, suddenly stands forth
attired in the garment of ideas which clothed early Victorian England.
This condition is largely due to the absence of an educated class
accustomed to leisure. To the American work for work’s sake has a
dignity unknown in Europe, where it is rare to find anybody working
for mere wages if he has any means of independent subsistence, however
small. In America the contrary is the case, and people who could afford
to cultivate their own personalities prefer to waste their energies
upon some definite business. Almost all the best that has come out
of Europe has been developed in that peculiar class which sacrificed
money-making for the privilege of leisure and relative independence.
The only corresponding class in the United States is that of the
college professors, who are an omnipresent menace to the free interplay
of ideas. Terrorized by economic fears and intellectual inhibitions,
they have no independence. They are despised by the plain people
because of their failure to make money; and to them are relegated all
matters which are considered of slight moment, namely, learning and
the arts. In these fields the pedants rule unchallenged, save when
some irate railroad presidents discover in their teachings the heresy
of radicalism. Æsthetics is a science as incomprehensible to them as
beauty, and they prefer to substitute the more homely Christian ethics.
Moral preoccupations are their sole test of excellence. The views of
these gentlemen and their favourite pupils fill the bookshelves and the
news-stands.
The professorial guardians of Colonial precedents and traditions
determine what the intellectual life of America shall be. Hence the
cult of anæmia. Instead of writing out of themselves and their own
lives, they aspire to nothing greater than to be classed as English.
They are obsessed by the standards imposed from without, and their
possible achievement is thwarted. While they are still shaking their
heads over Poe, and trying to decide whether Whitman is respectable, a
national literature is growing up without the guidance and help which
it should expect from them. At the same time, as the official pundits
have the ear of Europe, and particularly of England, American culture
is known only as they reflect it. It is natural, therefore, that the
European attitude should be as contemptuous as it so often is.
When the reviews publish some ignorant and patronizing dissertation on
the American novel or American poetry, by an English writer, they are
pained by the evident lack of appreciation. The ladies and gentlemen
whose works are respectfully discussed by the professors, and warmly
recommended by the reviewers, do not seem to receive the consideration
due to them for their unflinching adherence to the noblest standards
of academic criticism. When these torch-bearers of the purest Colonial
tradition are submitted to the judgment of their “big” cousins in
England, there is a noticeable condescension in those foreigners.
But why should they profess to admire as the brightest stars in the
American firmament what are, after all, the phosphorescent gleams of
literary ghosts? Is it any wonder that the majority of Britishers
can continue in the comfortable belief that there is practically no
American literature worthy of serious attention?
The academic labours of American professors of literature are an
easy and constant butt for English critics. Yet, they rarely think
of questioning the presentation of literary America for which these
gentlemen are so largely responsible. When have the Stuart Shermans and
Paul Elmer Mores (and their diminutives) recognized the existence of
a living American writer of genius, originality, or distinction? The
only justification for their existences is their alleged capacity to
estimate literary values. If they cannot do so, it is hardly surprising
that their English patrons, who imagine that they are representative
men, do not often penetrate the veil of Colonialism. Whatever their
outward professions, the majority of Englishmen regard all other
English-speaking countries as Colonies. Since they are stubborn enough
when faced with undeniable proof of the contrary, as in Ireland, it is
unlikely they will persuade themselves unaided that they are mistaken.
When will American criticism have the courage to base the claims of
contemporary literature on those works which are essentially and
unmistakably American?
The mandarins, of course, have stood for reaction in all countries,
and there is no intention here to acquit the European of the species.
So many of his worst outrages are matters of history that it would be
futile to pretend that he is untrue to type. Nevertheless, his position
in Europe is measurably more human than in this country, owing to the
greater freedom of intellectual intercourse. In America the mandarin is
firmly established on a pedestal which rests upon the vast unculture
of an immense immigrant population, enjoying for the first time the
benefits of sufficient food and heat. He is obviously secure in his
conviction that those qualified to challenge him--except perhaps
some isolated individual--are not likely to do so, being of the same
convention as himself. He belongs to the most perfect trade-union, one
which has a practical monopoly of its labour. His European colleagues,
on the contrary, live in constant dread of traitors from their ranks,
or worse still, the advance of an opposing force manned with brains of
no inferior calibre. France, for example, can boast of a remarkable
roll of names which never adorned the councils of pedantry, or not
until they had imposed a new tradition. The two finest minds of
modern French literature, Anatole France and Rémy de Gourmont, are
illustrations of this fact. France has never allowed his academic
honours to restrict the daring play of his ideas; Gourmont died in the
admiration of all cultivated men, although his life was a prolonged
protest against the orthodox, who never succeeded in taming him.
What America requires is an unofficial _intelligentsia_ as strong and
as articulate as the political and literary pundits, whose purely
negative attitude first exasperates, and finally sterilizes, every
impulse towards originality. Only when a survey is made of the leading
figures in the various departments of American life is it possible
fully to realize the weight of inertia which presses upon the intellect
of the country. While the spirit of enterprise and progress is
stimulated and encouraged in all that relates to material advancement,
the artistic and reasoning faculties are deadened. Scientific study,
when directed to obviously practical ends, is the only form of mental
effort which can count upon recognition and reward. It is not without
its significance that the Johns Hopkins Medical School is the one
learned institution in America whose fame is world-wide amongst
those who appreciate original research, otherwise the names of few
universities are mentioned outside academic circles. Even in the field
of orthodox literary culture the mandarins have, in the main, failed
to do anything positive. They have preferred to bury their talent
in anæmic commentary. The reputed intellectuals are still living on
a tradition bequeathed by the attenuated transcendentalism of the
Bostonian era.
That tradition was, after all, but a refinement of the notorious
Puritanism of New England. Having lost whatever semblance of
dignity the Emersons and Thoreaus conferred upon it, its subsequent
manifestations have been a decadent reversion to aboriginal barbarism.
This retrograde movement, so far as it affects social life, is
noticeable in the ever-increasing number of crusades and taboos, the
constant probing of moral and industrial conditions, unrelated to any
well-considered desire for improvement, or intelligent conception of
progress. The orgies of prohibition and suppression are unbelievable to
the civilized European, who has no experience of a community in which
everything from alcohol to Sunday tennis has attracted the attention
of the “virtuosi of vice”--to quote the phrase of a discerning critic.
Innumerable commissions, committees, and boards of enquiry supplement
the muck-raking of yellow journalism, and encourage espionage in social
reformers. But what has the country to show for this? Probably the
greatest number of bungled, unsolved, and misunderstood problems of all
industrial nations of the same rank.
These debauches of virtue, however, are the direct outcome of the
mental conditions fostered by those who are in a position to mould
public opinion. The crowd which tolerates, or participates in, the
Puritanical frenzy is merely reflecting the current political and
social doctrine of the time. Occasionally the newspapers will hold a
symposium, or the reviews will invite the aid of some foreign critic,
to ascertain the reasons for the prevailing puerility of American
fiction. Invariably it is urged, and rightly, that the novel is
written by women for women. Where almost all articles of luxury are
produced for female consumption, and the arts are deemed unessential to
progress, the latter are naturally classed with uneconomic production
destined to amuse the idle. They are left to the women, as the men
explain, who have not yet understood the true dignity of leisure.
They are abandoned, in other words, to the most unreal section of the
community, to those centres of culture, the drama leagues and literary
clubs, composed of male and female spinsters. Needless to say, any
phrase or idea likely to have disturbed a mid-Victorian vicarage will
be ruled out as unseemly.
The malady of intellectual anæmia is not restricted to any one
department of American life. In politics, as in art and literature,
there is a dread of reality. The emasculation of thought in general
is such as to render colourless the ideas commonly brought to the
attention of the public. Perhaps the most palpable example of
this penchant for platitude is the substantial literature of a
pseudo-philosophic character which encumbers the book-stores, and is
read by thousands of right-thinking citizens. Namby-pamby works, it
is true, exist to some extent in all Protestant countries, but their
number, prevalence, and cost in America are evidence of the demand they
must meet. It is not for nothing that the books of thoughtful writers
are crowded from shelves amply stocked with the meditations of an
Orison Swett Marden, a Henry van Dyke, or a Hamilton Wright Mabie--to
mention at random some typical authors.
These moral soothsayers successfully compete with moving-picture
actors, and novelists whose claim to distinction is their ability to
write the best-seller of the season. If they addressed themselves only
to the conventicles, the phenomenon would have less significance,
but the conventicles have their own minor prophets. The conclusion,
therefore, suggests itself, that these must be the leaders and moulders
of American thought. The suspicion is confirmed when men of the same
stamp, sometimes, indeed, the actual authors of this evangelical
literature, are found holding the most important public offices.
To have written a methodist-tract would appear to be an unfailing
recommendation for promotion. It is rare to find the possessor of such
a mentality relegated to the obscurity he deserves.
A wish to forestall the accusation of exaggeration or inaccuracy
imposes the painful obligation of citing specific instances of the
tendency described. Who are the leading public men of this country,
and what have they written? Besides the classic volumes of Thiers and
Guizot must we set such amiable puerilities as “The New Freedom,” “On
Being Human,” and “When a Man Comes to Himself.” Even the essays of
Raymond Poincaré do not sound the depths indicated by the mere titles
of these presidential works. But the author of “The State,” for all
his antiquated theories of government, writes measurably above the
level of that diplomatist whose copious bibliography includes numerous
variations upon such themes as “The Gospel for a World of Sin,” “The
First Christmas Tree,” and “The Blue Flower.” A search through the
underworld of parish magazines in England, France, and Germany would
probably reveal something to be classed with the works of Dr. Lyman
Abbott, but the authors would not be entrusted with the editorship of
a leading weekly review. As for the writings of his associate, the
existence of his book on Shakespeare is a testimony to Anglo-Saxon
indifference to the supreme genius of the race.
It is hardly necessary to dwell upon the literary labours of William
Jennings Bryan, ex-Secretary of State, except to wonder that they did
not alone suffice to disqualify him for such an office. They belong
to the same category as those volumes of popular American philosophy
whose titles are: “Character the Grandest Thing in the World,”
“Cheerfulness as a Life Power,” and “The Miracle of Right Thought.” If
those quoted are to be laid to the charge of Mr. Orison Swett Marden,
every department of American life contains prominent men who might say:
There, but for the grace of God, speak I. The sanctimonious breath of
the uplifter tarnishes the currency of ideas in almost every circle of
society. Irrespective of party, Republicans, Democrats, and Socialists
help to build up this monument of platitude which may one day mark
the resting place of the American brain. Books, reviews, magazines,
and newspapers are largely conceived in the evangelical spirit. The
average contributor, when not a foreigner, suggests a Sunday-school
superintendent who has (perhaps) missed his vocation. Where the
subject excludes the pedantry of the professors, the tone is intensely
moral, and the more it is so the surer one may be that the writer is
a colonel, a rear-admiral, or a civil officer of the State or Federal
government. Imagination refuses to conceive these functionaries as
fulfilling their duties efficiently in any service, other than that of
the Salvation Army or a revivalist campaign.
The stage of culture which these phenomena presuppose cannot but be
hostile to artistic development in such as escape contamination. It has
already been postulated that the just claims of ethics and æsthetics
are hopelessly confounded in America, to the evident detriment of art
in all its branches. To the poor quality of the current political and
social philosophy corresponds an equally mediocre body of literary
criticism. A recent historian of American literature accords a high
place amongst contemporary critics, to the author of “Shelburne
Essays,” and other works. These volumes are dignified as “our nearest
approach to those ‘Causeries du Lundi’ of an earlier age,” and may well
be taken as representative. Typical of the cold inhumanity which a
certain type of “cultured person” deems essential is the circumstance
related, by Mr. Paul Elmer More himself, in explanation of the genesis
of these essays. “In a secluded spot,” he writes, “in the peaceful
valley of the Androscoggin I took upon myself to live two years as
a hermit,” and “Shelburne Essays” was the fruit of his solitary
mediations. The historian is mightily impressed by this evidence of
superiority. “In another and far more unusual way he qualified himself
for his high office of critic,” says Professor Pattee, “he immured
himself for two years in solitude.”... “The period gave him time to
read leisurely, thoughtfully, with no nervous subconsciousness that the
product of that reading was to be marketable.”
What a revelation of combined timidity and intellectual snobbishness
there is in this attitude so fatuously endorsed by a writer for the
schools! We can imagine what the effect of such a pose must be upon the
minds of the students whom the professor would constrain to respect.
Only a young prig could pretend to be favourably impressed by this
pseudo-Thoreau in the literary backwoods. The impulse of most healthy
young men would be to turn in contempt from an art so unnatural as this
conception of criticism implies. How are they to know that the Taines,
Sainte-Beuves, Brunetières, and Arnolds of the world are not produced
by expedients so primitive as to suggest the _mise en scène_ of some
latter-day Messiah, a Dowie, or a Mrs. Baker Eddy? The heralds of new
theologies may find the paraphernalia of asceticism and aloofness a
useful part of their stock in trade--neither is associated with the
great criticism of literature. The _causeries_ of Sainte-Beuve were not
written in an ivory tower, yet they show no traces of that “nervous
subconsciousness” which our professor finds inseparable from reading
that is “marketable.”
The suspicion of insincerity in this craving for the wilderness will be
strengthened by reference to the first of Mr. More’s volumes. Whatever
may have been the case of its successors, this work was certainly
the product of his retirement. What, then, are the subjects of such
a delicate nature that they could not be discussed within the sound
of “the noisy jargon of the market-place”? Of the eleven essays, only
four deal with writers whose proximity to the critic’s own age might
justify a retreat, in order that they be judged impartially, and
without reference to popular enthusiasm and the prevalent fashion of
the moment. The seven most substantial studies in the book are devoted
to flogging horses so dead that no fear of their kicking existed. “A
Hermit’s Notes on Thoreau,” “The Solitude of Nathaniel Hawthorne,” “The
Origins of Hawthorne and Poe,” “The Influence of Emerson,” “The Spirit
of Carlyle”--these are a few of the startling topics which Mr. More
could discuss only with fasting and prayer! Any European schoolmaster
could have written these essays in the leisure moments of his Sunday
afternoons or Easter vacation.
No more remarkable profundity or originality will be found in the
critic’s essays in contemporary literature. His strictures upon Lady
Gregory’s versions of the Irish epic, and his comments upon the Celtic
Renaissance in general are the commonplaces of all hostile English
criticism. “The shimmering hues of decadence rather than the strong
colours of life” is the phrase in which he attempts to estimate the
poetry of the Literary Revival in Ireland. In fact, for all his
isolation Mr. More was obsessed by the critical cant of the hour, as
witness his readiness to apply the term “decadent” to all and sundry.
The work of Arthur Symons is illuminated by this appellation, as is
also that of W. B. Yeats. The jargon of the literary market-place,
to vary Mr. More’s own _cliché_, is all that he seems to have found
in that “peaceful valley of the Androscoggin.” Even poor Tolstoy
is branded as “a decadent with the humanitarian superimposed,”
an application of the word which renders its previous employment
meaningless. As a crowning example of incomprehension may be cited Mr.
More’s opinion that the English poet, Lionel Johnson, is “the one great
... and genuinely significant poet of the present Gaelic movement.”
In the circumstances, it is not surprising that he should pronounce
Irishmen incapable of exploiting adequately the themes of Celtic
literature. For this task he considers the Saxon genius more qualified.
With these examples before us it is unnecessary to examine the
remaining volumes of “Shelburne Essays.” Having started with a
distorted conception of the critical office, the author naturally
contributed nothing helpful to the literature of American criticism.
His laborious platitudes do not help us to a better appreciation of
the dead, his dogmatic hostility nullifies his judgments upon the
living. Not once has he a word of discerning censure or encouragement
for any rising talent. Like most of his colleagues, Mr. More prefers
to exercise his faculties at the expense of reputations already
established, save when he condescends to repeat the commonplaces of
complaint against certain of the better known modern writers. He is so
busy with Mrs. Gaskell, Charles Lamb, Milton, Plato, and Dickens that
he can find time to mention only some fifteen Americans, not one of
them living.