“courageous,” having “standards of criticism” which make him comparable
to Sainte-Beuve. As editor of “the leading critical review of America,”
we are assured that Mr. More had “a dominating clientèle and a leader’s
authority.” Alas! There can be no doubt as to this, though it is very
doubtful if the fact can be regarded as “one of the most promising
signs for that new literary era which already is overdue.” That era
will long continue overdue while criticism remains absorbed in the
past, aloof from life and implacably hostile to every manifestation of
originality. If the new literary generation were merely ignored its lot
would be comparatively happy. But the mandarins come down periodically
from their Olympic communings with George Eliot and Socrates, to fill
the reviews with verbose denunciations of whatever is being written
independently of their idols. The oracles having spoken, the newcomers
are left with an additional obstacle in the way of their reaching
the indifferent ear of the crowd. The crowd wallows in each season’s
literary novelties, satisfied that whatever is well advertised is good.
Rather than face the subjects endorsed by the frigid enthusiasm of Mr.
Paul Elmer More or Stuart Sherman, Mr. W. C. Brownell and Professor
Brander Matthews, it takes refuge in fields where the writ of pedantry
does not run. Meanwhile, the task of welcoming new talent is left to
amiable journalists, whose casual recommendations, usually without any
background of critical experience, are accepted as the judgments of
competent experts. The “colyumist” has to perform the true function of
the critic.
Although anæmia is the dominant characteristic of intellectual life in
the United States, the reaction against that condition is none the less
worthy of notice. When we remember that the fervour of righteousness
is the very breath of current philosophy, we are also reminded that
crudeness, sensationalism, and novelty are commonly held by Europeans
to be the quintessence of America. It might be replied, in answer to
this objection, that Hearst newspapers, and the vaudeville theology of
Billy Sunday, are the only alternatives to the prim conventionality of
authoritative journalism, and the sanctimoniousness of popular leaders.
The man in the street obtains the illusion of strenuous cerebral
activity when he contrasts the homely qualities of those prophets of
democracy with the spinster-like propriety and beatific purity of
prominent publicists and statesmen. He likes to hear his master’s
voice, it is true, but he likes even more to hear his own, especially
where his personal interests are at issue. The æsthetic _obiter dicta_
of the professors, like the language of diplomacy, are concerned with
questions sufficiently remote to make sonority an acceptable substitute
for thought.
In the realm of ideas, nevertheless, there is a more or less articulate
expression of reaction, mainly concentrated in the larger cities of the
East. There the professional supermen and their female counterparts
have come together by tacit agreement, and have attempted to shake off
the incubus of respectability. The extremists impress one as being
overpowered by a sense of their own sinful identity. In a wild burst of
hysterical revolt they are plunged into a debauch of ideas from which
they are emerging in a very shaken and parlous condition. For the most
part their adventures, mental and otherwise, have been in the domain
of sex, with a resultant flooding of the “radical” market by varied
tomes upon the subject. What the bookstores naïvely catalogue as the
literature of advanced thought is a truly wonderful _salade russe_, in
which Krafft-Ebbing and Forel compete with Freud and Eugene Debs. Karl
Marx, and Signora Montessori, Professor Scott Nearing, and Havelock
Ellis engage the same attention as the neo-Malthusian pamphleteers,
and the young ladies whose novels tell of what Flaubert called “_les
souillures du mariage et les platitudes de l’adultère_.”
The natural morbidity of the Puritan mind is exasperated in advanced
circles, whose interest is nothing if not catholic. Let Brieux
discourse of venereal disease, or Strindberg expound his tragedies of
prurience, their success is assured amongst those who would believe
them geniuses, rather than risk the ignominy of agreement with the
champions of orthodoxy. So long as our European pornographers are
serious and inartistic, they need have no fear of America. Unbalanced
by prolonged contemplation of the tedious virtues of New England, a
generation has arisen whose great illusion is that the transvaluation
of all values may be effected by promiscuity. Lest they should ever
incur the suspicion of conservatism the emancipated have a permanent
welcome for everything that is strange or new. The blush on the cheek
of the vice-crusader is their criterion of excellence.
By an irony of fate, however, they are condemned to the disheartening
spectacle of their moral bogies being received into a society but one
removed from the Olympians themselves. In recent years it has been
the practice of the latter to accept certain reputations, when they
have passed through the sieve of the literary clubs and drama leagues.
In fact, candidates for academic immortality frequently serve on the
board of these literary filtration plants. While the mandarins execute
their ritual in the cult of Longfellow and Bryant, and excommunicate
heretical moderns, their servitors are engaged upon an ingenious task.
They discover the more innocuous subjects of “radical” enthusiasm,
deprive them of whatever sting of originality their work possessed,
and then submit the result discreetly to the official pundits. When
these judges have satisfied themselves as to the sterility of the
innovations, their imprimatur is granted, and another mediocrity is
canonized. Ibsen is saluted because of his “message,” and “Anna
Karenina” becomes a masterpiece, because Tolstoy was a Christian. While
remarkable talents at home are ignored or vilified, the fifth-rate
European is in the process of literary naturalization. Mr. Masefield
receives the benediction of Paul Elmer More, who in the same breath
tries to convince us that he is qualified to pronounce “The Spoon River
Anthology” a bad joke.
Nothing more clearly demonstrates the futility and disrepute of
criticism in this country than the constant surrenders to the prestige
of the foreigner. A cheap fashion in European literature has only to be
thrust with sufficient publicity upon the women’s literary clubs, and
parish meeting-houses, to ensnare the uneasy wearers of the academic
crown. Give them time and they will be found praising a translated
French poet for precisely those qualities which offend them in the
protégés of Miss Harriet Monroe. The young Englishman, Rupert Brooke,
might have contributed to “Poetry” for ten years without securing any
more recognition than did the American, Robert Frost. But now both
reputations, made in England, are widely accepted, and the inevitable
professor is found to tread respectfully where Henry James rushed in.
Compare the critical essays which James wrote during a period of thirty
years with the stereotyped Bostonian theses of the men he left behind
him. Yet nobody will accuse James of a disregard for tradition.
The American word “standpatter” is curiously precise as a designation
of the species. The conservative critic in Europe, Brunetière, for
example, is never so purely negative as his counterpart on this side
of the Atlantic. When Brunetière adversely criticized the Symbolist
movement in French poetry he did so intelligently, not in that
laboriously facetious fashion which is affected by the Stuart Shermans
and W. H. Boyntons when they are moved to discuss _les jeunes_.
Brunetière, in a word, was a man of education and culture, capable of
defending rationally his own theories, without suggesting that the
unfamiliar was necessarily bad. He condemned the excesses of the new
school, not the school itself. If he had been in America, he would
have denied the Symbolists even the right to exist. Edward Dowden
might also be cited as a similar example, in English literature, of
enlightened conservatism. Dowden was partly responsible for bringing
Whitman to the favourable notice of the English public, and his work
stands as a proof that respect for the classics does not involve
hostility to the moderns. Just as he was able to write a masterpiece
of Shakespearean criticism without retiring into hermitage, so he was
qualified to appreciate original genius when it presented itself. He
was not paralyzed, in short, by the weight of his literary traditions
and conventions.
A thousand and one reasons have been advanced to explain the absence
of a genuine American literature, and all of them are probably true.
The country is comparatively young, and its energies have been, are
still, directed chiefly towards the exploitation of material resources
and the conquest of natural difficulties. Racially the nation is
in an embryonic stage, and until some homogeneity is attained the
creation of a native tradition must be slow. Moreover, the conflict
of diverse races implies, in a broad sense, the clash of two or more
civilizations, one of which must impose its culture if any organized
progress is to be made. The language of the Hyphenated States is
English, but to what extent will the nation in being evolve in
accordance with this linguistic impulse? Will it be Anglo-Saxon,
Teutonic, Latin, or Slav? These are a few of the problems which have a
direct bearing upon the intellectual development of the country. They
must be solved before America can give her imprint to the arts. They
cannot be solved by the assumption that the Anglo-Saxon hyphen is alone
authentic. The permanent hypothesis of Colonialism must be abandoned,
if “Americanization” is ever to be more than the silliest political
cant. Puritanism must be confined to the conventicles, to its natural
habitat. It must not be allowed to masquerade as art, philosophy, and
statesmanship. The evangelical tyranny exists elsewhere, but only in
America has it invaded every branch of the national life. In the more
impatient and realistic generation which has emerged from the world
war this monstrous extension of prohibitions is arousing a violent
reaction. It is rare now to find a young American who does not cry out
against American civilization.
To the disinterested European, this spectacle is an affecting
illustration of what may be called the enchantment of distance.
Evidently these disconsolate citizens imagine that there is a way of
escape from the Presbyterian wilderness, an oasis in the desert of one
hundred per cent. Americanism, where every prospect pleases and man is
only relatively vile. One listens to the _intelligentsia_, rendered
more than usually loquacious by generous potations of unconstitutional
Scotch whiskey, cursing the subtle blow to the arts administered by the
Volstead denial of the necessary ambrosia. Advanced thinkers revelling
in the delights of a well-organized polygamy, have taken me aside to
explain how the prophets of Methodism have laid waste this fair land.
I have read desperate appeals to all young men of spirit to shake off
the yoke of evangelistic philistinism by expatriation to more urbane
centres of culture.
These are brave words, coming as they do, for the most part, from those
who are in no wise incommoded by the ukases of the gospel-tent tyrants,
and who have taken appropriate measures to defeat the Eighteenth
Amendment. Back of all their plaints is the superstition that Europe
is free from the blight which makes America intolerable in their eyes.
They do not know that the war has almost destroyed the Europe of a
civilized man’s affections. Socially, politically, and intellectually
that distracted continent is rapidly expiring in the arms of profiteers
and class-conscious proletarians, who have decided between them to
leave not a blade of culture upstanding. The leisured class, which
was rarely the wealthiest, is being ground out of existence by the
plutocracy and the proletariat. That was the class which made the old
Europe possible, yet there are Americans who go on talking as if its
extinction did not knock the bottom out of their utopia. Most of these
disgruntled Americans are radicals, who strive to forward the designs
of the plain people and their advocates.
Yet, every European knows that if prohibition is making the headway it
surely is, the chief reason must be sought in the growth of radicalism.
From Bernard Shaw to Trotsky, our revolutionaries are “dry.” Their
avowed ideal is a state of society in which the allurements of love
are reduced to a eugenic operation, the mellowing influences of liquor
are abolished, and compulsory labour on the Taylor efficiency plan of
scientific management is substituted. In fine, by the benign workings
of democratic progress Europe is moving steadily toward the state of
affairs attributed here by disillusioned intellectuals to the sinister
machinations of Wall Street and the evangelists.
No doubt America was a purer and happier place in 1620 than in 1920.
No Sumner was needed to keep the eyes of the settlers from the dimpled
knees of Ziegfeld’s beauties, and the platitudes of the Wilsonian epoch
were the brightest flowers of wisdom in 1776. Alas! that it should be
so, and in every country of our Western World. If the Magna Charta were
to be offered for signature in London now, some nasty Bolshevik would
be sure to prove that the document was drawn up in a private conclave
of the international financiers. If Lincoln were to make his Gettysburg
speech to-day the world would snicker irreverently, and a dreadfully
superior person, with a Cambridge accent (like John Maynard Keynes,
C.B.), would publish the “Economic Consequences of the Civil War,” full
of sardonic gibes at the innocent evangelism of Springfield. As for the
Declaration of Independence--well, during “the late unpleasantness” we
saw what happened to such un-American sedition-mongers. In fine, things
are not what they used to be; we pine for what is not, and so forth.
Of this only we may be sure, that America corresponds neither more nor
less than any other country to the dreams of its ancestors.
Indeed, to be more affirmative in this plea for America, it is probable
that this country has followed more closely the intentions of its
founders than the critics will admit. Unlike most European nations, the
Americans have preserved, with an almost incomprehensible reverence,
the constitution laid down to meet conditions entirely unlike those of
the 20th century. Ancestor worship is the cardinal virtue of America
and surpasses that of China and Japan, where revolutionary changes
have been made in the whole social and political structure. America
was created as a political democracy for the benefit of staunch
individualists, and both these ends have been achieved to perfection.
Everything against which the super-sensitive revolt has come about
_planmaessig_, and existed in the germ from the day when the Pilgrim
Fathers first brought the blessings of Anglo-Saxon civilization to the
shores of Cape Cod.
In the South alone were traces of a _Weltanschauung_ which might have
given an impulse in another direction, but the South went under, in
obedience to the rules of democratic Darwinism. Once the dissatisfied
American can bring himself to look the facts of his own history and
of contemporary Europe in the face, he may be forced to relent. He
will grant, at least, that it is useless to cherish the notion that
the ills the American mind is heir to are spared to other peoples. He
may even come to recognize the positive virtues of this country, where
the stories in the _Saturday Evening Post_ actually come true. Here a
man can look his neighbour straight in the eye and subscribe--without
a smile--to the romantic credo that all men are equal, in so far as
it is possible by energy, hard work, and regular attendance at divine
service, to reach the highest post in any career. Class barriers are
almost unknown, and on all sides there is an endlessly generous desire
to learn, to help, and to encourage. The traditional boy can still
arrive from the slums of Europe and finish up in the editorial chair of
a wealthy newspaper. If he ever fails to do so it can only be because
he starts by reading the _Liberator_, and devotes to the deciphering
of Thorstein Veblen’s hieroglyphics of socialism the time which
should have been given to mastering the more profitable technique of
Americanism.
ERNEST BOYD
III. AS AN ITALIAN SEES IT
In a typical form of primitive society, where institutions and ideals,
collective representations and individual reactions, coincide, no
distinction can be made between culture and civilization. Every element
of the practical culture is a spiritual symbol, and there is no other
logic or reason than that which is made manifest by the structure and
habits of the social group. Life is a religion, in the two meanings of
the word, that of a binding together of men, and the deeper one--of
gathering the manifold activities of the individual in one compact
spiritual mass. The mythical concepts, which limit and integrate the
data of experience, in a sphere which is neither purely imaginative nor
purely intellectual, present to the individual mind as irresistibly
as to the mind of the group, a world of complementary objects which
are of the same stuff as the apprehended data. Thought--practical,
æsthetic, ethical--is still undifferentiated, unindividualized, as if a
collective mind were an active reality, a gigantic, obscure, coherent
personality, entering into definite relations with a world homogeneous
with itself.
Such an abstract, ideal scheme of the life of the human spirit before
it has any history, before it is even capable of history, affords,
in its hypothetical indistinction (within the group, within the
individual), a prefiguration of a certain higher relationship of
culture with civilization, of a _humana civilitas_, in which the
practical should be related to the spiritual, nature to the mind,
in the full light of consciousness, with a perfect awareness of the
processes of distinction and individualization. In the twilight and
perspective of historical knowledge, if not in their actuality, Greece
before Socrates, Rome before Christ, the Middle Ages before Saint
Francis (each of them, before the apparition of the disrupting and
illuminating element of growth), are successive attempts or _étapes_
towards the creation of a civilization of such a kind--a human
civilization.
Between these two limits--the primitive and the human--the ideal
beginning and the ideal end--we can recognize, at any given moment in
history, through the segmentation and aggregation of a multitude of
cultures, different ages and strata of culture coexisting in the same
social group; and the individual mind emerges at the confluence of
the practical cultures, with science and philosophy and the ethical,
non-tribal ideals, germs and _initia_, of the human civilization
remaining above the given society as a soul that never entirely
vivifies its own body. History begins where first the distinction
between civilization and culture appears, or, to state the same fact
from a different angle, where individual consciousness is born. It
ends, ideally, where the same distinction fades away into Utopia, or
death, or the Kingdom of Heaven; where the highest form of individual
consciousness is at no point higher than the consciousness of the group
from which it originally differentiated itself.
* * * * *
The writer of these pages belongs, by birth, education, and election,
to the civilization of Rome and to the culture, or cultures, of Italy.
The civilization of Rome, the _latina civilitas_, is a complex mind,
whose successive phases of growth are the abstract humanism of ancient
Greece, the civic and legal humanism of Rome, the moral and spiritual
humanism of the Latin church, the æsthetic and metaphysical humanism
of the Renaissance. Each phase is an integration of the preceding one
and the acquisition of a new universal principle, made independent of
the particular social body in which it has partially realized itself
before becoming a pure, intelligible ideal, an essential element of
the human mind. The first three phases, Greece, Rome, and the Church,
are still more or less closely associated, in relation to the forms of
humanism which are peculiar to each of them, with particular cultures.
But the last one, which, in its progress from the 13th century to
our days, has been assimilating, purifying, and clarifying all the
preceding ones, does not, at any given moment, directly connect itself
with any definite social body. In its inception, as a purely Italian
Renaissance, it may appear as the spiritual form of Italian society
from the 13th to the 15th century; but its apparition coincides
with the natural growth of the several, sharply defined European
nationalities, and very soon (and apart from the evident insufficiency
of any individual nation to fulfil its spiritual exigencies) it
manifests its intrinsic character of universality by overflowing the
frontiers of Italy and becoming the law of the whole Western European
world.
The history of Europe during the last six centuries is the history
of the gradual penetration of that idea within the circle of the
passively or actively resistant, or inert, local, national cultures.
The Reformation, of all active resistances, is the strongest and
most important. The Germanic tribes rebel against the law of Rome,
because a delay of from five to ten centuries in the experience of
Christianity, and an experience of Christianity to be made not on a
Græco-Roman, but on an Odinic background, create in them the spiritual
need of an independent elaboration of the same universal principles.
Germany is practically untouched by the spirit of the Renaissance until
the 18th century, and Italy herself is for two centuries reduced to
spiritual and political servitude by the superior material strength
which accompanies and sustains the spiritual development of the
nations of the North. Through the whole continent, within the single
national units, as well as between nation and nation, the contrast and
collaboration of the Romanic and Germanic elements, of Renaissance and
Reformation, is the actual dialectic of the development of European
civilization: of the successive approximations of the single cultures,
or groups of cultures, in a multitude of more or less divergent
directions, with alternating accelerations and involutions, towards the
common form, the _humana civilitas_.
* * * * *
Of all the nations of Europe, Italy is the only one that, however
contingently and imperfectly, has actually realized all of the four
phases of humanism in a succession of historical cultures: Magna
Græcia, the Roman Empire, the Catholic Church, the Renaissance. And
as each of these successive cultures was trying to embody in itself
a universal, not a particular, principle, nationality in Italy is
not, as for other nations, the acceptance of certain spiritual limits
elaborated from within the social body, but a reaction to the pressure
of adjoining nationalities, which presented themselves as obstacles and
impediments, even within the life of Italy herself, to the realization
of a super-national principle. This is the process through which
the humanism of the Renaissance, after having received its abstract
political form at the hands of the thinkers and soldiers of the French
Revolution, becomes active and militant in Mazzini’s principle of
nationality, which is a heroic effort towards the utilization of the
natural growth of European nations for the purposes of a universal
civilization.