and sociological approach to the problems of the mind. Such an
approach is in keeping with the general tendency towards assuming
the form of natural and mathematical sciences, which moral sciences
in American universities have been obeying during the last thirty or
forty years, partly under the influence of a certain kind of European
positivism, and partly because of the prestige that natural and
mathematical sciences gained from their practical applications. Even
now it is easier to find a truly humanistic mind, a sound conception
of intellectual values, among the great American scientists than among
the philosophers and philologists: but pure science has become the
most solitary of occupations, and the scientist the most remote of
men, since his place in society has been taken by the inventor and
by the popularizer. Psychology and sociology, those half-literary,
half-scientific disciplines, gave as a basis to philosophy not the
individual effort to understand and to think, but the positive
observation of the more or less involuntary processes of thought in
the multitude. Intellect was sacrificed to a democratic idea of the
equality of minds: how could the philosopher presume to think, I do
not say better or more efficiently than, but differently from the
multitude? To European philosophy the reproach has been made again and
again, and with some justice, of imposing laws upon reality which are
only the laws of individual philosophic thought; and yet what else
does the scientist ultimately do? But both scientist and philosopher
find their justification in their faith in the validity of their
instruments: in a spirit of devotion and humility, not in a gratuitous
presumption. The typical American philosopher has sold his birthright,
not for a pottage of lentils, but for mere love.
* * * * *
I am painfully aware of the fact that, through the meshes of this
necessarily abstract and sketchy analysis, a good deal of the beauty
and vastness, the vigour and good-humour of American life inevitably
escapes. The traveller from the old countries experiences here a sense
of great spaces and of practically unbounded possibilities, which
reflects itself in an unparalleled gaiety and openness of heart, and
freedom of social intercourse. The true meaning of the doctrine of
opportunity lies much more in these individual attitudes than in any
difference between the structures of American and European societies.
And I do not believe that the only explanation for them is in the
prosperity of America when compared to the misery of Europe, because
this generosity stands in no direct relation with individual wealth.
The lumberman and the longshoreman are as good as, if not better than,
the millionaire.
These individual attitudes find their collective expression in the idea
of, and readiness for, service, which is universal in this country.
Churches, political parties, movements for social reform, fraternal
orders, industrial and business organizations, meet on this common
ground. There is no material interest or spiritual prejudice that
will not yield to an appeal for service: and whenever the object of
service is clearly defined, action follows the impulse, intolerant of
any delay. But Service is a means and not an end: you can serve a God,
or a man, or a group of men, and in that man or group of men what you
conceive to be his or their need, but you cannot serve Service. And
the common end can only be given by a clear intellectual vision of the
relations between a set of ideals and the realities of life.
This intrinsic generosity of the American people is the motive of
the song, and the substance of the ideal, of the one great poet that
America has added to the small family of European poets: Walt Whitman.
In him that feeling and that impulse became a vision and a prophecy.
There is a habit on the part of American intellectuals to look with a
slight contempt on the admiration of Europeans for the poetry of Walt
Whitman, as just another symptom of their ignorance of American things.
But I, for one, will confess that what I have loved passionately, as
little more than a boy, in that poetry, is that same quality whose
presence I have now recognized as the human flower of American culture,
and which makes me love this country as passionately as I loved that
poetry.
It is one of the many paradoxes of American intellectual life that
even the cultural preparation of a Walt Whitman should have been
deeper and more substantial, if not more systematic, than that of any
professor or writer of his times. These were minds which had as fully
imbibed European thought and imagination as any professor or writer in
Europe: but that thought, that imagination, transplanted to the new
country, stood in no real relation with the new practical and moral
surroundings, and were therefore thin and sterile. Walt Whitman knew
and understood the great traditions of European civilization, and tried
to express them in the original idiom, moral and literary, of his
America.
But _nemo propheta_, and it takes centuries to understand a poet. Walt
Whitman still waits for his own generation. The modern schools of
American poetry, curious of all winds of fashion, working for the day
rather than for the times, have not yet fully grasped, I do not say
the spirit of his message, but even, for all their free-versifying,
the mystery of his magnificent rhythms. His successors are rather
among some of the younger novelists, and in a few men, spiritually
related to them, who approach the study of American conditions from a
combined economic and psychological point of view. The novelists are
busy in discovering the actual traits of the American physiognomy, with
sufficient faith in the future to describe the shades with as much care
as the lights, and with a deeper passion; the economists are making way
for the highest and purest American ideals by revealing the contingent
and merely psychological basis of the supposedly scientific axioms of
classical economics.
* * * * *
My own experience of American life, between the autumn of 1919 and the
summer of 1921, has brought me in contact with all sorts and manners of
people from one end to the other of the country, from the Atlantic to
the Pacific. It is from this direct intercourse with Americans, rather
than from my readings of American literature, continued for a much
longer time, that I have formed the opinions expressed in this paper.
But as my work has brought me in closer communion with colleges and
universities than with any other kind of institutions, I feel a little
more assured in writing of the educational aspect of the American
problem.
A university is in any case more a _universitas studentium_ than
a corporation of professors. I have enjoyed my life in American
faculties, and I have gained a good deal from the many noble souls
and intellects that I have met among them; but, whenever it has been
possible to me, I have escaped from the faculties to the students and
tried to understand the tendencies of the coming generations.
The students of the American college or university, from the
comparatively ancient institutions of the East, to the young
co-educational schools of the Middle and Far West, form a fairly
homogeneous, though very widely representative, cross-section of
the American community. They are, in a very precise and inclusive
meaning, young America, the America of to-morrow. A good many of their
intellectual and spiritual characteristics are the common traits of
American culture which we have studied in the preceding paragraphs;
and yet, because of the social separation of individuals according
to ages, which is carried in this country much farther than in any
European country, they develop also a number of independent traits,
which are peculiar to each one of the “younger generations” in their
turn. The life of the American boy or girl, up to the time of their
entrance into college, is mainly the life of a beautiful and healthy
young organism, not subject to any too strict intellectual or spiritual
discipline. The High Schools seem to understand their function in a
spirit which is substantially different from that of the European
secondary schools, owing especially to certain prevailing educational
doctrines founded on a fiction which is used also in many other fields
of American life, but which in the field of education has wrought
more harm than in any other one, the fiction of the public demand--in
this particular case of one or another type of education. A fiction
undoubtedly it is, and used to give prestige and authority to the
theories of individual educationalists, since in no country and in no
time there have existed educational opinions outside the circle of the
educators themselves. But this fiction has unfortunately had practical
consequences because American educators, subject to big business in the
private institutions, and to the politicians in the State schools and
universities, have not found in themselves the energy, except in a few
isolated instances, to resist what came to them strengthened by such
auspices. And the public itself was easily convinced that it wanted
what it was told that it wanted. The students, more sinned against
than sinning, enjoy the easy atmosphere of the school, and it is only
when they reach college that they become aware of their absolute
unpreparedness for the higher studies.
This consciousness of their inferiority manifests itself in an attitude
of “low-browism,” which is not contempt of that which they think is
beyond them, but rather an unwillingness to pretend that they are
what they know they are not. It is practically impossible for them to
acquire any standards in matters of scholarship, and they are thus
forcibly thrown back on that which they know very well, the sports, and
social life among themselves. A Chinese friend of mine once quaintly
defined an American university as an athletic association in which
certain opportunities for study were provided for the feeble-bodied.
Now, in athletics and social life, the student finds something that
is real, and therefore is an education: there is no pretence or fraud
about football, and in their institutions within the college and the
university the students obey certain standards and rules which are
not as clearly justified as those of athletics, but still are made by
themselves, and therefore readily understood. They are standards and
rules that sometimes strangely resemble those of primitive society,
as it is only too natural when the ground on which they grow is a
community of the very young only, and yet undoubtedly they are a
preparation for a life after college in which similar features are
very far from being the exception. And besides, that social life
has a freedom and beauty of its own, evident in one at least of its
most hallowed institutions, the dance. American dances, with those
captivating and vital rhythms which American music has appropriated
for itself from the Negro, are a perfect expression of the mere joy
of life. The older generations are shocked and mystified by these
dances, and also by many other ways and by the implicit opinions of
the young; but so they have been in all ages and countries. To a
curious and passionate observer, the youth of America seems to be
obscurely labouring at a liberation of the sexual life from pretences
and unjustified inhibitions, and, through an original experience of
the elements of love, at a creation of new values, perhaps of a new
morality.
But the student is an object of perplexity and wonder to the professor,
who generally ends by taking very seriously, very literally, as
something that cannot be changed, his attitude towards athletics and
the social life of the college. Starting from such an assumption,
the professor becomes shy of teaching; that is, he keeps for himself
whatever true intellectual and spiritual interests he may have, and
deals out to the students in the classroom rations of knowledge, which
go up to form a complicated system of units and credits symbolizing
the process of education. There is, to my mind, no more tragic
misunderstanding in American life.
My own experience (and I give it for what it is worth) tells me that
athletics and the social life are vicarious satisfactions for much
deeper spiritual and intellectual needs. The student receives from
the common American tradition a desire for spiritual values; from his
individual reaction to that tradition, a craving for intellectual
clarity. But he is handicapped by his scholastic unpreparedness, and
disillusioned by the aloofness of the professor, by the intricacies
and aridity of the curriculum: by the fact, only too evident to him,
that what he is given is not science or thought, but their scholastic
version. Whenever a man stands before him, and without trying to “put
himself at his level,” talks to him as one talks to a man, thinking for
him as one thinks for oneself, there is no more ready and enthusiastic
response to be had than from the American student. He is not afraid of
the difficulties or dangers, but he must trust his guide, and know that
his guide trusts him. There is evidence for this in the cases which are
too frequent to be called mere exceptions, of those American professors
who are truly popular in the colleges and universities. But until many
more of them realize what splendid material is in their hands, what big
thirst there is for them to quench, and go back to their work with this
new faith, the gulf will not be bridged, and young America will have
to attempt to solve her own problems without the help of the spiritual
experience of the centuries.
* * * * *
This condition in the institutions of higher learning is a symbol and a
mirror of the condition of the country. With an impoverished religious
tradition, with an imperfect knowledge of the power of intellect,
America is starving for religious and intellectual truth. No other
country in the world has, as the phrase goes, a heart more full of
service: a heart that is constantly _quaerens quem amet_. With the war,
and after the war, America has wished to dedicate herself to the world,
and has only withdrawn from action when she has felt that she could not
trust her leaders, what was supposed to be her mind.
In a few years, the children of the recent millions of immigrants
from all regions of Europe will come forward in American life and ask
for their share in the common inheritance of American tradition, in
the common work of American civilization. They will not have much to
contribute directly from their original cultures, but they will add an
unexampled variety of bloods, of intellectual and moral temperaments,
to the population of America. Their Americanization, in habits and
language and manners, is a natural process which, left to itself,
invariably takes place in the second generation. America must clarify
and intensify her tradition, the moral discipline of the Puritan,
the moral enthusiasm of the Discoverers and Pioneers, for them, and
they will gladly embrace her heritage; but this clarification and
intensification is only possible through the revision of the original
values in the light of the central humanistic tradition of European
thought.
The dreams of the European founders of this Commonwealth of Utopia may
yet come true, in the way in which human dreams come true, by becoming
the active, all-pervading motive of spiritual effort, the substance
of life. Exiles, voluntary or forced, from England and Ireland, from
Russia and Italy, from Germany and Israel, children of one mother,
unified in America as they will not be unified for centuries to come
in Europe, will thus have a chance to anticipate, in the _civilitas
americana_, the future developments of the _humana civilitas_.
And if this generation needs a motto, I would suggest one line of Dante:
_luce intellettual piena d’amore_:
the light of intellect, in the fulness of love.
RAFFAELLO PICCOLI
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTES
THE CITY
There is no adequate literature of cities in America. Some of the
larger cities possess guide-books and local histories; but the most
valuable illuminations on the history and development of the American
city lie buried in contemporary papers, narratives of travel, and
speeches. The reader who wishes to explore the ground farther should
dip into volumes and papers drawn from all periods. The recent editions
of “Valentine’s Manual” should be interesting to those who cannot
consult the original “Manual of the Common Council of New York.”
During the last twenty years a great many reports and surveys have
been printed, by city planning commissions and other bodies: these are
valuable both for showing the limitations of the established régime
and for giving hints of the forces that are working, more or less,
for improvement. “The Pittsburgh Survey” (Russell Sage Foundation) is
the great classic in this field. A compendious summary of American
city developments during the last generation is contained in Charles
Zueblin’s “American Municipal Progress” (Macmillan). Standing by
itself in this literature is a very able book by Paul Harlan Douglass,
called “The Little Town,” published by Macmillan. (A book which
shall deal similarly with the Great Town is badly needed.) The best
general approach to the city is that of Professor Patrick Geddes in
“Cities in Evolution” (Williams and Norgate, London.) Those who are
acquainted with Professor Geddes’s “A Study in City Development” or his
contributions to “Sociological Papers” (Macmillan, 1905, 1906, 1907)
will perhaps note my debt to him: I hasten heartily to acknowledge
this, as well as my debt, by personal intercourse, to his colleague,
Mr. Victor V. Branford. If the lay reader can learn nothing else
from Professor Geddes, he can learn the utility of throwing aside
the curtains of second-hand knowledge and studying cities and social
institutions by direct observation. The inadequacy of American civic
literature will not be altogether a handicap if it forces the reader to
obtain by personal explorations impressions which he would otherwise
get through the blur of the printed page. Every city and its region
is in a sense an exhibition of natural and social history. Let the
reader walk the streets of our cities, as through the halls of a
museum, and use the books that have been suggested only as so many
tickets and labels. Americans have a reputation in Europe as voracious
sightseers. One wonders what might not happen if Americans started to
see the sights at home--not the Grand Canyon and the Yosemite, but a
“Broadway,” and its back alleys, and the slums and suburbs that stretch
beyond. If observation led to criticism, and criticism to knowledge,
where might not knowledge lead?
L. M.
POLITICS
The standard works on the history of American politics are so well
known (and so few) that they scarcely need mention. Bryce, Ostrogorski
and de Tocqueville, I assume, have been read by all serious students,
as have also such personal memoirs as those of Blaine and John Sherman.
Bryce’s work is a favourite, but it suffers from the disingenuousness
of the man. Dr. Charles A. Beard’s “Economic Interpretation of the
Constitution” is less a complete treatise than a prospectus of a
history that is yet to be written. As far as I know, the valuable
suggestions in his preface have never inspired any investigation of
political origins by other American historians, most of whom are simply
unintelligent school-teachers, as their current “histories” of the
late war well show. All such inquiries are blocked by the timorousness
and stupidity that are so characteristic of American scholarship. Our
discussion of politics, like our discussion of economics, deals chiefly
with superficialities. Both subjects need ventilation by psychologists
not dependent upon college salaries, and hence free to speak. Certainly
the influence of religious enthusiasm upon American politics deserves
a careful study; nevertheless, I have never been able to find a book
upon it. Again, there is the difficult question of the relations
between politics and journalism. My belief is that the rising power of
newspapers has tended to drive intelligent and self-respecting men out
of politics, for the newspapers are chiefly operated by cads and no
such man wants to be at their mercy. But that sort of thing is never
studied in the United States. We even lack decent political biography,
so common in England. The best light to be obtained upon current
politics is in the _Congressional Record_. It costs $1.50 a month and
is well worth it. Soon or late the truth gets into the _Record_; it
even got there during the war. But it seldom gets into the newspapers
and it never gets into books.
H. L. M.
JOURNALISM
I know of no quite satisfactory book on American journalism. “History
of Journalism in the United States” by George Henry Payne and “History
of American Journalism” by James Melvin Lee are fairly good in their
treatment of the past, but neither of them shows any penetration in
analyzing present conditions. The innocence of Mr. Payne may be judged
by his opinion that the Kansas City _Star_, under Nelson, exemplifies
a healthier kind of “reform journalism” than the _Post_ under Godkin!
“Liberty and the News” by Walter Lippmann is suggestive, but it does
not pretend to contain any specific information. More specific in
naming names and giving modern instances is a short essay by Hamilton
Holt, “Commercialism and Journalism.” “The Brass Check” by Upton
Sinclair contains much valuable material, and perhaps what I have said
of it does not do it justice; certainly it should be read by everybody
interested in this subject. Will Irwin published in _Collier’s Weekly_
from January to July, 1911, a valuable series of articles, “The
American Newspaper: A Study of Journalism.” I cannot find that these
articles have been reprinted in book form. There is some information
in autobiographies and biographies of important journalists, such as
“Recollections of a Busy Life” by Horace Greeley, “Life of Whitelaw
Reid” by Royal Cortissoz, “Life and Letters of E. L. Godkin” by
Rollo Ogden, “Life of Charles A. Dana” by J. H. Wilson, “Life and
Letters of John Hay” by William Roscoe Thayer, “An Adventure with
Genius: Recollections of Joseph Pulitzer,” by Alleyne Ireland; also
“The Story of the _Sun_” by Frank M. O’Brien. Biographies, however,
celebrate persons and only indirectly explain institutions. A useful
bibliography, which includes books and magazine articles, is “Daily
Newspapers in U. S.” by Wieder Callie of the Wisconsin University
School of Journalism. But after all the best source of information is
the daily newspaper, if one knows how to read it--and read between the
lines.
J. M.
THE LAW