superficial observer. The European, who after the prescribed fashion
lands at New York and travels to Philadelphia, Washington, Chicago, and
Niagara, and then winds up his journey through the United States in
Boston, has in this last place generally the impression that he has
already come back from the New World into the Old. The admirable
traditions of culture, the thoroughly intellectual character of the
society, the predominance of interests which are not commercial—in fact,
even the quaint and picturesque look of the city—everything strikes him
as being so entirely different from what his fancy had pictured, from
its Old World point of view, as being specifically American. And no less
is it different from what the rest of his experience of the New World
has given him. Not until he knows the country more thoroughly does he
begin to understand that really in this Yankee city the true spirit of
the purely American life is embodied.
The American himself recognizes this leading position of Boston in the
intellectual life of his country, although he often recognizes it with
mixed feelings. He is fond, with the light irony of Holmes, to call
Boston “the hub of the universe.” He likes to poke fun at the Boston
woman by calling her a “blue-stocking,” and the comic papers habitually
affirm that in Boston all cabbies speak Latin. But this does not obscure
from him the knowledge that almost everything which is intellectually
exalted and significant in this country has come from Boston, that
Massachusetts, under the leadership of Boston, has become the foremost
example in all matters of education and of real culture, and that there,
on the ground of the oldest and largest academy of the country—Harvard
University—the true home of New World ideals is to be found. And the
intellectual pre-eminence of New England is no less recognizable in the
representatives of its culture which Boston sends forth through the
country; the artistic triumph of the Columbian Exposition may be
ascribed to Chicago, but very many of the men who accomplished this work
came from Massachusetts; the reform movement against Tammany belongs to
the moral annals of New York, but those workers whose moral enthusiasm
gained the victory are from New England. This latent impression, that
all the best æsthetic and moral and intellectual impulses originate in
New England, becomes especially deep the instant one turns one’s gaze
into the past. The true picture is at the present day somewhat overlaid,
because owing to the industrial development of the West the emigration
from New England has taken on such large proportions that the essential
traits of Massachusetts have been carried through the whole land. In
past times, her peculiar pre-eminence was much more marked.
Whoever traces back the origins of American intellectual life must go to
the fourth decade of the seventeenth century. Then the colonies in the
Southern and Middle States were flourishing as well as the Northern
colonies of New England; but only in these last was there any real
initiative toward intellectual culture. In the year 1636, only eight
years after the foundation of Boston, Harvard College was founded as the
first, and for a long while the only, school of higher learning. And
among the products of the printing-press which this country gave forth
in the whole seventeenth century such an astonishing majority comes from
New England that American literary history has no need to consider the
other colonies of that time. The most considerable literary figure of
the country at that time was Cotton Mather, a Bostonian. The eighteenth
century perpetuated these traditions. The greatest thinker of the
country, Jonathan Edwards, was developed at Harvard, and Benjamin
Franklin was brought up in Boston. The literature of New England was the
best which the country had so far produced, and when the time came for
breaking away politically from England, then in the same way the moral
energy and enthusiasm of Boston took front rank.
Not until these days of political independence did the true history of
the free and independent intellectual life of America begin. Now one
name followed close on another, and most of the great ones pertained to
New England. Poets like Longfellow, Lowell, and Holmes were Bostonians;
Whittier and Hawthorne also sprang from the soil of New England. Here,
too, appeared the intellectually leading magazines; in the first half of
the century the _North American Review_, in the second half the
_Atlantic Monthly_. Here the religious movement of Unitarianism worked
itself out, and here was formed that school of philosophers in whose
midst stood the shining figure of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Here sounded the
most potent words against slavery; here Parker, Garrison, Phillips, and
Sumner poured forth their charges against the South into the midst of a
public morally aroused. Here, also, first flourished the quiet work of
scientific investigation. Since the day when Ticknor and Everett studied
in Göttingen in the year 1815, there sprang up in Massachusetts, more
than anywhere else, the custom which caused young American scholars to
frequent German schools of higher learning. The historians Prescott,
Sparks, Bancroft, Parkman, and Motley were among this number. Here in
Boston was the classic ground for the cultivation of serious music, and
here was founded the first large public library. And all these movements
have continued down to this day. None of the traditions are dead; and
any one who is not deceived by superficial impressions knows that the
most essential traits of Boston and New England are the ones which, in
respect to intellectual life, lead the nation. Quite as the marble
Capitol at Washington is the symbol of the political power of America,
and the sky-scrapers of lower Broadway are the symbol of America’s
economic life, so we may say the elm-shaded college yard of Harvard is
the symbol of American intellectual capacity and accomplishment.
It may seem astonishing at first that a single vicinity can attain such
eminence, and especially that so small a part of the Union is able to
impress its character on the whole wide land. The phenomenon, however,
becomes almost a matter of course, if we put before ourselves how this
world-power slowly grew from the very smallest beginnings, and how this
growth did not take place by successive increments of large and compact
masses of people who had their own culture and their own independent
spirit, but took place by the continual immigration of wanderers who
were detached and isolated, and who joined themselves to that which was
already here, and so became assimilated. Then, as soon as a beginning
had been made, and in a certain place a specific expression had been
given to intellectual life, this way of thinking and this general
attitude necessarily became the prevailing ones, and in this way spread
abroad farther and farther. If in the seventeenth century, instead of
the little New England states, the Southern colonies, say, had developed
a characteristic and independent intellectual life, then by the same
process of constant assimilation the character and thought of Virginia
might have impressed itself on the whole nation as have the character
and thought of Massachusetts. Yet it was by no means an accident that
the spirit which was destined to be most vital did not proceed from the
pleasure-loving Virginians, but rather came from the severely earnest
settlers of the North.
The way of thinking of those Northern colonists can be admirably
characterized by a single word—they were Puritans. The Puritan spirit
influenced the inner life of Boston Bay in the seventeenth century, and
consequently the inner life of the whole country down to our time, more
deeply and more potently than any other factor. The Puritanical spirit
signifies something incomparably precious—it is much more admirable than
its detractors dream of; and yet at the same time, it carries with it
its decided limitations. For nearly three hundred years the genius of
America has nourished itself on these virtues and has suffered by these
limitations. That which the Puritans strove for was just what their name
signifies—purity; purity in the service of God, purity of character,
and, in an evil time, purity of life. Filled with the religious
doctrines of Calvinism, that little band of wanderers had crossed the
ocean in spite of the severest trials, in order to find free scope for
their Puritan ideals; had left that same England where, some time later
under Cromwell, they were to achieve a victory, although a short and
after all insignificant one. They much more cared for the spotlessness
of their faith than for any outward victory, and every impulse of their
devout and simple lives was informed by their convictions. Under these
circumstances it was no accident that here the intellectual and moral
ideals were not obscured by any economic or political preoccupations;
but from the very outset were accounted in themselves of prime
importance. Harvard College was founded as a school for the Puritan
clergy, and almost the entire American literature, which is to say the
literature of New England, of the seventeenth century is purely
religious, or at any rate is thoroughly permeated with the Calvinistic
way of thought.
Of course, externally this is all entirely changed, and it is almost a
typical example of this transformation, that Harvard, once a seminary
for ministers, to-day prepares not one-fiftieth part of its five
thousand students for the clerical calling. Indeed, as early as the year
1700, Yale University was founded in Connecticut, largely in the aim of
creating a fortress for the old faith, because Harvard had become too
much a place of free thought; and the great scholar of Harvard, the
preacher Jonathan Edwards, went away from Boston in anger because it
seemed to him, even in the eighteenth century, that the old Calvinistic
traditions had been lost. And then finally, in the nineteenth century,
appeared Unitarianism—a creed which became the most energetic enemy of
Calvinism. These changes and disruptions were, however, rather an
internal matter. They were actually nothing but small differences within
the Puritan community. From the meagre days of the Pilgrim Fathers down
to the time when Emerson in rhapsodic flights preached the ethical
idealism of Fichte, and Longfellow wrote his “Psalm of Life,” the old
Puritan spirit remained predominant.
One fundamental note sounded through the whole. Life was not to be lived
for the sake of pleasure, but for the sake of duty. Existence got its
sense and value only in ethical endeavour; self-perfection was the great
duty which took precedence over all others. Among the particularly
dogmatic tenets of the Calvinistic theology this self-searching became,
in the last resort, perhaps a somewhat dispiriting searching after inner
signs by which God was expected to show somewhat arbitrarily his favour.
More broadly taken, however, it signified rather a continual searching
of the conscience—a conscious suppression of impure, of worldly, and of
selfish impulses; and so in effect it was an untiring moral
purification. And if in this theological atmosphere it appeared as if
God had led a singularly large number of predestined spirits together
into the New England colonies, the reason was obviously this—that in
such a community of earnest, self-searching characters a moral purity
developed such as was to be found nowhere in the wild turmoil of the Old
World. When the entire life is so permeated by ethical ideals, there
indeed the nobler part of man’s nature cannot be conquered by lower
instincts or by the sordid demands of every-day life.
Such a place could not fail to be a favourable environment for any
intellectual undertakings. There serious books were more welcome than
the merely amusing ones which flourished in the rest of the colonies. In
New England more was done for education, the development of law and the
service of God, than for any outward show or material prosperity. In
short, the life of the intellect throve there from the very outset. And
yet of course this spirit of culture necessarily took a turn very
different from what it had been in the mother land, different from what
it was on the Continent, and different from what it would have been if
the Southern colonies had been intellectually dominant.
For the Puritan, absolutely the whole of culture was viewed from the
moral point of view. But the moral judgment leads always to the
individual; neither in the physical nor in the psychical world can
anything be found which has an ethical value except the good will of the
individual. No work of culture has any value in itself; it becomes
ethically significant only in its relation to the individual will, and
all intellectual life has ethically a single aim—to serve the highest
development of the individual. From this point of view, therefore,
science, poetry, and art have no objective value: for the Puritan, they
are nothing to accept and to make himself subordinate to; but they are
themselves subordinate means merely toward that one end—the perfection
of the man. Life was a moral problem, for which art and science became
important only in so far as they nourished the inner growth of every
aspirant. In the language of the newer time we might say that a
community developed under Puritan influences cared considerably more for
the culture of its individual members than for the creation of things
intellectual, that the intellectual worker did not set out to perfect
art and science, but aimed by means of art and science to perfect
himself.
Of course there must be some reciprocal working between the general body
of culture and the separate personalities, but the great tendency had to
be very different from that which it would have been had the chief
emphasis been laid on æsthetic or intellectual productions as such. In
Europe during the decisive periods the starting-point has been and
to-day is, the objective; and this has only secondarily come to be
significant for the subjective individual life. But in Puritan America
the soul’s welfare stood in the foreground, and only secondarily was the
striving for self-perfection, self-searching, and self-culture made to
contribute to the advance of objective culture. As a consequence
individual characters have had to be markedly fine even at a time in
which all creative achievements of enduring significance were very few.
Just in the opposite way the history of the culture of non-puritanical
Europe has shown the greatest creative achievements at the very times
when personal morals were at their lowest ebb.
But the spirit of self-perfection can have still an entirely different
source. In ethical idealism the perfection of personality is its own
end; but this perfection of the individual may also be a means to an
end, an instrument for bringing about the highest possible capacity for
achievement in practical life. This is the logic of utilitarianism. For
utilitarianism as well as for Puritan idealism the growth of science and
art, and the development of moral institutions, are nothing in
themselves, but are significant only as they work backward on the minds
of the individuals. Idealism demands the intellectual life for the sake
of the individual soul’s welfare, utilitarianism for the sake of the
individual’s outward success. A greater antithesis could hardly be
thought of; and nevertheless the desire for self-perfection is common to
both, and for both the increase of the national products of culture are
at the outset indifferent. It is clear that both of these tendencies in
their sociological results will always reach out far beyond their
initial aims. Puritanism and utilitarianism, although they begin with
the individual, nevertheless must bear their fruits in the whole
intellectual status of the nation. Ethical idealism aims not only to
receive, but also to give. To be sure, it gives especially in order to
inspire in others its own spirit of self-perfection, but in order so to
inspire and so to work it must give expression to its inner ideals by
the creation of objects of art and science. Utilitarianism, on the
contrary, must early set such a premium on all achievements which make
for prosperity that in the same way again the individual, from purely
utilitarian motives, is incited to bring his thought to a creative
issue. The intellectual life of the nation which is informed with
Puritan and utilitarian impulses, will therefore, after a certain
period, advance to a new and national stage of culture; but the highest
achievements will be made partly in the service of moral ideals, partly
in the service of technical culture. As the result of the first
tendency, history, law, literature, philosophy, and religion will come
to their flowering; in consequence of the second tendency, science and
technique.
In modern Continental Europe, both these tendencies have been rather
weakly developed. From the outset idealism has had an intellectual and
æsthetic bias. Any great moral earnestness has been merely an episode in
the thought of those nations; and in the same way, too, utilitarianism
has played really a subordinate rôle in their intellectual life, because
the desire for free initiative has never been a striking feature in the
intellectual physiognomy. The love of truth, the enjoyment of beauty,
and the social premiums for all who minister to this love and pleasure
have been in Continental Europe more potent factors in the national
intellectual life than either ethical idealism or practical
utilitarianism. And it is only because of its steady assimilation of all
European immigrants that the Puritan spirit of the New England colonies
has become the fundamental trait of the country, and that moral
earnestness has not been a mere episode also in the life of America.
There is no further proof necessary that, along with idealism,
utilitarianism has in fact been an efficient factor in all intellectual
activities of America. Indeed, we have very closely traced out how
deeply the desire for self-initiative has worked on the population and
been the actual spring of the economic life of all classes. But for the
American it has been also a matter of course that the successful results
of initiative presuppose, in addition to energy of character, technical
training and the best possible liberal education. Here and there, to be
sure, there appears a successful self-made man—a man who for his lack of
making has only himself to thank—and he comes forward to warn young
people to be wary of the higher culture, and to preach to them that the
school of practical life is the sole high-road to success. But the
exemplary organization of the great commercial corporations is itself a
demonstration against any such fallacious paradoxes. Precisely there the
person with the best training is always placed at the head, and the
actual results of American technique would be still undreamt of if the
American had preferred, before the solid intellectual mastery of his
problems, really nothing but energy or “dash” or, say, mere audacity.
The issues which really seriously interest the American are not between
the adherents of culture and the adherents of mere push, undeterred by
any culture; the material value of the highest possible intellectual
culture has come to be a dogma. The real issues are mainly even to-day
those between the Puritanical and utilitarian ideals of self-perfection.
Of course those most in the heat of battle are not aware of this; and
yet when in the thousandfold discussions the question comes up whether
the higher schools and colleges should have fixed courses of instruction
for the sake of imparting a uniform and general culture, or whether on
the other hand specialization should be allowed to step in and so to
advance the time for the technical training, then the Puritans of New
England and the utilitarians of the Middle States are ranged against
each other.
In fact, it is the Middle, and a little later on the Western, States,
where along with the tremendous development of the instinct of
individual initiative the pressure for the utilitarian exploitation of
the higher intellectual powers has been most lively. Also this side of
the American spirit has not sprung up to-day nor yesterday; and its
influence is neither an immoral nor a morally indifferent force.
Utilitarianism has decidedly its own ethics. It is the robust ethics of
the Philistine, with its rather trivial references to the greatest good
of the greatest number and citations of the general welfare. Benjamin
Franklin, for instance, preached no mean morality, along with his
labours for politics and science; but his words, “Honesty is the best
policy,” put morality on a level with the lightning-rod which he
invented. Both are means toward human prosperity. Although born and bred
in Boston, Franklin did not feel himself at home there, where for the
best people life was thought to be “a trembling walk with God.” For him
Philadelphia was a more congenial field of activity. To-day there is no
single place which is specially noted for its utilitarian turn of mind.
It is rather a matter of general dissemination, for the influence of the
entire Western population goes in this direction. But no one should for
a moment imagine that this utilitarian movement has overcome or
destroyed the Puritan spirit. The actual state of the national culture
can be understood only as a working together of these two types of the
spirit of self-perfection; and even to-day, the Puritan spirit is the
stronger—the spirit of New England is in the lead.
All that we have so far spoken of relates to that which is distinctly of
national origin; over and above this there is much which the American
has adopted from other nations. The most diverse factors work to make
this importation from foreign thought more easy. The wealth and the
fondness for travel of the American, his craze for collections, and his
desire to have in everything the best—this in addition to the
uninterrupted stream of immigration and much else—have all brought it
about that anything which is foreign is only too quickly adopted in the
national culture. Not until very lately has a more or less conscious
reaction against this sort of thing stepped in, partly through the
increased strengthening of the national consciousness, but more
specially through the surprisingly quick rise of native achievement. The
time for imitation in architecture has gone by and the prestige of the
English romance is at an end. And yet to-day English literature, French
art, and German music still exercise here their due and potent
influence.