done into a stately volume by M. A. DeWolfe Howe, will probably go down
into history as the last flower of the Puritan _Kultur_. Himself by no
means a pure New Englander, for his surname was obviously Dutch, he
yet had enough New England blood in him to feel himself wholly of that
forlorn region, and he was accepted as a fit representative of it by
all its tribal headmen. He was steeped in its tradition, and venerated
its heroes. What came out of New England seemed to him to be virtuous
and lovely, or, as he might have said, gentlemanly; what came out of
the rest of the country was simply barbarous.
Nevertheless, Wendell was himself a walking proof that all he admired
was passing into the shadows, for, try as he would, he could not, as
a contemporary man, squeeze himself into the old Puritan mold. Over
and over again he would make an effort to do so, but always, as he
struggled with the lid, a diabolical, iconoclastic mood would overcome
him, and he would leap up and emit a ribald yell. Harvard, startled
and uneasy, never knew what to make of him. His principles were
apparently impeccable; he was, in the current phrase, a consistent
booster for the lost Golden Age, its glories and high deeds. And
yet, whenever the answering cheer came back, he would make a mocking
face and say something awful. The Cambridge campus is still warmed
by these mockings. What saved him from downright infamy was the fact
that, whenever they were actually in contempt of the Puritan mores
and gnosiology, they were safely superficial--that is, they never
questioned fundamentals. Wendell had a lot to say about the transient
excesses and imbecilities of democracy, visible in his time, but he
nevertheless believed in all the primary democratic fallacies, and even
defended them eloquently. He was a tart critic of the whole educational
process, and went to the length, in his own department of English, of
denying it any value whatever; nevertheless, he remained a romantic
Harvard man to the end of his days, and venerated _alma mater_ with the
best of them. He must have seen clearly that there was little that was
sound and solid left in the New England culture, that the rest of the
country had little need of it and would quickly surpass it; all the
same, he clung to the superstition that the preposterous theologians of
its early days constituted an intellectual aristocracy, and even wrote
a book eulogizing the most absurd of them, Cotton Mather.
Wendell, in fact, was two men, separate and distinct, and they were
often at war. One of these men was highly intelligent (though surely
not very learned); the other was a romantic under the spell of a
disintegrating tradition. The latter was the more charming, but often
a prey to mere lyrical fancy. The picture of the American character
that Wendell presented to gaping throngs in his Sorbonne lectures was
a sort of fantastic chromo of the primeval New England character,
seen through nine thicknesses of amber gelatine--in brief, a thing
as bizarre as the accounts of the Revolution that used to be in
school-books. Fundamentally, he once said somewhere else, we believe
in fair play. It would be hard to imagine a more inaccurate saying. If
any single quality, indeed, has marked off the Americano from all other
civilized men since the start, it is his incapacity to purge combat
of passion, his strong disinclination to allow any merit whatever to
the other fellow;--in brief, his bad sportsmanship. Our history is a
history of minorities put down with clubs. Even the duel, during the
few years it flourished in America, took on a ferocity unheard of
elsewhere. Gentlemen, going out at daybreak, shot to kill. Aaron Burr
was a thorough American; Hamilton was an Englishman. In other fields,
Wendell indulged himself in similar sentimentalities. He reacted to the
shock of the late war in the correct manner of a State Street banker.
He succumbed to the Coolidge buncombe far back in 1920. Yet always
the sharply intelligent Wendell hauled up and stayed the orthodox
romantic. The tribute to him by Prof. Kuno Francke, quoted by Mr. Howe,
is a tribute not only to a gentleman, but also to a man of sense. And
even in the midst of his banal speculation whether Coolidge, after
all, would not turn out to be a Yankee Lincoln, he saw clearly the
“small, hatchet-faced, colorless man, with a tight-shut, thin-lipped
mouth”--in other words, the third-rate, small-town attorney, stuffed
with copy-book platitudes and quite without imagination. He saw, too,
the truth about Wilson, and stated it blisteringly in a letter to his
friend R. W. Curtis.
Wendell’s actual books, I believe, are now all dead, even his arbitrary
and ignorant but highly amusing “Literary History of America.” His
volume on Shakespeare, published in 1894, is admired by Sir Arthur
Quiller-Couch and Mrs. Edith Wharton, but no one else seems to remember
it. His novels and dramas are long forgotten. His “English Composition”
was and is a school-book; he himself, in his old age, had doubts that
it had accomplished even its pedagogic purpose. His political essays,
once so salacious, now read like the heresies of the Jefferson era.
What remains, then, of Prof. Barrett Wendell, A.B., Litt.D.? A great
deal more, I believe, than a mere ghost. When, indeed, the roll of
American literati is drawn up at last, and the high deeds of each are
set down, it will be found that Wendell, too, did something, and that
what he did was of considerable importance. In a few words, he helped
to divert criticism from books to life itself--he was one of the first
to see that mere literature is, after all, mere literature--that it
cannot be understood without knowing something about the society which
produced it. Even Poe, masterly critic that he was, overlooked this
obvious and all-important fact. His discussion of books went on in a
sort of vacuum. He had brilliant (and often sound) opinions about every
technical problem imaginable, and about every question of taste, but
only too often he overlooked the fact that his author was also a man,
and that what the author wrote the man had first to think, feel and
endure. Wendell got rid of that narrow bookishness, still lingering
in Lowell. He was primarily a critic, not of literary manners and
postures, but of human existence under the Republic. There was no
scholarly affectation about him, for all his superficial play-acting,
his delight in impressing sophomores. He did not bury his nose in
books; he went out and looked at the world, and what he saw there
amused him immensely and filled him with ideas. In Mr. Howe’s index the
name of Longfellow appears but once, and that of Gilder but once, and
that of Aldrich not at all, but that of Blaine is there six times, and
after Democracy there are twenty-two entries.
It seems to me that this break with the old American tradition had its
high uses, and has left its mark upon American letters. Criticism among
us is vastly less cloistered than it once was. Even professors of the
loftiest tone, if they would have themselves attended to, must descend
from their ivory towers and show themselves at the sea-level. The aloof
and austere spirit is now viewed with suspicion. There are, I daresay,
ancients who deplore the change. A natural regret, for it has made
criticism vastly more difficult. But few deplore it, I believe, who
know what literature really is--few, that is, who know the difference
between mere intellectual prettiness and a body of living ideas.
As for Wendell’s amazing contradictions and inconsistencies, his
endless flounderings between orthodoxy and heresy, I believe that an
adequate explanation of them is to be found in the compositions of
Prof. Dr. Sigmund Freud, the Viennese necromancer. Freud, himself a
Jew, discusses in one of his books the curious fact that jokes at
the expense of the Jews are chiefly circulated by Jews themselves,
and especially by the younger ones. Two Jewish drummers in a Pullman
smoking-room fall into an exchange of such jocosities almost
automatically. Why? Because, says Freud, they attain thereby to an
escape from their Jewishness, which often irks them. It is not they are
ashamed of being Jews; it is that the Jewish practices of their elders
are burdensome. They dare not revolt openly, for their sense of filial
piety is strong, so they take it out by making jokes. By much the
same psychological process, I believe, Wendell arrived at his curious
mixture of contrarieties. Sentimentally and emotionally, he was moved
powerfully by the New England tradition, and felt a strong impulse to
defend it against the world. Intellectually, he saw clearly that it
was in collapse around him--worse, that it had been full of defects
and weaknesses even when, by his own doctrine, it had been strong. The
result was his endless shuttling between worship and ribaldry. The last
of the New Englanders, he clung pathetically to a faith which gradually
succumbed to doubts. In his later years he thus stood upon a burning
deck, whence all but him had fled.
Two things, for all his skepticism, he could never bring himself to
admit formally, both obvious: first, that the so-called culture of
Puritan New England was largely imaginary, that civilization was
actually introduced into the region by anti-Puritans, and second, that
when Transcendentalism came in, the leadership of Puritanism passed
from New England and went to the South and Middle West. To admit the
truth of either proposition was psychically impossible to a man of
his romantic feelings. Each, baldly stated, seemed to flout the local
Holy Ghost. And yet both were true, and their proofs were visible at a
glance. The first, I daresay, will never be granted formally, or even
heard patiently, by any genuine New Englander. Only a short while ago
Walter Prichard Eaton, a very able Puritan, was arguing eloquently that
his blue-nosed ancestors were really lovers of beauty, nay, downright
artists--and offering the charming old houses on Nantucket Island as
exhibits. Unfortunate examples, alas, alas! The houses on Nantucket
were not built until the Puritan theocracy was completely demoralized
and impotent--until Boston had a theatre, and was already two-thirds of
the way to hell. And if they were actually built by Puritans at all,
then it was by Puritans who had gone out into the wide, wide word and
savored its dreadful and voluptuous marvels--Puritans who had come back
from the Eastern seas with gaudy silks in their sea-chests, and the
perfume of strange gals upon their whiskers, and a new glitter to their
eyes.
Orthodox history, at least as it appears in school-books, assumes
that the witch-burners and infant-damners had it all their own way in
New England, even down to Revolutionary times. They actually met with
sturdy opposition from the start. All of their sea-ports gradually
filled up with sailors who were anything but pious Christian men,
and even the back-country had its heretics, as the incessant wars
upon them demonstrate. The fact that only Puritans could vote in the
towns has deceived the historians; they mistake what was the law for
what was really said and done. We have had proofs in our own time that
that error is easy. Made by students of early New England, it leads to
multiple absurdities. The fact is that the civilization that grew up in
the region, such as it was, owed very little to the actual Puritans; it
was mainly the product of anti-Puritans, either home-bred or imported.
Even the school system, so celebrated in legend, owed whatever value
was in it to what were currently regarded as criminals. The Puritans
did not found their schools for the purpose of propagating what is now
known as learning; they found them simply as nurseries of orthodoxy.
Beyond the barest rudiments nothing of any worldly value was taught in
them. The principal subject of study, first and last, was theology, and
it was theology of the most grotesque and insane sort ever cherished
by man. Genuine education began in New England only when the rising
minority of anti-Puritans, eventually to become a majority, rose
against this theology, and tried to put it down. The revolt was first
felt at Harvard; it gradually converted a seminary for the training
of Puritan pastors into a genuine educational institution. Harvard
delivered New England, and made civilization possible there. All the
men who adorned that civilization in the days of its glory--Emerson,
Hawthorne and all the rest of them--were essentially anti-Puritans.
To-day, save in its remoter villages, New England is no more Puritan
than, say, Maryland or Missouri. There is scarcely a clergyman in the
entire region who, if the Mathers could come back to life, would not
be condemned by them instantly as a heretic, and even as an atheist.
The dominant theology is mild, skeptical and wholly lacking in passion.
The evangelical spirit has completely disappeared. Save in a small
minority of atavistic fanatics, there is a tolerance that is almost
indistinguishable from indifference. Roman Catholicism and Christian
Science are alike viewed amiably. The old heat is gone. Where it
lingers in America is in far places--on the Methodist prairies of the
Middle West, in the Baptist back-waters of the South. There, I believe,
it still retains not a little of its old vitality. There Puritanism
survives, not merely as a system of theology, but also as a way of
life. It colors every human activity. Kiwanis mouths it; it is powerful
in politics; learning wears its tinge. To charge a Harvard professor
of to-day with agnosticism would sound as banal as to charge him with
playing the violoncello. But his colleague of Kansas, facing the same
accusation, would go damp upon the forehead, and his colleague of Texas
would leave town between days.
Wendell, a sentimentalist, tried to put these facts behind him, though
he must have been well aware of them. There got into his work, in
consequence, a sense of futility, even when he was discussing very real
and important things. He opened paths that he was unable to traverse
himself. Sturdier men, following him, were soon marching far ahead of
him. He will live in the history of American criticism, but his own
criticism is already dead.
XIII. THE NATION
One often hears lamentation that the American weeklies of opinion are
not as good as their English prototypes--that we have never produced
anything in that line to equal, say, the _Athenæum_ or the _Saturday
Review_. In the notion, it seems to me, there is nothing save that
melancholy colonialism which is one of the curses of America. The
plain fact is that our weeklies, taking one with another, are quite
as well turned out as anything that England has ever seen, and that
at least two of them, the _Nation_ and the _New Republic_, are a
great deal better. They are better because they are more hospitable
to ideas, because they are served by a wider and more various range
of writers, and because they show an occasional sense of humor. Even
the _New Republic_ knows how to be waggish, though it also knows,
especially when it is discussing religion, how to be cruelly dull.
Its Washington correspondence is better than any Parliamentary stuff
in any English weekly ever heard of, if only because it is completely
devoid of amateur statesmanship, the traditional defect of political
correspondence at all times and everywhere. The editors of the English
weeklies all ride political hobbies, and many of them are actively
engaged in politics. Their American colleagues, I suspect, have been
tempted in that direction more than once, but happily they have
resisted, or maybe fate has resisted for them.
Of all the weeklies--and I go through at least twenty each week,
American and English, including the Catholic _Commonweal_ and a Negro
journal--I like the _Nation_ best. There is something charming about
its format, and it never fails to print an interesting piece of news,
missed by the daily newspapers. Moreover, there is always a burst of
fury in it, and somewhere or other, often hidden in a letter from a
subscriber, a flash of wit--two things that make for amusing reading.
The _New Republic_, I suspect, is more authoritative in certain
fields,--for example, the economic--but it is also more pontifical.
The _Nation_ gets the air of a lark into many of its most violent
crusades against fraud and folly; one somehow gathers the notion that
its editors really do not expect the millennium to come in to-morrow.
Of late they have shown many signs of forsaking Liberalism for
Libertarianism--a far sounder and more satisfying politics. A Liberal
is committed to sure cures that always turn out to be swindles; a
Libertarian throws the bottles out of the window, and asks only that
the patient be let alone.
What the circulation of the _Nation_ may be I don’t know. In its
sixtieth anniversary number, published in 1925, there was a hint
that the number then sold each week ran far ahead of the 11,000 with
which E. L. Godkin began in 1865. I have heard gabble in the saloons
frequented by New York publishers that the present circulation is
above 30,000. But no one, so far as I know, has ever suggested that it
equals the circulation of even a third-rate daily paper. Such dull,
preposterous sheets as the New York _Telegram_, the Washington _Star_,
the Philadelphia _Public Ledger_ and the Atlanta _Constitution_ sell
two or three times as many copies. Such magazines for the herd as _True
Stories_ and _Hot Dog_ sell fifty times as many. Nevertheless, if I
were a fellow of public spirit and eager to poison the Republic with
my sagacity, I’d rather be editor of the _Nation_ than editor of any
of the other journals that I have mentioned--nay, I’d rather be editor
of the _Nation_ than editor of all of them together, with every other
newspaper and magazine in America, save perhaps four or five, thrown
in. For the _Nation_ is unique in American journalism for one thing:
it is read by its enemies. They may damn it, they may have it barred
from libraries, they may even--as they did during the war--try to have
it put down by the Postoffice, but all the while they read it. That
is, the more intelligent of them--the least hopeless minority of them.
It is to such minorities that the _Nation_ addresses itself, on both
sides of the fence. It has penetrated to the capital fact that they
alone count--that the ideas sneaked into them to-day will begin to
sweat out of the herd day after to-morrow.
Is the Creel Press Bureau theory of the late war abandoned? Is it
impossible to find an educated man who is not ashamed that he succumbed
to the Wilson buncombe? Then thank the _Nation_ for that deliverance,
for when it tackled Wilson it tackled him alone. Is the Coolidge
Golden Age beginning to be sicklied o’er with a pale cast of green?
Then prepare to thank the _Nation_ again, for it began to tell the
harsh, cold truth about good Cal at a time when all the daily journals
of America, with not ten exceptions, were competing for the honor of
shining his shoes. I often wonder, indeed, that the great success
of the _Nation_ under Villard has made such little impression upon
American journalists--that they are so dead to the lessons that it
roars into their ears. They all read it--that is, all who read anything
at all. It prints news every week that they can’t find in their own
papers--sometimes news of the very first importance. It comments upon
that news in a tart and well-informed fashion. It presents all the new
ideas that rage in the world, always promptly and often pungently. To
an editorial writer the _Nation_ is indispensable. Either he reads it,
or he is an idiot. Yet its example is very seldom followed--that is,
forthrightly and heartily. Editorial writers all over the land steal
ideas from it daily; it supplies, indeed, all the ideas that most of
them ever have. It lifts them an inch, two inches, three inches, above
the sedimentary stratum of Rotarians, bankers and ice-wagon drivers;
they are conscious of its pull even when they resist. Yet very few of
them seem to make the inevitable deduction that the kind of journalism
it practices is better and more effective than the common kind--that
they, too, might amount to something in this world if they would
imitate it.
In such matters, alas, change is very slow. The whole press of
the United States, I believe, is moving in the direction of the
_Nation_--that is, in the direction of independence and honesty. Even
such papers as the New York _Herald-Tribune_ are measurably less stupid
and intransigeant than they used to be, in their news if not in their
opinions. But the majority of active journalists in the higher ranks
were bred on the old-time party organs, and it is very difficult for
them to reform their ways. They still think, not as free men, but as
party hacks. On the one side they put the truth; on the other side they
put what they call policy. Thus there are thousands of them who still
sit down nightly to praise Coolidge--though to the best of my knowledge
and belief there is not a single journalist in the whole United States
who ever speaks of Coolidge in private without sneering at him. This
resistance to change grows all the more curious when one observes
what happens to the occasional paper which abandons it. I offer the
Baltimore _Sunpaper_ as an example--an especially apposite one, for the
influence of the _Nation_ upon it must be apparent to everyone familiar
with its recent history. It was, a dozen years ago, a respectable
but immensely dull journal. It presented the day’s news in a formal,
unintelligent fashion. It was accurate in small things, and free from
sensationalism, but it seldom if ever went beyond the overt event to
the causes and motives behind it. Its editorial opinions were flabby,
and without influence. To-day it is certainly something far different.
It must still go a long, long way, I suspect, before it escapes its old
self altogether, but that must be a dull reader, indeed, who cannot see
how vastly it has improved. It no longer prints the news formally; it
devotes immense energy to discovering and revealing what is behind the
news. In opinion it has thrown off all chains of faction and party, and
is sharply and often intelligently independent. Its reaction to a new
public problem is not that of a party hack, but that of a free man. It
is, perhaps, sometimes grossly wrong, but no sane person believes that
it is ever deliberately disingenuous.
Well, the point is that this new scheme has been tremendously
successful--that it has paid in hard cash as well as in the
usufructs of the spirit. There is no sign that the readers of the
_Sunpaper_--barring a few quacks with something to sell--dislike its
new vigor, enterprise and independence. On the contrary, there is every
evidence that they like it. They have increased greatly in numbers. The
paper itself rises in dignity and influence. And every other newspaper
in America that ventures upon the same innovations, from the _World_
in New York to the _Enquirer-Sun_ down in Columbus, Ga., rises in the
same way. It is my contention that the _Nation_ has led the way in
this reform of American journalism--that it will be followed by many
papers to-morrow, as it is followed by a few to-day. Its politics
are sometimes outrageous. It frequently gets into lamentable snarls,
battling for liberty with one hand and more laws with the other. It
is doctrinaire, inconsistent, bellicose. It whoops for men one day,
and damns them as frauds the next. It has no sense of decorum. It
is sometimes a bit rowdy. But who will deny that it is honest? And
who will deny that, taking one day with another, it is generally
right--that its enthusiasms, if they occasionally send it mooning
after dreamers, at least never send it cheering for rogues--that its
wrongness, when it is wrong, is at all events not the dull, simian
wrongness of mere stupidity? It is disliked inordinately, but not, I
believe, by honest men, even among its enemies. It is disliked by
demagogues and exploiters, by frauds great and small. They have all
tasted its snickersnee, and they have all good reason to dislike it.