The language and traditions common to England and America are like other
family bonds: they draw kindred together at the greater crises in life,
but they also occasion at times a little friction and fault‐finding. The
groundwork of the two societies is so similar, that each nation, feeling
almost at home with the other, and almost able to understand its speech,
may instinctively resent what hinders it from feeling at home
altogether. Differences will tend to seem anomalies that have slipped in
by mistake and through somebody’s fault. Each will judge the other by
his own standards, not feeling, as in the presence of complete
foreigners, that he must make an effort of imagination and put himself
in another man’s shoes.
In matters of morals, manners, and art, the danger of comparisons is not
merely that they may prove invidious, by ranging qualities in an order
of merit which might wound somebody’s vanity; the danger is rather that
comparisons may distort comprehension, because in truth good qualities
are all different in kind, and free lives are different in spirit.
Comparison is the expedient of those who cannot reach the heart of the
things compared; and no philosophy is more external and egotistical than
that which places the essence of a thing in its relation to something
else. In reality, at the centre of every natural being there is
something individual and incommensurable, a seed with its native
impulses and aspirations, shaping themselves as best they can in their
given environment. Variation is a consequence of freedom, and the slight
but radical diversity of souls in turn makes freedom requisite. Instead
of instituting in his mind any comparisons between the United States and
other nations, I would accordingly urge the reader to forget himself
and, in so far as such a thing may be possible for him or for me, to
transport himself ideally with me into the outer circumstances of
American life, the better to feel its inner temper, and to see how
inevitably the American shapes his feelings and judgements, honestly
reporting all things as they appear from his new and unobstructed
station.
I speak of the American in the singular, as if there were not millions
of them, north and south, east and west, of both sexes, of all ages, and
of various races, professions, and religions. Of course the one American
I speak of is mythical; but to speak in parables is inevitable in such a
subject, and it is perhaps as well to do so frankly. There is a sort of
poetic ineptitude in all human discourse when it tries to deal with
natural and existing things. Practical men may not notice it, but in
fact human discourse is intrinsically addressed not to natural existing
things but to ideal essences, poetic or logical terms which thought may
define and play with. When fortune or necessity diverts our attention
from this congenial ideal sport to crude facts and pressing issues, we
turn our frail poetic ideas into symbols for those terrible irruptive
things. In that paper money of our own stamping, the legal tender of the
mind, we are obliged to reckon all the movements and values of the
world. The universal American I speak of is one of these symbols; and I
should be still speaking in symbols and creating moral units and a false
simplicity, if I spoke of classes pedantically subdivided, or
individuals ideally integrated and defined. As it happens, the symbolic
American can be made largely adequate to the facts; because, if there
are immense differences between individual Americans—for some Americans
are black—yet there is a great uniformity in their environment, customs,
temper, and thoughts. They have all been uprooted from their several
soils and ancestries and plunged together into one vortex, whirling
irresistibly in a space otherwise quite empty. To be an American is of
itself almost a moral condition, an education, and a career. Hence a
single ideal figment can cover a large part of what each American is in
his character, and almost the whole of what most Americans are in their
social outlook and political judgements.
The discovery of the new world exercised a sort of selection among the
inhabitants of Europe. All the colonists, except the negroes, were
voluntary exiles. The fortunate, the deeply rooted, and the lazy
remained at home; the wilder instincts or dissatisfaction of others
tempted them beyond the horizon. The American is accordingly the most
adventurous, or the descendant of the most adventurous, of Europeans. It
is in his blood to be socially a radical, though perhaps not
intellectually. What has existed in the past, especially in the remote
past, seems to him not only not authoritative, but irrelevant, inferior,
and outworn. He finds it rather a sorry waste of time to think about the
past at all. But his enthusiasm for the future is profound; he can
conceive of no more decisive way of recommending an opinion or a
practice than to say that it is what everybody is coming to adopt. This
expectation of what he approves, or approval of what he expects, makes
up his optimism. It is the necessary faith of the pioneer.
Such a temperament is, of course, not maintained in the nation merely by
inheritance. Inheritance notoriously tends to restore the average of a
race, and plays incidentally many a trick of atavism. What maintains
this temperament and makes it national is social contagion or
pressure—something immensely strong in democracies. The luckless
American who is born a conservative, or who is drawn to poetic subtlety,
pious retreats, or gay passions, nevertheless has the categorical
excellence of work, growth, enterprise, reform, and prosperity dinned
into his ears: every door is open in this direction and shut in the
other; so that he either folds up his heart and withers in a corner—in
remote places you sometimes find such a solitary gaunt idealist—or else
he flies to Oxford or Florence or Montmartre to save his soul—or perhaps
not to save it.
The optimism of the pioneer is not limited to his view of himself and
his own future: it starts from that; but feeling assured, safe, and
cheery within, he looks with smiling and most kindly eyes on everything
and everybody about him. Individualism, roughness, and self‐trust are
supposed to go with selfishness and a cold heart; but I suspect that is
a prejudice. It is rather dependence, insecurity, and mutual jostling
that poison our placid gregarious brotherhood; and fanciful passionate
demands upon people’s affections, when they are disappointed, as they
soon must be, breed ill‐will and a final meanness. The milk of human
kindness is less apt to turn sour if the vessel that holds it stands
steady, cool, and separate, and is not too often uncorked. In his
affections the American is seldom passionate, often deep, and always
kindly. If it were given me to look into the depths of a man’s heart,
and I did not find good‐will at the bottom, I should say without any
hesitation, You are not an American. But as the American is an
individualist his good‐will is not officious. His instinct is to think
well of everybody, and to wish everybody well, but in a spirit of rough
comradeship, expecting every man to stand on his own legs and to be
helpful in his turn. When he has given his neighbour a chance he thinks
he has done enough for him; but he feels it is an absolute duty to do
that. It will take some hammering to drive a coddling socialism into
America.
As self‐trust may pass into self‐sufficiency, so optimism, kindness, and
good‐will may grow into a habit of doting on everything. To the good
American many subjects are sacred: sex is sacred, women are sacred,
children are sacred, business is sacred, America is sacred, Masonic
lodges and college clubs are sacred. This feeling grows out of the good
opinion he wishes to have of these things, and serves to maintain it. If
he did not regard all these things as sacred he might come to doubt
sometimes if they were wholly good. Of this kind, too, is the idealism
of single ladies in reduced circumstances who can see the soul of beauty
in ugly things, and are perfectly happy because their old dog has such
pathetic eyes, their minister is so eloquent, their garden with its
three sunflowers is so pleasant, their dead friends were so devoted, and
their distant relations are so rich.
Consider now the great emptiness of America: not merely the primitive
physical emptiness, surviving in some regions, and the continental
spacing of the chief natural features, but also the moral emptiness of a
settlement where men and even houses are easily moved about, and no one,
almost, lives where he was born or believes what he has been taught. Not
that the American has jettisoned these impedimenta in anger; they have
simply slipped from him as he moves. Great empty spaces bring a sort of
freedom to both soul and body. You may pitch your tent where you will;
or if ever you decide to build anything, it can be in a style of your
own devising. You have room, fresh materials, few models, and no
critics. You trust your own experience, not only because you must, but
because you find you may do so safely and prosperously; the forces that
determine fortune are not yet too complicated for one man to explore.
Your detachable condition makes you lavish with money and cheerfully
experimental; you lose little if you lose all, since you remain
completely yourself. At the same time your absolute initiative gives you
practice in coping with novel situations, and in being original; it
teaches you shrewd management. Your life and mind will become dry and
direct, with few decorative flourishes. In your works everything will be
stark and pragmatic; you will not understand why anybody should make
those little sacrifices to instinct or custom which we call grace. The
fine arts will seem to you academic luxuries, fit to amuse the ladies,
like Greek and Sanskrit; for while you will perfectly appreciate
generosity in men’s purposes, you will not admit that the execution of
these purposes can be anything but business. Unfortunately the essence
of the fine arts is that the execution should be generous too, and
delightful in itself; therefore the fine arts will suffer, not so much
in their express professional pursuit—for then they become practical
tasks and a kind of business—as in that diffused charm which qualifies
all human action when men are artists by nature. Elaboration, which is
something to accomplish, will be preferred to simplicity, which is
something to rest in; manners will suffer somewhat; speech will suffer
horribly. For the American the urgency of his novel attack upon matter,
his zeal in gathering its fruits, precludes meanderings in primrose
paths; devices must be short cuts, and symbols must be mere symbols. If
his wife wants luxuries, of course she may have them; and if he has
vices, that can be provided for too; but they must all be set down under
those headings in his ledgers.
At the same time, the American is imaginative; for where life is
intense, imagination is intense also. Were he not imaginative he would
not live so much in the future. But his imagination is practical, and
the future it forecasts is immediate; it works with the clearest and
least ambiguous terms known to his experience, in terms of number,
measure, contrivance, economy, and speed. He is an idealist working on
matter. Understanding as he does the material potentialities of things,
he is successful in invention, conservative in reform, and quick in
emergencies. All his life he jumps into the train after it has started
and jumps out before it has stopped; and he never once gets left behind,
or breaks a leg. There is an enthusiasm in his sympathetic handling of
material forces which goes far to cancel the illiberal character which
it might otherwise assume. The good workman hardly distinguishes his
artistic intention from the potency in himself and in things which is
about to realise that intention. Accordingly his ideals fall into the
form of premonitions and prophecies; and his studious prophecies often
come true. So do the happy workmanlike ideals of the American. When a
poor boy, perhaps, he dreams of an education, and presently he gets an
education, or at least a degree; he dreams of growing rich, and he grows
rich—only more slowly and modestly, perhaps, than he expected; he dreams
of marrying his Rebecca and, even if he marries a Leah instead, he
ultimately finds in Leah his Rebecca after all. He dreams of helping to
carry on and to accelerate the movement of a vast, seething, progressive
society, and he actually does so. Ideals clinging so close to nature are
almost sure of fulfilment; the American beams with a certain
self‐confidence and sense of mastery; he feels that God and nature are
working with him.
Idealism in the American accordingly goes hand in hand with present
contentment and with foresight of what the future very likely will
actually bring. He is not a revolutionist; he believes he is already on
the right track and moving towards an excellent destiny. In
revolutionists, on the contrary, idealism is founded on dissatisfaction
and expresses it. What exists seems to them an absurd jumble of
irrational accidents and bad habits, and they want the future to be
based on reason and to be the pellucid embodiment of all their maxims.
All their zeal is for something radically different from the actual and
(if they only knew it) from the possible; it is ideally simple, and they
love it and believe in it because their nature craves it. They think
life would be set free by the destruction of all its organs. They are
therefore extreme idealists in the region of hope, but not at all, as
poets and artists are, in the region of perception and memory. In the
atmosphere of civilised life they miss all the refraction and all the
fragrance; so that in their conception of actual things they are apt to
be crude realists; and their ignorance and inexperience of the moral
world, unless it comes of ill‐luck, indicates their incapacity for
education. Now incapacity for education, when united with great inner
vitality, is one root of idealism. It is what condemns us all, in the
region of sense, to substitute perpetually what we are capable of
imagining for what things may be in themselves; it is what condemns us,
wherever it extends, to think _a priori_; it is what keeps us bravely
and incorrigibly pursuing what we call the good—that is, what would
fulfil the demands of our nature—however little provision the fates may
have made for it. But the want of insight on the part of revolutionists
touching the past and the present infects in an important particular
their idealism about the future; it renders their dreams of the future
unrealisable. For in human beings—this may not be true of other animals,
more perfectly preformed—experience is necessary to pertinent and
concrete thinking; even our primitive instincts are blind until they
stumble upon some occasion that solicits them; and they can be much
transformed or deranged by their first partial satisfactions. Therefore
a man who does not idealise his experience, but idealises _a priori_, is
incapable of true prophecy; when he dreams he raves, and the more he
criticises the less he helps. American idealism, on the contrary, is
nothing if not helpful, nothing if not pertinent to practicable
transformations; and when the American frets, it is because whatever is
useless and impertinent, be it idealism or inertia, irritates him; for
it frustrates the good results which he sees might so easily have been
obtained.
The American is wonderfully alive; and his vitality, not having often
found a suitable outlet, makes him appear agitated on the surface; he is
always letting off an unnecessarily loud blast of incidental steam. Yet
his vitality is not superficial; it is inwardly prompted, and as
sensitive and quick as a magnetic needle. He is inquisitive, and ready
with an answer to any question that he may put to himself of his own
accord; but if you try to pour instruction into him, on matters that do
not touch his own spontaneous life, he shows the most extraordinary
powers of resistance and oblivescence; so that he often is remarkably
expert in some directions and surprisingly obtuse in others. He seems to
bear lightly the sorrowful burden of human knowledge. In a word, he is
young.
What sense is there in this feeling, which we all have, that the
American is young? His country is blessed with as many elderly people as
any other, and his descent from Adam, or from the Darwinian rival of
Adam, cannot be shorter than that of his European cousins. Nor are his
ideas always very fresh. Trite and rigid bits of morality and religion,
with much seemly and antique political lore, remain axiomatic in him, as
in the mind of a child; he may carry all this about with an
unquestioning familiarity which does not comport understanding. To keep
traditional sentiments in this way insulated and uncriticised is itself
a sign of youth. A good young man is naturally conservative and loyal on
all those subjects which his experience has not brought to a test;
advanced opinions on politics, marriage, or literature are comparatively
rare in America; they are left for the ladies to discuss, and usually to
condemn, while the men get on with their work. In spite of what is
old‐fashioned in his more general ideas, the American is unmistakably
young; and this, I should say, for two reasons: one, that he is chiefly
occupied with his immediate environment, and the other, that his
reactions upon it are inwardly prompted, spontaneous, and full of
vivacity and self‐trust. His views are not yet lengthened; his will is
not yet broken or transformed. The present moment, however, in this, as
in other things, may mark a great change in him; he is perhaps now
reaching his majority, and all I say may hardly apply to‐day, and may
not apply at all to‐morrow. I speak of him as I have known him; and
whatever moral strength may accrue to him later, I am not sorry to have
known him in his youth. The charm of youth, even when it is a little
boisterous, lies in nearness to the impulses of nature, in a quicker and
more obvious obedience to that pure, seminal principle which, having
formed the body and its organs, always directs their movements, unless
it is forced by vice or necessity to make them crooked, or to suspend
them. Even under the inevitable crust of age the soul remains young,
and, wherever it is able to break through, sprouts into something green
and tender. We are all as young at heart as the most youthful American,
but the seed in his case has fallen upon virgin soil, where it may
spring up more bravely and with less respect for the giants of the wood.
Peoples seem older when their perennial natural youth is encumbered with
more possessions and prepossessions, and they are mindful of the many
things they have lost or missed. The American is not mindful of them.
In America there is a tacit optimistic assumption about existence, to
the effect that the more existence the better. The soulless critic might
urge that quantity is only a physical category, implying no excellence,
but at best an abundance of opportunities both for good and for evil.
Yet the young soul, being curious and hungry, views existence _a priori_
under the form of the good; its instinct to live implies a faith that
most things it can become or see or do will be worth while. Respect for
quantity is accordingly something more than the childish joy and wonder
at bigness; it is the fisherman’s joy in a big haul, the good uses of
which he can take for granted. Such optimism is amiable. Nature cannot
afford that we should begin by being too calculating or wise, and she
encourages us by the pleasure she attaches to our functions in advance
of their fruits, and often in excess of them; as the angler enjoys
catching his fish more than eating it, and often, waiting patiently for
the fish to bite, misses his own supper. The pioneer must devote himself
to preparations; he must work for the future, and it is healthy and
dutiful of him to love his work for its own sake. At the same time,
unless reference to an ultimate purpose is at least virtual in all his
activities, he runs the danger of becoming a living automaton, vain and
ignominious in its mechanical constancy. Idealism about work can hide an
intense materialism about life. Man, if he is a rational being, cannot
live by bread alone nor be a labourer merely; he must eat and work in
view of an ideal harmony which overarches all his days, and which is
realised in the way they hang together, or in some ideal issue which
they have in common. Otherwise, though his technical philosophy may call
itself idealism, he is a materialist in morals; he esteems things, and
esteems himself, for mechanical uses and energies. Even sensualists,
artists, and pleasure‐lovers are wiser than that, for though their
idealism may be desultory or corrupt, they attain something ideal, and
prize things only for their living effects, moral though perhaps
fugitive. Sensation, when we do not take it as a signal for action, but
arrest and peruse what it positively brings before us, reveals something
ideal—a colour, shape, or sound; and to dwell on these presences, with
no thought of their material significance, is an æsthetic or dreamful
idealism. To pass from this idealism to the knowledge of matter is a
great intellectual advance, and goes with dominion over the world; for
in the practical arts the mind is adjusted to a larger object, with more
depth and potentiality in it; which is what makes people feel that the
material world is real, as they call it, and that the ideal world is
not. Certainly the material world is real; for the philosophers who deny
the existence of matter are like the critics who deny the existence of
Homer. If there was never any Homer, there must have been a lot of other
poets no less Homeric than he; and if matter does not exist, a
combination of other things exists which is just as material. But the
intense reality of the material world would not prevent it from being a
dreary waste in our eyes, or even an abyss of horror, if it brought
forth no spiritual fruits. In fact, it does bring forth spiritual
fruits, for otherwise we should not be here to find fault with it, and
to set up our ideals over against it. Nature is material, but not
materialistic; it issues in life, and breeds all sorts of warm passions
and idle beauties. And just as sympathy with the mechanical travail and
turmoil of nature, apart from its spiritual fruits, is moral
materialism, so the continual perception and love of these fruits is
moral idealism—happiness in the presence of immaterial objects and
harmonies, such as we envisage in affection, speculation, religion, and
all the forms of the beautiful.
The circumstances of his life hitherto have necessarily driven the
American into moral materialism; for in his dealings with material
things he can hardly stop to enjoy their sensible aspects, which are
ideal, nor proceed at once to their ultimate uses, which are ideal too.
He is practical as against the poet, and worldly as against the clear
philosopher or the saint. The most striking expression of this
materialism is usually supposed to be his love of the almighty dollar;
but that is a foreign and unintelligent view. The American talks about
money, because that is the symbol and measure he has at hand for
success, intelligence, and power; but as to money itself he makes,
loses, spends, and gives it away with a very light heart. To my mind the
most striking expression of his materialism is his singular
preoccupation with quantity. If, for instance, you visit Niagara Falls,
you may expect to hear how many cubic feet or metric tons of water are
precipitated per second over the cataract; how many cities and towns
(with the number of their inhabitants) derive light and motive power
from it; and the annual value of the further industries that might very
well be carried on by the same means, without visibly depleting the
world’s greatest wonder or injuring the tourist trade. That is what I
confidently expected to hear on arriving at the adjoining town of
Buffalo; but I was deceived. The first thing I heard instead was that
there are more miles of asphalt pavement in Buffalo than in any city in
the world. Nor is this insistence on quantity confined to men of
business. The President of Harvard College, seeing me once by chance
soon after the beginning of a term, inquired how my classes were getting
on; and when I replied that I thought they were getting on well, that my
men seemed to be keen and intelligent, he stopped me as if I was about
to waste his time. “I meant,” said he, “_what is the number_ of students
in your classes.”
Here I think we may perceive that this love of quantity often has a
silent partner, which is diffidence as to quality. The democratic
conscience recoils before anything that savours of privilege; and lest
it should concede an unmerited privilege to any pursuit or person, it
reduces all things as far as possible to the common denominator of
quantity. Numbers cannot lie: but if it came to comparing the ideal
beauties of philosophy with those of Anglo‐Saxon, who should decide? All
studies are good—why else have universities?—but those must be most
encouraged which attract the greatest number of students. Hence the
President’s question. Democratic faith, in its diffidence about quality,
throws the reins of education upon the pupil’s neck, as Don Quixote
threw the reins on the neck of Rocinante, and bids his divine instinct
choose its own way.
The American has never yet had to face the trials of Job. Great crises,
like the Civil War, he has known how to surmount victoriously; and now
that he has surmounted a second great crisis victoriously, it is
possible that he may relapse, as he did in the other case, into an
apparently complete absorption in material enterprise and prosperity.
But if serious and irremediable tribulation ever overtook him, what
would his attitude be? It is then that we should be able to discover
whether materialism or idealism lies at the base of his character.
Meantime his working mind is not without its holiday. He spreads humour
pretty thick and even over the surface of conversation, and humour is
one form of moral emancipation. He loves landscape, he loves mankind,
and he loves knowledge; and in music at least he finds an art which he
unfeignedly enjoys. In music and landscape, in humour and kindness, he
touches the ideal more truly, perhaps, than in his ponderous academic
idealisms and busy religions; for it is astonishing how much even
religion in America (can it possibly be so in England?) is a matter of
meetings, building‐funds, schools, charities, clubs, and picnics. To be
poor in order to be simple, to produce less in order that the product
may be more choice and beautiful, and may leave us less burdened with
unnecessary duties and useless possessions—that is an ideal not
articulate in the American mind; yet here and there I seem to have heard
a sigh after it, a groan at the perpetual incubus of business and shrill
society. Significant witness to such aspirations is borne by those new
forms of popular religion, not mere variations on tradition, which have
sprung up from the soil—revivalism, spiritualism, Christian Science, the
New Thought. Whether or no we can tap, through these or other channels,
some cosmic or inner energy not hitherto at the disposal of man (and
there is nothing incredible in that), we certainly may try to remove
friction and waste in the mere process of living; we may relax morbid
strains, loosen suppressed instincts, iron out the creases of the soul,
discipline ourselves into simplicity, sweetness, and peace. These
religious movements are efforts toward such physiological economy and
hygiene; and while they are thoroughly plebeian, with no great lights,
and no idea of raising men from the most vulgar and humdrum worldly
existence, yet they see the possibility of physical and moral health on
that common plane, and pursue it. That is true morality. The dignities
of various types of life or mind, like the gifts of various animals, are
relative. The snob adores one type only, and the creatures supposed by
him to illustrate it perfectly; or envies and hates them, which is just
as snobbish. Veritable lovers of life, on the contrary, like Saint
Francis or like Dickens, know that in every tenement of clay, with no
matter what endowment or station, happiness and perfection are possible
to the soul. There must be no brow‐beating, with shouts of work or
progress or revolution, any more than with threats of hell‐fire. What
does it profit a man to free the whole world if his soul is not free?
Moral freedom is not an artificial condition, because the ideal is the
mother tongue of both the heart and the senses. All that is requisite is
that we should pause in living to enjoy life, and should lift up our
hearts to things that are pure goods in themselves, so that once to have
found and loved them, whatever else may betide, may remain a happiness
that nothing can sully. This natural idealism does not imply that we are
immaterial, but only that we are animate and truly alive. When the
senses are sharp, as they are in the American, they are already half
liberated, already a joy in themselves; and when the heart is warm, like
his, and eager to be just, its ideal destiny can hardly be doubtful. It
will not be always merely pumping and working; time and its own pulses
will lend it wings.