existence of certain national traits needs corroboration from many
non-literary sources. If it is dangerous to judge modern Japan by the
characteristics of a piece of pottery, it is only less misleading to
select half a dozen excellent New England writers of fifty years ago as
sole witnesses to the qualities of contemporary America. We must
broaden the range of evidence. The historians of American literature
must ultimately reckon with all those sources of mental and emotional
quickening which have yielded to our pioneer people a substitute for
purely literary pleasures: they must do justice to the immense mass of
letters, diaries, sermons, editorials, speeches, which have served as
the grammar and phrase-book of national feeling. A history of our
literature must be flexible enough, as I have said elsewhere, to
include "the social and economic and geographical background of
American life; the zest of the explorer, the humor of the pioneer; the
passion of old political battles; the yearning after spiritual truth
and social readjustment; the baffled quest of beauty. Such a history
must be broad enough for the _Federalist_ and for Webster's oratory,
for Beecher's sermons and Greeley's editorials, and the Lincoln-Douglas
debates. It must picture the daily existence of our citizens from the
beginning; their working ideas, their phrases and shibboleths and all
their idols of the forum and the cave. It should portray the misspelled
ideals of a profoundly idealistic people who have been usually immersed
in material things."
Our most characteristic American writing, as must be pointed out again
and again, is not the self-conscious literary performance of a Poe or a
Hawthorne. It is civic writing; a citizen literature, produced, like
the _Federalist_, and Garrison's editorials and Grant's _Memoirs_,
without any stylistic consciousness whatever; a sort of writing which
has been incidental to the accomplishment of some political, social, or
moral purpose, and which scarcely regards itself as literature at all.
The supreme example of it is the "Gettysburg Address." Homeliness,
simplicity, directness, preoccupation with moral issues, have here been
but the instrument of beauty; phrase and thought and feeling have a
noble fitness to the national theme. "Nothing of Europe here," we may
instinctively exclaim, and yet the profounder lesson of this citizen
literature of ours is in the universality of the fundamental questions
which our literature presents. The "Gettysburg Address" would not
to-day have a secure fame in Europe if it spoke nothing to the ear and
the heart of Europe. And this brings us back to our main theme.
Lincoln, like Franklin, like many another lesser master of our citizen
literature, is a typical American. In the writing produced by such men,
there cannot but be a revelation of American characteristics. We are
now to attempt an analysis of these national traits, as they have been
expressed by our representative writers.
Simple as the problem seems, when thus stated, its adequate performance
calls for a constant sensitiveness to the conditions prevalent, during
a long period, in English and Continental society and literature. The
most rudimentary biographical sketch of such eminent contemporary
American authors as Mr. Henry James and Mr. Howells shows that Europe
is an essential factor in the intellectual life and in the artistic
procedure of these writers. Yet in their racial and national
relationships they are indubitably American. In their local variations
from type they demand from the critic an understanding of the culture
of the Ohio Valley, and of Boston and New York. The analysis of the
mingled racial, psychological, social, and professional traits in these
masters of contemporary American fiction presents to the critic a
problem as fascinating as, and I think more complex than, a
corresponding study of Meredith or Hardy, of Daudet or D'Annunzio. In
the three hundred years that have elapsed since Englishmen who were
trained under Queen Elizabeth settled at Jamestown, Virginia, we have
bred upon this soil many a master of speech. They have been men of
varied gifts: now of clear intelligence, now of commanding power; men
of rugged simplicity and of tantalizing subtlety; poets, novelists,
orators, essayists, and publicists, who have interpreted the soul of
America to the mind of the world. Our task is to exhibit the essential
Americanism of these spokesmen of ours, to point out the traits which
make them most truly representative of the instincts of the tongue-tied
millions who work and plan and pass from sight without the gift and
art of utterance; to find, in short, among the books which are
recognized as constituting our American literature, some vital and
illuminating illustrations of our national characteristics. For a truly
"American" book--like an American national game, or an American
city--is that which reveals, consciously or unconsciously, the American
mind.
II
The American Mind
The origin of the phrase, "the American mind," was political. Shortly
after the middle of the eighteenth century, there began to be a
distinctly American way of regarding the debatable question of British
Imperial control. During the period of the Stamp Act agitation our
colonial-bred politicians and statesmen made the discovery that there
was a mode of thinking and feeling which was native--or had by that
time become a second nature--to all the colonists. Jefferson, for
example, employs those resonant and useful words "the American mind" to
indicate that throughout the American colonies an essential unity of
opinion had been developed as regards the chief political question of
the day.
It is one of the most striking characteristics of the present United
States that this instinct of political unity should have endured,
triumphing over every temporary motive of division. The inhabitants of
the United States belong to a single political type. There is scarcely
a news-stand in any country of Continental Europe where one may not
purchase a newspaper openly or secretly opposed to the government,--not
merely attacking an unpopular administration or minister or ruler,--but
desiring and plotting the overthrow of the entire political system of
the country. It is very difficult to find such a newspaper anywhere in
the United States. I myself have never seen one. The opening sentence
of President Butler's admirable little book, _The American as He Is_,
originally delivered as lectures before the University of Copenhagen,
runs as follows:
"The most impressive fact in American life is the substantial
unity of view in regard to the fundamental questions of
government and of conduct among a population so large,
distributed over an area so wide, recruited from sources so
many and so diverse, living under conditions so widely
different."
But the American type of mind is evident in many other fields than that
of politics. The stimulating book from which I have just quoted,
attempts in its closing paragraph, after touching upon the more salient
features of our national activity, to define the typical American in
these words:--
"The typical American is he who, whether rich or poor,
whether dwelling in the North, South, East, or West, whether
scholar, professional man, merchant, manufacturer, farmer, or
skilled worker for wages, lives the life of a good citizen
and good neighbor; who believes loyally and with all his
heart in his country's institutions, and in the underlying
principles on which these institutions are built; who directs
both his private and his public life by sound principles; who
cherishes high ideals; and who aims to train his children for
a useful life and for their country's service."
This modest and sensible statement indicates the existence of a
national point of view. We have developed in the course of time, as a
result of certain racial inheritances and historic experiences, a
national "temper" or "ethos"; a more or less settled way of considering
intellectual, moral, and social problems; in short, a peculiarly
national attitude toward the universal human questions.
In a narrower sense, "the American mind" may mean the characteristics
of the American intelligence, as it has been studied by Mr. Bryce, De
Tocqueville, and other trained observers of our methods of thinking. It
may mean the specific achievements of the American intelligence in
fields like science and scholarship and history. In all these
particular departments of intellectual activity the methods and the
results of American workers have recently received expert and by no
means uniformly favorable assessment from investigators upon both sides
of the Atlantic. But the observer of literary processes and productions
must necessarily take a somewhat broader survey of national tendencies.
He must study what Nathaniel Hawthorne, with the instinct of a romance
writer, preferred to call the "heart" as distinguished from the mere
intellect. He must watch the moral and social and imaginative impulses
of the individual; the desire for beauty; the hunger for
self-expression; the conscious as well as the unconscious revelation of
personality; and he must bring all this into relation--if he can, and
knowing that the finer secrets are sure to elude him!--with the
age-long impulses of the race and with the mysterious tides of feeling
that flood or ebb with the changing fortunes of the nation.
One way to begin to understand the typical American is to take a look
at him in Europe. It does not require a professional beggar or a
licensed guide to identify him. Not that the American in Europe need
recall in any particular the familiar pictorial caricature of "Uncle
Sam." He need not bear any outward resemblances to such stage types as
that presented in "The Man From Home." He need not even suggest, by
peculiarities of speech or manner, that he has escaped from the pages
of those novels of international observation in which Mr. James and Mr.
Howells long ago attained an unmatched artistry. Our "American Abroad,"
at the present hour, may be studied without the aid of any literary
recollections whatever. There he is, with his wife and daughters, and
one may stare at him with all the frankness of a compatriot. He is
obviously well-to-do,--else he would not be there at all,--and the wife
and daughters seem very well-to-do indeed. He is kindly;
considerate--sometimes effusively considerate--of his fellow
travellers; patient with the ladies of his family, who in turn are
noticeably patient with him. He is genial--very willing to talk with
polyglot headwaiters and chauffeurs; in fact the wife and daughters are
also practised conversationalists, although their most loyal admirers
must admit that their voices _are_ a trifle sharp or flat. These ladies
are more widely read than "papa." He has not had much leisure for
Ruskin and Symonds and Ferrero. His lack of historical training limits
his curiosity concerning certain phases of his European surroundings;
but he uses his eyes well upon such general objects as trains,
hotel-service, and Englishmen. In spite of his habitual geniality, he
is rather critical of foreign ways, although this is partly due to his
lack of acquaintance with them. Intellectually, he is really more
modest and self-distrustful than his conversation or perhaps his
general bearing would imply; in fact, his wife and daughters,
emboldened very likely by the training of their women's clubs, have a
more commendable daring in assaulting new intellectual positions.
Yet the American does not lack quickness, either of wits or emotion.
His humor and sentiment make him an entertaining companion. Even when
his spirits run low, his patriotism is sure to mount in proportion, and
he can always tell you with enthusiasm in just how many days he expects
to be back again in what he calls "God's country."
This, or something like this, is the "American" whom the European
regards with curiosity, contempt, admiration, or envy, as the case may
be, but who is incontestably modifying Western Europe, even if he is
not, as many journalists and globe-trotters are fond of asserting,
"Americanizing" the world. Interesting as it is to glance at him
against that European background which adds picturesqueness to his
qualities, the "Man from Home" is still more interesting in his native
habitat. There he has been visited by hundreds of curious and observant
foreigners, who have left on record a whole literature of bewildered
and bewildering, irritating and flattering and amusing testimony
concerning the Americans. Settlers like Crevecoeur in the glowing dawn
of the Republic, poets like Tom Moore, novelists like Charles
Dickens,--other novelists like Mr. Arnold Bennett,--professional
travellers like Captain Basil Hall, students of contemporary sociology
like Paul Bourget and Mr. H. G. Wells, French journalists, German
professors, Italian admirers of Colonel Roosevelt, political theorists
like De Tocqueville, profound and friendly observers like Mr. Bryce,
have had, and will continue to have, their say.
The reader who tries to take all this testimony at its face value, and
to reconcile its contradictions, will be a candidate for the insane
asylum. Yet the testimony is too amusing to be neglected and some of it
is far too important to be ignored. Mr. John Graham Brooks, after long
familiarity with these foreign opinions of America, has gathered some
of the most representative of them into a delightful and stimulating
volume entitled _As Others See Us_. There one may find examples of what
the foreigner has seen, or imagined he has seen, during his sojourn in
America, and what he has said about it afterwards. Mr. Brooks is too
charitable to our visitors to quote the most fantastic and highly
colored of their observations; but what remains is sufficiently
bizarre.
The real service of such a volume is to train us in discounting the
remarks made about us in a particular period like the
eighteen-thirties, or from observations made in a special place, like
Newport, or under special circumstances, like a Bishop's private car.
It helps us to make allowances for the inevitable angle of nationality,
the equally inevitable personal equation. A recent ambitious book on
America, by a Washington journalist of long residence here, although of
foreign birth, declares that "the chief trait of the American people is
the love of gain and the desire of wealth acquired through commerce."
That is the opinion of an expert observer, who has had extraordinary
chances for seeing precisely what he has seen. I think it,
notwithstanding, a preposterous opinion, fully as preposterous as
Professor Muensterberg's notion that America has latterly grown more
monarchical in its tendencies,--but I must remember that, in my own
case, as in that of the journalist under consideration, there are
allowances to be made for race, and training, and natural idiosyncracy
of vision.
The native American, it may be well to remember, is something of an
observer himself. If his observations upon the characteristics of his
countrymen are less piquant than the foreigner's, it is chiefly
because the American writes, upon the whole, less incisively than he
talks. But incisive native writing about American traits is not
lacking. If a missionary, say in South Africa, has read the New York
_Nation_ every week for the past forty years, he has had an
extraordinary "moving picture" of American tendencies, as interpreted
by independent, trenchant, and high-minded criticism. That a file of
the _Nation_ will convey precisely the same impression of American
tendencies as a file of the _Sun_, for instance, or the _Boston Evening
Transcript_, is not to be affirmed. The humor of the London _Punch_ and
the New York _Life_ does not differ more radically than the aspects of
American civilization as viewed by two rival journals in Newspaper Row.
The complexity of the material now collected and presented in daily
journalism is so great that adequate editorial interpretation is
obviously impossible. All the more insistently does this heterogeneous
picture of American life demand the impartial interpretation of the
historian, the imaginative transcription of the novelist. Humorist and
moralist, preacher and mob orator and social essayist, shop-talk and
talk over the tea-cup or over the pipe, and the far more illuminating
instruction of events, are fashioning day by day the infinitely
delicate processes of our national self-assessment. Scholars like Mr.
Henry Adams or Mr. James Ford Rhodes will explain to us American life
as it was during the administrations of Jefferson or in the
eighteen-fifties. Professor Turner will expound the significance of the
frontier in American history. Mr. Henry James will portray with
unrivalled psychological insight the Europeanized American of the
eighteen-seventies and eighties. Literary critics like Professor
Wendell or Professor Trent will deduce from our literature itself
evidence concerning this or that national quality; and all this mass of
American expert testimony, itself a result and a proof of national
self-awareness and self-respect, must be put into the scales to
balance, to confirm, or to outweigh the reports furnished by
foreigners.
I do not pretend to be able, like an expert accountant, to draw up a
balance-sheet of national qualities, to credit or debit the American
character with this or that precise quantity of excellence or defect.
But having turned the pages of many books about the United States, and
listened to many conversations about its inhabitants in many states of
the Union, I venture to collect a brief list of the qualities which
have been assigned to us, together with a few, but not, I trust, too
many, of our admitted national defects.
Like that excellent German who wrote the History of the English Drama
in six volumes, I begin with Physical Geography. The differentiation of
the physical characteristics of our branch of the English race is
admittedly due, in part, to climate. In spite of the immense range of
climatic variations as one passes from New England to New Orleans, from
the Mississippi Valley to the high plains of the Far West, or from the
rainy Oregon belt southward to San Diego, the settlers of English stock
find a prevalent atmospheric condition, as a result of which they
begin, in a generation or two, to change in physique. They grow thinner
and more nervous, they "lean forward," as has been admirably said of
them, while the Englishman "leans back"; they are less heavy and less
steady; their voices are higher, sharper; their athletes get more
easily "on edge"; they respond, in short, to an excessively
stimulating climate. An old-fashioned sea-captain put it all into a
sentence when he said that he could drink a bottle of wine with his
dinner in Liverpool and only a half a bottle in New York. Explain the
cause as we may, the fact seems to be that the body of John Bull
changes, in the United States, into the body of Uncle Sam.
There are mental differences no less pronounced. No adjective has been
more frequently applied to the Anglo-Saxon than the word "dull." The
American mind has been accused of ignorance, superficiality, levity,
commonplaceness, and dozens of other defects, but "dulness" is not one
of them. "Smartness," rather, is the preferred epithet of derogation;
or, to rise a little in the scale of valuation, it is the word
"cleverness," used with that lurking contempt for cleverness which is
truly English and which long survived in the dialect of New England,
where the village ne'er-do-well or Jack-of-all-trades used to be
pronounced a "clever" fellow. The variety of employments to which the
American pioneers were obliged to betake themselves has done something,
no doubt, to produce a national versatility, a quick assimilation of
new methods and notions, a ready adaptability to novel emergencies. An
invaluable pioneer trait is curiosity; the settler in a new country,
like Moses in the wilderness of Arabia, must "turn aside to see"; he
must look into things, learn to read signs,--or else the Indians or
frost or freshet will soon put an end to his pioneering. That curiosity
concerning strangers which so much irritated Dickens and Mrs. Trollope
was natural to the children of Western emigrants to whom the difference
between Sioux and Pawnee had once meant life or death. "What's your
business, stranger, in these parts?" was an instinctive, because it had
once been a vital, question. That it degenerates into mere
inquisitiveness is true enough; just as the "acuteness," the
"awareness," essential to the existence of one generation becomes only
"cuteness," the typical tin-pedler's habit of mind, in the generation
following.
American inexperience, the national rawness and unsophistication which
has impressed so many observers, has likewise its double significance
when viewed historically. We have exhibited, no doubt, the
amateurishness and recklessness which spring from relative isolation,
from ignorance as to how they manage elsewhere this particular sort of
thing,--the conservation of forests, let us say, or the government of
colonial dependencies. National smugness and conceit, the impatience
crystallized in the phrase, "What have we got to do with abroad?" have
jarred upon the nerves of many cultivated Americans. But it is no less
true that a nation of pioneers and settlers, like the isolated
individual, learns certain rough-and-ready Robinson Crusoe ways of
getting things done. A California mining-camp is sure to establish law
and order in due time, though never, perhaps, a law and order quite
according to Blackstone. In the most trying crises of American
political history, it was not, after all, a question of profiting by
European experience. Washington and Lincoln, in their sorest struggles,
had nothing to do with "abroad"; the problem had first to be thought
through, and then fought through, in American and not in European
terms. Not a half-dozen Englishmen understood the bearings of the
Kansas-Nebraska Bill, or, if they did, we were little the wiser. We had
to wait until a slow-minded frontier lawyer mastered it in all its
implications, and then patiently explained it to the farmers of
Illinois, to the United States, and to the world.
It is true that the unsophisticated mode of procedure may turn out to
be sheer folly,--a "sixteen to one" triumph of provincial barbarism.
But sometimes it is the secret of freshness and of force. Your
cross-country runner scorns the highway, but that is because he has
confidence in his legs and loins, and he likes to take the fences.
Fenimore Cooper, when he began to write stories, knew nothing about the
art of novel-making as practised in Europe, but he possessed something
infinitely better for him, namely, instinct, and he took the right road
to the climax of a narrative as unerringly as the homing bee follows
its viewless trail.
No one can be unaware how easily this superb American confidence may
turn to over-confidence, to sheer recklessness. We love to run past the
signals, in our railroading and in our thinking. Emerson will "plunge"
on a new idea as serenely as any stock-gambler ever "plunged" in Wall
Street, and a pretty school-teacher will tell you that she has become
an advocate of the "New Thought" as complacently as an old financier
will boast of having bought Calumet and Hecla when it was selling at
25. (Perhaps the school-teacher may get as good a bargain. I cannot
say.) Upon the whole, Americans back individual guesswork and pay
cheerfully when they lose. A great many of them, as it happens, have
guessed right. Even those who continue to guess wrong, like Colonel
Sellers, have the indefeasible romantic appetite for guessing again.
The American temperament and the chances of American history have
brought constant temptation to speculation, and plenty of our people
prefer to gamble upon what they love to call a "proposition," rather
than to go to the bottom of the facts. They would rather speculate than
know.