though we can scarcely translate them into words, and these vaguely
felt emotions of admiration, of effort, of fellowship and social faith
are the invisible America. Take, for a single example, the national
admiration for what we call a "self-made" man: here is a boy selling
candy and newspapers on a Michigan Central train; he makes up his mind
to be a lawyer; in twelve years from that day he is general counsel for
the Michigan Central road; he enters the Senate of the United States
and becomes one of its leading figures. The instinctive flush of
sympathy and pride with which Americans listen to such a story is far
more deeply based than any vulgar admiration for money-making
abilities. No one cares whether such a man is rich or poor. He has
vindicated anew the possibilities of manhood under American conditions
of opportunity; the miracle of our faith has in him come true once
more.
No one can understand America with his brains. It is too big, too
puzzling. It tempts, and it deceives. But many an illiterate immigrant
has felt the true America in his pulses before he ever crossed the
Atlantic. The descendant of the Pilgrims still remains ignorant of our
national life if he does not respond to its glorious zest, its
throbbing energy, its forward urge, its uncomprehending belief in the
future, its sense of the fresh and mighty world just beyond to-day's
horizon. Whitman's "Pioneers, O Pioneers" is one of the truest of
American poems because it beats with the pulse of this onward movement,
because it is full of this laughing and conquering fellowship and of
undefeated faith.
III
American Idealism
Our endeavor to state the general characteristics of the American mind
has already given us some indication of what Americans really care for.
The things or the qualities which they like, the objects of their
conscious or unconscious striving, are their ideals. "There is what I
call the American idea," said Theodore Parker in the Anti-Slavery
Convention of 1850. "This idea demands, as the proximate organization
thereof, a democracy--that is, a government of all the people, by all
the people, for all the people; of course, a government on the
principle of eternal justice, the unchanging law of God; for shortness'
sake, I will call it the idea of Freedom." That is one of a thousand
definitions of American idealism. Books devoted to the "Spirit of
America"--like the volume by Henry van Dyke which bears that very
title--give a programme of national accomplishments and aspirations.
But our immediate task is more specific. It is to point out how
adequately this idealistic side of the national temperament has been
expressed in American writing. Has our literature kept equal pace with
our thinking and feeling?
We do not need, in attempting to answer this question, any definition
of idealism, in its philosophical or in its more purely literary sense.
There are certain fundamental human sentiments which lift men above
brutes, Frenchmen above "frog-eaters," and Englishmen above
"shop-keepers." These ennobling sentiments or ideals, while universal
in their essential nature, assume in each civilized nation a somewhat
specific coloring. The national literature reveals the myriad shades
and hues of private and public feeling, and the more truthful this
literary record, the more delicate and noble become the harmonies of
local and national thought or emotion with the universal instincts and
passions of mankind. On the other hand, when the literature of Spain,
for instance, or of Italy, fails, within a given period, in range and
depth of human interest, we are compelled to believe either that the
Spain or Italy of that age was wanting in the nobler ideals, or that
it lacked literary interpretation.
In the case of America we are confronted by a similar dilemma. Since
the beginning of the seventeenth century this country has been, in a
peculiar sense, the home of idealism; but our literature has remained
through long periods thin and provincial, barren in cosmopolitan
significance; and the hard fact faces us to-day that only three or four
of our writers have aroused any strong interest in the cultivated
readers of continental Europe. Evidently, then, either the torch of
American idealism does not burn as brightly as we think, or else our
writers, with but few exceptions, have not hitherto possessed the
height and reach and grasp to hold up the torch so that the world could
see it. Let us look first at the flame, and then at the torch-bearers.
Readers of Carlyle have often been touched by the humility with which
that disinherited child of Calvinism speaks of Goethe's doctrine of the
"Three Reverences," as set forth in _Wilhelm Meister_. Again and again,
in his correspondence and his essays, does Carlyle recur to that
teaching of the threefold Reverence: Reverence for what is above us,
for what is around us and for what is under us; that is to say, the
ethnic religion which frees us from debasing fear, the philosophical
religion which unites us with our comrades, and the Christian religion
which recognizes humility and poverty and suffering as divine.
"To which of these religions do you specially adhere?" inquired
Wilhelm.
"To all the three," replied the sages; "for in their union they produce
what may properly be called the true Religion. Out of those three
Reverences springs the highest Reverence, Reverence for Oneself."
An admirable symbolism, surely; vaguer, no doubt, than the old symbols
which Carlyle had learned in the Kirk at Ecclefechan, but less vague,
in turn, than that doctrine of reverence for the Oversoul, which was
soon to be taught at Concord.
As one meditates upon the idealism of the first colonists in America,
one is tempted to ask what their "reverences" were. Toward what
tangible symbols of the invisible did their eyes instinctively turn?
For New England, at least, the answer is relatively simple. One form
of it is contained in John Adams's well-known prescription for
Virginia, as recorded in his _Diary_ for July 21, 1786. "Major
Langbourne dined with us again. He was lamenting the difference of
character between Virginia and New England. I offered to give him a
receipt for making a New England in Virginia. He desired it; and I
recommended to him town-meetings, training-days, town-schools, and
ministers."
The "ministers," it will be noticed, come last on the Adams list. But
the order of precedence is unimportant.
Here are four symbols, or, if you like, "reverences." Might not the
Virginia planters, loyal to their own specific symbol of the
"gentleman,"--no unworthy ideal, surely; one that had been glorified in
European literature ever since Castiligione wrote his _Courtier_, and
one that had been transplanted from England to Virginia as soon as Sir
Walter Raleigh's men set foot on the soil which took its name from the
Virgin Queen,--might not the Virginia gentlemen have pondered to their
profit over the blunt suggestion of the Massachusetts commoner? No
doubt; and yet how much picturesqueness and nobility--and tragedy,
too--we should have missed, if our history had not been full of these
varying symbols, clashing ideals, different Reverences!
One Reverence, at least, was common to the Englishman of Virginia and
to the Englishman of Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay. They were joint
heirs of the Reformation, children of that waxing and puissant England
which was a nation of one book, the Bible; a book whose phrases color
alike the _Faerie Queen_ of Spenser and the essays of Francis Bacon; a
book rich beyond all others in human experience; full of poetry,
history, drama; the test of conduct; the manual of devotion; and above
all, and blinding all other considerations by the very splendor of the
thought, a book believed to be the veritable Word of the unseen God.
For these colonists in the wilderness, as for the Protestant Europe
which they had left irrevocably behind them, the Bible was the plainest
of all symbols of idealism: it was the first of the "Reverences."
The Church was a symbol likewise, but to the greater portion of
colonial America the Church meant chiefly the tangible band of
militant believers within the limits of a certain township or parish,
rather than the mystical Bride of Christ. Except in Maryland and
Virginia, whither the older forms of Church worship were early
transplanted, there was scanty reverence for the Establishment. There
was neither clergyman nor minister on board the Mayflower. In Rufus
Choate's oration on the Pilgrims before the New England Society of New
York in 1843, occurred the famous sentence about "a church without a
bishop and a state without a King"; to which Dr. Wainwright, rector of
St. John's, replied wittily at the dinner following the oration that
there "can be no church without a bishop." This is perhaps a question
for experts; but Thomas Hooker, Thomas Shepard, and John Cotton would
have sided with Rufus Choate. The awe which had once been paid to the
Establishment was transferred, in the seventeenth-century New England,
to the minister. The minister imposed himself upon the popular
imagination, partly through sheer force of personal ascendency, and
partly as a symbol of the theocracy,--the actual governing of the
Commonwealth by the laws and spirit of the sterner Scriptures. The
minister dwelt apart as upon an awful Sinai. It was no mere romantic
fancy of Hawthorne that shadowed his countenance with a black veil. The
church organization, too,--though it may have lacked its bishop,--had a
despotic power over its communicants; to be cast out of its fellowship
involved social and political consequences comparable to those
following excommunication by the Church of Rome. Hawthorne and Whittier
and Longfellow--all of them sound antiquarians, though none of them in
sympathy with the theology of Puritanism--have described in fit terms
the bareness of the New England meeting-house. What intellectual
severity and strain was there; what prodigality of learning; what
blazing intensity of devotion; what pathos of women's patience, and of
children, prematurely old, stretched upon the rack of insoluble
problems! What dramas of the soul were played through to the end in
those barn-like buildings, where the musket, perhaps, stood in the
corner of the pew! "How aweful is this place!" must have been murmured
by the lips of all; though there were many who have added, "This is the
gate of Heaven."
The gentler side of colonial religion is winningly portrayed in
Whittier's _Pennsylvania Pilgrim_ and in his imaginary journal of
Margaret Smith. There were sunnier slopes, warmer exposures for the
ripening of the human spirit, in the Southern colonies. Even in New
England there was sporadic revolt from the beginning. The number of
non-church-members increased rapidly after 1700; Franklin as a youth in
Boston admired Cotton Mather's ability, but he did not go to church,
"Sunday being my studying day." Doubtless there were always humorous
sceptics like Mrs. Stowe's delightful Sam Lawson in _Oldtown Folks_.
Lawson's comment on Parson Simpson's service epitomizes two centuries
of New England thinking. "Wal," said Sam, "Parson Simpson's a smart
man; but I tell ye, it's kind o' discouragin'. Why, he said our state
and condition by natur was just like this. We was clear down in a well
fifty feet deep, and the sides all round nothin' but glare ice; but we
was under immediate obligations to get out, 'cause we was free,
voluntary agents. But nobody ever had got out, and nobody would, unless
the Lord reached down and took 'em. And whether he would or not nobody
could tell; it was all sovereignty. He said there wan't one in a
hundred, not one in a thousand,--not one in ten thousand,--that would
be saved. Lordy massy, says I to myself, ef that's so they're any of
'em welcome to my chance. _And so I kind o' ris up and come out._"
Mrs. Stowe's novel is fairly representative of a great mass of
derivative literature which draws its materials from the meeting-house
period of American history. But the direct literature of that period
has passed almost wholly into oblivion. Jonathan Edwards had one of the
finest minds of his century; no European standard of comparison is too
high for him; he belongs with Pascal, with Augustine, if you like, with
Dante. But his great treatises written in the Stockbridge woods are
known only to a few technical students of philosophy. One terrible
sermon, preached at Enfield in 1741, is still read by the curious; but
scarcely anybody knows of the ineffable tenderness, dignity, and pathos
of his farewell sermon to his flock at Northampton: and the Yale
Library possesses nearly twelve hundred of Edwards's sermons which have
never been printed at all. Nor does anybody, save here and there an
antiquarian, read Shepard and Hooker and Mayhew. And yet these
preachers and their successors furnished the emotional equivalents of
great prose and verse to generations of men. "That is poetry," says
Professor Saintsbury (in a dangerous latitudinarianism, perhaps!),
"which gives the reader the feeling of poetry." Here we touch one of
the fundamental characteristics of our national state of mind, in its
relation to literature. We are careless of form and type, yet we crave
the emotional stimulus. Milton, greatest of Puritan poets, was read and
quoted all too seldom in the Puritan colonies, and yet those colonists
were no strangers to the emotions of sublimity and awe and beauty. They
found them in the meeting-house instead of in a book; precisely as, in
a later day, millions of Americans experienced what was for them the
emotional equivalent of poetry in the sermons of Henry Ward Beecher and
Phillips Brooks. French pulpit oratory of the seventeenth century wins
recognition as a distinct type of literature; its great practitioners,
like Massillon, Bourdaloue, Bossuet, are appraised in all the histories
of the national literature and in books devoted to the evolution of
literary species. In the American colonies the great preachers
performed the functions of men of letters without knowing it. They have
been treated with too scant respect in the histories of American
literature. It is one of the penalties of Protestantism that the
audiences, after a while, outgrow the preacher. The development of the
historic sense, of criticism, of science, makes an impassable gulf
between Jonathan Edwards and the American churches of the twentieth
century. A sense of profound changes in theology has left our
contemporaries indifferent to the literature in which the old theology
was clothed.
There is one department of American literary production, of which
Bossuet's famous sermon on Queen Henrietta Maria of England may serve
to remind us, which illustrates significantly the national idealism. I
mean the commemorative oration. The addresses upon the Pilgrim Fathers
by such orators as Everett, Webster, and Choate; the countless orations
before such organizations as the New England Society of New York and
the Phi Beta Kappa; the papers read before historical and patriotic
societies; the birthday and centenary discourses upon national figures
like Washington or Lincoln, have all performed, and are still
performing, an inestimable service in stimulating popular loyalty to
the idealism of the fathers. As literature, most of this production is
derivative: we listen to eloquence about the Puritans, but we do not
read the Puritans; the description of Arthur Dimmesdale's election
sermon in _The Scarlet Letter_, moving as it may be, tempts no one to
open the stout collections of election sermons in the libraries. Yet
the original literature of mediaeval chivalry is known only to a few
scholars: Tennyson's _Idylls_ outsell the _Mabinogion_ and Malory. The
actual world of literature is always shop-worn; a world chiefly of
second-hand books, of warmed-over emotions and it is not surprising
that many listeners to orations about Lincoln do not personally emulate
Lincoln, and that many of the most enthusiastic dealers in the
sentiment of the ancestral meeting-house do not themselves attend
church.
The other ingredients of John Adams's ideal Commonwealth are no less
significant of our national disposition. Take the school-house. It was
planted in the wilderness for the training of boys and girls and for a
future "godly and learned ministry." The record of American education
is a long story of idealism which has touched literature at every turn.
The "red school-house" on the hill-top or at the cross-roads, the
"log-colleges" in forgotten hamlets, the universities founded by great
states, are all a record of the American faith--which has sometimes
been called a fetich--in education. In its origin, it was a part of the
essential programme of Calvinism to make a man able to judge for
himself upon the most momentous questions; a programme, too, of that
political democracy which lay embedded in the tenets of Calvinism, a
democracy which believes and must continue to believe that an educated
electorate can safeguard its own interests and train up its own
leaders. The poetry of the American school-house was written long ago
by Whittier, in describing Joshua Coffin's school under the big elm on
the cross-road in East Haverhill; its humor and pathos and drama have
been portrayed by innumerable story-writers and essayists. Mrs. Martha
Baker Dunn's charming sketches, entitled "Cicero in Maine" and "Virgil
in Maine," indicate the idealism once taught in the old rural
academies,--and it is taught there still. City men will stop wistfully
on the street, in the first week of September, to watch the boys and
girls go trudging off to their first day of school; men who believe in
nothing else at least believe in that! And school and college and
university remain, as in the beginning, the first garden-ground and the
last refuge of literature.
That "town-meeting" which John Adams thought Virginia might do well to
adopt has likewise become a symbol of American idealism. Together with
the training-day, it represented the rights and duties and privileges
of free men; the machinery of self-government. It was democracy, rather
than "representative" government, under its purest aspect. Sentiments
of responsibility to the town, the political unit, and to the
Commonwealth, the group of units, were bred there. Likewise, it was a
training-school for sententious speech and weighty action; its roots,
as historians love to demonstrate, run back very far; and though the
modern drift to cities has made its machinery ineffective in the larger
communities, it remains a perpetual spring or feeding stream to the
broader currents of our national life. Without an understanding of the
town-meeting and its equivalents, our political literature loses much
of its significance. Like the school-house and meeting-house, it has
become glorified by our men of letters. John Fiske and other historians
have celebrated it in some of the most brilliant pages of our political
writing; and that citizen literature, so deeply characteristic of us,
found in the plain, forthright, and public-spirited tone of
town-meeting discussions its keynote. The spectacular debates of our
national history, the dramatic contests in the great arena of the
Senate Chamber, the discussions before huge popular audiences in the
West, have maintained the civic point of view, have developed and
dignified and enriched the prose style first employed by American
freemen in deciding their local affairs in the presence of their
neighbors. "I am a part of this people," said Lincoln proudly in one of
his famous debates of 1858; "I was raised just a little east of here";
and this nearness to the audience, this directness and simplicity and
genuineness of our best political literature, its homely persuasiveness
and force, is an inheritance of the town-meeting.
Bible and meeting-house, school-house and town-meeting, thus illustrate
concretely the responsiveness of the American character to idealistic
impulses. They are external symbols of a certain state of mind. It may
indeed be urged that they are primarily signs of a moral and social or
institutional trend, and are therefore non-literary evidence of
American idealism. Nevertheless, institutional as they may be deemed,
they lie close to that poetry of daily duty in which our literature has
not been poor. They are fundamentally related to that attitude of mind,
that habitual temper of the spirit, which has produced, in all
countries of settled use and wont, the literature of idealism.
Brunetiere said of Flaubert's most famous woman character that poor
Emma Bovary, the prey and the victim of Romantic desires, was after all
much like the rest of us except that she lacked the intelligence to
perceive the charm and poetry of the daily task. We have already
touched upon the purely romantic side of American energy and of
American imagination, and we must shortly look more closely still at
those impulses of daring, those moods of heightened feeling, that
intensified individualism, the quest of strangeness and terror and
wild beauty, which characterize our romantic writing. But this
romanticism is, as it were, a segment of the larger circle of idealism.
It is idealism accentuated by certain factors, driven to
self-expression by the passions of scorn or of desire; it exceeds, in
one way or another, the normal range of experience and emotion. Our
romantic American literature is doubtless our greatest. And yet some of
the most characteristic tendencies of American writing are to be found
in the poetry of daily experience, in the quiet accustomed light that
falls upon one's own doorway and garden, in the immemorial charm of
going forth to one's labor and returning in the evening,--poetry old as
the world.
* * * * *
Let us see how this glow of idealism touches some of the more intimate
aspects of human experience. "Out of the three Reverences," says
Wilhelm Meister, "springs the highest Reverence, Reverence for
Oneself." Open the pages of Hawthorne. Moving wholly within the
framework of established institutions, with no desire to shatter the
existing scheme of social order, choosing as its heroes men of the
meeting-house, town-meeting, and training-day, how intensely
nevertheless does the imagination of this fiction-writer illuminate the
Body and the Soul!
Take first the Body. The inheritance of English Puritanism may be
traced throughout our American writing, in its reverence for physical
purity. The result is something unique in literary history. Continental
critics, while recognizing the intellectual and artistic powers
revealed in _The Scarlet Letter_, have seldom realized the awfulness,
to the Puritan mind, of the very thought of an adulterous minister.
That a priest in southern Europe should break his vows is indeed
scandalous; but the sin is regarded as a failure of the natural man to
keep a vow requiring supernatural grace for its fulfilment; it may be
that the priest had no vocation for his sacred office; he is unfrocked,
punished, forgotten, yet a certain mantle of human charity still covers
his offence. But in the Puritan scheme (and _The Scarlet Letter_, save
for that one treacherous, warm human moment in the woodland where "all
was spoken," lies wholly within the set framework of Puritanism) there
is no forgiveness for a sin of the flesh. There is only Law, Law
stretching on into infinitude until the mind shudders at it. Hawthorne
knew his Protestant New England through and through. _The Scarlet
Letter_ is the most striking example in our national literature of that
idealization of physical purity, but hundreds of other romances and
poems, less morbid if less great, assert in unmistakable terms the same
moral conviction, the same ideal.
Yet, in spite of its theme, there was never a less adulterous novel
than this book which plays so artistically with the letter A. The body
is branded, is consumed, is at last, perhaps, transfigured by the
intense rays of light emitted from the suffering soul.
"The soul is form and doth the body make."