once on this account, for one night; and, as I stood
considering the walls of solid stone, two or three feet
thick, the door of wood and iron, a foot thick, and the iron
grating which strained the light, I could not help being
struck with the foolishness of that institution which treated
me as if I were mere flesh and blood and bones, to be locked
up. I wondered that it should have concluded at length that
this was the best use it could put me to, and had never
thought to avail itself of my services in some way. I saw
that, if there was a wall of stone between me and my
townsmen, there was a still more difficult one to climb or
break through before they could get to be as free as I was. I
did not for a moment feel confined, and the walls seemed a
great waste of stone and mortar. I felt as if I alone of all
my townsmen had paid my tax. They plainly did not know how to
treat me, but behaved like persons who are underbred. In
every threat and in every compliment there was a blunder; for
they thought that my chief desire was to stand on the other
side of that stone wall. I could not but smile to see how
industriously they locked the door on my meditations, which
followed them out again without let or hindrance, and _they_
were really all that was dangerous. As they could not reach
me, they had resolved to punish my body; just as boys, if
they cannot come at some person against whom they have a
spite, will abuse his dog. I saw that the State was
half-witted, that it was timid as a lone woman with her
silver spoons, and that it did not know its friends from its
foes, and I lost all my remaining respect for it, and pitied
it."
Here is Thoreau's attitude toward the problems of the inner life. The
three quotations are from his _Walden_:--
"Probably I should not consciously and deliberately forsake
my particular calling to do the good which society demands of
me, to save the universe from annihilation."
"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately,
to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could
not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die,
discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what
was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice
resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live
deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily
and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to
cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a
corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved
to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of
it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were
sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a
true account of it in my next excursion."
"It is said that the British Empire is very large and
respectable, and that the United States are a first-rate
power. We do not believe that a tide rises and falls behind
every man which can float the British Empire like a chip, if
he should ever harbor it in his mind."
All of these quotations from Emerson and Thoreau are but various modes
of saying "Let the world go." Everybody knows that in later crises of
American history, both Thoreau and Emerson forgot their old preaching
of individualism, or at least merged it in the larger doctrine of
identification of the individual with the acts and emotions of the
community. And nevertheless as men of letters they habitually laid
stress upon the rights and duties of the private person. Upon a hundred
brilliant pages they preached the gospel that society is in conspiracy
against the individual manhood of every one of its members.
They had a right to this doctrine. They came by it honestly through
long lines of ancestral heritage. The republicanism of the seventeenth
century in the American forests, as well as upon the floor of the
English House of Commons, had asserted that private persons had the
right to make and unmake kings. The republican theorists of the
eighteenth century had insisted that life, liberty, and the pursuit of
happiness were the birthright of each individual. This doctrine was
related, of course, to the doctrine of equality. If republicanism
teaches that "I am as good as others," democracy is forever hinting
"Others are as good as I." Democracy has been steadily extending the
notion of rights and duties. The first instinct, perhaps, is to ask
what is right, just, lawful, for me? Next, what is right, just, lawful
for my crowd? That is to say, my family, my clan, my race, my country.
The third instinct bids one ask what is right and just and lawful, not
merely for me, and for men like me, but for everybody. And when we get
that third question properly answered, we can afford to close
school-house and church and court-room, for this world's work will have
ended.
We have already glanced at various phases of colonial individualism. We
have had a glimpse of Cotton Mather prostrate upon the dusty floor of
his study, agonizing now for himself and now for the countries of
Europe; we have watched Jonathan Edwards in his solitary ecstasies in
the Northampton and the Stockbridge woods; we have seen Franklin
preaching his gospel of personal thrift and of getting on in the world.
Down to the very verge of the Revolution the American pioneer spirit
was forever urging the individual to fight for his own hand. Each boy
on the old farms had his own chores to do; each head of a family had to
plan for himself. The most tragic failure of the individual in those
days was the poverty or illness which compelled him to "go on the
town." To be one of the town poor indicated that the individualistic
battle had been fought and lost. No one ever dreamed, apparently, that
a time for old-age pensions and honorable retiring funds was coming.
The feeling against any form of community assistance was like the
bitter hatred of the workhouse among English laborers of the
eighteen-forties.
The stress upon purely personal qualities gave picturesqueness, color,
and vigor to the early life of the United States. Take the persons whom
Parkman describes in his _Oregon Trail_. They have the perfect
clearness of outline of the portraits by Walter Scott and the great
Romantic school of novelists who loved to paint pictures of interesting
individual men. There is the same stress upon individualistic
portraiture in Irving's _Astoria_; in the humorous journals of early
travellers in the Southern States. It is the secret of the curiosity
with which we observe the gamblers and miners and stage-drivers
described by Bret Harte. In the rural communities of to-day, in the
older portions of the country, and in the remoter settlements of the
West and Southwest, the individual man has a sort of picturesque, and,
as it were, artistic value, which the life of cities does not allow.
The gospel of self-reliance and of solitude is not preached more
effectively by the philosophers of Concord than it is by the
backwoodsmen, the spies, and the sailors of Fenimore Cooper.
Individualism as a doctrine of perfection for the private person and
individualism as a literary creed have thus gone hand in hand. "Produce
great persons, the rest follows," cried Walt Whitman. He was thinking
at the moment about American society and politics. But he believed that
the same law held good in poetry. Once get your great man and let him
abandon himself to poetry and the great poetry will be the result. It
was almost precisely the same teaching as in Carlyle's lecture on "The
Hero as Poet."
Well, it is clear enough nowadays that both Whitman and Carlyle
underrated the value of discipline. The lack of discipline is the chief
obstacle to effective individualism. The private person must be well
trained, or he cannot do his work; and as civilization advances, it
becomes exceedingly difficult to train the individual without social
cooperation. A Paul or a Mahomet may discipline his own soul in the
Desert of Arabia; he may there learn the lessons that may later make
him a leader of men. But for the average man and indeed for most of the
exceptional men, the path to effectiveness lies through social and
professional discipline. Here is where the frontier stage of our
American life was necessarily weak. We have seen that our ancestors
gained something, no doubt, from their spirit of unconventionally and
freedom. But they also lost something through their dislike for
discipline, their indifference to criticism, their ineradicable
tendency, whether in business, in diplomacy, in art and letters and
education, to go "across lots." A certain degree of physical
orderliness was, indeed, imposed upon our ancestors by the conditions
of pioneer life. The natural prodigality and recklessness of frontier
existence was here and there sharply checked. Order is essential in a
camp, and the thin line of colonies was all camping. A certain instinct
for order underlay that resourcefulness which impresses every reader of
our history. Did the colonist need a tool? He learned to make it
himself. Isolation from the mother country was a stimulus to the
inventive imagination. Before long they were maintaining public order
in the same ingenious fashion in which they kept house. Appeals to
London took too much time. "We send a complaint this year," ran the
saying, "the next year they send to inquire, the third year the
ministry is changed." No wonder that resourcefulness bred independent
action, stimulated the Puritan taste for individualism, and led the way
to self-government.
Yet who does not know that the inherent instinct for political order
may be accompanied by mental disorderliness? Even your modern
Englishman--as the saying goes--"muddles through." The minds of our
American forefathers were not always lucid. The mysticism of the New
England Calvinists sometimes bred fanaticism. The practical and the
theoretical were queerly blended. The essential unorderliness of the
American mind is admirably illustrated by that "Father of all the
Yankees," Benjamin Franklin. No student of Franklin's life fails to be
impressed by its happy casualness, its cheerful flavor of the
rogue-romance. Gil Blas himself never drifted into and out of an
adventure with a more offhand and imperturbable adroitness. Franklin
went through life with the joyous inventiveness of the amateur. He had
the amateur's enthusiasm, coupled with a clairvoyant penetration into
technical problems such as few amateurs have possessed. With all of his
wonderful patience towards other men, Franklin had in the realm of
scientific experiment something of the typical impatience of the mere
dabbler. He was inclined to lose interest in the special problem before
it was worked out. His large, tolerant intelligence was often as
unorderly as his papers and accounts. He was a wonderful colonial
Jack-of-all-trades; with a range of suggestion, a resourcefulness, a
knack of assimilation, a cosmopolitan many-sidedness, which has left us
perpetually his debtors. Under different surroundings, and disciplined
by a more severe and orderly training, Franklin might easily have
developed the very highest order of professional scientific
achievement. His natural talent for organization of men and
institutions, his "early projecting public spirit," his sense of the
lack of formal educational advantages in the colonies, made him the
founder of the Philadelphia Academy, the successful agitator for public
libraries. Academicism, even in the narrow sense, owes much to this
LL.D. of St. Andrews, D.C.L. of Oxford, and intimate associate of
French academicians. But one smiles a little, after all, to see the
bland printer in this academic company: he deserves his place there,
indeed, but he is something more and other than his associates. He is
the type of youthful, inexhaustible colonial America; reckless of
precedent, self-taught, splendidly alive; worth, to his day and
generation, a dozen born academicians; and yet suggesting by his very
imperfections, that the Americans of a later day, working under
different conditions, are bound to develop a sort of professional
skill, of steady, concentrated, ordered intellectual activity, for
which Franklin possessed the potential capacity rather than the
opportunity and the desire.
Yet there were latent lines of order, hints and prophecies of a coming
fellowship, running deep and straight beneath the confused surface of
the preoccupied colonial consciousness. In another generation we see
the rude Western democracy asserting itself in the valley of the
Mississippi. This breed of pioneers, like their fathers on the Atlantic
coast line, could turn their hands to anything, because they must. "The
average man," says Mr. Herbert Croly, "without any special bent or
qualifications, was in the pioneer states the useful man. In that
country it was sheer waste to spend much energy upon tasks which
demanded skill, prolonged experience, high technical standards, or
exclusive devotion.... No special equipment was required. The farmer
was obliged to be all kinds of a rough mechanic. The business man was
merchant, manufacturer, and storekeeper. Almost everybody was something
of a politician. The number of parts which a man of energy played in
his time was astonishingly large. Andrew Jackson was successively a
lawyer, judge, planter, merchant, general, politician, and statesman;
and he played most of these parts with conspicuous success. In such a
society a man who persisted in one job, and who applied the most
rigorous and exacting standards to his work, was out of place and
really inefficient. His finished product did not serve its temporary
purpose much better than did the current careless and hasty product,
and his higher standards and peculiar ways constituted an implied
criticism on the easy methods of his neighbors. He interfered with the
rough good-fellowship which naturally arises among a group of men who
submit good naturedly and uncritically to current standards. It is no
wonder, consequently, that the pioneer Democracy viewed with distrust
and aversion the man with a special vocation and high standards of
achievement."
The truth of this comment is apparent to everybody. It explains the
still lingering popular suspicion of the "academic" type of man. But we
are likely to forget that back of all that easy versatility and
reckless variety of effort there was some sound and patient and
constructive thinking. Lincoln used to describe himself humorously,
slightingly, as a "mast-fed" lawyer, one who had picked up in the woods
the scattered acorns of legal lore. It was a true enough description,
but after all, there were very few college-bred lawyers in the Eighth
Illinois Circuit or anywhere else who could hold their own, even in a
purely professional struggle, with that long-armed logician from the
backwoods.
There was once a "mast-fed" novelist in this country, who scandalously
slighted his academic opportunities, went to sea, went into the navy,
went to farming, and then went into novel-writing to amuse himself. He
cared nothing and knew nothing about conscious literary art; his style
is diffuse, his syntax the despair of school-teachers, and many of his
characters are bores. But once let him strike the trail of a story, and
he follows it like his own Hawkeye; put him on salt water or in the
wilderness, and he knows rope and paddle, axe and rifle, sea and forest
and sky; and he knows his road home to the right ending of a story by
an instinct as sure as an Indian's. Professional novelists like Balzac,
professional critics like Sainte-Beuve, stand amazed at Fenimore
Cooper's skill and power. The true engineering and architectural lines
are there. They were not painfully plotted beforehand, like George
Eliot's. Cooper took, like Scott, "the easiest path across country,"
just as a bee-hunter seems to take the easiest path through the woods.
But the bee-hunter, for all his apparent laziness, never loses sight of
the air-drawn line, marked by the homing bee; and your _Last of the
Mohicans_ will be instinctively, inevitably right, while your _Daniel
Deronda_ will be industriously wrong.
Cooper literally builded better than he knew. Obstinately unacademic in
his temper and training, he has won the suffrages of the most
fastidious and academic judges of excellence in his profession. The
secret is, I suppose, that the lawlessness, the amateurishness, the
indifference to standards were on the surface,--apparent to
everybody,--the soundness and rightness of his practice were
unconscious.
Franklin and Lincoln and Cooper, therefore, may be taken as striking
examples of individuals trained in the old happy-go-lucky way, and yet
with marked capacities for socialization, for fellowship. They
succeeded, even by the vulgar tests of success, in spite of their lack
of discipline. But for most men the chief obstacle to effective labor
even as individuals is the lack of thoroughgoing training.
It is scarcely necessary to add that there are vast obstacles in the
way of individualism as a working theory of society. Carlyle's theory
of "Hero Worship" has fewer adherents than for half a century. It is
picturesque,--that conception of a great, sincere man and of a world
reverencing him and begging to be led by him. But the difficulty is
that contemporary democracy does not say to the Hero, as Carlyle
thought it must say, "Govern me! I am mad and miserable, and cannot
govern myself!"
Democracy says to the Hero, "Thank you very much, but this is our
affair. Join us, if you like. We shall be glad of your company. But we
are not looking for governors. We propose to govern ourselves."
Even from the point of view of literature and art,--fields of activity
where the individual performer has often been felt to be quite
independent of his audience,--it is quite evident nowadays that the old
theory of individualism breaks down. Even your lyric poet, who more
than any other artist stands or sings alone, falls easily into mere
lyric eccentricity if he is not bound to his fellows by wholesome and
normal ties. In fact, this lyric eccentricity, weakness, wistfulness,
is one of the notable defects of American poetry. We have always been
lacking in the more objective forms of literary art, like epic and
drama. Poe, and the imitators of Poe, have been regarded too often by
our people as the normal type of poet. One must not forget the silent
solitary ecstasies that have gone into the making of enduring lyric
verse, but our literature proves abundantly how soon sweetness may turn
to an Emily Dickinson strain of morbidness; how fatally the lovely
becomes transformed into the queer. The history of the American short
story furnishes many similar examples. The artistic intensity of a
Hawthorne, his ethical and moral preoccupations, are all a part of the
creed of individualistic art. But both Hawthorne and Poe would have
written,--one dare not say better stories, but at least greater and
broader and more human stories,--if they had not been forced to walk so
constantly in solitary pathways. That fellowship in artistic creation
which has characterized some of the greatest periods of art production
was something wholly absent from the experience of these gifted and
lonely men. Even Emerson and Thoreau wrote "whim" over their portals
more often than any artist has the privilege to write it. Emerson never
had any thorough training, either in philosophy, theology, or history.
He admits it upon a dozen smiling pages. Perhaps it adds to his purely
personal charm, just as Montaigne's confession of his intellectual and
moral weaknesses heightens our fondness for the Prince of Essayists.
But the deeper fact is that not only Emerson and Thoreau, Poe and
Hawthorne, but practically every American writer and artist from the
beginning has been forced to do his work without the sustaining and
heartening touch of national fellowship and pride. Emerson himself felt
the chilling poverty in the intellectual and emotional life of the
country. He betrays it in this striking passage from his _Journal_,
about the sculptor Greenough:--
"What interest has Greenough to make a good statue? Who cares
whether it is good? A few prosperous gentlemen and ladies;
but the Universal Yankee Nation roaring in the capitol to
approve or condemn would make his eye and hand and heart go
to a new tune."
Those words were written in 1836, but we are still waiting for that new
national anthem, sustaining the heart and the voice of the individual
artist. Yet there are signs that it is coming.
It is obvious that the day for the old individualism has passed.
Whether one looks at art and literature or at the general activities of
American society, it is clear that the isolated individual is
incompetent to carry on his necessary tasks. This is not saying that we
have outgrown the individual. We shall never outgrow the individual. We
need for every page of literature and for every adequate performance of
society more highly perfected individuals. Some one said of Edgar Allan
Poe that he did not know enough to be a great poet. All around us and
every day we find individuals who do not know enough for their specific
job; men who do not love enough, men in whom the power of will is too
feeble. Such men, as individuals, must know and love and will more
adequately; and this not merely to perfect their functioning as
individuals, but to fulfill their obligations to contemporary society.
A true spiritual democracy will never be reached until highly trained
individuals are united in the bonds of fraternal feeling. Every
individual defect in training, defect in aspiration, defect in passion,
becomes ultimately a defect in society.
Let us turn, then, to those conditions of American society which have
prepared the way for, and foreshadowed, a more perfect fellowship. We
shall instantly perceive the relation of these general social
conditions to the specific performances of our men of letters. We have
repeatedly noted that our most characteristic literature is what has
been called a citizen literature. It is the sort of writing which
springs from a sense of the general needs of the community and which
has had for its object the safe-guarding or the betterment of the
community. Aside from a few masterpieces of lyric poetry, and aside
from the short story as represented by such isolated artists as Poe and
Hawthorne, our literature as a whole has this civic note. It may be
detected in the first writings of the colonists. Captain John Smith's
angry order at Jamestown, "He that will not work neither let him eat,"
is one of the planks in the platform of democracy. Under the trying and
depressing conditions of that disastrous settlement at Eden in _Martin
Chuzzlewit_ it is the quick wits and the brave heart of Mark Tapley
which prove him superior to his employer. The same sermon is preached
in Mr. Barrie's play, _The Admirable Crichton_: cast away upon the
desert island, the butler proves himself a better man than his master.
This is the motive of a very modern play, but it may be illustrated a
hundred times in the history of the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries in America. The practical experiences of the colonists
confirmed them in their republican theories. It is true that they held
to a doctrine of religious and political individualism. But the moment
these theories were put to work in the wilderness a new order of things
decreed that this individualism should be modified in the direction of
fellowship. Calvinism itself, for all of its insistence upon the value
of the individual soul, taught also the principle of the equality of
all souls before God. It was thus that the _Institutes_ of Calvin
became one of the charters of democracy. The democratic drift in the
writings of Franklin and Jefferson is too well known to need any
further comment. The triumph of the rebellious colonists of 1776 was a
triumph of democratic principles; and although a Tory reaction came
promptly, although Hamiltonianism came to stay as a beneficent check to
over-radical, populistic theories, the history of the last century and
a quarter has abundantly shown the vitality and the endurance of
democratic ideas.