its most ugly and quarrelsome aspect was the decade of the
eighteen-thirties. That was the decade when Washington Irving and
Fenimore Cooper came home from long sojourns in Europe. They found
themselves confronted at once by sensitive, suspicious neighbors who
hated England and Europe and had a lurking or open hostility towards
anything that savored of Old World culture. Yet in that very epoch
when English visitors were passing their most harsh and censorious
verdict upon American culture, Emerson was writing in his _Journal_
(June 18, 1834) a singular prophecy to the effect that the evils of
our democracy, so far as literature was concerned, were to be cured by
the remedy of more democracy. Is it not striking that he turns away
from the universities and the traditional culture of New England and
looks towards the Jacksonism of the new West to create a new and native
American literature? Here is the passage:--
"We all lean on England; scarce a verse, a page, a newspaper,
but is writ in imitation of English forms; our very manners
and conversation are traditional, and sometimes the life
seems dying out of all literature, and this enormous paper
currency of Words is accepted instead. I suppose the evil may
be cured by this rank rabble party, the Jacksonism of the
country, heedless of English and of all literature--a stone
cut out of the ground without hands;--they may root out the
hollow dilettantism of our cultivation in the coarsest way,
and the new-born may begin again to frame their own world
with greater advantage."
From that raw epoch of the eighteen-thirties on to the Civil War, one
may constantly detect in American writing the accents of democratic
radicalism. Partly, no doubt, it was a heritage of the sentiment of the
French Revolution. "My father," said John Greenleaf Whittier, "really
believed in the Preamble of the Bill of Rights, which re-affirmed the
Declaration of Independence." So did the son! Equally clear in the
writings of those thirty years are echoes of the English radicalism
which had so much in common with the democratic movement across the
English Channel. The part which English thinkers and English agitators
played in securing for America the fruits of her own democratic
principles has never been adequately acknowledged.
That the outcome of the Civil War meant a triumph of democratic ideas
as against aristocratic privilege, no one can doubt. There were no
stancher adherents of the democratic idea than our intellectual
aristocrats. The best Union editorials at the time of the Civil War,
says James Ford Rhodes, were written by scholars like Charles Eliot
Norton and James Russell Lowell. I think it was Lowell who once said,
in combatting the old aristocratic notion of white man supremacy, that
no gentleman is willing to accept privileges that are inaccessible to
other men. This is precisely like the famous sentence of Walt Whitman
which first arrested the attention of "Golden Rule Jones," the mayor of
Toledo, and which made him not only a Whitmaniac for the rest of his
life but one of the most useful of American citizens. The line was, "I
will accept nothing which all may not have their counterpart of on the
same terms."
This instinct of fellowship cannot be separated, of course, from the
older instincts of righteousness and justice. It involves, however,
more than giving the other man his due. It means feeling towards him as
towards another "fellow." It involves the sentiment of partnership.
Historians of early mining life in California have noted the new phase
of social feeling in the mining-camps which followed upon the change
from the pan--held and shaken by the solitary miner--to the cradle,
which required the cooperation of at least two men. It was when the
cradle came in that the miners first began to say "partner." As the
cradle gave way to placer mining, larger and larger schemes of
cooperation came into use. In fact, Professor Royce has pointed out in
his _History of California_ that the whole lesson of California
history is precisely the lesson most necessary to be learned by the
country as a whole, namely, that the phase of individual gain-getting
and individualistic power always leads to anarchy and reaction, and
that it becomes necessary, even in the interests of effective
individualism itself, to recognize the compelling and ultimate
authority of society.
What went on in California between 1849 and 1852 is precisely typical
of what is going on everywhere to-day. American men and women are
learning, as we say, "to get together." It is the distinctly
twentieth-century programme. We must all learn the art of getting
together, not merely to conserve the interests of literature and art
and society, but to preserve the individual himself in his just rights.
Any one who misunderstands the depth and the scope of the present
political restlessness which is manifested in every section of the
country, misunderstands the American instinct for fellowship. It is a
law of that fellowship that what is right and legitimate for me is
right and legitimate for the other fellow also. The American mind and
the American conscience are becoming socialized before our very eyes.
American art and literature must keep pace with this socialization of
the intelligence and the conscience, or they will be no longer
representative of the true America.
Literary illustrations of this spirit of fraternalism lie close at
hand. They are to be found here and there even in the rebellious,
well-nigh anarchic, individualism of the Concord men. They are to be
found throughout the prose and verse of Whittier. No one has preached a
truer or more effective gospel of fellowship than Longfellow, whose
poetry has been one of the pervasive influences in American democracy,
although Longfellow had but little to say about politics and never
posed in a slouch hat and with his trousers tucked into his boots.
Fellowship is taught in the _Biglow Papers_ of Lowell and the stories
of Mrs. Stowe. It is wholly absent from the prose and verse of Poe, and
it imparts but a feeble warmth to the delicately written pages of
Hawthorne. But in the books written for the great common audience of
American men and women, like the novels of Winston Churchill; and in
the plays which have scored the greatest popular successes, like those
of Denman Thompson, Bronson Howard, Gillette, Augustus Thomas, the
doctrine of fellowship is everywhere to be traced. It is in the poems
of James Whitcomb Riley and of Sam Walter Foss; in the work of hundreds
of lesser known writers of verse and prose who have echoed Foss's
sentiment about living in a "house by the side of the road" and being a
"friend of man."
To many readers the supreme literary example of the gospel of American
fellowship is to be found in Walt Whitman. One will look long before
one finds a more consistent or a nobler doctrine of fellowship than is
chanted in _Leaves of Grass_. It is based upon individualism; the
strong body and the possessed soul, sure of itself amid the whirling of
the "quicksand years"; but it sets these strong persons upon the "open
road" in comradeship; it is the sentiment of comradeship which creates
the indissoluble union of "these States"; and the States, in turn, in
spite of every "alarmist," "partialist," or "infidel," are to stretch
out unsuspicious and friendly hands of fellowship to the whole world.
Anybody has the right to call _Leaves of Grass_ poor poetry, if he
pleases; but nobody has the right to deny its magnificent Americanism.
It is not merely in literature that this message of fellowship is
brought to our generation. Let me quote a few sentences from the recent
address of George Gray Barnard, the sculptor, in explaining the meaning
of his marble groups now placed at the entrance to the Capitol of
Pennsylvania. "I resolved," says Barnard, "that I would build such
groups as should stand at the entrance to the People's temple ... the
home of those visions of the ever-widening and broadening brotherhood
that gives to life its dignity and its meaning. Life is told in terms
of labor. It is fitting that labor, its triumphs, its message, should
be told to those who gaze upon a temple of the people. The worker is
the hope of all the future. The needs of the worker, his problems, his
hopes, his untold longings, his sacrifices, his triumphs, all of these
are the field of the art of the future. Slowly we are groping our way
towards the new brotherhood, and when that day dawns, men will enter a
world made a paradise by labor. Labor makes us kin. It is for this
reason that there has been placed at the entrance of this great
building the message of the Adam and Eve of the future, the message of
labor and of fraternity."
That there are defects in this gospel and programme of American
fellowship, every one is aware. If the obstacle to effective
individualism is lack of discipline, the obstacles to effective
fellowship are vagueness, crankiness, inefficiency, and the relics of
primal selfishness. Nobody in our day has preached the tidings of
universal fellowship more fervidly and powerfully than Tolstoi. Yet
when one asks the great Russian, "What am I to do as a member of this
fellowship?" Tolstoi gives but a confused and impractical answer. He
applies to the complex and contradictory facts of our contemporary
civilization the highest test and standard known to him: namely, the
principles of the New Testament. But if you ask him precisely how these
principles are to be made the working programme of to-morrow, the
Russian mysticism and fanaticism settle over him like a fog. We pass
Tolstoians on the streets of our American cities every day; they have
the eyes of dreamers, of those who would build, if they could, a new
Heaven and a new Earth. But they do not know exactly how to go about
it. Our practical Western minds seize upon some actual plan for
constructive labor. Miss Jane Addams organizes her settlements in the
slums; Booker Washington gives his race models of industrial education;
President Eliot has a theory of university reform and then struggles
successfully for forty years to put that theory into practice. Compared
with the concrete performance of such social workers as these, the
gospel according to Whitman and Tolstoi is bound to seem vague in its
outlines, and ineffective in its concrete results. That such a gospel
attracts cranks and eccentrics of all sorts is not to be wondered at.
They come and go, but the deeper conceptions of fraternalism remain.
A further obstacle to the progress of fellowship lies in selfishness.
But let us see how even the coarser and rawer and cruder traits of the
American character may be related to the spirit of common endeavor
which is slowly transforming our society, and modifying, before our
eyes, our contemporary art and literature.
"The West," says James Bryce, "is the most American part of America,
that is to say the part where those features which distinguish America
from Europe come out in the strongest relief." We have already noted in
our study of American romance how the call of the West represented for
a while the escape from reality. The individual, following that
retreating horizon which we name the West, found an escape from
convention and from social law. Beyond the Mississippi or beyond the
Rockies meant to him that "somewheres east of Suez" where the Ten
Commandments are no longer to be found, where the individual has free
rein. But by and by comes the inevitable reaction, the return to
reality. The pioneer sobers down; he finds that "the Ten Commandments
will not budge"; he sees the need of law and order; he organizes a
vigilance committee; he impanels a jury, even though the old Spanish
law does not recognize a jury. The new land settles to its rest. The
output of the gold mines shrinks into insignificance when compared with
the cash value of crops of hay and potatoes. The old picturesque
individualism yields to a new social order, to the conception of the
rights of the state. The story of the West is thus an epitome of the
individual human life as well as the history of the United States.
We have been living through a period where the mind of the West has
seemed to be the typical national mind. We have been indifferent to
traditions. We have overlooked the defective training of the
individual, provided he "made good." We have often, as in the free
silver craze, turned our back upon universal experience. We have been
recklessly deaf to the teachings of history; we have spoken of the laws
of literature and art as if they were mere conventions designed to
oppress the free activity of the artist. Typical utterances of our
writers are Jack London's "I want to get away from the musty grip of
the past," and Frank Norris's "I do not want to write literature, I
want to write life."
The soul of the West, and a good deal of the soul of America, has been
betrayed in words like those. Not to share this hopefulness of the
West, its stress upon feeling rather than thinking, its superb
confidence, is to be ignorant of the constructive forces of the nation.
The humor of the West, its democracy, its rough kindness, its faith in
the people, its generous notion of "the square deal for everybody,"
its elevation of the man above the dollar, are all typical of the
American way of looking at the world. Typical also, is its social
solidarity, its swift emotionalism of the masses. It is the Western
interest in the ethical aspect of social movements that is creating
some of the moving forces in American society to-day. Experiment
stations of all kinds flourish on that soil. Chicago newspapers are
more alive to new ideas than the newspapers of New York or Boston. No
one can understand the present-day America if he does not understand
the men and women who live between the Allegheny Mountains and the
Rocky Mountains. They have worked out, more successfully than the
composite population of the East, a general theory of the relation of
the individual to society; in other words, a combination of
individualism with fellowship.
To draw up an indictment against this typical section of our country is
to draw up an indictment against our people as a whole. And yet one who
studies the literature and art produced in the great Mississippi Valley
will see, I believe, that the needs of the West are the real needs of
America. Take that commonness of mind and tone, which friendly foreign
critics, from De Tocqueville to Bryce, have indicated as one of the
dangers of our democracy. This commonness of mind and tone is often one
of the penalties of fellowship. It may mean a levelling down instead of
a levelling up.
Take the tyranny of the majority,--to which Mr. Bryce has devoted one
of his most suggestive chapters. You begin by recognizing the rights of
the majority. You end by believing that the majority must be right. You
cease to struggle against it. In other words, you yield to what Mr.
Bryce calls "the fatalism of the multitude." The individual has a sense
of insignificance. It is vain to oppose the general current. It is
easier to acquiesce and to submit. The sense of personal responsibility
lessens. What is the use of battling for one's own opinions when one
can already see that the multitude is on the other side? The greater
your democratic faith in the ultimate rightness of the multitude, the
less perhaps your individual power of will. The easier is it for you to
believe that everything is coming out right, whether you put your
shoulder to the wheel or not.
The problem of overcoming these evils is nothing less than the problem
of spiritualizing democracy. There are some of our hero-worshipping
people who think that that vast result can still be accomplished by
harking back to some such programme as the "great man" theory of
Carlyle. Another theory of spiritualizing democracy, no less familiar
to the student of nineteen-century literature, is what is called "the
divine average" doctrine of Walt Whitman. The average man is to be
taught the glory of his walk and trade. Round every head there is to be
an aureole. "A common wave of thought and joy, lifting mankind again,"
is to make us forget the old distinction between the individual and the
social group. We are all to be the sons of the morning.
We must not pause to analyze or to illustrate these two theories.
Carlyle's theory seems to me to be outworn, and Whitman's theory is
premature. But it is clear that they both admit that the mass of men
are as yet incompletely spiritualized, not yet raised to their full
stature. Unquestionably, our American life is, in European eyes at
least, monotonously uniform. It is touched with self-complacency. It
is too intent upon material progress. It confuses bigness with
greatness. It is unrestful. It is marked by intellectual impatience.
Our authors are eager to write life rather than literature. But they
are so eager that they overlook the need of literary discipline. They
do not learn to write literature and therefore most of them are
incapable of interpreting life. They escape, perhaps, from "the musty
grip of the past," but in so doing they refuse to learn the inexorable
lessons of the past. Hence the fact that our books lack power, that
they are not commensurate with the living forces of the country. The
unconscious, moral, and spiritual life of the nation is not back of
them, making "eye and hand and heart go to a new tune."
If we could have that, we should ask no more, for we believe in the
nation. I heard a doctor say, the other day, that a man's chief lesson
was to pull his brain down into his spinal cord; that is to say, to
make his activities not so much the result of conscious thought and
volition, as of unconscious, reflex action; to stop thinking and
willing, and simply _do_ what one has to do. May there not be a hint
here of the ultimate relation of the individual to the social
organism; the relation of our literature to our national character?
There is a period, no doubt, when the individual must painfully
question himself, test his powers, and acquire the sense of his own
place in the world. But there also comes a more mature period when he
takes that place unconsciously, does his work almost without thinking
about it, as if it were not his work at all. The brain has gone down
into the spinal cord; the man is functioning as apart of the organism
of society; he has ceased to question, to plan, to decide; it is
instinct that does his work for him.
Literature and art, at their noblest, function in that instinctive way.
They become the unconscious expression of a civilization. A nation
passes out of its adolescent preoccupation with plans and with
materials. It learns to do its work, precisely as Goethe bade the
artist do his task, without talking about it. We, too, shall outgrow in
time our questioning, our self-analysis, our futile comparison of
ourselves with other nations, our self-conscious study of our own
national character. We shall not forget the distinction between "each"
and "all," but "all" will increasingly be placed at the service of
"each." With fellowship based upon individualism, and with
individualism ever leading to fellowship, America will perform its
vital tasks, and its literature will be the unconscious and beautiful
utterance of its inner life.
THE END.
The Riverside Press
CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS
U. S. A.
* * * * *
Transcriber's Notes
Pages 53, 141: Changed the oe ligature to oe in the name Crevecoeur:
(Settlers like Crevecoeur), (enthusiasm of a settler like Crevecoeur)
Page 67: Changed compaign to campaign:
(Their compaign of "exposure," during the last decade,)
Page 165: Retained the spaced 't is, to match original line of poetry:
("If my bark sinks, 't is to another sea.")
Page 222: Changed conciousness to consciousness:
(the preoccupied colonial conciousness.)
Page 223: Changed explans to explains:
(It explans the still lingering popular suspicion)
Page 232: Changed sojurns to sojourns:
(Fenimore Cooper came home from long sojurns in Europe.)