DEMOCRACY AND DISTINCTION
THE PROBLEM—DEMOCRACY SHOULD BE DISTINGUISHED FROM
TRANSITION—THE DEAD-LEVEL THEORY OF DEMOCRACY—CONFUSION AND ITS
EFFECTS—“INDIVIDUALISM” MAY NOT BE FAVORABLE TO DISTINGUISHED
INDIVIDUALITY—CONTEMPORARY UNIFORMITY—RELATIVE ADVANTAGES OF AMERICA
AND EUROPE—HASTE, SUPERFICIALITY, STRAIN—SPIRITUAL ECONOMY OF A
SETTLED ORDER—COMMERCIALISM—ZEAL FOR DIFFUSION—CONCLUSION.
What shall we say of the democratic trend of the modern world as
it affects the finer sort of intellectual achievement? While the
conscious sway of the masses seems not uncongenial to the more popular
and obvious kinds of eminence, as of statesmen, inventors, soldiers,
financiers and the like, there are many who believe it to be hostile
to distinction in literature, art or science. Is there hope for this
also, or must we be content to offset the dearth of greatness by the
abundance of mediocrity?
This, I take it, is a matter for _a priori_ psychological reasoning
rather than for close induction from fact. The present democratic
movement is so different from anything in the past that historical
comparison of any large sort is nearly or quite worthless. And,
moreover, it is so bound up with other conditions which are not
essential to it and may well prove transient, that even contemporary
fact gives us very little secure guidance. All that is really
practicable is a survey of the broad principles at work and a rough
attempt to forecast how they may work out. An inquiry of this sort
seems to me to lead to conclusions somewhat as follows.
First, there is, I believe, no sound reason for thinking that the
democratic spirit or organization is in its essential nature hostile to
distinguished production. Indeed, one who holds that the opposite is
the case, while he will not be able to silence the pessimist, will find
little in fact or theory to shake his own faith.
Second, although democracy itself is not hostile, so far as we can
make out its nature by general reasoning, there is much that is so in
the present state of thought, both in the world at large and, more
particularly, in the United States.
In this, as in all discussions regarding contemporary tendency, we
need to discriminate between democracy and transition. At present the
two go together because democracy is new; but there is no reason in
the nature of things why they should remain together. As popular rule
becomes established it proves capable of developing a stability, even
a rigidity, of its own; and it is already apparent that the United
States, for instance, just because democracy has had its way there, is
less liable to sudden transitions than perhaps any other of the great
nations.
It is true that democracy involves some elements of permanent
unrest. Thus, by demanding open opportunity and resisting hereditary
stratification, it will probably maintain a competition of persons more
general, and as regards personal status more unsettling, than anything
the world has been used to in the past. But personal competition
alone is the cause of only a small part of the stress and disorder
of our time; much more being due to general changes in the social
system, particularly in industry, which we may describe as transition.
And moreover, competition itself is in a specially disordered or
transitional state at present, and will be less disquieting when a more
settled state of society permits it to be carried on under established
rules of justice, and when a discriminating education shall do a large
part of its work. In short, democracy is not necessarily confusion, and
we shall find reason to think that it is the latter, chiefly, that is
opposed to distinction.
The view that popular rule is in its nature unsuited to foster genius
rests chiefly on the dead-level theory. Equality not distinction is
said to be the passion of the masses, diffusion not concentration.
Everything moves on a vast and vaster scale: the facility of
intercourse is melting the world into one fluid whole in which the
single individual is more and more submerged. The era of salient
personalities is passing away, and the principle of equality, which
ensures the elevation of men in general, is fatal to particular
greatness. “In modern society,” said De Tocqueville, the chief begetter
of this doctrine, “everything threatens to become so much alike that
the peculiar characteristics of each individual will soon be entirely
lost in the general aspect of the world.”[75] Shall we agree with this
or maintain with Plato that a democracy will have the greatest variety
of human nature?[76]
Perhaps the most plausible basis for this theory is the levelling
effect ascribed by many to the facilities for communication that have
grown up so surprisingly within the past century. In a former chapter
I have said much upon this matter, holding that we must distinguish
between the individuality of choice and that of isolation, and giving
reasons why the modern facility of intercourse should be favorable to
the former.
To this we may add that the mere fact of popular rule has no inevitable
connection, either friendly or hostile, with variety and vigor of
individuality. If France is somewhat lacking in these, it is not
because she is democratic, but because of the race traits of her people
and her peculiar antecedents; if America abounds in a certain kind of
individuality, it is chiefly because she inherited it from England and
developed it in a frontier life. In either case democracy, in the sense
of popular government, is a secondary matter.
Certainly, America is a rather convincing proof that democracy does
not necessarily suppress salient personality. So far as individuality
of spirit is concerned, our life leaves little to be desired, and no
trait impresses itself more than this upon observers from the continent
of Europe. “All things grow clear in the United States,” says Paul
Bourget, “when one understands them as an immense act of faith in
the social beneficence of individual energy left to itself.”[77] The
“individualism” of our social system is a commonplace of contemporary
writers. Nowhere else, not even in England, I suppose, is there more
respect for non-conformity or more disposition to assert it. In
our intensely competitive life men learn to value character above
similarity, and one who has character may hold what opinions he
pleases. Personality, as Mr. Brownell points out in contrasting the
Americans with the French, is the one thing of universal interest
here: our conversation, our newspapers, our elections are dominated
by it, and our great commercial transactions are largely a struggle
for supremacy among rival leaders.[78] The augmenting numbers of the
people, far from obscuring the salient individual, only make for him
a larger theatre of success; and personal reputation—whether for
wealth, statesmanship, literary achievement, or for mere singularity—is
organized on a greater scale than ever before. One who is familiar
with any province of American life, as for example, that of charitable
and penal reform, is aware that almost every advance is made through
the embodiment of timely ideas in one or a few energetic individuals
who set an example for the country to follow. Experience with numbers,
instead of showing the insignificance of the individual, proves that
if he has faith and a worthy aim there is no limit to what he may do;
and we find, accordingly, plenty of courage in starting new projects.
The country is full of men who find the joys of self-assertion, if not
always of outward success, in the bold pursuit of hazardous enterprises.
If there is a deficiency of literary and artistic achievement in a
democracy of this kind, it is due to some other cause than a general
submergence of the individual in the mass.
The dead-level theory, then, is sufficiently discredited as a general
law by the undiminished ascendency of salient individualities in every
province of activity. The enlargement of social consciousness does not
alter the essential relation of individuality to life, but simply gives
it a greater field of success or failure. The man of genius may meet
with more competition, but if he is truly great a larger world is his.
To imagine that the mass will submerge the individual is to suppose
that one aspect of society will stand still while the other grows. It
rests upon a superficial, numerical way of thinking, which regards
individuals as fixed units each of which must become less conspicuous
the more they are multiplied. But if the man of genius represents a
spiritual principle his influence is not fixed but grows with the
growth of life itself, and is limited only by the vitality of what he
stands for. Surely the great men of the past—Plato, Dante, Shakespeare
and the rest—are not submerged, nor in danger of being; nor is it
apparent why their successors should be.
The real cause of literary and artistic weakness (in so far as it
exists) I take to be chiefly the spiritual disorganization incident
to a time of rather sudden transition. How this condition, and
others closely associated with it, are unfavorable to great æsthetic
production, I shall try to point out under the four heads, confusion,
commercialism, haste and zeal for diffusion.
With reference to the higher products of culture, not only the United
States, but in some degree contemporary civilization in general, is a
confused, a raw, society, not as being democratic but as being new. It
is our whole newspaper and factory epoch that is crude, and scarcely
more so in America than in England or Germany; the main difference in
favor of European countries being that the present cannot so easily be
separated from the conditions of an earlier culture. It is a general
trait of the time that social types are disintegrated, old ones going
to pieces and new ones not perfected, leaving the individual without
adequate discipline either in the old or in the new.
Now works of enduring greatness seem to depend, among other things,
on a certain ripeness of historical conditions. No matter how gifted
an individual may be, he is in no way apart from his time, but has
to take that and make the best of it he can; the man of genius is in
one point of view only a twig upon which a mature tendency bears its
perfect fruit. In the new epoch the vast things in process are as yet
so unfinished that individual gifts are scarce sufficient to bring
anything to a classical completeness; so that our life remains somewhat
inarticulate, our literature, and still more our plastic art, being
inadequate exponents of what is most vital in the modern spirit.
The psychological effect of confusion is a lack of mature culture
groups, and of what they only can do for intellectual or æsthetic
production. What this means may, perhaps, be made clearer by a
comparison drawn from athletic sports. We find in our colleges that
to produce a winning foot-ball team, or distinguished performance in
running or jumping, it is essential first of all to have a spirit of
intense interest in these things, which shall arouse the ambition of
those having natural gifts, support them in their training and reward
their success. Without this group spirit no efficient organization,
no high standard of achievement, can exist, and a small institution
that has this will easily surpass a large one that lacks it. And
experience shows that it takes much time to perfect such a spirit and
the organizations through which it is expressed.
In quite the same way any ripe development of productive power in
literary or other art implies not merely capable individuals but
the perfection of a social group, whose traditions and spirit the
individual absorbs, and which floats him up to a point whence he can
reach unique achievement. The unity of this group or type is spiritual,
not necessarily local or temporal, and so may be difficult to trace,
but its reality is as sure as the principle that man is a social
being and cannot think sanely and steadfastly except in some sort of
sympathy with his fellows. There must be others whom we can conceive as
sharing, corroborating and enhancing our ideals, and to no one is such
association more necessary than the man of genius.
The group is likely to be more apparent or tangible in some arts than
in others: it is generally quite evident in painting, sculpture,
architecture and music, where a regular development by the passage of
inspiration from one artist to another can almost always be traced. In
literature the connections are less obvious, chiefly because this art
is in its methods more disengaged from time and place, so that it is
easier to draw inspiration from distant sources. It is also partly a
matter of temperament, men of somewhat solitary imagination being able
to form their group out of remote personalities, and so to be almost
independent of time and place. Thus Thoreau lived with the Greek and
Hindoo classics, with the old English poets, and with the suggestions
of nature; but even he owed much to contemporary influences, and the
more he is studied the less solitary he appears. Is not this the case
also with Wordsworth, with Dante, with all men who are supposed to have
stood alone?
The most competent of all authorities on this question—Goethe—was a
full believer in the dependence of genius on influences. “People are
always talking about originality,” he says, “but what do they mean?
As soon as we are born the world begins to work upon us, and this
goes on to the end. And after all what can we call our own except
energy, strength and will? If I could give an account of all that
I owe to great predecessors and contemporaries, there would be but
a small balance in my favor.”[79] He even held that men of genius
are more dependent upon their environment than others; for, being
thinner-skinned, they are more suggestible, more perturbable, and
peculiarly in need of the right sort of surroundings to keep their
delicate machinery in fruitful action.
No doubt such questions afford ground for infinite debate, but the
underlying principle that the thought of every man is one with that of
a group, visible or invisible, is sure, I think, to prove sound; and if
so it is indispensable that a great capacity should find access to a
group whose ideals and standards are of a sort to make the most of it.
Another reason why the rawness of the modern world is unfavorable
to great production is that the ideals themselves which a great art
should express share in the general incompleteness of things and do
not present themselves to the mind clearly defined and incarnate in
vivid symbols. Perhaps a certain fragmentariness and pettiness in
contemporary art and literature is due more to this cause than to any
other—to the fact that the aspirations of the time, large enough,
certainly, are too much obscured in smoke to be clearly and steadily
regarded. We may believe, for example, in democracy, but it can hardly
be said that we _see_ democracy, as the middle ages, in their art, saw
the Christian religion.
From this point of view of groups and organization it is easy to
understand why the “individualism” of our epoch does not necessarily
produce great individuals. Individuality may easily be aggressive
and yet futile, because not based on the training afforded by
well-organized types—like the fruitless valor of an isolated
soldier. Mr. Brownell points out that the prevalence of this sort of
individuality in our art and life is a point of contrast between us and
the French. Paris, compared with New York, has the “organic quality
which results from variety of types,” as distinguished from variety of
individuals. “We do far better in the production of striking artistic
personalities than we do in the general medium of taste and culture. We
figure well, invariably, at the Salon.... Comparatively speaking, of
course, we have no _milieu_.”[80]
The same conditions underlie that comparative uniformity of American
life which wearies the visitor and implants in the native such a
passion for Europe. When a populous society springs up rapidly
from a few transplanted seeds, its structure, however vast, is
necessarily somewhat simple and monotonous. A thousand towns, ten
thousand churches, a million houses, are built on the same models,
and the people and the social institutions do not altogether escape a
similar poverty of types. No doubt this is sometimes exaggerated, and
America does present many picturesque variations, but only a reckless
enthusiasm will equal them with those of Europe. How unspeakably
inferior in exterior aspect and in many inner conditions of culture
must any recent civilization be to that, let us say, of Italy, whose
accumulated riches represent the deposit of several thousand years.
Such deposits, however, belong to the past; and as regards contemporary
accretions the sameness of London or Rome is hardly less than that of
Chicago. It is a matter of the epoch, more conspicuous here chiefly
because it has had fuller sweep. A heavy fall of crude commercialism is
rapidly obscuring the contours of history.
In comparison with Europe America has the advantages that come from
being more completely in the newer current of things. It is nearer,
perhaps, to the spirit of the coming order, and so perhaps more likely,
in due time, to give it adequate utterance in art. Another benefit of
being new is the attitude of confidence that it fosters. If America
could hardly have sustained the assured mastery of Tennyson, neither,
perhaps, could England an optimism like that of Emerson. In contrast to
the latter, Carlyle, Ruskin and Tolstoi—prophets of an older world—are
shadowed by a feeling of the ascendency and inertia of ancient and
somewhat decadent institutions. They are afraid of them, and so are apt
to be rather shrill in protest. An American, accustomed to see human
nature have pretty much its own way, has seldom any serious mistrust of
the outcome. Nearly all of our writers—as Emerson, Longfellow, Lowell,
Whittier, Holmes, Thoreau, Whitman, even Hawthorne—have been of a
cheerful and wholesome personality.[81]
On the other hand, an old civilization has from its mere antiquity a
richness and complexity of spiritual life that cannot be transplanted
to a new world. The immigrants bring with them the traditions of which
they feel in immediate need, such as those necessary to found the
state, the church and the family; but even these lose something of
their original flavor, while much of what is subtler and less evidently
useful is left behind. We must remember, too, that the culture of the
Old World is chiefly a class culture, and that the immigrants have
mostly come from a class that had no great part in it.
With this goes loss of the visible monuments of culture inherited from
the past—architecture, painting, sculpture, ancient universities and
the like. Burne-Jones, the English painter, speaking of the commercial
city in which he spent his youth, says: ... “if there had been one
cast from ancient Greek sculpture, or one faithful copy of a great
Italian picture, to be seen in Birmingham when I was a boy, I should
have begun to paint ten years before I did ... even the silent presence
of great works in your town will produce an impression on those who
see them, and the next generation will, without knowing how or why,
find it easier to learn than this one does whose surroundings are so
unlovely.”[82]
Nor is American life favorable to the rapid crystallization of a new
artistic culture; it is too transient and restless; transatlantic
migration is followed by internal movements from east to west and from
city to country; while on top of these we have a continuous subversion
of industrial relations.[83]
Another element of special confusion in our life is the headlong
mixture of races, temperaments and traditions that comes from the
new immigration, from the irruption by millions of peoples from the
south and east of the Old World. If they were wholly inferior, as we
sometimes imagine, it would perhaps not matter so much; but the truth
is that they contest every intellectual function with the older stock,
and, in the universities for instance, are shortly found teaching
our children their own history and literature. They assimilate, but
always with a difference, and in the northern United States, formerly
dominated by New England influences, a revolution from this cause is
well under way. It is as if a kettle of broth were cooking quietly on
the fire, when some one should come in and add suddenly a great pailful
of raw meats, vegetables and spices—a rich combination, possibly, but
likely to require much boiling. That fine English sentiment that came
down to us through the colonists more purely, perhaps, than to the
English in the old country, is passing away—as a distinct current,
that is—lost in a flood of cosmopolitan life. Before us, no doubt, is a
larger humanity, but behind is a cherished spirit that can hardly live
again; and, like the boy who leaves home, we must turn our thoughts
from an irrevocable past and go hopefully on to we know not what.
In short, our world lacks maturity of culture organization. What we
sometimes call—truly enough as regards its economic life—our complex
civilization, is simple to the point of poverty in spiritual structure.
We have cast off much rubbish and decay and are preparing, we may
reasonably hope, to produce an art and literature worthy of our vigor
and aspiration, but in the past, certainly, we have hardly done so.
Haste and the superficiality and strain which attend upon it are widely
and insidiously destructive of good work in our day. No other condition
of mind or of society—not ignorance, poverty, oppression or hate—kills
art as haste does. Almost any phase of life may be ennobled if there
is only calm enough in which the brooding mind may do its perfect work
upon it; but out of hurry nothing noble ever did or can emerge. In art
human nature should come to a total, adequate expression; a spiritual
tendency should be perfected and recorded in calmness and joy. But ours
is, on the whole, a time of stress, of the habit of incomplete work;
its products are unlovely and unrestful and such as the future will
have no joy in. The pace is suited only to turn out mediocre goods on a
vast scale.
It is, to put the matter otherwise, a _loud_ time. The newspapers,
the advertising, the general insistence of suggestion, have an effect
of din, so that one feels that he must raise his voice to be heard,
and the whispers of the gods are hard to catch. Men whose voices are
naturally low and fine easily lose this trait in the world and begin
to shout like the rest. That is to say, they exaggerate and repeat and
advertise and caricature, saying too much in the hope that a little may
be heard. Of course, in the long run this is a fatal delusion; nothing
will really be listened to except that whose quiet truth makes it worth
hearing; but it is one so rooted in the general state of things that
few escape it. Even those who preserve the lower tone do so with an
effort which is in itself disquieting.
A strenuous state of mind is always partial and special, sacrificing
scope to intensity and more fitted for execution than insight.
It is useful at times, but if habitual cuts us off from that sea
of subconscious spirit from which all original power flows. “The
world of art,” says Paul Bourget, speaking of America, “requires
less self-consciousness—an impulse of life which forgets itself,
the alternations of dreamy idleness with fervid execution.”[84] So
Henry James[85] remarks that we have practically lost the faculty of
attention, meaning, I suppose, that unstrenuous, brooding sort of
attention required to produce or appreciate works of art—and as regards
the prevalent type of business or professional mind this seems quite
true.
It comes mainly from having too many things to think of, from the
urgency and distraction of an epoch and a country in which the
traditional structures that support the mind and save its energy have
largely gone to pieces. The endeavor to supply by will functions that
in other conditions would be automatic creates a rush which imitation
renders epidemic, and from which it is not easy to escape in order to
mature one’s powers in fruitful quiet.
There is an immense spiritual economy in any settled state of society,
sufficient, so far as production is concerned, to offset much that
is stagnant or oppressive; the will is saved and concentrated; while
freedom, as De Tocqueville noted, sometimes produces “a small,
distressing motion, a sort of incessant jostling of men, which annoys
and disturbs the mind without exciting or elevating it.”[86] The modern
artist has too much choice. If he attempts to deal largely with life,
his will is overworked at the expense of æsthetic synthesis. Freedom
and opportunity are without limit, all cultures within his reach and
splendid service awaiting performance. But the task of creating a
glad whole seems beyond any ordinary measure of talent. The result in
most cases—as has been said of architecture—is “confusion of types,
illiterate combinations, an evident breathlessness of effort and
striving for effect, with the inevitable loss of repose, dignity and
style.”[87] A mediæval cathedral or a Greek temple was the culmination
of a long social growth, a gradual, deliberate, corporate achievement,
to which the individual talent added only the finishing touch. The
modern architect has, no doubt, as much personal ability, but the
demands upon it are excessive; it would seem that only a transcendent
synthetic genius of the calibre of Dante could deal adequately with our
scattered conditions.
The cause of strain is radical and somewhat feverish change, not
democracy as such. A large part of the people, particularly the farming
class, are little affected by it, and there are indications that in
America, where it has been greater than elsewhere, the worst is now
over.
By commercialism, in this connection, we may understand a preoccupation
of the ability of the people with material production and with the
trade and finance based upon it. This again is in part a trait of the
period, in part a peculiarity of America, in its character as a new
country with stumps to get out and material civilization to erect from
the ground up.
The result of it is that ability finds constant opportunity and
incitement to take a commercial direction, and little to follow pure
art or letters. A man likes to succeed in something, and if he is
conscious of the capacity to make his way in business or professional
life, he is indisposed to endure the poverty, uncertainty and
indifference which attend the pursuit of an artistic calling. Less
prosperous societies owe something to that very lack of opportunity
which makes it less easy for artistic ability to take another direction.
An even greater peril is the debasing of art by an uncultured market.
There seem to be plenty of artists of every kind, but their standard
of success is mostly low. The beginner too early gets commercial
employment in which he is not held up to any high ideal. This brings
us back to the lack of a well-knit artistic tradition to educate both
the artist and the public, the lack of a type, “the non-existence,” as
Mr. Russell Sturgis says, “of an artistic community with a mind of its
own and a certain general agreement as to what a work of art ought to
be.” This lack involves the weakness of the criticism which is required
to make the artist see himself as he ought to be. “That criticism is
nowhere in proportion to the need of it,” says Henry James, “is the
visiting observer’s first and last impression—an impression so constant
that it at times swallows up or elbows out every other.”
The antipathy between art and the commercial spirit, however, is
often much overstated. As a matter of history art and literature have
flourished most conspicuously in prosperous commercial societies,
such as Athens, Florence, Venice, the communes of the thirteenth and
fourteenth centuries, the trading cities of Germany, the Dutch Republic
and the England of Elizabeth. Nothing does more than commerce to awaken
intelligence, enterprise and a free spirit, and these are favorable
to ideal production. It is only the extreme one-sidedness of our
civilization in this regard that is prejudicial.
It is also true—and here we touch upon something pertaining more to the
very nature of democracy than the matters so far mentioned—that the
zeal for diffusion which springs from communication and sympathy has in
it much that is not directly favorable to the finer sorts of production.
Which is the better, fellowship or distinction? There is much to be
said on both sides, but the finer spirits of our day lean toward the
former, and find it more human and exhilarating to spread abroad the
good things the world already has than to prosecute a lonesome search
for new ones. I notice among the choicest people I know—those who seem
to me most representative of the inner trend of democracy—a certain
generous contempt for distinction and a passion to cast their lives
heartily on the general current. But the highest things are largely
those which do not immediately yield fellowship or diffuse joy. Though
making in the end for a general good, they are as private in their
direct action as selfishness itself, from which they are not always
easily distinguished. They involve intense self-consciousness. Probably
men who follow the whispers of genius will always be more or less at
odds with their fellows.
Ours, then, is an Age of Diffusion. The best minds and hearts seek joy
and self-forgetfulness in active service, as in another time they might
seek it in solitary worship; God, as we often hear, being sought more
through human fellowship and less by way of isolate self-consciousness
than was the case a short time since.
I need hardly particularize the educational and philanthropic zeal
that, in one form or another, incites the better minds among our
contemporaries and makes them feel guilty when they are not in some way
exerting themselves to spread abroad material or spiritual goods. No
one would wish to see this zeal diminished; and perhaps it makes in the
long run for every kind of worthy achievement; but its immediate effect
is often to multiply the commonplace, giving point to De Tocqueville’s
reflection that “in aristocracies a few great pictures are produced,
in democratic countries a vast number of insignificant ones.”[88] In a
spiritual as well as a material sense there is a tendency to fabricate
cheap goods for an uncritical market.
“Men and gods are too extense.”[89]
Finally, all theories that aim to deduce from social conditions the
limits of personal achievement must be received with much caution.
It is the very nature of a virile sense of self to revolt from the
usual and the expected and pursue a lonesome road. Of course it must
have support, but it may find this in literature and imaginative
intercourse. So, in spite of everything, we have had in America men
of signal distinction—such, for instance, as Emerson, Thoreau and
Whitman—and we shall no doubt have more. We need fear no dearth of
inspiring issues; for if old ones disappear energetic minds will always
create new ones by making greater demands upon life.
The very fact that our time has so largely cast off all sorts of
structure is in one way favorable to enduring production, since it
means that we have fallen back upon human nature, upon that which is
permanent and essential, the adequate record of which is the chief
agent in giving life to any product of the mind.
FOOTNOTES:
[75] Democracy in America, vol. ii, book iv, chap. 7. But elsewhere
he expresses the opinion that this levelling and confusion is only
temporary. See, for example, book iii, chap. 21.
[76] Republic, book viii.
[77] Outre-Mer. English Translation, 306.
[78] See the final chapter of his French Traits.
[79] Conversation with Eckermann, May 12, 1825.
[80] French Traits, 385, 387, 393.
[81] Poe is the only notable exception that occurs to me.
[82] Memorials of Edward Burne-Jones, ii, 100, 101.
[83] Our most notable group of writers—flourishing at Concord and
Boston about 1850—is, of course, connected with the maturing, in
partial isolation, of a local type of culture, now disintegrated and
dispersed on the wider currents of the time.
[84] Outre-Mer, 25.
[85] In his essay on Balzac.
[86] Democracy in America, vol. ii, book i, chap. 10.
[87] Henry Van Brunt, Greek Lines, 225. Some of these phrases, such
as “illiterate combinations,” could never apply to the work of good
architects.
[88] Democracy in America, vol. ii, book i, chap. 11.
[89] Emerson, Alphonso of Castile.