or some other country, but chiefly England. "My market and my
reputation," said Prescott in 1838, "rest principally with England."
To Poe, a few years later, the United States was "a literary colony
of Great Britain." And there has been little change to this day. The
English leisure class, says Prof. Dr. Veblen, is "for purposes of
reputable usage the upper leisure class of this country." Despite all
the current highfalutin about melting pots and national destinies the
United States remains almost as much an English colonial possession,
intellectually and spiritually, as it was on July 3, 1776. The American
social pusher keeps his eye on Mayfair; the American literatus dreams
of recognition by the London weeklies; the American don is lifted to
bliss by the imprimatur of Oxford or Cambridge; even the American
statesman knows how to cringe to Downing Street. Most of the essential
policies of Dr. Wilson between 1914 and 1920--when the realistic
English, finding him no longer useful, incontinently dismissed
him--were, to all intents and purposes, those of a British colonial
premier. He went into the Peace Conference willing to yield everything
to English interests, and he came home with a treaty that was so
extravagantly English that it fell an easy prey to the anti-English
minority, ever alert for the makings of a bugaboo to scare the plain
people. What lies under all this subservience is simple enough. The
American, for all his braggadocio, is quite conscious of his intrinsic
inferiority to the Englishman, on all cultural counts. He may put
himself first as a man of business, as an adventurer in practical
affairs or as a pioneer in the applied arts and sciences, but in
all things removed from the mere pursuit of money and physical ease
he well understands that he belongs at the second table. Even his
recurrent attacks of Anglophobia are no more than Freudian evidences
of his inferiority complex. He howls in order to still his inner
sense of inequality, as he howls against imaginary enemies in order
to convince himself that he is brave and against fabulous despotisms
in order to prove that he is free. The Englishman is never deceived
by this hocus-pocus. He knows that it is always possible to fetch
the rebel back into camp by playing upon his elemental fears and
vanities. A few dark threats, a few patronizing speeches, a few Oxford
degrees, and the thing is done. More, the English scarcely regard
it as hunting in the grand manner; it is a business of subalterns.
When, during the early stages of the war, they had occasion to woo
the American _intelligentsia,_ what agents did they choose? Did they
nominate Thomas Hardy, Joseph Conrad, George Moore and company? Nay,
they nominated Conan Doyle, Coningsby Dawson, Alfred Noyes, Ian Hay,
Chesterton, Kipling, Zangwill and company. In the choice there was high
sagacity and no little oblique humor--as there was a bit later in the
appointment of Lord Reading and Sir Auckland Geddes to Washington. The
valuation they set upon the _aluminados_ of the Republic was exactly
the valuation they were in the habit of setting, at home, upon MM. of
the Free Church Federation. They saw the eternal green-grocer beneath
the master's gown and mortarboard. Let us look closely and we shall see
him, too.
The essence of a self-reliant and autonomous culture is an unshakable
egoism. It must not only regard itself as the peer of any other
culture; it must regard itself as the superior of any other. You will
find this indomitable pride in the culture of any truly first-rate
nation: France, Germany or England. But you will not find it in the
so-called culture of America. Here the decadent Anglo-Saxon majority
still looks obediently and a bit wistfully toward the motherland.
No good American ever seriously questions an English judgment on an
æsthetic question, or even on an ethical, philosophical or political
question. There is, in fact, seldom any rational reason why he should:
it is almost always more mature, more tolerant, more intelligent than
any judgment hatched at home. Behind it lies a settled scheme of
things, a stable point of view, the authority of a free intellectual
aristocracy, the pride of tradition and of power. The English are
sure-footed, well-informed, persuasive. It is beyond their imagination
that any one should seriously challenge them. In this over-grown and
oafish colony there is no such sureness. The American always secretly
envies the Englishman, even when he professes to flout him. The
Englishman never envies the American.
The extraordinary colonist, moved to give utterance to the ideas
bubbling within him, is thus vastly handicapped, for he must submit
them to the test of a culture that, in the last analysis, is never
quite his own culture, despite its dominance. Looking within himself,
he finds that he is different, that he diverges from the English
standard, that he is authentically American--and to be authentically
American is to be officially inferior. He thus faces dismay at
the very start: support is lacking when he needs it most. In the
motherland--in any motherland, in any wholly autonomous nation--there
is a class of men like himself, devoted to translating the higher
manifestations of the national spirit into ideas--men differing
enormously among themselves, but still united in common cause against
the lethargy and credulity of the mass. But in a colony that class,
if it exists at all, lacks coherence and certainty; its authority
is not only disputed by the inertia and suspiciousness of the lower
orders, but also by the superior authority overseas; it is timorous and
fearful of challenge. Thus it affords no protection to an individual
of assertive originality, and he is forced to go as a suppliant to a
quarter in which nothing is his by right, but everything must go by
favor--in brief to a quarter where his very application must needs be
regarded as an admission of his inferiority. The burden of proof upon
him is thus made double. Obviously, he must be a man of very strong
personality to surmount such obstacles triumphantly. Such strong men,
of course, sometimes appear in a colony, but they always stand alone;
their worst opposition is at home. For a colonial of less vigorous soul
the battle is almost hopeless. Either he submits to subordination and
so wears docilely the inferior badge of a praiseworthy and tolerated
colonist, or he deserts the minority for the far more hospitable and
confident majority, and so becomes a mere mob-artist.
Examples readily suggest themselves. I give you Poe and Whitman as men
strong enough to weather the adverse wind. The salient thing about each
of these men was this: that his impulse to self-expression, the force
of his "obscure, inner necessity," was so powerful that it carried him
beyond all ordinary ambitions and prudences--in other words, that the
ego functioned so heroically that it quite disregarded the temporal
welfare of the individual. Neither Poe nor Whitman made the slightest
concession to what was the predominant English taste, the prevailing
English authority, of his time. And neither yielded in the slightest
to the maudlin echoes of English notions that passed for ideas in the
United States; in neither will you find any recognizable reflection
of the things that Americans were saying and doing all about them.
Even Whitman, preaching democracy, preached a democracy that not one
actual democrat in a hundred thousand could so much as imagine. What
happened? _Imprimis,_ English authority, at the start, dismissed them
loftily; they were, at best, simply rare freaks from the colonies.
Secondly, American stupidity, falling into step, came near overlooking
them altogether. The accident that maintained them was an accident
of personality and environment. They happened to be men accustomed
to social isolation and of the most meager wants, and it was thus
difficult to deter them by neglect and punishment. So they stuck to
their guns--and presently they were "discovered," as the phrase is, by
men of a culture wholly foreign to them and perhaps incomprehensible
to them, and thereafter, by slow stages, they began to win a slow
and reluctant recognition in England (at first only from rebels and
iconoclasts), and finally even in America. That either, without French
prompting, would have come to his present estate I doubt very much. And
in support of that doubt I cite again the fact that Poe's high talents
as a critic, not having interested the French, have never got their
deserts either in England or at home.
It is lesser men that we chiefly have to deal with in this world,
and it is among lesser men that the lack of a confident intellectual
viewpoint in America makes itself most evident. Examples are numerous
and obvious. On the one hand, we have Fenimore Cooper first making a
cringing bow for English favor, and then, on being kicked out, joining
the mob against sense; he wrote books so bad that even the Americans of
1830 admired them. On the other hand, we nave Henry James, a deserter
made by despair; one so depressed by the tacky company at the American
first table that he preferred to sit at the second table of the
English. The impulse was, and is common; it was only the forthright
act that distinguished him. And in the middle ground, showing both
seductions plainly, there is Mark Twain--at one moment striving his
hardest for the English _imprimatur,_ and childishly delighted by every
favorable gesture; at the next, returning to the native mob as its
premier clown-monkey-shining at banquets, cavorting in the newspapers,
shrinking poltroonishly from his own ideas, obscenely eager to give
no offense. A much greater artist than either Poe or Whitman, so I
devoutly believe, but a good deal lower as a man. The ultimate passion
was not there; the decent householder always pulled the ear of the
dreamer. His fate has irony in it. In England they patronize him: he
is, for an American, not so bad. In America, appalled by his occasional
ascents to honesty, his stray impulses to be wholly himself, the
dunderheads return him to arm's length, his old place, and one of the
most eminent of them, writing in the New York _Times,_ argues piously
that it is impossible to imagine him actually believing the commonplace
heresies he put into "What Is Man?"
11
_Epilogue_
I have described the disease. Let me say at once that I have no remedy
to offer. I simply set down a few ideas, throw out a few hints,
attempt a few modest inquiries into causes. Perhaps my argument
often turns upon itself: the field is weed-grown and paths are hard
to follow. It may be that insurmountable natural obstacles stand
in the way of the development of a distinctively American culture,
grounded upon a truly egoistic nationalism and supported by a native
aristocracy. After all, there is no categorical imperative that ordains
it. In such matters, when the conditions are right, nature often
arranges a division of labor. A nation shut in by racial and linguistic
isolation--a Sweden, a Holland or a France--is forced into autonomy by
sheer necessity; if it is to have any intellectual life at all it must
develop its own. But that is not our case. There is England to hold
up the torch for us, as France holds it up for Belgium, and Spain for
Latin America, and Germany for Switzerland. It is our function, as the
younger and less confident partner, to do the simpler, rougher parts of
the joint labor--to develop the virtues of the more elemental orders
of men: industry, piety, docility, endurance, assiduity and ingenuity
in practical affairs--the wood-hewing and water-drawing of the race.
It seems to me that we do all this very well; in these things we are
better than the English. But when it comes to those larger and more
difficult activities which concern only the superior minority, and are,
in essence, no more than products of its efforts to _demonstrate_ its
superiority--when it comes to the higher varieties of speculation and
self-expression, to the fine arts and the game of ideas--then we fall
into a bad second place. Where we stand, intellectually, is where the
English non-conformists stand; like them, we are marked by a fear of
ideas as disturbing and corrupting. Our art is imitative and timorous.
Our political theory is hopelessly sophomoric and superficial; even
English Toryism and Russian Bolshevism are infinitely more profound
and penetrating. And of the two philosophical systems that we have
produced, one is so banal that it is now imbedded in the New Thought,
and the other is so shallow that there is nothing in it either to
puzzle or to outrage a school-marm.
Nevertheless, hope will not down, and now and then it is supported
by something rather more real than mere desire. One observes an
under-current of revolt, small but vigorous, and sometimes it exerts
its force, not only against the superficial banality but also against
the fundamental flabbiness, the intrinsic childishness of the Puritan
_Anschauung._ The remedy for that childishness is skepticism, and
already skepticism shows itself: in the iconoclastic political realism
of Harold Stearns, Waldo Frank and company, in the groping questions
of Dreiser, Cabell and Anderson, in the operatic rebellions of the
Village. True imagination, I often think, is no more than a function
of this skepticism. It is the dull man who is always sure, and the sure
man who is always dull. The more a man dreams, the less he believes. A
great literature is thus chiefly the product of doubting and inquiring
minds in revolt against the immovable certainties of the nation.
Shakespeare, at a time of rising democratic feeling in England, flung
the whole force of his genius against democracy. Cervantes, at a time
when all Spain was romantic, made a headlong attack upon romance.
Goethe, with Germany groping toward nationalism, threw his influences
on the side of internationalism. The central trouble with America is
conformity, timorousness, lack of enterprise and audacity. A nation
of third-rate men, a land offering hospitality only to fourth-rate
artists. In Elizabethan England they would have bawled for democracy,
in the Spain of Cervantes they would have yelled for chivalry, and in
the Germany of Goethe they would have wept and beat their breasts for
the Fatherland. To-day, as in the day of Emerson, they set the tune....
But into the singing there occasionally enters a discordant note. On
some dim to-morrow, perhaps, perchance, peradventure, they may be
challenged.
II. ROOSEVELT: AN AUTOPSY
One thinks of Dr. Woodrow Wilson's biography of George Washington as
of one of the strangest of all the world's books. Washington: the
first, and perhaps also the last American gentleman. Wilson: the
self-bamboozled Presbyterian, the right-thinker, the great moral
statesman, the perfect model of the Christian cad. It is as if the
Rev. Dr. Billy Sunday should do a biography of Charles Darwin--almost
as if Dr. Wilson himself should dedicate his senility to a life of
the Chevalier Bayard, or the Cid, or Christ.... But such phenomena,
of course, are not actually rare in the republic; here everything
happens that is forbidden by the probabilities and the decencies. The
chief native critic of beautiful letters, for a whole generation, was
a Baptist clergyman; he was succeeded by a literary Wall Street man,
who gave way, in turn, to a soviet of ninth-rate pedagogues; this
very curious apostolic succession I have already discussed. The dean
of the music critics, even to-day, is a translator of grand opera
libretti, and probably one of the worst that ever lived. Return,
now, to political biography. Who can think of anything in American
literature comparable to Morley's life of Gladstone, or Trevelyan's
life of Macaulay, or Carlyle's Frederick, or even Winston Churchill's
life of his father? I dredge my memory hopelessly; only William Graham
Sumner's study of Andrew Jackson emerges--an extraordinarily astute and
careful piece of work by one of the two most underestimated Americans
of his generation, the other being Daniel Coit Gilman. But where is the
first-rate biography of Washington--sound, fair, penetrating, honest,
done by a man capable of comprehending the English gentry of the
eighteenth century? And how long must we wait for adequate treatises
upon Jefferson, Hamilton, Sam Adams, Aaron Burr, Henry Clay, Calhoun,
Webster, Sumner, Grant, Sherman, Lee?
Even Lincoln is yet to be got vividly between the covers of a book.
The Nicolay-Hay work is quite impossible; it is not a biography, but
simply a huge storehouse of biographical raw materials; whoever can
read it can also read the official Records of the Rebellion. All the
other standard lives of old Abe--for instance, those of Lamon, Herndon
and Weil, Stoddard, Morse and Miss Tarbell--fail still worse; when
they are not grossly preachy and disingenuous they are trivial. So far
as I can make out, no genuinely scientific study of the man has ever
been attempted. The amazing conflict of testimony about him remains a
conflict; the most elemental facts are yet to be established; he grows
vaguer and more fabulous as year follows year. One would think that, by
this time, the question of his religious views (to take one example)
ought to be settled, but apparently it is not, for no longer than a
year ago there came a reverend author, Dr. William E. Barton, with a
whole volume upon the subject, and I was as much in the dark after
reading it as I had been before I opened it. All previous biographers,
it appeared by this author's evidence, had either dodged the problem,
or lied. The official doctrine, in this as in other departments, is
obviously quite unsound. One hears in the Sunday-schools that Abe was
an austere and pious fellow, constantly taking the name of God in
whispers, just as one reads in the school history-books that he was a
shining idealist, holding all his vast powers by the magic of an inner
and ineffable virtue. Imagine a man getting on in American politics,
interesting and enchanting the boobery, sawing off the horns of other
politicians, elbowing his way through primaries and conventions, by the
magic of virtue! As well talk of fetching the mob by hawking exact and
arctic justice! Abe, in fact, must have been a fellow highly skilled
at the great democratic art of gum-shoeing. I like to think of him as
one who defeated such politicians as Stanton, Douglas and Sumner with
their own weapons--deftly leading them into ambuscades, boldly pulling
their noses, magnificently ham-stringing and horn-swoggling them--in
brief, as a politician of extraordinary talents, who loved the game for
its own sake, and had the measure of the crowd. His official portraits,
both in prose and in daguerreotype, show him wearing the mien of a
man about to be hanged; one never sees him smiling. Nevertheless, one
hears that, until he emerged from Illinois, they always put the women,
children and clergy to bed when he got a few gourds of corn aboard,
and it is a matter of unescapable record that his career in the State
Legislature was indistinguishable from that of a Tammany Nietzsche.
But, as I say, it is hopeless to look for the real man in the
biographies of him: they are all full of distortion, chiefly pious
and sentimental. The defect runs through the whole of American
political biography, and even through the whole of American history.
Nearly all our professional historians are poor men holding college
posts, and they are ten times more cruelly beset by the ruling
politico-plutocratic-social oligarchy than ever the Prussian professors
were by the Hohenzollerns. Let them diverge in the slightest from what
is the current official doctrine, and they are turned out of their
chairs with a ceremony suitable for the expulsion of a drunken valet.
During the recent war a herd of two thousand and five hundred such
miserable slaves was organized by Dr. Creel to lie for their country,
and they at once fell upon the congenial task of rewriting American
history to make it accord with the ideas of H. P. Davison, Admiral
Sims, Nicholas Murray Butler, the Astors, Barney Baruch and Lord
Northcliffe. It was a committee of this herd that solemnly pledged the
honor of American scholarship to the authenticity of the celebrated
Sisson documents....
In the face of such acute miliary imbecility it is not surprising to
discover that all of the existing biographies of the late Colonel
Roosevelt--and they have been rolling off the presses at a dizzy rate
since his death--are feeble, inaccurate, ignorant and preposterous. I
have read, I suppose, at least ten of these tomes during the past year
or so, and in all of them I have found vastly more gush than sense.
Lawrence Abbott's "Impressions of Theodore Roosevelt" and William
Roscoe Thayer's "Theodore Roosevelt" may well serve as specimens.
Abbott's book is the composition, not of an unbiased student of the
man, but of a sort of groom of the hero. He is so extremely eager to
prove that Roosevelt was the perfect right-thinker, according to the
transient definitions of right-thinking, that he manages to get a
flavor of dubiousness into his whole chronicle. I find myself doubting
him even when I know that he is honest and suspect that he is right.
As for Thayer, all he offers is a hasty and hollow pot-boiler--such a
work as might have been well within the talents of, say, the late Murat
Halstead or the editor of the New York _Times._ This Thayer has been
heavily praised of late as the Leading American Biographer, and one
constantly hears that some new university has made him _Legum Doctor,_
or that he has been awarded a medal by this or that learned society, or
that the post has brought him a new ribbon from some literary potentate
in foreign parts. If, in fact, he is actually the cock of the walk in
biography, then all I have said against American biographers is too
mild and mellow. What one finds in his book is simply the third-rate
correctness of a Boston colonial. Consider, for example, his frequent
discussions of the war--a necessity in any work on Roosevelt. In
England there is the mob's view of the war, and there is the view of
civilized and intelligent men, _e. g.,_ Lansdowne, Loreburn, Austin
Harrison, Morel, Keynes, Haldane, Hirst, Balfour, Robert Cecil. In
New England, it would appear, the two views coalesce, with the first
outside. There is scarcely a line on the subject in Thayer's book that
might not have been written by Horatio Bottomley....
Obviously, Roosevelt's reaction to the war must occupy a large part
of any adequate biography of him, for that reaction was probably more
comprehensively typical of the man than any other business of his
life. It displayed not only his whole stock of political principles,
but also his whole stock of political tricks. It plumbed, on the one
hand, the depths of his sagacity, and on the other hand the depths of
his insincerity. Fundamentally, I am convinced, he was quite out of
sympathy with, and even quite unable to comprehend the body of doctrine
upon which the Allies, and later the United States, based their case.
To him it must have seemed insane when it was not hypocritical, and
hypocritical when it was not insane. His instincts were profoundly
against a new loosing of democratic fustian upon the world; he believed
in strongly centralized states, founded upon power and devoted to
enterprises far transcending mere internal government; he was an
imperialist of the type of Cecil Rhodes, Treitschke and Delcassé. But
the fortunes of domestic politics jockeyed him into the position of
standing as the spokesman of an almost exactly contrary philosophy. The
visible enemy before him was Wilson. What he wanted as a politician
was something that he could get only by wresting it from Wilson, and
Wilson was too cunning to yield it without making a tremendous fight,
chiefly by chicane--whooping for peace while preparing for war, playing
mob fear against mob fear, concealing all his genuine motives and
desires beneath clouds of chautauqual rhetoric, leading a mad dance
whose tune changed at every swing. Here was an opponent that more than
once puzzled Roosevelt, and in the end flatly dismayed him. Here was a
mob-master with a technique infinitely more subtle and effective than
his own. So lured into an unequal combat, the Rough Rider got bogged in
absurdities so immense that only the democratic anæsthesia to absurdity
saved him. To make any progress at all he was forced into fighting
against his own side. He passed from the scene bawling piteously for a
cause that, at bottom, it is impossible to imagine him believing in,
and in terms of a philosophy that was as foreign to his true faith as
it was to the faith of Wilson. In the whole affair there was a colossal
irony. Both contestants were intrinsically frauds.
The fraudulence of Wilson is now admitted by all save a few survivors
of the old corps of official press-agents, most of them devoid of
both honesty and intelligence. No unbiased man, in the presence of
the revelations of Bullitt, Keynes and a hundred other witnesses, and
of the Russian and Shantung performances, and of innumerable salient
domestic phenomena, can now believe that the _Doctor dulcifluus_ was
ever actually in favor of any of the brummagem ideals he once wept
for, to the edification of a moral universe. They were, at best, no
more than ingenious _ruses de guerre,_ and even in the day of their
widest credit it was the Espionage Act and the Solicitor-General to
the Postoffice, rather than any plausibility in their substance,
that got them their credit. In Roosevelt's case the imposture is
less patent; he died before it was fully unmasked. What is more, his
death put an end to whatever investigation of it was under way, for
American sentimentality holds that it is indecent to inquire into the
weaknesses of the dead, at least until all the flowers have withered
on their tombs. When, a year ago, I ventured in a magazine article to
call attention to Roosevelt's philosophical kinship to the Kaiser I
received letters of denunciation from all parts of the United States,
and not a few forthright demands that I recant on penalty of lynch law.
Prudence demanded that I heed these demands. We live in a curious and
often unsafe country. Haled before a Roosevelt judge for speeding my
automobile, or spitting on the sidewalk, or carrying a jug, I might
have been railroaded for ten years under some constructive corollary
of the Espionage Act. But there were two things that supported me
in my contumacy to the departed. One was a profound reverence for
and fidelity to the truth, sometimes almost amounting to fanaticism.
The other was the support of my venerable brother in epistemology,
the eminent Iowa right-thinker and patriot, Prof. Dr. S. P. Sherman.
Writing in the _Nation,_ where he survives from more seemly days than
these, Prof. Dr. Sherman put the thing in plain terms. "With the
essentials in the religion of the militarists of Germany," he said,
"Roosevelt was utterly in sympathy."