The American people is far less sensitive to foreign opinion than it
used to be, but three or four letters to this address witness that
there are still Americans who want to have themselves discussed. They
ask for prophecies of the American future. The demand is too big for
me. But, in common with many other English people, I have been made
to think rather vividly about certain aspects of the American future
in the last few months, and it may be interesting to turn over the
convergent reactions and conclusions.
English people will not consent to think of Americans as foreigners
and aliens in the way in which they think of Turks or Italians. They
have a great and intimate curiosity about things American. It is
not always a friendly intimacy they feel; there is a great deal of
irritation and hostility both ways. But while an Englishman will never
say, “I might be an Italian,” it comes very easily to him to say, “I
might be an American.” Imaginatively he tries on the stars and stripes.
He is eager for American plays and receptive of American novels. He can
see himself living like that. Without a monarchy, the “county” and our
army people, I do not know how like Americans we English might not be.
American common life is being set down now very ably and vividly by
American writers, primarily for the benefit of American readers, but
their work is gaining the constantly increasing and constantly more
respectful attention of European readers. Until quite our own time,
American novels have been, so to speak, European novels about America;
they followed European methods and respected European standards. Their
characters had a morbid predisposition to cross the Atlantic. But
now there is a growing school of American writers who take their own
way with their own novel and enviable wealth of material. Sherwood
Anderson, Sinclair Lewis, and above all Dreiser, are outstanding
examples of this new-won American literary independence, of which
Edgar Allan Poe and Whitman were the prophets and Stephen Crane the
most brilliant pioneer. Upton Sinclair veils the power of a very
considerable writer in the flag of a vehement propagandist, but he too
must not be forgotten in the reckoning of America’s literary liberation.
“Babbitt” we felt was a great exposition of commercial America seen
and written with complete originality, and though many of us found
“Martin Arrowsmith” a little incredible and unconvincing, “Elmer
Gantry” again has produced the distinctive Sinclair Lewis effect, which
is that of looking at a vividly interesting reality through a lens
which refracts and exaggerates indeed, but which may even exhibit all
the better by virtue of its magnification. One believes in Babbitt and
understands that the American world may be infested by innumerable
Babbitts, while at the same time one may doubt whether there was ever
quite such a Babbitt as Babbitt. “Elmer Gantry,” which deals with the
popular religious life, is even more like seeing through the curves of
a bottle. It has the quality of veracity. One feels, that is to say,
that what is seen in it is truly there; that it is not “made up.” But
also one feels that the thing seen is different in its proportions. The
story is universal. Where there is revivalism and popular missioning,
whether it be Catholic or Protestant, or “New Thought” or No Thought,
there is the same danger of reaction between the “magnetic” preacher
type and the excitable woman convert or associate. But the scale of the
development is distinctive because of the entirely unprecedented social
atmosphere in which it goes on, and there lies the major interest of
the European observer.
The first quality that impresses the European is the abounding vigour
of the social life these books reveal; the next is its immense crudity,
and hard on that its lack of variety in culture and the absence of half
shades, a sort of universal black and whiteness. Everybody seems to
think the same things and to express them by the same common idioms.
Henry James, in his all too rarely cited book, “The American Scene,”
complains of his native land as he saw it in 1909, that “nothing in
the array is ‘behind’ anything else--an odd result, I admit, of the
fact that so many things affirm themselves as preponderantly before.”
“Babbitt” and “Elmer Gantry” tell of a world that must be on the
street line or perish. With the book in hand one might say, “This
is a community wholly without criticism,” which would be to ignore
completely the existence of the book in hand. But it is a community in
which criticism and the idea of dropping out of the front line to think
about things is evidently only beginning.
An American novel of outstanding power which is being read all over
Europe with great curiosity and admiration is Dreiser’s “An American
Tragedy.” Dreiser is, in the extreme sense of the word, a genius.
He seems to work by some rare and inexplicable impulse, enormously,
without self-criticism or any fun or fatigue in the writing. Long ago
I admired his “Sister Carrie,” and rebelled against his long novel,
“The Genius,” surely the largest, dullest piece of ineptitude that has
ever been produced by a first-class writer. His “American Tragedy,”
still vaster, is--I agree with Bennett--one of the very greatest
novels of this century. It is a far more than life-size rendering of
a poor little representative corner of American existence, lit up by
a flash of miserable tragedy. But I would disagree with Bennett’s
condemnation of its style. It is raw, full of barbaric locutions, but
it never fatigues; it keeps the reader reading, it gets the large,
harsh, superficial truth that it has to tell with a force that no
grammatical precision and no correctitude could attain. Large, harsh,
and superficial that truth is, and fresh from this book I am moved to
express something about America that has been smouldering in my mind
for some time.
Let me set down two impressions of a very intelligent French reader of
these representative books. The first impression was one of the wide
freedom of movement and the universal restlessness of these common
people, compared with the rooted, limited lives of their European
equivalents (so far as they can be counted as equivalents). The next,
and the stronger, was the extreme thinness and poverty of their mental
life. We were in the presence of a people with no depth of conversation
at all. They had no variety nor penetration in their discussion. They
had no poetry whatever. They did not seem to know the names of, or ever
to have observed, any birds, flowers, minerals, or any natural things.
They had no metaphors, but slang phrases horribly bent and flattened
by excessive use. They betrayed nothing a European could recognize
as religion and no general ideas of any sort. Their revivalism was
the cheapest, shallowest orgy of mass emotion. They knew nothing of
any literature. They read so badly that their news had to be shouted
at them from the tops of columns. The poverty of their language was
amazing. The lover wrung to ecstasy might say: “My! but you’re cute.”
The phrase for all occasions seemed to be “That gets me!” My French
observer insisted that here was a people degenerating, worn down,
halfway back to speechlessness and brutishness. We had a long argument,
because I am still a backer of the United States, and in the end we
both gave ground.
I had to grant the flattening and cheapening of the language, but it
was arguable that that was a phase. Two-thirds of the surnames in
Dreiser’s book were Central or Eastern European names. These people
were newcomers; they had left Polish, or Czech, or Yiddish, or German
behind them, and the names of flowers and legend and metaphor had been
also left behind. There had been a vast mental attrition during the
process of transplantation to a new soil. No real attempt had been made
to assimilate them to any conceivable American culture. Was it any
wonder if they dealt with each other through a cheap sort of English,
tenses and moods all wrong? And, moreover, they were still unsettled,
moving over a big area, where flowers and suchlike poetic material
varied. People do not pick up the phraseology for that sort of thing
_en route_. And just as their native languages had worn off in the rub
and movement of immigration so too their native faith and traditions
had been rubbed down to something very cheap, thin, and raw. But that
was only a phase of clearance. Stripping is not degeneration. Clearing
a site is not decay.
So I argued. The antagonist, however, scored points by demanding what,
if there was a clearance, was being built in the clearing. Where were
the great vigorous schools and colleges in which the new culture was
to arise? Where were the signs of a copious cheap literature of high
quality? One had glimpses of American college life, and the quality of
the new civilization brewing there was, well, questionable. America,
said my friend, was a new thing in the world, a vast possibility,
a hope for all mankind. The schools, the colleges, the popular
literature, the intellectual leading of such a community, if it was
indeed to realize these hopes and achieve its destiny, had to be far
stouter, bigger, and better things than poor old muddling Europe
could show. Were they even as good? The travelling Americans one met
in Europe seemed, when it came to any abstract discussion, to be far
less able to express and handle ideas than their European equivalents.
But that brought down the talk to individual instances, in which no
argument is ever possible.
I turn back to Henry James. He describes a long journey from north to
south. He speaks of “the general pretension of the Pullman, the great,
monotonous rumble of which seems for ever to say to you: ‘See what I’m
making of all this, see what I’m making, what I’m making...’”
To which in his character of returning native he replies: “I see what
you are _not_ making, oh, what you are ever so vividly not, and how can
I help it if I am subject to that lucidity?--which appears never so
welcome to you, for its measure of truth, as it ought to be!”
I still hesitate to adjudicate. I hate to cheapen, or even to
seem to cheapen, the immense achievement which America embodies
in material form. But I could wish for better evidence than these
novels and the general report of things over there give me, of a
great and unprecedented movement throughout that community towards
sustained intellectual activity on a scale commensurate with American
opportunity. Things, it seems to me, stand very much as follows. The
common schools of a number of States in the Union (but by no means all)
are perhaps as good as the elementary schools of Britain and Germany.
No better. Yes, but for the peculiar needs of America they ought to be
four times better. Children do not go to school so regularly as they do
in Western Europe, and they ought to go more. America is rich enough to
keep all her children at school until sixteen, learning to use their
own language fully and skilfully, learning the elements of science and
something sound and solid about the rest of the world. She does nothing
of the sort. Her educational progress is shallow and pretentious. It is
decades behind her material progress. The Fundamentalist controversy
displayed great areas of the United States as being mentally twenty
years behind Western Europe. She ought to be handing out to her people
all the best literature of the world, good scientific works and modern
discussion at a quarter of a dollar or less for a full book. We can
do that in England, but in America books of that sort cost anything
from one dollar to twenty. Common people in America and their children
must read old, worn books or none. She is, in fact, building the great
nation of the future on a foundation that would be thought insufficient
even for an effete and tradition-cemented European community. This will
not do. She has to see to that. If she does not see to that all her
large promise is in vain. But the growing volume of self-criticism in
America, of which the books I have cited are only samples, is a very
hopeful sign that she will see to it. The sooner she sets about seeing
to it good and hard, the more cheerfully will my hopes for America go
about in my mind.
But the job is no slight one. If it is to be done at all, a very great
effort indeed is required. The universities, book distribution, and
above all the common schools in America must have something like a
renascence before the atmosphere of “An American Tragedy” can be pushed
out of reality into history, and the American people take the place its
material advantages offer it of leadership among the nations of the
earth.
_15 May, 1927._