I
We look forward with keen interest to reading _Civilization in the
United States_, the work of thirty-three independent observers
commenting upon various phases of the American scene. So far we have
only glanced into it, and have already found much that looks as though
it needed contradiction. It is obviously going to be a gloomy book,
rather strongly flavoured with intellectual ammonia. Of course, it is
a healthy thing that some of our Intellectuals are so depressed about
America. It is a good thing for a nation, as it is for an individual,
occasionally to go home at night cursing itself for being a boob, a
numbskull, and a mental flounder. But we feel about some of our Extreme
Intellectuals as we do about the Physical Culture restaurants. The
people in these restaurants eat nothing but vitamines and plasms and
protose; they live in an atmosphere of carefully planned Scandinavian
hygiene; yet most of them look mysteriously pallid. And some of our
most Conscientious Brows, in spite of leading lives of carefully
regulated meditation, don’t seem any too robust in the region of the
wits.
However, we shall study this book with care. It contains articles by a
number of people whom we admire specially. What we have been wondering
is whether among its rather acid comments it gives any panoramic
picture of the America we see daily and admire--an America which, in
spite of comical simplicities and tragic misdirections of energy,
seems to us, in vitality, curiosity, and surprising beauty, the most
thrilling experiment of the human race.
In one article in this book we find the following:
Everything in our society tends to check the growth of the
spirit and to shatter the confidence of the individual
in himself. Considered with reference to its higher
manifestations, life itself has been thus far, in modern
America, a failure. Of this the failure of our literature is
merely emblematic. Mr. Mencken, who shares this belief, urges
that the only hope of a change for the better lies in the
development of a native aristocracy that will stand between
the writer and the public, supporting him, appreciating him,
forming as it were a _cordon sanitaire_ between the individual
and the mob.
Well, our confidence in ourself is not yet wholly shattered, in spite
of the grinding horror of American life. We feel confident enough
to venture that this theory is dubious. Greatness in literature does
not need to be protected from the insanitary infection of the mob.
How Charles Dickens would have roared at such a timid little bluesock
doctrine! Great writers do not need any clique of private appreciators
or supporters. They are not produced by plaintive patter about ideals
and the pride of the “artist.” They arise haphazard, and they carry
in them an anger, an energy, and a fecundity that deny all classroom
rules. And the mob, heaven help us! is the ground and source of their
strength and their happiness. Nothing can “check the growth of their
spirit,” because the spirit is big enough to turn everything to its own
inscrutable account. You might as well say that Shakespeare couldn’t
write great plays because the typewriter hadn’t been invented.
Of course, if by “a native aristocracy that will stand between the
writer and the public,” we are to understand an efficient service of
tactful office boys and mendacious telephone girls to keep the chance
caller from cutting the mortal artery of Time, we applaud. But we fear
that is not meant.
When we get weary of upstage comments about literature we go aloft and
have a talk to the fellows in the composing room (who, by the way, are
all reading _Moby Dick_ nowadays). There is no priggishness in their
criticism. They have the sound, sober, sincere instinct--as when one of
them tells us, with magnificent insight, that _Moby Dick_ is “Hamlet
stuff.” When professional connoisseurs can teach us as much as the
composing room can about the human values that lie behind literature,
then we will mend our manners.
The more we think about it, the more we are staggered by the statement
that American life “tends to check the growth of the spirit.” To us
the exact opposite seems true. American life as we see it all round us
seems to be crying aloud for a spirit great enough to grasp and express
it. It seems the most prodigious and stimulating material that any
writer ever had for his contemplation. It is a perpetual challenge to
the imagination--a challenge that hardly any one since Whitman has been
great enough, or daring enough, to deal with; but to say that it stunts
the spirit can only be valid as a personal opinion. It is to say that a
hungry man going into a restaurant loses his appetite.