The American Mind The E. T. Earl Lectures

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The American Mind

_The E. T. Earl Lectures_

1912

By the Same Author

The American Mind Park-Street Papers John Greenleaf Whittier: A Memoir Walt Whitman The Amateur Spirit A Study of Prose Fiction The Powers at Play The Plated City Salem Kittredge and Other Stories The Broughton House

The American Mind

By Bliss Perry

[Illustration: The Riverside Press]

Boston and New York

Houghton Mifflin Company

1912

Copyright, 1912, By Bliss Perry

All Rights Reserved

_Published October 1912_

To

Walter Morris Hart

Preface

_The material for this book was delivered as the E. T. Earl Lectures for 1912 at the Pacific Theological Seminary, Berkeley, California, and I wish to take this opportunity to express to the President and Faculty of that institution my appreciation of their generous hospitality._

_The lectures were also given at the Lowell Institute, Boston, the Brooklyn Institute, and elsewhere, under the title "American Traits in American Literature." In revising them for publication a briefer title has seemed desirable, and I have therefore availed myself of Jefferson's phrase "The American Mind," as suggesting, more accurately perhaps than the original title, the real theme of discussion._

B. P.

Cambridge, 1912.

Contents

I. Race, Nation, And Book 3

II. The American Mind 47

III. American Idealism 86

IV. Romance And Reaction 128

V. Humor And Satire 166

VI. Individualism And Fellowship 209

The American Mind

I

Race, Nation, and Book

Many years ago, as a student in a foreign university, I remember attacking, with the complacency of youth, a German history of the English drama, in six volumes. I lost courage long before the author reached the age of Elizabeth, but I still recall the subject of the opening chapter: it was devoted to the physical geography of Great Britain. Writing, as the good German professor did, in the triumphant hour of Taine's theory as to the significance of place, period, and environment in determining the character of any literary production, what could be more logical than to begin at the beginning? Have not the chalk cliffs guarding the southern coast of England, have not the fatness of the midland counties and the soft rainy climate of a North Atlantic island, and the proud, tenacious, self-assertive folk that are bred there, all left their trace upon _A Midsummer Night's Dream_, and _Every Man in his Humour_ and _She Stoops to Conquer_? Undoubtedly. Latitude and longitude, soil and rainfall and food-supply, racial origins and crossings, political and social and economic conditions, must assuredly leave their marks upon the mental and artistic productiveness of a people and upon the personality of individual writers.

Taine, who delighted to point out all this, and whose _English Literature_ remains a monument of the defects as well as of the advantages of his method, was of course not the inventor of the climatic theory. It is older than Aristotle, who discusses it in his treatise on _Politics_. It was a topic of interest to the scholars of the Renaissance. Englishmen of the seventeenth century, with an unction of pseudo-science added to their natural patriotism, discovered in the English climate one of the reasons of England's greatness. Thomas Sprat, writing in 1667 on the History of the Royal Society, waxes bold and asserts: "If there can be a true character given of the Universal Temper of any Nation under Heaven, then certainly this must be ascribed to our countrymen, that they have commonly an unaffected sincerity, that they love to deliver their minds with a sound simplicity, that they have the middle qualities between the reserved, subtle southern and the rough, unhewn northern people, that they are not extremely prone to speak, that they are more concerned what others will think of the strength than of the fineness of what they say, and that a universal modesty possesses them. These qualities are so conspicuous and proper to the soil that we often hear them objected to us by some of our neighbor Satyrists in more disgraceful expressions.... Even the position of our climate, the air, the influence of the heaven, the composition of the English blood, as well as the embraces of the Ocean, seem to join with the labours of the _Royal Society_ to render our country a Land of Experimental Knowledge."

The excellent Sprat was the friend and executor of the poet Cowley, who has in the Preface to his _Poems_ a charming passage about the relation of literature to the external circumstances in which it is written.

"If _wit_ be such a _Plant_ that it scarce receives heat enough to keep it alive even in the _summer_ of our cold _Clymate_, how can it choose but wither in a long and a sharp _winter_? a warlike, various and a tragical age is best to write _of_, but worst to write _in_." And he adds this, concerning his own art of poetry: "There is nothing that requires so much serenity and chearfulness of _spirit_; it must not be either overwhelmed with the cares of _Life_, or overcast with the _Clouds_ of _Melancholy_ and _Sorrow_, or shaken and disturbed with the storms of injurious _Fortune_; it must, like the _Halcyon_, have fair weather to breed in. The Soul must be filled with bright and delightful _Idaeas_, when it undertakes to communicate delight to others, which is the main end of _Poesie_. One may see through the stile of _Ovid de Trist._, the humbled and dejected condition of _Spirit_ with which he wrote it; there scarce remains any footstep of that _Genius_, _Quem nec Jovis ira, nec ignes_, etc. The _cold_ of the country has strucken through all his faculties, and benummed the very _feet_ of his _Verses_."

Madame de Stael's _Germany_, one of the most famous of the "national character" books, begins with a description of the German landscape. But though nobody, from Ovid in exile down to Madame de Stael, questions the general significance of place, time, and circumstances as affecting the nature of a literary product, when we come to the exact and as it were mathematical demonstration of the precise workings of these physical influences, our generation is distinctly more cautious than were the literary critics of forty years ago. Indeed, it is a hundred years since Fisher Ames, ridiculing the theory that climate acts directly upon literary products, said wittily of Greece: "The figs are as fine as ever, but where are the Pindars?" The theory of race, in particular, has been sharply questioned by the experts. "Saxon" and "Norman," for example, no longer seem to us such simple terms as sufficed for the purpose of Scott's _Ivanhoe_ or of Thierry's _Norman Conquest_, a book inspired by Scott's romance. The late Professor Freeman, with characteristic bluntness, remarked of the latter book: "Thierry says at the end of his work that there are no longer either Normans or Saxons except in history.... But in Thierry's sense of the word, it would be truer to say that there never were 'Normans' or 'Saxons' anywhere, save in the pages of romances like his own."

There is a brutal directness about this verdict upon a rival historian which we shall probably persist in calling "Saxon"; but it is no worse than the criticisms of Matthew Arnold's essay on "The Celtic Spirit" made to-day by university professors who happen to know Old Irish at first hand, and consequently consider Arnold's opinion on Celtic matters to be hopelessly amateurish.

The wiser scepticism of our day concerning all hard-and-fast racial distinctions has been admirably summed up by Josiah Royce. "A race psychology," he declares, "is still a science for the future to discover.... We do not scientifically know what the true racial varieties of mental type really are. No doubt there are such varieties. The judgment day, or the science of the future, may demonstrate what they are. We are at present very ignorant regarding the whole matter."

Nowhere have the extravagances of the application of racial theories to intellectual products been more pronounced than in the fields of art and literature. Audiences listen to a waltz which the programme declares to be an adaptation of a Hungarian folk-song, and though they may be more ignorant of Hungary than Shakespeare was of Bohemia, they have no hesitation in exclaiming: "How truly Hungarian this is!" Or, it may be, how truly "Japanese" is this vase which was made in Japan--perhaps for the American market; or how intensely "Russian" is this melancholy tale by Turgenieff. This prompt deduction of racial qualities from works of art which themselves give the critic all the information he possesses about the races in question,--or, in other words, the enthusiastic assertion that a thing is like itself,--is one of the familiar notes of amateur criticism. It is travelling in a circle, and the corregiosity of Corregio is the next station.

Blood tells, no doubt, and a masterpiece usually betrays some token of the place and hour of its birth. A knowledge of the condition of political parties in Athens in 416 B.C. adds immensely to the enjoyment of the readers of Aristophanes; the fun becomes funnier and the daring even more splendid than before. Moliere's training as an actor does affect the dramaturgic quality of his comedies. All this is demonstrable, and to the prevalent consciousness of it our generation is deeply indebted to Taine and his pupils. But before displaying dogmatically the inevitable brandings of racial and national traits on a national literature, before pointing to this and that unmistakable evidence of local or temporal influence on the form or spirit of a masterpiece, we are now inclined to make some distinct reservations. These reservations are not without bearing upon our own literature in America.

There are, for instance, certain artists who seem to escape the influences of the time-spirit. The most familiar example is that of Keats. He can no doubt be assigned to the George the Fourth period by a critical examination of his vocabulary, but the characteristic political and social movements of that epoch in England left him almost untouched. Edgar Allan Poe might have written some of his tales in the seventeenth century or in the twentieth; he might, like Robert Louis Stevenson, have written in Samoa rather than in the Baltimore, Philadelphia, or New York of his day; his description of the Ragged Mountains of Virginia, within very sight of the university which he attended, was borrowed, in the good old convenient fashion, from Macaulay; in fact, it requires something of Poe's own ingenuity to find in Poe, who is one of the indubitable assets of American literature, anything distinctly American.

Wholly aside from such spiritual insulation of the single writer, there is the obvious fact that none of the arts, not even literature, and not all of them together, can furnish a wholly adequate representation of racial or national characteristics. It is well known to-day that the so-called "classic" examples of Greek art, most of which were brought to light and discoursed upon by critics from two to four centuries ago, represent but a single phase of Greek feeling; and that the Greeks, even in what we choose to call their most characteristic period, had a distinctly "romantic" tendency which their more recently discovered plastic art betrays. But even if we had all the lost statues, plays, poems, and orations, all the Greek paintings about which we know so little, and the Greek music about which we know still less, does anybody suppose that this wealth of artistic expression would furnish a wholly satisfactory notion of the racial and psychological traits of the Greek people?

One may go even further. Does a truly national art exist anywhere,--an art, that is to say, which conveys a trustworthy and adequate expression of the national temper as a whole? We have but to reflect upon the European and American judgments, during the last thirty years, concerning the representative quality of the art of Japan, and to observe how many of those facile generalizations about the Japanese character, deduced from vases and prints and enamel, were smashed to pieces by the Russo-Japanese War. This may illustrate the blunders of foreign criticism, perhaps, rather than any inadequacy in the racially representative character of Japanese art. But it is impossible that critics, and artists themselves, should not err, in the conscious endeavor to pronounce upon the infinitely complex materials with which they are called upon to deal. We must confess that the expression of racial and national characteristics, by means of only one art, such as literature, or by all the arts together, is at best imperfect, and is always likely to be misleading unless corroborated by other evidence.

For it is to be remembered that in literature, as in the other fields of artistic activity, we are dealing with the question of form; of securing a concrete and pleasurable embodiment of certain emotions. It may well happen that literature not merely fails to give an adequate report of the racial or national or personal emotions felt during a given epoch, but that it fails to report these emotions at all. Not only the "old, unhappy, far-off" things of racial experience, but the new and delight-giving experiences of the hour, may lack their poet. Widespread moods of public elation or wistfulness or depression have passed without leaving a shadow upon the mirror of art. There was no one to hold the mirror or even to fashion it. No note of Renaissance criticism, whether in Italy, France, or England, is more striking, and in a way more touching, than the universal feeling that in the rediscovery of the classics men had found at last the "terms of art," the rules and methods of a game which they had long wished to be playing. Englishmen and Frenchmen of the sixteenth century will not allow that their powers are less virile, their emotions less eager, than those of the Greeks and Romans. Only, lacking the very terms of art, they had not been able to arrive at fit expression; the soul had found no body wherewith to clothe itself into beauty. As they avowed in all simplicity, they needed schoolmasters; the discipline of Aristotle and Horace and Virgil; a body of critical doctrine, to teach them how to express the France and England or Italy of their day, and thus give permanence to their fleeting vision of the world. Naive as may have been the Renaissance expression of this need of formal training, blind as it frequently was to the beauty which we recognize in the undisciplined vernacular literatures of mediaeval Europe, those groping scholars were essentially right. No one can paint or compose by nature. One must slowly master an art of expression.

Now through long periods of time, and over many vast stretches of territory, as our own American writing abundantly witnesses, the whole formal side of expression may be neglected. "Literature," in its narrower sense, may not exist. In that restricted and higher meaning of the term, literature has always been uncommon enough, even in Athens or Florence. It demands not merely personal distinction or power, not merely some uncommon height or depth or breadth of capacity and insight, but a purely artistic training, which in the very nature of the case is rare. Millions of Russians, perhaps, have felt about the general problems of life much as Turgenieff felt, but they lacked the sheer literary art with which the _Notes of a Sportsman_ was written. Thousands of frontier lawyers and politicians shared Lincoln's hard and varied and admirable training in the mastery of speech, but in his hands alone was the weapon wrought to such perfection of temper and weight and edge that he spoke and wrote literature without knowing it.

Such considerations belong, I am aware, to the accepted commonplaces,--perhaps to what William James used to call "the unprofitable delineation of the obvious." Everybody recognizes that literary gifts imply an exceptionally rich development of general human capacities, together with a professional aptitude and training of which but few men are capable. There is but one lumberman in camp who can play the fiddle, though the whole camp can dance. Thus the great book, we are forever saying, is truly representative of myriads of minds in a certain degree of culture, although but one man could have written it. The writing member of a family is often the one who acquires notoriety and a bank account, but he is likely to have candid friends who admit, though not always in his presence, that, aside from this one professional gift and practice, he is not intellectually or emotionally or spiritually superior to his brothers and sisters. Waldo Emerson thought himself the intellectual inferior of his brother Charles; and good observers loved to maintain that John Holmes was wittier than Oliver Wendell, and Ezekiel Webster a better lawyer than Daniel.

Applied to the literary history of a race, this principle is suggestive. We must be slow to affirm that, because certain ideas and feelings did not attain, in this or that age or place, to purely literary expression, they were therefore not in existence. The men and women of the colonial period in our own country, for instance, have been pretty uniformly declared to have been deficient in the sense of beauty. What is the evidence? It is mostly negative. They produced no poetry, fiction, painting, sculpture, or music worthy of the name. They were predominantly Puritan, and the whole world has been informed that English Puritanism was hostile to Art. They were preoccupied with material and moral concerns. Even if they had remained in England, Professor Trent affirms, these contemporaries of Milton and Bunyan would have produced no art or literature. Now it is quite true that for nearly two hundred years after the date of the first settlement of the American colonists, opportunities for cultivating the arts did not exist. But that the sense of beauty was wholly atrophied, I, for one, do not believe. The passionate eagerness with which the forefathers absorbed the noblest of all poetry and prose in the pages of their one book, the Bible; the unwearied curiosity and care with which those farmers and fishermen and woodsmen read the signs of the sky; their awe of the dark wilderness and their familiar traffic with the great deep; the silences of lonely places; the opulence of primeval meadows by the clear streams; the English flowers that were made to bloom again in farmhouse windows and along garden walks; the inner visions, more lovely still, of duty and of moral law; the spirit of sacrifice; the daily walk with God, whether by green pastures of the spirit or through ways that were dark and terrible;--is there in all this no discipline of the soul in moral beauty, and no training of the eye to perceive the exquisite harmonies of the visible earth? It is true that the Puritans had no professional men of letters; it is true that doctrinal sermons provided their chief intellectual sustenance; true that their lives were stern, and that many of the softer emotions were repressed. But beauty may still be traced in the fragments of their recorded speech, in their diaries and letters and phrases of devotion. You will search the eighteenth century of old England in vain for such ecstasies of wonder at the glorious beauty of the universe as were penned by Jonathan Edwards in his youthful _Diary_. There is every presumption, from what we know of the two men, that Whittier's father and grandfather were peculiarly sensitive to the emotions of home and neighborhood and domesticity which their gifted descendant--too physically frail to be absorbed in the rude labor of the farm--has embodied in _Snow-Bound_. The Quaker poet knew that he surpassed his forefathers in facility in verse-making, but he would have been amused (as his _Margaret Smith's Journal_ proves) at the notion that his ancestors were without a sense of beauty or that they lacked responsiveness to the chords of fireside sentiment. He was simply the only Whittier, except his sister Elizabeth, who had ever found leisure, as old-fashioned correspondents used to say, "to take his pen in hand." This leisure developed in him the sense--latent no doubt in his ancestors--of the beauty of words, and the excitement of rhythm. Emerson's _Journal_ in the eighteen-thirties glows with a Dionysiac rapture over what he calls "delicious days"; but did the seven generations of clergymen from whom Emerson descended have no delicious and haughty and tender days that passed unrecorded? Formal literature perpetuates and glorifies many aspects of individual and national experience; but how much eludes it wholly, or is told, if at all, in broken syllables, in Pentecostal tongues that seem to be our own and yet are unutterably strange!

To confess thus that literature, in the proper sense of the word, represents but a narrow segment of personal or racial experience, is very far from a denial of the genuineness and the significance of the affirmations which literature makes. We recognize instinctively that Whittier's _Snow-Bound_ is a truthful report, not merely of a certain farmhouse kitchen in East Haverhill, Massachusetts, during the early nineteenth century, but of a mode of thinking and feeling which is widely diffused wherever the Anglo-Saxon race has wandered. Perhaps _Snow-Bound_ lacks a certain universality of suggestiveness which belongs to a still more famous poem, _The Cotter's Saturday Night_ of Burns, but both of these portrayals of rustic simplicity and peace owe their celebrity to their truly representative character. They are evidence furnished by a single art, as to a certain mode and coloring of human existence; but every corroboration of that evidence heightens our admiration for the artistic sincerity and insight of the poet. To draw an illustration from a more splendid epoch, let us remind ourselves that the literature of the "spacious times of great Elizabeth"--a period of strong national excitement, and one deeply representative of the very noblest and most permanent traits of English national character--was produced within startlingly few years and in a local territory extremely limited. The very language in which that literature is clothed was spoken only by the court, by a couple of counties, and at the two universities. Its prose and verse were frankly experimental. It is true that such was the emotional ferment of the score of years preceding the Armada, that great captains and voyagers who scarcely wrote a line were hailed as kings of the realm of imagination, and that Puttenham, in phrases which that generation could not have found extravagant, inscribes his book on Poetry to Queen Elizabeth as the "most excellent Poet" of the age. Well, the glorified political images may grow dim or tawdry with time, but the poetry has endured, and it is everywhere felt to be a truly national, a deeply racial product. Its time and place and hour were all local; but the Canadian and the American, the South African and Australasian Englishman feels that that Elizabethan poetry is his poetry still.

When we pass, therefore, as we must shortly do, to the consideration of this and that literary product of America, and to the scrutiny of the really representative character of our books, we must bear in mind that the questions concerning the race, the place, the hour, the man,--questions so familiar to modern criticism,--remain valid and indeed essential; but that in applying them to American writing there are certain allowances, qualifications, adjustments of the scale of values, which are no less important to an intelligent perception of the quality of our literature. This task is less simple than the critical assessment of a typical German or French or Scandinavian writer, where the strain of blood is unmixed, the continuity of literary tradition unbroken, the precise impact of historical and personal influences more easy to estimate. I open, for example, any one of half a dozen French studies of Balzac. Here is a many-sided man, a multifarious writer, a personality that makes ridiculous the merely formal pigeon-holing and labelling processes of professional criticism. And yet with what perfect precision of method and certainty of touch do Le Breton, for example, or Brunetiere, in their books on Balzac, proceed to indicate those impulses of race and period and environment which affected the character of Balzac's novels! The fact that he was born in Tours in 1799 results in the inevitable and inevitably expert paragraphs about Gallic blood, and the physical exuberance of the Touraine surroundings of his youth, and the post-revolutionary tendency to disillusion and analysis. And so with Balzac's education, his removal to Paris in the Restoration period, his ventures in business and his affairs of love, his admiration for Shakespeare and for Fenimore Cooper; his mingled Romanticism and Realism; his Titanism and his childishness; his stupendous outline for the Human Comedy; and his scarcely less astounding actual achievement. All this is discussed by his biographers with the professional dexterity of critics trained intellectually in the Latin traditions and instinctively aware of the claims of race, biographers familiar with every page of French history, and profoundly interested, like their readers, in every aspect of French life. Alas, we may say, in despairing admiration of such workmanship, "they order these things better in France." And they do; but racial unity, and long lines of national literary tradition, make these things easier to order than they are with us. The intellectual distinction of American critical biographies like Lounsbury's _Cooper_ or Woodberry's _Hawthorne_ is all the more notable because we possess such a slender body of truly critical doctrine native to our own soil; because our national literary tradition as to available material and methods is hardly formed; because the very word "American" has a less precise connotation than the word "New Zealander."

Let us suppose, for instance, that like Professor Woodberry a few years ago, we were asked to furnish a critical study of Hawthorne. The author of _The Scarlet Letter_ is one of the most justly famous of American writers. But precisely what national traits are to be discovered in this eminent fellow-countryman of ours? We turn, like loyal disciples of Taine and Sainte-Beuve, to his ancestral stock. We find that it is English as far back as it can be traced; as purely English as the ancestry of Dickens or Thackeray, and more purely English than the ancestry of Browning or Burke or His Majesty George the Fifth. Was Hawthorne, then, simply an Englishman living in America? He himself did not think so,--as his _English Note-Books_ abundantly prove. But just what subtle racial differentiation had been at work, since William Hawthorne migrated to Massachusetts with Winthrop in 1630? Here we face, unless I am mistaken, that troublesome but fascinating question of Physical Geography. Climate, soil, food, occupation, religious or moral preoccupation, social environment, Salem witchcraft and Salem seafaring had all laid their invisible hands upon the physical and intellectual endowment of the child born in 1804. Does this make Nathaniel Hawthorne merely an "Englishman with a difference," as Mr. Kipling, born in India, is an "Englishman with a difference"? Hawthorne would have smiled, or, more probably, he would have sworn, at such a question. He considered himself an American Democrat; in fact a _contra mundum_ Democrat, for good or for ill. Is it, then, a political theory, first put into full operation in this country a scant generation before Hawthorne's birth, which made him un-English? We must walk warily here. Our Canadian neighbors of English stock have much the same climate, soil, occupations, and preoccupations as the inhabitants of the northern territory of the United States. They have much the same courts, churches, and legislatures. They read the same books and magazines. They even prefer baseball to cricket. They are loyal adherents of a monarchy, but they are precisely as free, as self-governing, and--in the social sense of the word--as "democratic"--in spite of the absence of a republican form of government--as the citizens of that "land of the free and home of the brave" which lies to the south of them. Yet Canadian literature, one may venture to affirm, has remained to this hour a "colonial" literature, or, if one prefers the phrase, a literature of "Greater Britain." Was Hawthorne possibly right in his instinct that politics did make a difference, and that in writing _The Marble Faun_,--the scene of which is laid in Rome,--or _The House of the Seven Gables_,--which is a story of Salem,--he was consistently engaged in producing, not "colonial" or "Greater-British" but distinctly American literature? We need not answer this question prematurely, if we wish to reserve our judgment, but it is assuredly one of the questions which the biographers and critics of our men of letters must ultimately face and answer.

Furthermore, the student of literature produced in the United States of America must face other questions almost as complicated as this of race. In fact, when we choose Hawthorne as a typical case in which to observe the American refashioning of the English temper into something not English, we are selecting a very simple problem compared with the complexities which have resulted from the mingling of various European stocks upon American soil. But take, for the moment, the mere obvious matter of expanse of territory. We are obliged to reckon, not with a compact province such as those in which many Old World literatures have been produced, but with what our grandfathers considered a "boundless continent." This vast national domain was long ago "organized" for political purposes: but so far as literature is concerned it remains unorganized to-day. We have, as has been constantly observed, no literary capital, like London or Paris, to serve as the seat of centralized authority; no code of literary procedure and conduct; no "lawgivers of Parnassus"; no supreme court of letters, whose judgments are recognized and obeyed. American public opinion asserts itself with singular unanimity and promptness in the field of politics. In literary matters we remain in the stage of anarchic individualism, liable to be stampeded from time to time by mob-excitement over a popular novel or moralistic tract, and then disintegrating, as before, into an incoherent mass of individually intelligent readers.

The reader who has some personal acquaintance with the variations of type in different sections of this immense territory of ours finds his curiosity constantly stimulated by the presence of sectional and local characteristics. There are sharply cut provincial peculiarities, of course, in Great Britain and in Germany, in Italy and Spain, and in all of the countries a corresponding "regional" literature has been developed. Our provincial variations of accent and vocabulary, in passing from North to South or East to West, are less striking, on the whole, than the dialectical differences found in the various English counties. But our general uniformity of grammar and the comparatively slight variations in spoken accent cover an extraordinary variety of local and sectional modes of thinking and feeling. The reader of American short stories and lyrics must constantly ask himself: Is this truth to local type consistent with the main trend of American production? Is this merely a bit of Virginia or Texas or California, or does it, while remaining no less Southern or Western in its local coloring, suggest also the ampler light, the wide generous air of the United States of America?

The observer of this relationship between local and national types will find some American communities where all the speech or habitual thought is of the future. Foreigners usually consider such communities the most typically "American," as doubtless they are; but there are other sections, still more faithfully exploited by local writers, where the mood is wistful and habitually regards the past. America, too, like the Old World,--and in New England more than elsewhere,--has her note of decadence, of disillusion, of autumnal brightness and transiency. Some sections of the country, and notably the slave-holding states in the forty years preceding the Civil War, have suffered widespread intellectual blight. The best talent of the South, for a generation, went into politics, in the passionately loyal endeavor to prop up a doomed economic and social system; and the loss to the intellectual life of the country cannot be reckoned. Over vast sections of our prosperous and intelligent people of the Mississippi Basin to-day the very genius of commonplaceness seems to hover. Take the great State of Iowa, with its well-to-do and homogeneous population, its fortunate absence of perplexing city-problems, its general air of prosperity and content. It is a typical state of the most typically American portion of the country; but it breeds no books. Yet in Indiana, another state of the same general conditions as to population and prosperity, and only one generation further removed than Iowa from primitive pioneer conditions, books are produced at a rate which provokes a universal American smile. I do not affirm that the literary critic is bound to answer all such local puzzles as this. But he is bound at least to reflect upon them, and to demand of every local literary product throughout this varied expanse of states: Is the root of the "All-American" plant growing here, or is it not?

Furthermore, the critic must pursue this investigation of national traits in our writing, not only over a wide and variegated territory, but through a very considerable sweep of time. American literature is often described as "callow," as the revelation of "national inexperience," and in other similar terms. It is true that we had no professional men of letters before Irving and that the blossoming time of the notable New England group of writers did not come until nearly the middle of the nineteenth century. But we have had time enough, after all, to show what we wish to be and what we are. There have been European books about America ever since the days of Columbus; it is three hundred years since the first books were written in America. Modern English prose, the language of journalism, of science, of social intercourse, came into being only in the early eighteenth century, in the age of Queen Anne. But Cotton Mather's _Magnalia_, a vast book dealing with the past history of New England, was printed in 1702, only a year later than Defoe's _True-Born Englishman_. For more than two centuries the development of English speech and English writing on this side of the Atlantic has kept measurable pace--now slower, now swifter--with the speech of the mother country. When we recall the scanty term of years within which was produced the literature of the age of Elizabeth, it seems like special pleading to insist that America has not yet had time to learn or recite her bookish lessons.

This is not saying that we have had a continuous or adequate development, either of the intellectual life, or of literary expression. There are certain periods of strong intellectual movement, of heightened emotion, alike in the colonial epoch and since the adoption of our present form of government, in which it is natural to search for revelations of those qualities which we now feel to be essential to our national character. Certain epochs of our history, in other words, have been peculiarly "American," and have furnished the most ideal expression of national tendencies.

If asked to select the three periods of our history which in this sense have been most significant, most of us, I imagine, would choose the first vigorous epoch of New England Puritanism, say from 1630 to 1676; then, the epoch of the great Virginians, say from 1766 to 1789; and finally the epoch of distinctly national feeling, in which New England and the West were leaders, between 1830 and 1865. Those three generations have been the most notable in the three hundred years since the permanent settlements began. Each of them has revealed, in a noble fashion, the political, ethical, and emotional traits of our people; and although the first two of the three periods concerned themselves but little with literary expression of the deep-lying characteristics of our stock, the expression is not lacking. Thomas Hooker's sermon on the "Foundation of Political Authority," John Winthrop's grave advice on the "Nature of Liberty," Jefferson's "Declaration," Webster's "Reply to Hayne," Lincoln's "Inaugurals," are all fundamentally American. They are political in their immediate purpose, but, like the speeches of Edmund Burke, they are no less literature because they are concerned with the common needs and the common destiny. Hooker and Winthrop wrote before our formal national existence began; Jefferson, at the hour of the nation's birth; and Lincoln, in the day of its sharpest trial. Yet, though separated from one another by long intervals of time, the representative figures of the three epochs, English in blood and American in feeling, are not so unlike as one might think. A thorough grasp of our literature thus requires--and in scarcely less a degree than the mastery of one of the literatures of Europe--a survey of a long period, the search below the baffling or contradictory surface of national experience for the main drift of that experience, and the selection of the writers, of one generation after another, who have given the most fit and permanent and personalized expression to the underlying forces of the national life.

There is another preliminary word which needs no less to be said. It concerns the question of international influences upon national literature. Our own generation has been taught by many events that no race or country can any longer live "to itself." Internationalism is in the very atmosphere: and not merely as regards politics in the narrowed sense, but with reference to questions of economics, sociology, art, and letters. The period of international isolation of the United States, we are rather too fond of saying, closed with the Spanish-American War. It would be nearer the truth to say that so far as the things of the mind and the spirit are concerned, there has never been any absolute isolation. The Middle West, from the days of Jackson to Lincoln, that raw West described by Dickens and Mrs. Trollope, comes nearer isolation than any other place or time. The period of the most eloquent assertions of American independence in artistic and literary matters was the epoch of New England Transcendentalism, which was itself singularly cosmopolitan in its literary appetites. The letters and journals of Emerson, Whitman, and Thoreau show the strong European meat on which these men fed, just before their robust declarations of our self-sufficiency. But there is no real self-sufficiency, and Emerson and Whitman themselves, in other moods, have written most suggestive passages upon our European inheritances and affiliations.

The fortunes of the early New England colonies, in fact, were followed by Protestant Europe with the keen solicitude and affection of kinsmen. Oliver Cromwell signs his letter to John Cotton in 1651, "Your affectionate friend to serve you." The settlements were regarded as outposts of European ideas. Their Calvinism, so cheaply derided and so superficially understood, even to-day, was the intellectual platform of that portion of Europe which was mentally and morally awake to the vast issues involved in individual responsibility and self-government. Contemporary European democracy is hardly yet aware that Calvin's _Institutes_ is one of its great charters. Continental Protestantism of the seventeenth century, like the militant Republicanism of the English Commonwealth, thus perused with fraternal interest the letters from Massachusetts Bay. And if Europe watched America in those days, it was no less true that America was watching Europe. Towards the end of the century, Cotton Mather, "prostrate in the dust" before the Lord, as his newly published _Diary_ tells us, is wrestling "on the behalf of whole nations." He receives a "strong Persuasion that very overturning Dispensations of Heaven will quickly befal the French Empire"; he "lifts up his Cries for a mighty and speedy Revolution" there. "I spread before the Lord the Condition of His Church abroad ... especially in Great Britain and in France. And I prayed that the poor Vaudois may not be ruined by the Peace now made between France and Savoy. I prayed likewise for further Mortifications upon the Turkish Empire." Here surely was one colonial who was trying, in Cecil Rhodes's words, to "think continentally!"

Furthermore, the leaders of those early colonies were in large measure university men, disciplined in the classics, fit representatives of European culture. It has been reckoned that between the years 1630 and 1690 there were in New England as many graduates of Cambridge and Oxford as could be found in any population of similar size in the mother country. At one time during those years there was in Massachusetts and Connecticut alone a Cambridge graduate for every two hundred and fifty inhabitants. Like the exiled Greeks in Matthew Arnold's poem, they "undid their corded bales"--of learning, it is true, rather than of merchandise--upon these strange and inhospitable shores: and the traditions of Greek and Hebrew and Latin scholarship were maintained with no loss of continuity. To the lover of letters there will always be something fine in the thought of that narrow seaboard fringe of faith in the classics, widening slowly as the wilderness gave way, making its invisible road up the rivers, across the mountains, into the great interior basin, and only after the Civil War finding an enduring home in the magnificent state universities of the West. Lovers of Greek and Roman literature may perhaps always feel themselves pilgrims and exiles in this vast industrial democracy of ours, but they have at least secured for us, and that from the very first day of the colonies, some of the best fruitage of internationalism. For that matter, what was, and is, that one Book--to the eyes of the Protestant seventeenth century infallible and inexpressively sacred--but the most potent and universal commerce of ideas and spirit, passing from the Orient, through Greek and Roman civilization, into the mind and heart of Western Europe and America?

"Oh, East is East, and West is West, And never the twain shall meet,"

declares a confident poet of to-day. But East and West met long ago in the matchless phrases translated from Hebrew and Greek and Latin into the English Bible; and the heart of the East there answers to the heart of the West as in water face answereth to face. That the colonizing Englishmen of the seventeenth century were Hebrews in spiritual culture, and heirs of Greece and Rome without ceasing to be Anglo-Saxon in blood, is one of the marvels of the history of civilization, and it is one of the basal facts in the intellectual life of the United States of to-day.

Yet that life, as I have already hinted, is not so simple in its terms as it might be if we had to reckon merely with the men of a single stock, albeit with imaginations quickened by contact with an Oriental religion, and minds disciplined, directly or indirectly, by the methods and the literatures which the Revival of Learning imposed upon modern Europe. American formal culture is, and has been, from the beginning, predominantly English. Yet it has been colored by the influences of other strains of race, and by alien intellectual traditions. Such international influences as have reached us through German and Scandinavian, Celtic and Italian, Russian and Jewish immigration, are well marked in certain localities, although their traces may be difficult to follow in the main trend of American writing. The presence of Negro, Irishman, Jew, and German, has affected our popular humor and satire, and is everywhere to be marked in the vocabulary and tone of our newspapers. The cosmopolitan character of the population of such cities as New York and Chicago strikes every foreign observer. Each one of the manifold races now transplanted here and in process of Americanization has for a while its own newspapers and churches and social life carried on in a foreign dialect. But this stage of evolution passes swiftly. The assimilative forces of American schools, industry, commerce, politics, are too strong for the foreign immigrant to resist. The Italian or Greek fruit pedler soon prefers to talk English, and his children can be made to talk nothing else. This extraordinary amalgamating power of English culture explains, no doubt, why German and Scandinavian immigration--to take examples from two of the most intelligent and educated races that have contributed to the up-building of the country--have left so little trace, as yet, upon our more permanent literature.

But blood will have its say sooner or later. No one knows how profoundly the strong mentality of the Jew, already evident enough in the fields of manufacturing and finance, will mould the intellectual life of the United States. The mere presence, to say nothing of the rapid absorption, of these millions upon millions of aliens, as the children of the Puritans regard them, is a constant evidence of the subtle ways in which internationalism is playing its part in the fashioning of the American temper. The moulding hand of the German university has been laid upon our higher institutions of learning for seventy years, although no one can demonstrate in set terms whether the influence of Goethe, read now by three generations of American scholars and studied by millions of youth in the schools, has left any real mark upon our literature. Abraham Lincoln, in his store-keeping days, used to sit under a tree outside the grocery store of Lincoln and Berry, reading Voltaire. One would like to think that he then and there assimilated something of the incomparable lucidity of style of the great Frenchman. But Voltaire's influence upon Lincoln's style cannot be proved, any more than Rousseau's direct influence upon Jefferson. Tolstoi and Ibsen have, indeed, left unmistakable traces upon American imaginative writing during the last quarter of a century. Frank Norris was indebted to Zola for the scheme of that uncompleted trilogy, the prose epic of the Wheat; and Owen Wister has revealed a not uncommon experience of our younger writing men in confessing that the impulse toward writing his Western stories came to him after reading the delightful pages of a French romancer. But all this tells us merely what we knew well enough before: that from colonial days to the present hour the Atlantic has been no insuperable barrier between the thought of Europe and the mind of America; that no one race bears aloft all the torches of intellectual progress; and that a really vital writer of any country finds a home in the spiritual life of every other country, even though it may be difficult to find his name in the local directory.

Finally, we must bear in mind that purely literary evidence as to the existence of certain national traits needs corroboration from many non-literary sources. If it is dangerous to judge modern Japan by the characteristics of a piece of pottery, it is only less misleading to select half a dozen excellent New England writers of fifty years ago as sole witnesses to the qualities of contemporary America. We must broaden the range of evidence. The historians of American literature must ultimately reckon with all those sources of mental and emotional quickening which have yielded to our pioneer people a substitute for purely literary pleasures: they must do justice to the immense mass of letters, diaries, sermons, editorials, speeches, which have served as the grammar and phrase-book of national feeling. A history of our literature must be flexible enough, as I have said elsewhere, to include "the social and economic and geographical background of American life; the zest of the explorer, the humor of the pioneer; the passion of old political battles; the yearning after spiritual truth and social readjustment; the baffled quest of beauty. Such a history must be broad enough for the _Federalist_ and for Webster's oratory, for Beecher's sermons and Greeley's editorials, and the Lincoln-Douglas debates. It must picture the daily existence of our citizens from the beginning; their working ideas, their phrases and shibboleths and all their idols of the forum and the cave. It should portray the misspelled ideals of a profoundly idealistic people who have been usually immersed in material things."

Our most characteristic American writing, as must be pointed out again and again, is not the self-conscious literary performance of a Poe or a Hawthorne. It is civic writing; a citizen literature, produced, like the _Federalist_, and Garrison's editorials and Grant's _Memoirs_, without any stylistic consciousness whatever; a sort of writing which has been incidental to the accomplishment of some political, social, or moral purpose, and which scarcely regards itself as literature at all. The supreme example of it is the "Gettysburg Address." Homeliness, simplicity, directness, preoccupation with moral issues, have here been but the instrument of beauty; phrase and thought and feeling have a noble fitness to the national theme. "Nothing of Europe here," we may instinctively exclaim, and yet the profounder lesson of this citizen literature of ours is in the universality of the fundamental questions which our literature presents. The "Gettysburg Address" would not to-day have a secure fame in Europe if it spoke nothing to the ear and the heart of Europe. And this brings us back to our main theme. Lincoln, like Franklin, like many another lesser master of our citizen literature, is a typical American. In the writing produced by such men, there cannot but be a revelation of American characteristics. We are now to attempt an analysis of these national traits, as they have been expressed by our representative writers.

Simple as the problem seems, when thus stated, its adequate performance calls for a constant sensitiveness to the conditions prevalent, during a long period, in English and Continental society and literature. The most rudimentary biographical sketch of such eminent contemporary American authors as Mr. Henry James and Mr. Howells shows that Europe is an essential factor in the intellectual life and in the artistic procedure of these writers. Yet in their racial and national relationships they are indubitably American. In their local variations from type they demand from the critic an understanding of the culture of the Ohio Valley, and of Boston and New York. The analysis of the mingled racial, psychological, social, and professional traits in these masters of contemporary American fiction presents to the critic a problem as fascinating as, and I think more complex than, a corresponding study of Meredith or Hardy, of Daudet or D'Annunzio. In the three hundred years that have elapsed since Englishmen who were trained under Queen Elizabeth settled at Jamestown, Virginia, we have bred upon this soil many a master of speech. They have been men of varied gifts: now of clear intelligence, now of commanding power; men of rugged simplicity and of tantalizing subtlety; poets, novelists, orators, essayists, and publicists, who have interpreted the soul of America to the mind of the world. Our task is to exhibit the essential Americanism of these spokesmen of ours, to point out the traits which make them most truly representative of the instincts of the tongue-tied millions who work and plan and pass from sight without the gift and art of utterance; to find, in short, among the books which are recognized as constituting our American literature, some vital and illuminating illustrations of our national characteristics. For a truly "American" book--like an American national game, or an American city--is that which reveals, consciously or unconsciously, the American mind.

II

The American Mind

The origin of the phrase, "the American mind," was political. Shortly after the middle of the eighteenth century, there began to be a distinctly American way of regarding the debatable question of British Imperial control. During the period of the Stamp Act agitation our colonial-bred politicians and statesmen made the discovery that there was a mode of thinking and feeling which was native--or had by that time become a second nature--to all the colonists. Jefferson, for example, employs those resonant and useful words "the American mind" to indicate that throughout the American colonies an essential unity of opinion had been developed as regards the chief political question of the day.

It is one of the most striking characteristics of the present United States that this instinct of political unity should have endured, triumphing over every temporary motive of division. The inhabitants of the United States belong to a single political type. There is scarcely a news-stand in any country of Continental Europe where one may not purchase a newspaper openly or secretly opposed to the government,--not merely attacking an unpopular administration or minister or ruler,--but desiring and plotting the overthrow of the entire political system of the country. It is very difficult to find such a newspaper anywhere in the United States. I myself have never seen one. The opening sentence of President Butler's admirable little book, _The American as He Is_, originally delivered as lectures before the University of Copenhagen, runs as follows:

"The most impressive fact in American life is the substantial unity of view in regard to the fundamental questions of government and of conduct among a population so large, distributed over an area so wide, recruited from sources so many and so diverse, living under conditions so widely different."

But the American type of mind is evident in many other fields than that of politics. The stimulating book from which I have just quoted, attempts in its closing paragraph, after touching upon the more salient features of our national activity, to define the typical American in these words:--

"The typical American is he who, whether rich or poor, whether dwelling in the North, South, East, or West, whether scholar, professional man, merchant, manufacturer, farmer, or skilled worker for wages, lives the life of a good citizen and good neighbor; who believes loyally and with all his heart in his country's institutions, and in the underlying principles on which these institutions are built; who directs both his private and his public life by sound principles; who cherishes high ideals; and who aims to train his children for a useful life and for their country's service."

This modest and sensible statement indicates the existence of a national point of view. We have developed in the course of time, as a result of certain racial inheritances and historic experiences, a national "temper" or "ethos"; a more or less settled way of considering intellectual, moral, and social problems; in short, a peculiarly national attitude toward the universal human questions.

In a narrower sense, "the American mind" may mean the characteristics of the American intelligence, as it has been studied by Mr. Bryce, De Tocqueville, and other trained observers of our methods of thinking. It may mean the specific achievements of the American intelligence in fields like science and scholarship and history. In all these particular departments of intellectual activity the methods and the results of American workers have recently received expert and by no means uniformly favorable assessment from investigators upon both sides of the Atlantic. But the observer of literary processes and productions must necessarily take a somewhat broader survey of national tendencies. He must study what Nathaniel Hawthorne, with the instinct of a romance writer, preferred to call the "heart" as distinguished from the mere intellect. He must watch the moral and social and imaginative impulses of the individual; the desire for beauty; the hunger for self-expression; the conscious as well as the unconscious revelation of personality; and he must bring all this into relation--if he can, and knowing that the finer secrets are sure to elude him!--with the age-long impulses of the race and with the mysterious tides of feeling that flood or ebb with the changing fortunes of the nation.

One way to begin to understand the typical American is to take a look at him in Europe. It does not require a professional beggar or a licensed guide to identify him. Not that the American in Europe need recall in any particular the familiar pictorial caricature of "Uncle Sam." He need not bear any outward resemblances to such stage types as that presented in "The Man From Home." He need not even suggest, by peculiarities of speech or manner, that he has escaped from the pages of those novels of international observation in which Mr. James and Mr. Howells long ago attained an unmatched artistry. Our "American Abroad," at the present hour, may be studied without the aid of any literary recollections whatever. There he is, with his wife and daughters, and one may stare at him with all the frankness of a compatriot. He is obviously well-to-do,--else he would not be there at all,--and the wife and daughters seem very well-to-do indeed. He is kindly; considerate--sometimes effusively considerate--of his fellow travellers; patient with the ladies of his family, who in turn are noticeably patient with him. He is genial--very willing to talk with polyglot headwaiters and chauffeurs; in fact the wife and daughters are also practised conversationalists, although their most loyal admirers must admit that their voices _are_ a trifle sharp or flat. These ladies are more widely read than "papa." He has not had much leisure for Ruskin and Symonds and Ferrero. His lack of historical training limits his curiosity concerning certain phases of his European surroundings; but he uses his eyes well upon such general objects as trains, hotel-service, and Englishmen. In spite of his habitual geniality, he is rather critical of foreign ways, although this is partly due to his lack of acquaintance with them. Intellectually, he is really more modest and self-distrustful than his conversation or perhaps his general bearing would imply; in fact, his wife and daughters, emboldened very likely by the training of their women's clubs, have a more commendable daring in assaulting new intellectual positions.

Yet the American does not lack quickness, either of wits or emotion. His humor and sentiment make him an entertaining companion. Even when his spirits run low, his patriotism is sure to mount in proportion, and he can always tell you with enthusiasm in just how many days he expects to be back again in what he calls "God's country."

This, or something like this, is the "American" whom the European regards with curiosity, contempt, admiration, or envy, as the case may be, but who is incontestably modifying Western Europe, even if he is not, as many journalists and globe-trotters are fond of asserting, "Americanizing" the world. Interesting as it is to glance at him against that European background which adds picturesqueness to his qualities, the "Man from Home" is still more interesting in his native habitat. There he has been visited by hundreds of curious and observant foreigners, who have left on record a whole literature of bewildered and bewildering, irritating and flattering and amusing testimony concerning the Americans. Settlers like Crevecoeur in the glowing dawn of the Republic, poets like Tom Moore, novelists like Charles Dickens,--other novelists like Mr. Arnold Bennett,--professional travellers like Captain Basil Hall, students of contemporary sociology like Paul Bourget and Mr. H. G. Wells, French journalists, German professors, Italian admirers of Colonel Roosevelt, political theorists like De Tocqueville, profound and friendly observers like Mr. Bryce, have had, and will continue to have, their say.

The reader who tries to take all this testimony at its face value, and to reconcile its contradictions, will be a candidate for the insane asylum. Yet the testimony is too amusing to be neglected and some of it is far too important to be ignored. Mr. John Graham Brooks, after long familiarity with these foreign opinions of America, has gathered some of the most representative of them into a delightful and stimulating volume entitled _As Others See Us_. There one may find examples of what the foreigner has seen, or imagined he has seen, during his sojourn in America, and what he has said about it afterwards. Mr. Brooks is too charitable to our visitors to quote the most fantastic and highly colored of their observations; but what remains is sufficiently bizarre.

The real service of such a volume is to train us in discounting the remarks made about us in a particular period like the eighteen-thirties, or from observations made in a special place, like Newport, or under special circumstances, like a Bishop's private car. It helps us to make allowances for the inevitable angle of nationality, the equally inevitable personal equation. A recent ambitious book on America, by a Washington journalist of long residence here, although of foreign birth, declares that "the chief trait of the American people is the love of gain and the desire of wealth acquired through commerce." That is the opinion of an expert observer, who has had extraordinary chances for seeing precisely what he has seen. I think it, notwithstanding, a preposterous opinion, fully as preposterous as Professor Muensterberg's notion that America has latterly grown more monarchical in its tendencies,--but I must remember that, in my own case, as in that of the journalist under consideration, there are allowances to be made for race, and training, and natural idiosyncracy of vision.

The native American, it may be well to remember, is something of an observer himself. If his observations upon the characteristics of his countrymen are less piquant than the foreigner's, it is chiefly because the American writes, upon the whole, less incisively than he talks. But incisive native writing about American traits is not lacking. If a missionary, say in South Africa, has read the New York _Nation_ every week for the past forty years, he has had an extraordinary "moving picture" of American tendencies, as interpreted by independent, trenchant, and high-minded criticism. That a file of the _Nation_ will convey precisely the same impression of American tendencies as a file of the _Sun_, for instance, or the _Boston Evening Transcript_, is not to be affirmed. The humor of the London _Punch_ and the New York _Life_ does not differ more radically than the aspects of American civilization as viewed by two rival journals in Newspaper Row. The complexity of the material now collected and presented in daily journalism is so great that adequate editorial interpretation is obviously impossible. All the more insistently does this heterogeneous picture of American life demand the impartial interpretation of the historian, the imaginative transcription of the novelist. Humorist and moralist, preacher and mob orator and social essayist, shop-talk and talk over the tea-cup or over the pipe, and the far more illuminating instruction of events, are fashioning day by day the infinitely delicate processes of our national self-assessment. Scholars like Mr. Henry Adams or Mr. James Ford Rhodes will explain to us American life as it was during the administrations of Jefferson or in the eighteen-fifties. Professor Turner will expound the significance of the frontier in American history. Mr. Henry James will portray with unrivalled psychological insight the Europeanized American of the eighteen-seventies and eighties. Literary critics like Professor Wendell or Professor Trent will deduce from our literature itself evidence concerning this or that national quality; and all this mass of American expert testimony, itself a result and a proof of national self-awareness and self-respect, must be put into the scales to balance, to confirm, or to outweigh the reports furnished by foreigners.

I do not pretend to be able, like an expert accountant, to draw up a balance-sheet of national qualities, to credit or debit the American character with this or that precise quantity of excellence or defect. But having turned the pages of many books about the United States, and listened to many conversations about its inhabitants in many states of the Union, I venture to collect a brief list of the qualities which have been assigned to us, together with a few, but not, I trust, too many, of our admitted national defects.

Like that excellent German who wrote the History of the English Drama in six volumes, I begin with Physical Geography. The differentiation of the physical characteristics of our branch of the English race is admittedly due, in part, to climate. In spite of the immense range of climatic variations as one passes from New England to New Orleans, from the Mississippi Valley to the high plains of the Far West, or from the rainy Oregon belt southward to San Diego, the settlers of English stock find a prevalent atmospheric condition, as a result of which they begin, in a generation or two, to change in physique. They grow thinner and more nervous, they "lean forward," as has been admirably said of them, while the Englishman "leans back"; they are less heavy and less steady; their voices are higher, sharper; their athletes get more easily "on edge"; they respond, in short, to an excessively stimulating climate. An old-fashioned sea-captain put it all into a sentence when he said that he could drink a bottle of wine with his dinner in Liverpool and only a half a bottle in New York. Explain the cause as we may, the fact seems to be that the body of John Bull changes, in the United States, into the body of Uncle Sam.

There are mental differences no less pronounced. No adjective has been more frequently applied to the Anglo-Saxon than the word "dull." The American mind has been accused of ignorance, superficiality, levity, commonplaceness, and dozens of other defects, but "dulness" is not one of them. "Smartness," rather, is the preferred epithet of derogation; or, to rise a little in the scale of valuation, it is the word "cleverness," used with that lurking contempt for cleverness which is truly English and which long survived in the dialect of New England, where the village ne'er-do-well or Jack-of-all-trades used to be pronounced a "clever" fellow. The variety of employments to which the American pioneers were obliged to betake themselves has done something, no doubt, to produce a national versatility, a quick assimilation of new methods and notions, a ready adaptability to novel emergencies. An invaluable pioneer trait is curiosity; the settler in a new country, like Moses in the wilderness of Arabia, must "turn aside to see"; he must look into things, learn to read signs,--or else the Indians or frost or freshet will soon put an end to his pioneering. That curiosity concerning strangers which so much irritated Dickens and Mrs. Trollope was natural to the children of Western emigrants to whom the difference between Sioux and Pawnee had once meant life or death. "What's your business, stranger, in these parts?" was an instinctive, because it had once been a vital, question. That it degenerates into mere inquisitiveness is true enough; just as the "acuteness," the "awareness," essential to the existence of one generation becomes only "cuteness," the typical tin-pedler's habit of mind, in the generation following.

American inexperience, the national rawness and unsophistication which has impressed so many observers, has likewise its double significance when viewed historically. We have exhibited, no doubt, the amateurishness and recklessness which spring from relative isolation, from ignorance as to how they manage elsewhere this particular sort of thing,--the conservation of forests, let us say, or the government of colonial dependencies. National smugness and conceit, the impatience crystallized in the phrase, "What have we got to do with abroad?" have jarred upon the nerves of many cultivated Americans. But it is no less true that a nation of pioneers and settlers, like the isolated individual, learns certain rough-and-ready Robinson Crusoe ways of getting things done. A California mining-camp is sure to establish law and order in due time, though never, perhaps, a law and order quite according to Blackstone. In the most trying crises of American political history, it was not, after all, a question of profiting by European experience. Washington and Lincoln, in their sorest struggles, had nothing to do with "abroad"; the problem had first to be thought through, and then fought through, in American and not in European terms. Not a half-dozen Englishmen understood the bearings of the Kansas-Nebraska Bill, or, if they did, we were little the wiser. We had to wait until a slow-minded frontier lawyer mastered it in all its implications, and then patiently explained it to the farmers of Illinois, to the United States, and to the world.

It is true that the unsophisticated mode of procedure may turn out to be sheer folly,--a "sixteen to one" triumph of provincial barbarism. But sometimes it is the secret of freshness and of force. Your cross-country runner scorns the highway, but that is because he has confidence in his legs and loins, and he likes to take the fences. Fenimore Cooper, when he began to write stories, knew nothing about the art of novel-making as practised in Europe, but he possessed something infinitely better for him, namely, instinct, and he took the right road to the climax of a narrative as unerringly as the homing bee follows its viewless trail.

No one can be unaware how easily this superb American confidence may turn to over-confidence, to sheer recklessness. We love to run past the signals, in our railroading and in our thinking. Emerson will "plunge" on a new idea as serenely as any stock-gambler ever "plunged" in Wall Street, and a pretty school-teacher will tell you that she has become an advocate of the "New Thought" as complacently as an old financier will boast of having bought Calumet and Hecla when it was selling at 25. (Perhaps the school-teacher may get as good a bargain. I cannot say.) Upon the whole, Americans back individual guesswork and pay cheerfully when they lose. A great many of them, as it happens, have guessed right. Even those who continue to guess wrong, like Colonel Sellers, have the indefeasible romantic appetite for guessing again. The American temperament and the chances of American history have brought constant temptation to speculation, and plenty of our people prefer to gamble upon what they love to call a "proposition," rather than to go to the bottom of the facts. They would rather speculate than know.

Doubtless there are purely physical causes that have encouraged this mental attitude, such as the apparently inexhaustible resources of a newly opened country, the consciousness of youthful energy, the feeling that any very radical mistake in pitching camp to-day can easily be rectified when we pitch camp to-morrow. The habit of exaggeration which was so particularly annoying to English visitors in the middle of the last century--annoying even to Charles Dickens, who was himself something of an expert in exuberance--is a physical and moral no less than a mental quality. That monstrous braggadocio which Dickens properly satirized in _Martin Chuzzlewit_ was partly, of course, the product of provincial ignorance. Doubtless there were, and there are still, plenty of Pograms who are convinced that Henry Clay and Daniel Webster overtop all the intellectual giants of the Old World. But that youthful bragging, and perhaps some of the later bragging as well, has its social side. It is a perverted idealism. It springs from group loyalty, from sectional fidelity. The settlement of "Eden" may be precisely what Dickens drew it: a miasmatic mud-hole. Yet we who are interested in the new town do not intend, as the popular phrase has it, "to give ourselves away." We back our own "proposition," so that to this day Chicago cannot tell the truth to St. Louis, nor Harvard to Yale. Braggadocio thus gets glorified through its rootage in loyalty; and likewise extravagance--surely one of the worst of American mental vices--is often based upon a romantic confidence in individual opinion or in the righteousness of some specific cause. Convince a blue-blooded American like Wendell Phillips that the abolition of slavery is right, and, straightway, words and even facts become to him mere weapons in a splendid warfare. His statements grow rhetorical, reckless, virulent. Proof seems to him, as it did to the contemporary Transcendentalist philosophers, an impertinence. The sole question is, "Are you on the Lord's side?" i.e., on the side of Wendell Phillips.

Excuse as we may the faults of a gifted combatant in a moral crisis like the abolition controversy, the fact remains that the intellectual dangers of the oratorical temperament are typically American. What is commonly called our "Fourth of July" period has indeed passed away. It has few apologists, perhaps fewer than it really deserves. It is possible to regret the disappearance of that old-fashioned assertion of patriotism and pride, and to question whether historical pageants and a "noiseless Fourth" will develop any better citizens than the fathers were. But on the purely intellectual side, the influence of that spread-eagle oratory was disastrous. Throughout wide-extended regions of the country, and particularly in the South and West, the "orator" grew to be, in the popular mind, the normal representative of intellectual ability. Words, rather than things, climbed into the saddle. Popular assemblies were taught the vocabulary and the logic of passion, rather than of sober, lucid reasoning. The "stump" grew more potent than school-house and church and bench; and it taught its reckless and passionate ways to more than one generation. The intellectual leaders of the newer South have more than once suffered ostracism for protesting against this glorification of mere oratory. But it is not the South alone that has suffered. Wherever a mob can gather, there are still the dangers of the old demagogic vocabulary and rhetoric. The mob state of mind is lurking still in the excitable American temperament.

The intellectual temptations of that temperament are revealed no less in our popular journalism. This journalism, it is needless to say, is extremely able, but it is reckless to the last degree. The extravagance of its head-lines and the over-statements of its news columns are direct sources of profit, since they increase the circulation and it is circulation which wins advertising space. I think it is fair to say that the American people, as a whole, like precisely the sort of journalism which they get. The tastes of the dwellers in cities control, more and more, the character of our newspapers. The journals of New York, Chicago, and San Francisco are steadily gaining in circulation, in resourcefulness, and in public spirit, but they are, for the most part, unscrupulous in attack, sophistical, and passionate. They outvie the popular pulpit in sentimentality. They play with fire.

The note of exaggeration which is heard in American oratory and journalism is struck again in the popular magazines. Their campaign of "exposure," during the last decade, has been careless of individual and corporate rights and reputations. Even the magazine sketches and short stories are keyed up to a hysteric pitch. So universally is this characteristic national tension displayed in our periodical literature that no one is much surprised to read in his morning paper that some one has called the President of the United States a liar,--or that some one has been called a liar by the President of the United States.

For an explanation of these defects, shall we fall back upon a convenient maxim of De Tocqueville's and admit with him that "a democracy is unsuited to meditation"? We are forced to do so. But then comes the inevitable second thought that a democracy must needs have other things than meditation to attend to. Athenian and Florentine and Versailles types of political despotism have all proved highly favorable to the lucubrations of philosophers and men of letters who enjoyed the despot's approbation. For that matter, no scheme of life was ever better suited to meditation than an Indian reservation in the eighteen-seventies, with a Great Father in Washington to furnish blankets, flour, and tobacco. Yet that is not quite the American ideal of existence, and it even failed to produce the peaceable fruits of meditation in the Indian himself.

One may freely admit the shortcomings of the American intelligence; the "commonness of mind and tone" which Mr. Bryce believes to be inseparable from the presence of such masses of men associated under modern democratic government; the frivolity and extravagance which represent the gasconading of the romantic temper in face of the grey practicalities of everyday routine; the provincial boastfulness and bad taste which have resulted from intellectual isolation; the lack, in short, of a code, whether for thought or speech or behavior. And nevertheless, one's instinctive Americanism replies, May it not be better, after all, to have gone without a code for a while, to have lacked that orderly and methodized and socialized European intelligence, and to have had the glorious sense of bringing things to pass in spite of it? There is just one thing that would have been fatal to our democracy. It is the feeling expressed in La Bruyere's famous book: "Everything has been said, everything has been written, everything has been done." Here in America everything was to do; we were forced to conjugate our verbs in the future tense. No doubt our existence has been, in some respects, one of barbarism, but it has been the barbarism of life and not of death. A rawboned baby sprawling on the mud floor of a Kentucky log cabin is a more hopeful spectacle than a wholly civilized funeral.

"Perhaps it is," rejoins the European critic, somewhat impatiently, "but you are confusing the issue. We find certain grave defects in the American mind, defects which, if you had not had what Thomas Carlyle called 'a great deal of land for a very few people,' would long ago have involved you in disaster. You admit the mental defects, but you promptly shift the question to one of moral qualities, of practical energy, of subduing your wilderness, and so forth. You have too often absented yourself from the wedding banquet, from the European symposium of wit and philosophy, from the polished and orderly and delightful play and interplay of civilized mind,--and your excuse is the old one: that you are trying your yoke of oxen and cannot come. We charge you with intellectual sins, and you enter the plea of moral preoccupation. If you will permit personal examples, you Americans have made ere now your national heroes out of men whose reasoning powers remained those of a college sophomore, who were unable to state an opponent's position with fairness, who lacked wholly the judicial quality, who were vainglorious and extravagant, who had, in short, the mind of an exuberant barbarian; but you instantly forget their intellectual defects in the presence of their abounding physical and moral energy, their freedom from any taint of personal corruption, their whole-souled desire and effort for the public good. Were not such heroes, impossible as they would have been in any other civilized country, perfectly illuminative of your national state of mind?"

For one, I confess that I do not know what reply to make to my imaginary European critic. I suspect that he is right. At any rate, we stand here at the fork of the road. If we do not wish to linger any longer over a catalogue of intellectual sins, let us turn frankly to our moral preoccupations, comforting ourselves, if we like, as we abandon the field of purely intellectual rivalry with Europe, in the reflection that it is the muddle-headed Anglo-Saxon, after all, who is the dominant force in the modern world.

The moral temper of the American people has been analyzed no less frequently than their mental traits. Foreign and native observers are alike agreed in their recognition of the extraordinary American energy. The sheer power of the American bodily machine, driven by the American will, is magnificent. It is often driven too hard, and with reckless disregard of anything save immediate results. It wears out more quickly than the bodily machine of the Englishman. It is typical that the best distance runners of Great Britain usually beat ours, while we beat them in the sprints. Our public men are frequently--as the athletes say--"all in" at sixty. Their energy is exhausted at just the time that many an English statesman begins his best public service. But after making every allowance for wasteful excess, for the restless and impatient consumption of nervous forces which nature intended that we should hold in reserve, the fact remains that American history has demonstrated the existence of a dynamic national energy, physical and moral, which is still unabated. Immigration has turned hitherward the feet of millions upon millions of young men from the hardiest stocks of Europe. They replenish the slackening streams of vigor. When the northern New Englander cannot make a living on the old farm, the French Canadian takes it off his hands, and not only improves the farm, but raises big crops of boys. So with Italians, Swedes, Germans, Irish, Jews, and Portuguese, and all the rest. We are a nation of immigrants, a digging, hewing, building, breeding, bettering race, of mixed blood and varying creeds, but of fundamental faith in the wages of going on; a race compounded of materials crude but potent; raw, but with blood that is red and bones that are big; a race that is accomplishing its vital tasks, and, little by little, transmuting brute forces and material energies into the finer play of mind and spirit.

From the very beginning, the American people have been characterized by idealism. It was the inner light of Pilgrim and Quaker colonists; it gleams no less in the faces of the children of Russian Jew immigrants to-day. American irreverence has been noted by many a foreign critic, but there are certain subjects in whose presence our reckless or cynical speech is hushed. Compared with current Continental humor, our characteristic American humor is peculiarly reverent. The purity of woman and the reality of religion are not considered topics for jocosity. Cleanness of body and of mind are held by our young men to be not only desirable but attainable virtues. There is among us, in comparison with France or Germany, a defective reverence for the State as such; and a positive irreverence towards the laws of the Commonwealth, and towards the occupants of high political positions. Mayor, Judge, Governor, Senator, or even President, may be the butt of such indecorous ridicule as shocks or disgusts the foreigner; but nevertheless the personal joke stops short of certain topics which Puritan tradition disapproves. The United States is properly called a Christian nation, not merely because the Supreme Court has so affirmed it, but because the phrase "a Christian nation" expresses the historical form which the religious idealism of the country has made its own. The Bible is still considered, by the mass of the people, a sacred book; oaths in courts of law, oaths of persons elected to great office, are administered upon it. American faith in education, as all the world knows, has from the beginning gone hand in hand with faith in religion; the school-house was almost as sacred a symbol as the meeting-house; and the munificence of American private benefactions to the cause of education furnishes to-day one of the most striking instances of idealism in the history of civilization.

The ideal passions of patriotism, of liberty, of loyalty to home and section, of humanitarian and missionary effort, have all burned with a clear flame in the United States. The optimism which lies so deeply embedded in the American character is one phase of the national mind. Charles Eliot Norton once said to me, with his dry humor, that there was an infallible test of the American authorship of any anonymous article or essay: "Does it contain the phrase 'After all, we need not despair'? If it does, it was written by an American." In spite of all that is said about the practicality of the American, his love of gain and his absorption in material interests, those who really know him are aware how habitually he confronts his practical tasks in a spirit of romantic enthusiasm. He marches downtown to his prosaic day's job and calls it "playing the game"; to work as hard as he can is to "get into the game," and to work as long as he can is to "stay in the game"; he loves to win fully as much as the Jew and he hates to lose fully as much as the Englishman, but losing or winning, he carries into his business activity the mood of the idealist.

It is easy to think of all this as self-deception as the emotional effusiveness of the American temperament; but to refuse to see its idealism is to mistake fundamentally the character of the American man. No doubt he does deceive himself often as to his real motives: he is a mystic and a bargain-hunter by turns. Divided aims, confused ideals, have struggled for the mastery among us, ever since Challon's _Voyage_, in 1606, announced that the purpose of the first colonists to Virginia was "both to seek to convert the savages, as also to seek out what benefits or commodities might be had in those parts." How that "both"--"as also" keeps echoing in American history: "both" to christianize the Negro and work him at a profit, "both" duty and advantage in retaining the Philippines; "both" international good will and increased armaments; "both" Sunday morning precepts and Monday morning practice; "both" horns of a dilemma; "both God and mammon"; did ever a nation possess a more marvellous water-tight compartment method of believing and honoring opposites! But in all this unconscious hypocrisy the American is perhaps not worse--though he may be more absurd!--than other men.

Another aspect of the American mind is found in our radicalism. "To be an American," it has been declared, "is to be a radical." That statement needs qualification. Intellectually the American is inclined to radical views; he is willing to push certain social theories very far; he will found a new religion, a new philosophy, a new socialistic community, at the slightest notice or provocation; but he has at bottom a fund of moral and political conservatism. Thomas Jefferson, one of the greatest of our radical idealists, had a good deal of the English squire in him after all. Jeffersonianism endures, not merely because it is a radical theory of human nature, but because it expresses certain facts of human nature. The American mind looks forward, not back; but in practical details of land, taxes, and governmental machinery we are instinctively cautious of change. The State of Connecticut knows that her constitution is ill adapted to the present conditions of her population, but the difficulty is to persuade the rural legislators to amend it. Yet everybody admits that amendment will come "some day." This admission is a characteristic note of American feeling; and every now and then come what we call "uplift" movements, when radicalism is in the very air, and a thousand good "causes" take fresh vigor.

One such period was in the New England of the eighteen-forties. We are moving in a similar--only this time a national--current of radicalism, to-day. But a change in the weather or the crops has before now turned many of our citizens from radicalism into conservatism. There is, in fact, conservatism in our blood and radicalism in our brains, and now one and now the other rules. Very typical of American radicalism is that story of the old sea-captain who was ignorant, as was supposed, of the science of navigation, and who cheerfully defended himself by saying that he could work his vessel down to Boston Light without knowing any navigation, and after that he could go where he "dum pleased." I suspect the old fellow pulled his sextant and chronometer out of his chest as soon as he really needed them. American radicalism is not always as innocent of the world's experience as it looks. In fact, one of the most interesting phases of this twentieth century "uplift" movement is its respect and even glorification of expert opinion. A German expert in city-planning electrifies an audience of Chicago club-women by talking to them about drains, ash-carts, and flower-beds. A hundred other experts, in sanitation, hygiene, chemistry, conservation of natural resources, government by commission, tariffs, arbitration treaties, are talking quite as busily; and they have the attention of a national audience that is listening with genuine modesty, and with a real desire to refashion American life on wiser and nobler plans. In this national forward movement in which we are living, radicalism has shown its beneficent aspect of constructive idealism.

No catalogue of American qualities and defects can exclude the trait of individualism. We exalt character over institutions, says Mr. Brownell; we like our institutions because they suit us, and not because we admire institutions. "Produce great persons," declares Walt Whitman, "the rest follows." Whether the rest follows or not, there can be no question that Americans, from the beginning, have laid singular stress upon personal qualities. The religion and philosophy of the Puritans were in this respect at one with the gospel of the frontier. It was the principle of "every man for himself"; solitary confrontation of his God, solitary struggle with the wilderness. "He that will not work," declared John Smith after that first disastrous winter at Jamestown, "neither let him eat." The pioneer must clear his own land, harvest his own crops, defend his own fireside; his temporal and eternal salvation were strictly his own affair. He asked, and expected, no aid from the community; he could at most "change works" in time of harvest, with a neighbor, if he had one. It was the sternest school of self-reliance, from babyhood to the grave, that human society is ever likely to witness. It bred heroes and cranks and hermits; its glories and its eccentricities are written in the pages of Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman; they are written more permanently still in the instinctive American faith in individual manhood. Our democracy idolizes a few individuals; it ignores their defective training, or, it may be, their defective culture; it likes to think of an Andrew Jackson who was a "lawyer, judge, planter, merchant, general, and politician," before he became President; it asks only that the man shall not change his individual character in passing from one occupation or position to another; in fact, it is amused and proud to think of Grant hauling cordwood to market, of Lincoln keeping store or Roosevelt rounding-up cattle. The one essential question was put by Hawthorne into the mouth of Holgrave in the _House of the Seven Gables_. Holgrave had been by turns a schoolmaster, clerk in a store, editor, pedler, lecturer on Mesmerism, and daguerreotypist, but "amid all these personal vicissitudes," says Hawthorne, "he had never lost his identity.... He had never violated the innermost man, but had carried his conscience along with him." There speaks the local accent of Puritanism, but the voice insisting upon the moral integrity of the individual is the undertone of America.

Finally, and surely not the least notable of American traits, is public spirit. Triumphant individualism checks itself, or is rudely checked in spite of itself, by considerations of the general good. How often have French critics confessed, with humiliation, that in spite of the superior socialization of the French intelligence, France has yet to learn from America the art and habit of devoting individual fortunes to the good of the community. Our American literature, as has been already pointed out, is characteristically a citizen literature, responsive to the civic note, the production of men who, like the writers of the _Federalist_, applied a vigorous practical intelligence, a robust common sense, to questions affecting the interest of everybody. The spirit of fair play in our free democracy has led Americans to ask not merely what is right and just for one, the individual, but what are righteousness and justice and fair play for all. Democracy, as embodied in such a leader as Lincoln, has meant Fellowship. Nothing finer can be said of a representative American than to say of him, as Mr. Norton said of Mr. Lowell, that he had a "most public soul."

No one can present such a catalogue of American qualities as I have attempted without realizing how much escapes his classification. Conscious criticism and assessment of national characteristics is essential to an understanding of them; but one feels somehow that the net is not holding. The analysis of English racial inheritances, as modified by historical conditions, yields much, no doubt; but what are we to say of such magnificent embodiments of the American spirit as are revealed in the Swiss immigrant Agassiz, the German exile Carl Schurz, the native-born mulatto Booker Washington? The Americanism of representative Americans is something which must be felt; it is to be reached by imaginative perception and sympathy, no less than by the process of formal analysis. It would puzzle the experts in racial tendencies to find arithmetically the common denominator of such American figures as Franklin, Washington, Jackson, Webster, Lee, Lincoln, Emerson, and "Mark Twain"; yet the countrymen of those typical Americans instinctively recognize in them a sort of largeness, genuineness, naturalness, kindliness, humor, effectiveness, idealism, which are indubitably and fundamentally American.

There are certain sentiments of which we ourselves are conscious, though we can scarcely translate them into words, and these vaguely felt emotions of admiration, of effort, of fellowship and social faith are the invisible America. Take, for a single example, the national admiration for what we call a "self-made" man: here is a boy selling candy and newspapers on a Michigan Central train; he makes up his mind to be a lawyer; in twelve years from that day he is general counsel for the Michigan Central road; he enters the Senate of the United States and becomes one of its leading figures. The instinctive flush of sympathy and pride with which Americans listen to such a story is far more deeply based than any vulgar admiration for money-making abilities. No one cares whether such a man is rich or poor. He has vindicated anew the possibilities of manhood under American conditions of opportunity; the miracle of our faith has in him come true once more.

No one can understand America with his brains. It is too big, too puzzling. It tempts, and it deceives. But many an illiterate immigrant has felt the true America in his pulses before he ever crossed the Atlantic. The descendant of the Pilgrims still remains ignorant of our national life if he does not respond to its glorious zest, its throbbing energy, its forward urge, its uncomprehending belief in the future, its sense of the fresh and mighty world just beyond to-day's horizon. Whitman's "Pioneers, O Pioneers" is one of the truest of American poems because it beats with the pulse of this onward movement, because it is full of this laughing and conquering fellowship and of undefeated faith.

III

American Idealism

Our endeavor to state the general characteristics of the American mind has already given us some indication of what Americans really care for. The things or the qualities which they like, the objects of their conscious or unconscious striving, are their ideals. "There is what I call the American idea," said Theodore Parker in the Anti-Slavery Convention of 1850. "This idea demands, as the proximate organization thereof, a democracy--that is, a government of all the people, by all the people, for all the people; of course, a government on the principle of eternal justice, the unchanging law of God; for shortness' sake, I will call it the idea of Freedom." That is one of a thousand definitions of American idealism. Books devoted to the "Spirit of America"--like the volume by Henry van Dyke which bears that very title--give a programme of national accomplishments and aspirations. But our immediate task is more specific. It is to point out how adequately this idealistic side of the national temperament has been expressed in American writing. Has our literature kept equal pace with our thinking and feeling?

We do not need, in attempting to answer this question, any definition of idealism, in its philosophical or in its more purely literary sense. There are certain fundamental human sentiments which lift men above brutes, Frenchmen above "frog-eaters," and Englishmen above "shop-keepers." These ennobling sentiments or ideals, while universal in their essential nature, assume in each civilized nation a somewhat specific coloring. The national literature reveals the myriad shades and hues of private and public feeling, and the more truthful this literary record, the more delicate and noble become the harmonies of local and national thought or emotion with the universal instincts and passions of mankind. On the other hand, when the literature of Spain, for instance, or of Italy, fails, within a given period, in range and depth of human interest, we are compelled to believe either that the Spain or Italy of that age was wanting in the nobler ideals, or that it lacked literary interpretation.

In the case of America we are confronted by a similar dilemma. Since the beginning of the seventeenth century this country has been, in a peculiar sense, the home of idealism; but our literature has remained through long periods thin and provincial, barren in cosmopolitan significance; and the hard fact faces us to-day that only three or four of our writers have aroused any strong interest in the cultivated readers of continental Europe. Evidently, then, either the torch of American idealism does not burn as brightly as we think, or else our writers, with but few exceptions, have not hitherto possessed the height and reach and grasp to hold up the torch so that the world could see it. Let us look first at the flame, and then at the torch-bearers.

Readers of Carlyle have often been touched by the humility with which that disinherited child of Calvinism speaks of Goethe's doctrine of the "Three Reverences," as set forth in _Wilhelm Meister_. Again and again, in his correspondence and his essays, does Carlyle recur to that teaching of the threefold Reverence: Reverence for what is above us, for what is around us and for what is under us; that is to say, the ethnic religion which frees us from debasing fear, the philosophical religion which unites us with our comrades, and the Christian religion which recognizes humility and poverty and suffering as divine.

"To which of these religions do you specially adhere?" inquired Wilhelm.

"To all the three," replied the sages; "for in their union they produce what may properly be called the true Religion. Out of those three Reverences springs the highest Reverence, Reverence for Oneself."

An admirable symbolism, surely; vaguer, no doubt, than the old symbols which Carlyle had learned in the Kirk at Ecclefechan, but less vague, in turn, than that doctrine of reverence for the Oversoul, which was soon to be taught at Concord.

As one meditates upon the idealism of the first colonists in America, one is tempted to ask what their "reverences" were. Toward what tangible symbols of the invisible did their eyes instinctively turn?

For New England, at least, the answer is relatively simple. One form of it is contained in John Adams's well-known prescription for Virginia, as recorded in his _Diary_ for July 21, 1786. "Major Langbourne dined with us again. He was lamenting the difference of character between Virginia and New England. I offered to give him a receipt for making a New England in Virginia. He desired it; and I recommended to him town-meetings, training-days, town-schools, and ministers."

The "ministers," it will be noticed, come last on the Adams list. But the order of precedence is unimportant.

Here are four symbols, or, if you like, "reverences." Might not the Virginia planters, loyal to their own specific symbol of the "gentleman,"--no unworthy ideal, surely; one that had been glorified in European literature ever since Castiligione wrote his _Courtier_, and one that had been transplanted from England to Virginia as soon as Sir Walter Raleigh's men set foot on the soil which took its name from the Virgin Queen,--might not the Virginia gentlemen have pondered to their profit over the blunt suggestion of the Massachusetts commoner? No doubt; and yet how much picturesqueness and nobility--and tragedy, too--we should have missed, if our history had not been full of these varying symbols, clashing ideals, different Reverences!

One Reverence, at least, was common to the Englishman of Virginia and to the Englishman of Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay. They were joint heirs of the Reformation, children of that waxing and puissant England which was a nation of one book, the Bible; a book whose phrases color alike the _Faerie Queen_ of Spenser and the essays of Francis Bacon; a book rich beyond all others in human experience; full of poetry, history, drama; the test of conduct; the manual of devotion; and above all, and blinding all other considerations by the very splendor of the thought, a book believed to be the veritable Word of the unseen God. For these colonists in the wilderness, as for the Protestant Europe which they had left irrevocably behind them, the Bible was the plainest of all symbols of idealism: it was the first of the "Reverences."

The Church was a symbol likewise, but to the greater portion of colonial America the Church meant chiefly the tangible band of militant believers within the limits of a certain township or parish, rather than the mystical Bride of Christ. Except in Maryland and Virginia, whither the older forms of Church worship were early transplanted, there was scanty reverence for the Establishment. There was neither clergyman nor minister on board the Mayflower. In Rufus Choate's oration on the Pilgrims before the New England Society of New York in 1843, occurred the famous sentence about "a church without a bishop and a state without a King"; to which Dr. Wainwright, rector of St. John's, replied wittily at the dinner following the oration that there "can be no church without a bishop." This is perhaps a question for experts; but Thomas Hooker, Thomas Shepard, and John Cotton would have sided with Rufus Choate. The awe which had once been paid to the Establishment was transferred, in the seventeenth-century New England, to the minister. The minister imposed himself upon the popular imagination, partly through sheer force of personal ascendency, and partly as a symbol of the theocracy,--the actual governing of the Commonwealth by the laws and spirit of the sterner Scriptures. The minister dwelt apart as upon an awful Sinai. It was no mere romantic fancy of Hawthorne that shadowed his countenance with a black veil. The church organization, too,--though it may have lacked its bishop,--had a despotic power over its communicants; to be cast out of its fellowship involved social and political consequences comparable to those following excommunication by the Church of Rome. Hawthorne and Whittier and Longfellow--all of them sound antiquarians, though none of them in sympathy with the theology of Puritanism--have described in fit terms the bareness of the New England meeting-house. What intellectual severity and strain was there; what prodigality of learning; what blazing intensity of devotion; what pathos of women's patience, and of children, prematurely old, stretched upon the rack of insoluble problems! What dramas of the soul were played through to the end in those barn-like buildings, where the musket, perhaps, stood in the corner of the pew! "How aweful is this place!" must have been murmured by the lips of all; though there were many who have added, "This is the gate of Heaven."

The gentler side of colonial religion is winningly portrayed in Whittier's _Pennsylvania Pilgrim_ and in his imaginary journal of Margaret Smith. There were sunnier slopes, warmer exposures for the ripening of the human spirit, in the Southern colonies. Even in New England there was sporadic revolt from the beginning. The number of non-church-members increased rapidly after 1700; Franklin as a youth in Boston admired Cotton Mather's ability, but he did not go to church, "Sunday being my studying day." Doubtless there were always humorous sceptics like Mrs. Stowe's delightful Sam Lawson in _Oldtown Folks_. Lawson's comment on Parson Simpson's service epitomizes two centuries of New England thinking. "Wal," said Sam, "Parson Simpson's a smart man; but I tell ye, it's kind o' discouragin'. Why, he said our state and condition by natur was just like this. We was clear down in a well fifty feet deep, and the sides all round nothin' but glare ice; but we was under immediate obligations to get out, 'cause we was free, voluntary agents. But nobody ever had got out, and nobody would, unless the Lord reached down and took 'em. And whether he would or not nobody could tell; it was all sovereignty. He said there wan't one in a hundred, not one in a thousand,--not one in ten thousand,--that would be saved. Lordy massy, says I to myself, ef that's so they're any of 'em welcome to my chance. _And so I kind o' ris up and come out._"

Mrs. Stowe's novel is fairly representative of a great mass of derivative literature which draws its materials from the meeting-house period of American history. But the direct literature of that period has passed almost wholly into oblivion. Jonathan Edwards had one of the finest minds of his century; no European standard of comparison is too high for him; he belongs with Pascal, with Augustine, if you like, with Dante. But his great treatises written in the Stockbridge woods are known only to a few technical students of philosophy. One terrible sermon, preached at Enfield in 1741, is still read by the curious; but scarcely anybody knows of the ineffable tenderness, dignity, and pathos of his farewell sermon to his flock at Northampton: and the Yale Library possesses nearly twelve hundred of Edwards's sermons which have never been printed at all. Nor does anybody, save here and there an antiquarian, read Shepard and Hooker and Mayhew. And yet these preachers and their successors furnished the emotional equivalents of great prose and verse to generations of men. "That is poetry," says Professor Saintsbury (in a dangerous latitudinarianism, perhaps!), "which gives the reader the feeling of poetry." Here we touch one of the fundamental characteristics of our national state of mind, in its relation to literature. We are careless of form and type, yet we crave the emotional stimulus. Milton, greatest of Puritan poets, was read and quoted all too seldom in the Puritan colonies, and yet those colonists were no strangers to the emotions of sublimity and awe and beauty. They found them in the meeting-house instead of in a book; precisely as, in a later day, millions of Americans experienced what was for them the emotional equivalent of poetry in the sermons of Henry Ward Beecher and Phillips Brooks. French pulpit oratory of the seventeenth century wins recognition as a distinct type of literature; its great practitioners, like Massillon, Bourdaloue, Bossuet, are appraised in all the histories of the national literature and in books devoted to the evolution of literary species. In the American colonies the great preachers performed the functions of men of letters without knowing it. They have been treated with too scant respect in the histories of American literature. It is one of the penalties of Protestantism that the audiences, after a while, outgrow the preacher. The development of the historic sense, of criticism, of science, makes an impassable gulf between Jonathan Edwards and the American churches of the twentieth century. A sense of profound changes in theology has left our contemporaries indifferent to the literature in which the old theology was clothed.

There is one department of American literary production, of which Bossuet's famous sermon on Queen Henrietta Maria of England may serve to remind us, which illustrates significantly the national idealism. I mean the commemorative oration. The addresses upon the Pilgrim Fathers by such orators as Everett, Webster, and Choate; the countless orations before such organizations as the New England Society of New York and the Phi Beta Kappa; the papers read before historical and patriotic societies; the birthday and centenary discourses upon national figures like Washington or Lincoln, have all performed, and are still performing, an inestimable service in stimulating popular loyalty to the idealism of the fathers. As literature, most of this production is derivative: we listen to eloquence about the Puritans, but we do not read the Puritans; the description of Arthur Dimmesdale's election sermon in _The Scarlet Letter_, moving as it may be, tempts no one to open the stout collections of election sermons in the libraries. Yet the original literature of mediaeval chivalry is known only to a few scholars: Tennyson's _Idylls_ outsell the _Mabinogion_ and Malory. The actual world of literature is always shop-worn; a world chiefly of second-hand books, of warmed-over emotions and it is not surprising that many listeners to orations about Lincoln do not personally emulate Lincoln, and that many of the most enthusiastic dealers in the sentiment of the ancestral meeting-house do not themselves attend church.

The other ingredients of John Adams's ideal Commonwealth are no less significant of our national disposition. Take the school-house. It was planted in the wilderness for the training of boys and girls and for a future "godly and learned ministry." The record of American education is a long story of idealism which has touched literature at every turn. The "red school-house" on the hill-top or at the cross-roads, the "log-colleges" in forgotten hamlets, the universities founded by great states, are all a record of the American faith--which has sometimes been called a fetich--in education. In its origin, it was a part of the essential programme of Calvinism to make a man able to judge for himself upon the most momentous questions; a programme, too, of that political democracy which lay embedded in the tenets of Calvinism, a democracy which believes and must continue to believe that an educated electorate can safeguard its own interests and train up its own leaders. The poetry of the American school-house was written long ago by Whittier, in describing Joshua Coffin's school under the big elm on the cross-road in East Haverhill; its humor and pathos and drama have been portrayed by innumerable story-writers and essayists. Mrs. Martha Baker Dunn's charming sketches, entitled "Cicero in Maine" and "Virgil in Maine," indicate the idealism once taught in the old rural academies,--and it is taught there still. City men will stop wistfully on the street, in the first week of September, to watch the boys and girls go trudging off to their first day of school; men who believe in nothing else at least believe in that! And school and college and university remain, as in the beginning, the first garden-ground and the last refuge of literature.

That "town-meeting" which John Adams thought Virginia might do well to adopt has likewise become a symbol of American idealism. Together with the training-day, it represented the rights and duties and privileges of free men; the machinery of self-government. It was democracy, rather than "representative" government, under its purest aspect. Sentiments of responsibility to the town, the political unit, and to the Commonwealth, the group of units, were bred there. Likewise, it was a training-school for sententious speech and weighty action; its roots, as historians love to demonstrate, run back very far; and though the modern drift to cities has made its machinery ineffective in the larger communities, it remains a perpetual spring or feeding stream to the broader currents of our national life. Without an understanding of the town-meeting and its equivalents, our political literature loses much of its significance. Like the school-house and meeting-house, it has become glorified by our men of letters. John Fiske and other historians have celebrated it in some of the most brilliant pages of our political writing; and that citizen literature, so deeply characteristic of us, found in the plain, forthright, and public-spirited tone of town-meeting discussions its keynote. The spectacular debates of our national history, the dramatic contests in the great arena of the Senate Chamber, the discussions before huge popular audiences in the West, have maintained the civic point of view, have developed and dignified and enriched the prose style first employed by American freemen in deciding their local affairs in the presence of their neighbors. "I am a part of this people," said Lincoln proudly in one of his famous debates of 1858; "I was raised just a little east of here"; and this nearness to the audience, this directness and simplicity and genuineness of our best political literature, its homely persuasiveness and force, is an inheritance of the town-meeting.

Bible and meeting-house, school-house and town-meeting, thus illustrate concretely the responsiveness of the American character to idealistic impulses. They are external symbols of a certain state of mind. It may indeed be urged that they are primarily signs of a moral and social or institutional trend, and are therefore non-literary evidence of American idealism. Nevertheless, institutional as they may be deemed, they lie close to that poetry of daily duty in which our literature has not been poor. They are fundamentally related to that attitude of mind, that habitual temper of the spirit, which has produced, in all countries of settled use and wont, the literature of idealism. Brunetiere said of Flaubert's most famous woman character that poor Emma Bovary, the prey and the victim of Romantic desires, was after all much like the rest of us except that she lacked the intelligence to perceive the charm and poetry of the daily task. We have already touched upon the purely romantic side of American energy and of American imagination, and we must shortly look more closely still at those impulses of daring, those moods of heightened feeling, that intensified individualism, the quest of strangeness and terror and wild beauty, which characterize our romantic writing. But this romanticism is, as it were, a segment of the larger circle of idealism. It is idealism accentuated by certain factors, driven to self-expression by the passions of scorn or of desire; it exceeds, in one way or another, the normal range of experience and emotion. Our romantic American literature is doubtless our greatest. And yet some of the most characteristic tendencies of American writing are to be found in the poetry of daily experience, in the quiet accustomed light that falls upon one's own doorway and garden, in the immemorial charm of going forth to one's labor and returning in the evening,--poetry old as the world.

* * * * *

Let us see how this glow of idealism touches some of the more intimate aspects of human experience. "Out of the three Reverences," says Wilhelm Meister, "springs the highest Reverence, Reverence for Oneself." Open the pages of Hawthorne. Moving wholly within the framework of established institutions, with no desire to shatter the existing scheme of social order, choosing as its heroes men of the meeting-house, town-meeting, and training-day, how intensely nevertheless does the imagination of this fiction-writer illuminate the Body and the Soul!

Take first the Body. The inheritance of English Puritanism may be traced throughout our American writing, in its reverence for physical purity. The result is something unique in literary history. Continental critics, while recognizing the intellectual and artistic powers revealed in _The Scarlet Letter_, have seldom realized the awfulness, to the Puritan mind, of the very thought of an adulterous minister. That a priest in southern Europe should break his vows is indeed scandalous; but the sin is regarded as a failure of the natural man to keep a vow requiring supernatural grace for its fulfilment; it may be that the priest had no vocation for his sacred office; he is unfrocked, punished, forgotten, yet a certain mantle of human charity still covers his offence. But in the Puritan scheme (and _The Scarlet Letter_, save for that one treacherous, warm human moment in the woodland where "all was spoken," lies wholly within the set framework of Puritanism) there is no forgiveness for a sin of the flesh. There is only Law, Law stretching on into infinitude until the mind shudders at it. Hawthorne knew his Protestant New England through and through. _The Scarlet Letter_ is the most striking example in our national literature of that idealization of physical purity, but hundreds of other romances and poems, less morbid if less great, assert in unmistakable terms the same moral conviction, the same ideal.

Yet, in spite of its theme, there was never a less adulterous novel than this book which plays so artistically with the letter A. The body is branded, is consumed, is at last, perhaps, transfigured by the intense rays of light emitted from the suffering soul.

"The soul is form and doth the body make."

In this intense preoccupation with the Soul, Hawthorne's romance is in unison with the more mystical and spiritual utterances of Catholicism as well as of Protestantism. It was in part a resultant of that early American isolation which contributed so effectively to the artistic setting of _The Scarlet Letter_. But in his doctrine of spiritual integrity, in the agonized utterance, "Be true--be true!" as well as in his reverence for purity of the body, our greatest romancer was typical of the imaginative literature of his countrymen. The restless artistic experiments of Poe presented the human body in many a ghastly and terrifying aspect of illness and decay, and distorted by all passions save one. His imagination was singularly sexless. Pathological students have pointed out the relation between this characteristic of Poe's writing, and his known tendencies toward opium-eating, alcoholism, and tuberculosis. But no such explanation is at hand to elucidate the absence of sexual passion from the novels of the masculine-minded Fenimore Cooper. One may say, indeed, that Cooper's novels, like Scott's, lack intensity of spiritual vision; that their tone is consonant with the views of a sound Church of England parson in the eighteenth century; and that the absence of physical passion, like the absence of purely spiritual insight, betrays a certain defect in Cooper's imaginative grasp and depth. But it is better criticism, after all, to remember that these three pioneers in American fiction-writing were composing for an audience in which Puritan traditions or tastes were predominant. Not one of the three men but would have instantly sacrificed an artistic effect, legitimate in the eyes of Fielding or Goethe or Balzac, rather than--in the phrase so often satirized--"bring a blush to the cheek of innocence." In other words, the presence of a specific audience, accustomed to certain Anglo-Saxon and Puritanic restraint of topic and of speech, has from the beginning of our imaginative literature cooperated with the instinct of our writers. That Victorian reticence which is so plainly seen even in such full-bodied writers as Dickens or Thackeray--a reticence which men like Mr. Bernard Shaw and Mr. Galsworthy and Mr. Wells think so hypocritical and dangerous to society and which they have certainly done their utmost to abolish--has hitherto dominated our American writing. The contemporary influence of great Continental writers to whom reticence is unknown, combined with the influence of a contemporary opera and drama to which reticence would be unprofitable, are now assaulting this dominant convention. Very possibly it is doomed. But it is only within recent years that its rule has been questioned.

One result of it may, I think, be fairly admitted. While very few writers of eminence, after all, in any country, wish to bring a "blush to the cheek of innocence," they naturally wish, as Thackeray put it in one of the best-known of his utterances, to be permitted to depict a man to the utmost of their power. American literary conventions, like English conventions, have now and again laid a restraining and compelling hand upon the legitimate exercise of this artistic instinct; and this fact has cooperated with many social, ethical, and perhaps physiological causes to produce a thinness or bloodlessness in our books. They are graceful, pleasing, but pale, like one of those cool whitish uncertain skies of an American spring. They lack "body," like certain wines. It is not often that we can produce a real Burgundy. We have had many distinguished fiction-writers, but none with the physical gusto of a Fielding, a Smollett, or even a Dickens, who, idealist and romanticist as he was, and Victorian as were his artistic preferences, has this animal life which tingles upon every page. We must confess that there is a certain quality of American idealism which is covertly suspicious or openly hostile to the glories of bodily sensation. Emerson's thin high shoulders peep up reproachfully above the desk; Lanier is playing his reproachful flute; Longfellow reads Fremont's Rocky Mountain experiences while lying abed, and sighs "But, ah, the discomforts!"; Irving's _Astoria_, superb as were the possibilities of its physical background, tastes like parlor exploration. Even Dana's _Before the Mast_ and Parkman's _Oregon Trail_, transcripts of robust actual experience, and admirable books, reveal a sort of physical paleness compared with Turgenieff's _Notes of a Sportsman_ and Tolstoi's _Sketches_ of Sebastopol and the Crimea. They are Harvard undergraduate writing, after all!

These facts illustrate anew that standing temptation of the critic of American literature to palliate literary shortcomings by the plea that we possess certain admirable non-literary qualities. The dominant idealism of the nation has levied, or seemed to levy, a certain tax upon our writing. Some instincts, natural to the full-blooded utterance of Continental literature, have been starved or eliminated here. Very well. The characteristic American retort to this assertion would be: Better our long record and habit of idealism than a few masterpieces more or less. As a people, we have cheerfully accepted the Puritan restraint of speech, we have respected the shamefaced conventions of decent and social utterance. Like the men and women described in Locker-Lampson's verses, Americans

"eat, and drink, and scheme, and plod,-- They go to church on Sunday; And many are afraid of God-- And more of Mrs. Grundy."

Now Mrs. Grundy is assuredly not the most desirable of literary divinities, but the student of classical literature can easily think of other divinities, celebrated in exquisite Greek and Roman verse, who are distinctly less desirable still.

"Not passion, but sentiment," said Hawthorne, in a familiar passage of criticism of his own _Twice-Told Tales_. How often must the student of American literature echo that half-melancholy but just verdict, as he surveys the transition from the spiritual intensity of a few of our earlier writers to the sentimental qualities which have brought popular recognition to the many. Take the word "soul" itself. Calvinism shadowed and darkened the meaning, perhaps, and yet its spiritual passion made the word "soul" sublime. The reaction against Calvinism has made religion more human, natural, and possibly more Christlike, but "soul" has lost the thrilling solemnity with which Edwards pronounced the word. Emerson and Hawthorne, far as they had escaped from the bonds of their ancestral religion, still utter the word "soul" with awe. But in the popular sermon and hymn and story of our day,--with their search after the sympathetic and the sentimental, after what is called in magazine slang "heart-interest,"--the word has lost both its intellectual distinction and its literary magic. It will regain neither until it is pronounced once more with spiritual passion.

But in literature, as in other things, we must take what we can get. The great mass of our American writing is sentimental, because it has been produced by, and for, an excessively sentimental people. The poems in Stedman's carefully chosen _Anthology_, the prose and verse in the two volume Stedman-Hutchinson collection of American Literature, the Library of Southern Literature, and similar sectional anthologies, the school Readers and Speakers,--particularly in the half-century between 1830 and 1880,--our newspapers and magazines,--particularly the so-called "yellow" newspapers and the illustrated magazines typified by _Harper's Monthly_,--are all fairly dripping with sentiment. American oratory is notoriously the most sentimental oratory of the civilized world. The _Congressional Record_ still presents such specimens of sentiment--delivered or given leave to be printed, it is true, for "home consumption" rather than to affect the course of legislation--as are inexplicable to an Englishman or a Frenchman or an Italian.

Immigrants as we all are, and migratory as we have ever been,--so much so that one rarely meets an American who was born in the house built by his grandfather,--we cling with peculiar fondness to the sentiment of "Home." The best-known American poem, for decades, was Samuel Woodworth's "Old Oaken Bucket," the favorite popular song was Stephen Foster's "My Old Kentucky Home," the favorite play was Denman Thompson's "Old Homestead." Without that appealing word "mother" the American melodrama would be robbed of its fifth act. Without pictures of "the child" the illustrated magazines would go into bankruptcy. No country has witnessed such a production of periodicals and books for boys and girls: France and Germany imitate in vain _The Youth's Companion_ and _St. Nicholas_, as they did the stories of "Oliver Optic" and _Little Women_ and _Little Lord Fauntleroy_.

The sentimental attitude towards women and children, which is one of the most typical aspects of American idealism, is constantly illustrated in our short stories. Bret Harte, disciple of Dickens as he was, and Romantic as was his fashion of dressing up his miners and gamblers, was accurately faithful to the American feeling towards the "kid" and the "woman." "Tennessee's Partner," "The Luck of Roaring Camp," "Christmas at Sandy Bar," are obvious examples. Owen Wister's stories are equally faithful and admirable in this matter. The American girl still does astonishing things in international novels, as she has continued to do since the eighteen-sixties, but they are astonishing mainly to the European eye and against the conventionalized European background. She does the same things at home, and neither she nor her mother sees why she should not, so universal among us is the chivalrous interpretation of actions and situations which amaze the European observer. The popular American literature which recognizes and encourages this position of the "young girl" in our social structure is a literature primarily of sentiment. The note of passion--in the European sense of that word--jars and shatters it. The imported "problem-play," written for an adult public in Paris or London, introduces social facts and intellectual elements almost wholly alien to the experience of American matinee audiences. Disillusioned historians of our literature have instanced this unsophistication as a proof of our national inexperience; yet it is often a sort of radiant and triumphant unsophistication which does not lose its innocence in parting with its ignorance.

That sentimental idealization of classes, whether peasant, bourgeois, or aristocratic, which has long been a feature of Continental and English poetry and fiction, is practically absent from American literature. Whatever the future may bring, there have hitherto been no fixed classes in American society. Webster was guilty of no exaggeration when he declared that the whole North was made up of laborers, and Lincoln spoke in the same terms in his well-known sentences about "hired laborers": "twenty-five years ago I was a hired laborer." The relative uniformity of economic and social conditions, which prevailed until toward the close of the nineteenth century, made, no doubt, for the happiness of the greatest number, but it failed, naturally, to afford that picturesqueness of class contrast and to stimulate that sentiment of class distinction, in which European literature is so rich.

Very interesting, in the light of contemporary economic conditions, is the effort made by American poets in the middle of the last century to glorify labor. They were not so much idealizing a particular laboring class, as endeavoring, in Whitman's words, "To teach the average man the glory of his walk and trade." Whitman himself sketched the American workman in almost every attitude which appealed to his own sense of the picturesque and heroic. But years before _Leaves of Grass_ was published, Whittier had celebrated in his _Songs of Labor_ the glorified images of lumberman and drover, shoemaker and fisherman. Lucy Larcom and the authors of _The Lowell Offering_ portrayed the fine idealism of the young women--of the best American stock--who went enthusiastically to work in the cotton-mills of Lowell and Lawrence, or who bound shoes by their own firesides on the Essex County farms. That glow of enthusiasm for labor was chiefly moral, but it was poetical as well. The changes which have come over the economic and social life of America are nowhere more sharply indicated than in that very valley of the Merrimac where, sixty and seventy years ago, one could "hear America singing." There are few who are singing to-day in the cotton-mills; the operators, instead of girls from the hill-farms, are Greeks, Lithuanians, Armenians, Italians. Whittier's drovers have gone forever; the lumbermen and deep-sea fishermen have grown fewer, and the men who still swing the axes and haul the frozen cod-lines are mostly aliens. The pride that once broke into singing has turned harsh and silent. "Labor" looms vast upon the future political and social horizon, but the songs of labor have lost the lyric note. They have turned into the dramas and tragedies of labor, as portrayed with the swift and fierce insistence of the short story, illustrated by the Kodak. In the great agricultural sections of the West and South the old bucolic sentiment still survives,--that simple joy of seeing the "frost upon the pumpkin" and "the fodder in the stock" which Mr. James Whitcomb Riley has sung with such charming fidelity to the type. But even on the Western farms toil has grown less manual. It is more a matter of expert handling of machinery. Reaping and binding may still have their poet, but he needs to be a Kipling rather than a Burns.

Our literature, then, reveals few traces of idealization of a class, and but little idealization of trades or callings. Neither class nor calling presents anything permanent to the American imagination, or stands for anything ultimate in American experience. On the other hand, our writing is rich in local sentiment and sectional loyalty. The short story, which has seized so greedily the more dramatic aspects of American energy, has been equally true to the quiet background of rural scenery and familiar ways. American idealism, as shown in the transformation of the lesser loyalties of home and countryside into the larger loyalties of state and section, and the absorption of these, in turn, into the emotions of nationalism, is particularly illustrated in our political verse. A striking example of the imaginative visualization of the political units of a state is the spirited roll-call of the counties in Whittier's "Massachusetts to Virginia." But the burden of that fine poem, after all, is the essential unity of Massachusetts as a sovereign state, girding herself to repel the attack of another sovereign state, Virginia. Now the evolution of our political history, both local and national, has tended steadily, for half a century, to the obliteration, for purposes of the imagination, of county lines within state lines. At the last Republican state convention held in Massachusetts, there were no county banners displayed, for the first time in half a century. Many a city-dweller to-day cannot tell in what county he is living unless he has happened to make a transfer of real estate. State lines themselves are fading away. The federal idea has triumphed. Doubtless the majority of the fellow citizens of John Randolph of Roanoke were all the more proud of him because the poet could say of him, in writing an admiring and mournful epitaph:--

"Beyond Virginia's border line His patriotism perished."

The great collections of Civil War verse, which are lying almost unread in the libraries, are store-houses of this ancient state pride and jealousy, which was absorbed so fatally into the larger sectional antagonism. "Maryland, my Maryland" gave place to "Dixie," just as Whittier's "Massachusetts to Virginia" was forgotten when marching men began to sing "John Brown's Body" and "The Battle Hymn of the Republic." The literature of sectionalism still lingers in its more lovable aspect in the verse and fiction which still celebrates the fairer side of the civilization of the Old South: its ideals of chivalry and local loyalty, its gracious women and gallant men. Our literature needs to cultivate this provincial affection for the past, as an offset to the barren uniformity which the federal scheme allows. But the ultimate imaginative victory, like the actual political victory of the Civil War, is with the thought and feeling of Nationalism. It is foreshadowed in that passionate lyric cry of Lowell, which sums up so much and, like all true passion, anticipates so much:--

"O Beautiful! my Country!"

The literary record of American idealism thus illustrates how deeply the conception of Nationalism has affected the imagination of our countrymen. The literary record of the American conception of liberty runs further back. Some historians have allowed themselves to think that the American notion of liberty is essentially declamatory, a sort of futile echo of Patrick Henry's "Give me Liberty or give me Death"; and not only declamatory, but hopelessly theoretical and abstract. They grant that it was a trumpet-note, no doubt, for agitators against the Stamp Act, and for pamphleteers like Thomas Paine; that it may have been a torch for lighting dark and weary ways in the Revolutionary War; but they believe it likewise to be a torch which gleams with the fire caught from France and which was passed back to France in turn when her own great bonfire was ready for lighting. The facts, however, are inconsistent with this picturesque theory of contemporary reactionists. It is true that the word "liberty" has been full of temptation for generations of American orators, that it has become an idol of the forum, and often a source of heat rather than of light. But to treat American Liberty as if she habitually wore the red cap is to nourish a Francophobia as absurd as Edmund Burke's. The sober truth is that the American working theory of Liberty is singularly like St. Paul's. "Ye have been called unto liberty; only use not liberty for an occasion to the flesh." A few sentences from John Winthrop, written in 1645, are significant: "There is a twofold liberty, natural ... and civil or federal. The first is common to man with beasts and other creatures. By this, man, as he stands in relation to man simply, hath liberty to do what he lists; it is a liberty to evil as well as to good. This liberty is incompatible and inconsistent with authority.... The other kind of liberty I call civil or federal, it may also be termed moral.... This liberty is the proper end and object of authority, and cannot subsist without it; and it is a liberty to that only which is good, just, and honest. This liberty you are to stand for, with the hazard (not only of your goods, but) of your lives, if need be.... This liberty is maintained and exercised in a way of subjection to authority; it is of the same kind of liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free."

There speaks the governor, the man of affairs, the typical citizen of the future republic. The liberty to do as one pleases is a dream of the Renaissance; but out of dreamland it does not work. Nobody, even in revolutionary France, imagines that it will work. Jefferson, who is popularly supposed to derive his notion of liberty from French theorists, is to all practical purposes nearer to John Winthrop than he is to Rousseau. The splendid phrases of his "Declaration" are sometimes characterized as abstractions. They are really generalizations from past political experience. An arbitrary king, assuming a liberty to do as he liked, had encroached upon the long-standing customs and authority of the colonists. Jefferson, at the bidding of the Continental Congress, served notice of the royal trespass, and incidentally produced (as Lincoln said) a "standard maxim for free society."

It is true, no doubt, that the word "liberty" became in Jefferson's day, and later, a mere partisan or national shibboleth, standing for no reality, degraded to a catchword, a symbol of antagonism to Great Britain. In the political debates and the impressive prose and verse of the anti-slavery struggle, the word became once more charged with vital meaning; it glowed under the heat and pressure of an idea. Towards the end of the nineteenth century it went temporarily out of fashion. The late Colonel Higginson, an ideal type of what Europeans call an "1848" man, attended at the close of the century some sessions of the American Historical Association. In his own address, at the closing dinner, he remarked that there was one word for which he had listened in vain during the reading of the papers by the younger men. It was the word "liberty." One of the younger school retorted promptly that since we had the thing liberty, we had no need to glorify the word. But Colonel Higginson, stanch adherent as he was of the "good old cause," was not convinced. Like many another lover of American letters, he thought that William Vaughn Moody's "Ode in Time of Hesitation" deserved a place by the side of Lowell's "Commemoration Ode," and that when the ultimate day of reckoning comes for the whole muddled Imperialistic business, the standard of reckoning must be "liberty" as Winthrop and Jefferson and Lincoln and Lowell and Vaughn Moody understood the word.

In the mean time we must confess that the history of our literature, with a few noble exceptions, shows a surprising defect in the passion for freedom. Tennyson's famous lines about "Freedom broadening slowly down from precedent to precedent" are perfectly American in their conservative tone; while it is Englishmen like Byron and Landor and Shelley and Swinburne who have written the most magnificent republican poetry. The "land of the free" turns to the monarchic mother country, after all, for the glow and thunder and splendor of the poetry of freedom. It is one of the most curious phenomena in the history of literature. Shall we enter the preoccupation plea once more? Enjoying the thing liberty, have we been therefore less concerned with the idea? Or is it simply another illustration of the defective passion of American literature?

Yet there is one phase of political loyalty which has been cherished by the imagination of Americans, and which has inspired noteworthy oratory and noble political prose. It is the sentiment of Union. In one sense, of course, this dates back to the period of Franklin's _bon mot_ about our all hanging together, or hanging separately. It is found in Hamilton's pamphlets, in Paine's _Crisis_, in the _Federalist_, in Washington's "Farewell Address." It is peculiarly associated with the name and fame of Daniel Webster, and, to a less degree, with the career of Henry Clay. In the stress of the debate over slavery, many a Northerner with abolitionist convictions, like the majority of Southerners with slave-holding convictions, forgot the splendid peroration of Webster's "Reply to Hayne" and were willing to "let the Union go." But in the four tragic and heroic years that followed the firing upon the American flag at Fort Sumter the sentiment of Union was made sacred by such sacrifices as the patriotic imagination of a Clay or a Webster had never dreamed. A new literature resulted. A lofty ideal of indissoluble Union was preached in pulpits, pleaded for in editorials, sung in lyrics, and woven into the web of fiction. Edward Everett Hale's _Man Without a Country_ became one of the most poignantly moving of American stories. In Walt Whitman's _Drum-Taps_ and his later poems, the "Union of these States" became transfigured with mystical significance: no longer a mere political compact, dissoluble at will, but a spiritual entity, a new incarnation of the soul of man.

We must deal later with that American instinct of fellowship which Whitman believed to have been finally cemented by the Civil War, and which has such import for the future of our democracy. There are likewise communal loyalties, glowing with the new idealism which has come with the twentieth century: ethical, municipal, industrial, and artistic movements which are full of promise for the higher life of the country, but which have not yet had time to express themselves adequately in literature. There are stirrings of racial loyalty among this and that element of our composite population,--as for instance among the gifted younger generation of American Jews,--a racial loyalty not antagonistic to the American current of ideas, but rather in full unison with it. Internationalism itself furnishes motives for the activity of the noblest imaginations, and the true literature of internationalism has hardly yet begun. It is in the play and counterplay of these new forces that the American literature of the twentieth century must measure itself. Communal feelings novel to Americans bred under the accepted individualism will doubtless assert themselves in our prose and verse. But it is to be remembered that the best writing thus far produced on American soil has been a result of the old conditions: of the old "Reverences"; of the pioneer training of mind and body; of the slow tempering of the American spirit into an obstinate idealism. We do not know what course the ship may take in the future, but

"We know what Master laid thy keel, What Workman wrought thy ribs of steel, Who made each mast and sail and rope, What anvil rang, what hammers beat, In what a forge and what a heat Were shaped the anchors of thy hope!"

IV

Romance and Reaction

The characteristic attitude of the American mind, as we have seen, is one of idealism. We may now venture to draw a smaller circle within that larger circle of idealistic impulses, and to label the smaller circle "romance." Here, too, as with the word "idealism," although we are to make abundant use of literary illustrations of national tendencies, we have no need of a severely technical definition of terms. When we say, "Tom is an idealist" and "Lorenzo is a romantic fellow," we convey at least one tolerably clear distinction between Tom and Lorenzo. The idealist has a certain characteristic habit of mind or inclination of spirit. When confronted by experience, he reacts in a certain way. In his individual and social impulses, in the travail of his soul, or in his commerce with his neighbors and the world, he behaves in a more or less well-defined fashion. The romanticist, when confronted by the same objects and experiences, exhibits another type of behavior. Lorenzo, though he be Tom's brother, is a different fellow; he is--in the opinion of his friends, at least--a rather more peculiar person, a creature of more varying moods, of heightened feelings, of stranger ways. Like Tom, he is a person of sentiment, but his sentiment attaches itself, not so much to everyday aspects of experience, as to that which is unusual or terrifying, lovely or far away; he possesses, or would like to possess, bodily or spiritual daring. He has the adventurous heart. He is of those who love to go down to the sea in ships and do business in great waters. Lorenzo the romanticist is made of no finer clay than Tom the idealist, but his nerves are differently tuned. Your deep-sea fisherman, after all, is only a fisherman at bottom. That is to say, he too is an idealist, but he wants to catch different species of fish from those which drop into the basket of the landsman. Precisely what he covets, perhaps he does not know. I was once foolish enough to ask an old Alsatian soldier who was patiently holding his rod over a most unpromising canal near Strassburg, what kind of fish he was fishing for. "All kinds," was his rebuking answer, and I took off my hat to the veteran romanticist.

The words "romance" and "romanticism" have been repeated to the ears of our generation with wearisome iteration. Not the least of the good luck of Wordsworth and Coleridge lay in the fact that they scarcely knew that they were "romanticists." Middle-aged readers of the present day may congratulate themselves that in their youth they read Wordsworth and Coleridge simply because it was Wordsworth and Coleridge and not documents illustrating the history of the romantic movement. But the rising generation is sophisticated. For better or worse it has been taught to distinguish between the word "romance" on the one side, and the word "romanticism" on the other. "Romantic" is a useful but overworked adjective which attaches itself indiscriminately to both "romance" and "romanticism." Professor Vaughan, for example, and a hundred other writers, have pointed out that in the narrower and more usual sense, the words "romance" and "romanticism" point to a love of vivid coloring and strongly marked contrasts; to a craving for the unfamiliar, the marvellous, and the supernatural. In the wider and less definite sense, they signify a revolt from the purely intellectual view of man's nature; a recognition of the instincts and the passions, a vague intimation of sympathy between man and the world around him,--in one word, the sense of mystery. The narrower and the broader meanings pass into one another by imperceptible shades. They are affected by the well-known historic conditions for romantic feeling in the different European countries. The common factor, of course, is the man with the romantic world set in his heart. It is Gautier with his love of color, Victor Hugo enraptured with the sound of words, Heine with his self-destroying romantic irony, Novalis with his blue flower, and Maeterlinck with his _Blue Bird_.

But these romantic men of letters, writing in epochs of romanticism, are by no means the only children of romance. Sir Humphrey Gilbert and Sir Walter Raleigh were as truly followers of "the gleam" as were Spenser or Marlowe. The spirit of romance is found wherever and whenever men say to themselves, as Don Quixote's niece said of her uncle, that "they wish better bread than is made of wheat," or when they look within their own hearts, and assert, as the poet Young said in 1759, long before the English romantic movement had begun, "there is more in the spirit of man than mere prose-reason can fathom."

We are familiar, perhaps too remorsefully familiar, with the fact th