Civilization in the United States: An inquiry by thirty Americans

by Unknown

II. AS AN IRISHMAN SEES IT

The application of the term “shirt-sleeve” to American diplomacy is perhaps the most concise expression of the conception we have formed in Europe of life in the United States. We imagine that it is only necessary to cross the Atlantic Ocean to find a people young and vigorous in its emancipation from ancient forms and obsolete ceremonies. The average visitor returns, after a brief tour through the more urbane centres of European imitation, and tries to startle us with a narrative in which a few picturesque crudities are supposed to indicate the democratic ease of American civilization. His mind is filled with an incoherent jumble of skyscrapers, express elevators, ice water, chewing-gum, and elevated railroads, so that his inevitable contribution to the literature relating to America becomes the mere chronicle of a tourist’s experiences. Every deviation from European practice is emphasized, and in proportion to the writer’s consequent personal discomfort, he will conjure up a hideous picture of uncouthness, whose effect is to confirm us in our estimate of American progress ... or barbarism, as the case may be. If the critical stranger happens to be a well-known poet or dramatist, he will probably succeed in passing lightly over those minor inconveniences, which the generosity of wealthy admirers has prevented him from experiencing at first hand.

The consequence is that there is no subject more hopelessly involved in a cloud of voluminous complaint and banal laudation than American life as seen by the foreigner. Neither the enthusiasts nor the fault-finders have contributed much of any assistance either to Europeans or to the Americans themselves. The former accept America at its own valuation, the latter complain of precisely those things upon which the average citizen prides himself. It is not easy to decide which class of critics has helped most effectively to perpetuate the legend of American freedom; the minor commentators who hold democracy to be the cause of every offence, or the higher critics, like Viscount Bryce, who, finding no American commonwealth, proceeded to invent one. The objectors are dismissed as witnesses to the incapacity of the servile European to appreciate true liberty and equality; the well-disposed are gratefully received as evangelists of a gospel to which Americans subscribe without excessive introspection. There is something touching in the gratitude felt towards the author of “The American Commonwealth.” Who would have believed that a foreigner, and a Britisher at that, could make a monument of such imposing brick with the straws of political oratory in the United States?

On one point all observers have involuntarily agreed. Whether with approval or disapproval, they have depicted for us a society which presents such marked divergencies from our own manners and customs that there is not one of us but comes to America believing that his best or worst hopes will be confirmed. It is, therefore, somewhat disconcerting to confess that neither presentment has been realized. To have passed from Continental Europe to New York, via London, is to deprive oneself of that social and intellectual shock which is responsible for the uniformly profound impression which transatlantic conditions make upon the European mind. So many continentals enjoy in the United States their first direct contact with Anglo-Saxon institutions and modes of thought that the revelation cannot fail to stimulate them. Their writings frequently testify to a naïve ignorance of the prior existence in England of what excites their dismay or admiration in America. If it be asked why, then, have Englishmen similarly reacted to the same stimuli, if acquaintance with England blunts the fine edge of perception, the reply must be: the quality of their emotion is different. The impression made upon a mind formed by purely Latin traditions necessarily differs from that received by a mind previously subjected to Anglo-Saxon influences. Consequently, the student of American life who has neither the motive of what might be called family jealousy, in the Englishman, nor the mentality, wholly innocent of alien culture, of the Latin, would seem well equipped to view the subject from another angle.

To the good European the most striking characteristic of the United States is a widespread intellectual anæmia. So far from exhibiting those traits of freedom and progress which harrow the souls of sensitive aristocrats in Europe, the American people alarm the outsider in search of stimulating ideas by their devotion to conventions and formulæ. As soon as one has learnt to discount those lesser manifestations of independence, whose perilous proximity to discourtesy gives them an exaggerated importance in the eyes of superficial critics, the conventionality of the American becomes increasingly evident. So many foreigners have been misled—mainly because of an apparent rudeness—by this show of equality, this ungraciousness in matters of service, that one hesitates at first to dismiss the unconventional American as a myth closely related to that of the “immoral Frenchman.” It is only when prolonged association has revealed the timid respectability beneath this veneer of informality that it becomes possible to understand the true position of America. From questioning individuals one proceeds to an examination of the public utterances of prominent men, and the transition from the press to literature is easily made. At length comes the discovery that mentally the United States is a generation or two behind Western Europe. The rude and vigorous young democracy, cited by its admirers in extenuation of æsthetic sins of omission and commission, suddenly stands forth attired in the garment of ideas which clothed early Victorian England.

This condition is largely due to the absence of an educated class accustomed to leisure. To the American work for work’s sake has a dignity unknown in Europe, where it is rare to find anybody working for mere wages if he has any means of independent subsistence, however small. In America the contrary is the case, and people who could afford to cultivate their own personalities prefer to waste their energies upon some definite business. Almost all the best that has come out of Europe has been developed in that peculiar class which sacrificed money-making for the privilege of leisure and relative independence. The only corresponding class in the United States is that of the college professors, who are an omnipresent menace to the free interplay of ideas. Terrorized by economic fears and intellectual inhibitions, they have no independence. They are despised by the plain people because of their failure to make money; and to them are relegated all matters which are considered of slight moment, namely, learning and the arts. In these fields the pedants rule unchallenged, save when some irate railroad presidents discover in their teachings the heresy of radicalism. Æsthetics is a science as incomprehensible to them as beauty, and they prefer to substitute the more homely Christian ethics. Moral preoccupations are their sole test of excellence. The views of these gentlemen and their favourite pupils fill the bookshelves and the news-stands.

The professorial guardians of Colonial precedents and traditions determine what the intellectual life of America shall be. Hence the cult of anæmia. Instead of writing out of themselves and their own lives, they aspire to nothing greater than to be classed as English. They are obsessed by the standards imposed from without, and their possible achievement is thwarted. While they are still shaking their heads over Poe, and trying to decide whether Whitman is respectable, a national literature is growing up without the guidance and help which it should expect from them. At the same time, as the official pundits have the ear of Europe, and particularly of England, American culture is known only as they reflect it. It is natural, therefore, that the European attitude should be as contemptuous as it so often is.

When the reviews publish some ignorant and patronizing dissertation on the American novel or American poetry, by an English writer, they are pained by the evident lack of appreciation. The ladies and gentlemen whose works are respectfully discussed by the professors, and warmly recommended by the reviewers, do not seem to receive the consideration due to them for their unflinching adherence to the noblest standards of academic criticism. When these torch-bearers of the purest Colonial tradition are submitted to the judgment of their “big” cousins in England, there is a noticeable condescension in those foreigners. But why should they profess to admire as the brightest stars in the American firmament what are, after all, the phosphorescent gleams of literary ghosts? Is it any wonder that the majority of Britishers can continue in the comfortable belief that there is practically no American literature worthy of serious attention?

The academic labours of American professors of literature are an easy and constant butt for English critics. Yet, they rarely think of questioning the presentation of literary America for which these gentlemen are so largely responsible. When have the Stuart Shermans and Paul Elmer Mores (and their diminutives) recognized the existence of a living American writer of genius, originality, or distinction? The only justification for their existences is their alleged capacity to estimate literary values. If they cannot do so, it is hardly surprising that their English patrons, who imagine that they are representative men, do not often penetrate the veil of Colonialism. Whatever their outward professions, the majority of Englishmen regard all other English-speaking countries as Colonies. Since they are stubborn enough when faced with undeniable proof of the contrary, as in Ireland, it is unlikely they will persuade themselves unaided that they are mistaken. When will American criticism have the courage to base the claims of contemporary literature on those works which are essentially and unmistakably American?

The mandarins, of course, have stood for reaction in all countries, and there is no intention here to acquit the European of the species. So many of his worst outrages are matters of history that it would be futile to pretend that he is untrue to type. Nevertheless, his position in Europe is measurably more human than in this country, owing to the greater freedom of intellectual intercourse. In America the mandarin is firmly established on a pedestal which rests upon the vast unculture of an immense immigrant population, enjoying for the first time the benefits of sufficient food and heat. He is obviously secure in his conviction that those qualified to challenge him—except perhaps some isolated individual—are not likely to do so, being of the same convention as himself. He belongs to the most perfect trade-union, one which has a practical monopoly of its labour. His European colleagues, on the contrary, live in constant dread of traitors from their ranks, or worse still, the advance of an opposing force manned with brains of no inferior calibre. France, for example, can boast of a remarkable roll of names which never adorned the councils of pedantry, or not until they had imposed a new tradition. The two finest minds of modern French literature, Anatole France and Rémy de Gourmont, are illustrations of this fact. France has never allowed his academic honours to restrict the daring play of his ideas; Gourmont died in the admiration of all cultivated men, although his life was a prolonged protest against the orthodox, who never succeeded in taming him.

What America requires is an unofficial intelligentsia as strong and as articulate as the political and literary pundits, whose purely negative attitude first exasperates, and finally sterilizes, every impulse towards originality. Only when a survey is made of the leading figures in the various departments of American life is it possible fully to realize the weight of inertia which presses upon the intellect of the country. While the spirit of enterprise and progress is stimulated and encouraged in all that relates to material advancement, the artistic and reasoning faculties are deadened. Scientific study, when directed to obviously practical ends, is the only form of mental effort which can count upon recognition and reward. It is not without its significance that the Johns Hopkins Medical School is the one learned institution in America whose fame is world-wide amongst those who appreciate original research, otherwise the names of few universities are mentioned outside academic circles. Even in the field of orthodox literary culture the mandarins have, in the main, failed to do anything positive. They have preferred to bury their talent in anæmic commentary. The reputed intellectuals are still living on a tradition bequeathed by the attenuated transcendentalism of the Bostonian era.

That tradition was, after all, but a refinement of the notorious Puritanism of New England. Having lost whatever semblance of dignity the Emersons and Thoreaus conferred upon it, its subsequent manifestations have been a decadent reversion to aboriginal barbarism. This retrograde movement, so far as it affects social life, is noticeable in the ever-increasing number of crusades and taboos, the constant probing of moral and industrial conditions, unrelated to any well-considered desire for improvement, or intelligent conception of progress. The orgies of prohibition and suppression are unbelievable to the civilized European, who has no experience of a community in which everything from alcohol to Sunday tennis has attracted the attention of the “virtuosi of vice”—to quote the phrase of a discerning critic. Innumerable commissions, committees, and boards of enquiry supplement the muck-raking of yellow journalism, and encourage espionage in social reformers. But what has the country to show for this? Probably the greatest number of bungled, unsolved, and misunderstood problems of all industrial nations of the same rank.

These debauches of virtue, however, are the direct outcome of the mental conditions fostered by those who are in a position to mould public opinion. The crowd which tolerates, or participates in, the Puritanical frenzy is merely reflecting the current political and social doctrine of the time. Occasionally the newspapers will hold a symposium, or the reviews will invite the aid of some foreign critic, to ascertain the reasons for the prevailing puerility of American fiction. Invariably it is urged, and rightly, that the novel is written by women for women. Where almost all articles of luxury are produced for female consumption, and the arts are deemed unessential to progress, the latter are naturally classed with uneconomic production destined to amuse the idle. They are left to the women, as the men explain, who have not yet understood the true dignity of leisure. They are abandoned, in other words, to the most unreal section of the community, to those centres of culture, the drama leagues and literary clubs, composed of male and female spinsters. Needless to say, any phrase or idea likely to have disturbed a mid-Victorian vicarage will be ruled out as unseemly.

The malady of intellectual anæmia is not restricted to any one department of American life. In politics, as in art and literature, there is a dread of reality. The emasculation of thought in general is such as to render colourless the ideas commonly brought to the attention of the public. Perhaps the most palpable example of this penchant for platitude is the substantial literature of a pseudo-philosophic character which encumbers the book-stores, and is read by thousands of right-thinking citizens. Namby-pamby works, it is true, exist to some extent in all Protestant countries, but their number, prevalence, and cost in America are evidence of the demand they must meet. It is not for nothing that the books of thoughtful writers are crowded from shelves amply stocked with the meditations of an Orison Swett Marden, a Henry van Dyke, or a Hamilton Wright Mabie—to mention at random some typical authors.

These moral soothsayers successfully compete with moving-picture actors, and novelists whose claim to distinction is their ability to write the best-seller of the season. If they addressed themselves only to the conventicles, the phenomenon would have less significance, but the conventicles have their own minor prophets. The conclusion, therefore, suggests itself, that these must be the leaders and moulders of American thought. The suspicion is confirmed when men of the same stamp, sometimes, indeed, the actual authors of this evangelical literature, are found holding the most important public offices. To have written a methodist-tract would appear to be an unfailing recommendation for promotion. It is rare to find the possessor of such a mentality relegated to the obscurity he deserves.

A wish to forestall the accusation of exaggeration or inaccuracy imposes the painful obligation of citing specific instances of the tendency described. Who are the leading public men of this country, and what have they written? Besides the classic volumes of Thiers and Guizot must we set such amiable puerilities as “The New Freedom,” “On Being Human,” and “When a Man Comes to Himself.” Even the essays of Raymond Poincaré do not sound the depths indicated by the mere titles of these presidential works. But the author of “The State,” for all his antiquated theories of government, writes measurably above the level of that diplomatist whose copious bibliography includes numerous variations upon such themes as “The Gospel for a World of Sin,” “The First Christmas Tree,” and “The Blue Flower.” A search through the underworld of parish magazines in England, France, and Germany would probably reveal something to be classed with the works of Dr. Lyman Abbott, but the authors would not be entrusted with the editorship of a leading weekly review. As for the writings of his associate, the existence of his book on Shakespeare is a testimony to Anglo-Saxon indifference to the supreme genius of the race.

It is hardly necessary to dwell upon the literary labours of William Jennings Bryan, ex-Secretary of State, except to wonder that they did not alone suffice to disqualify him for such an office. They belong to the same category as those volumes of popular American philosophy whose titles are: “Character the Grandest Thing in the World,” “Cheerfulness as a Life Power,” and “The Miracle of Right Thought.” If those quoted are to be laid to the charge of Mr. Orison Swett Marden, every department of American life contains prominent men who might say: There, but for the grace of God, speak I. The sanctimonious breath of the uplifter tarnishes the currency of ideas in almost every circle of society. Irrespective of party, Republicans, Democrats, and Socialists help to build up this monument of platitude which may one day mark the resting place of the American brain. Books, reviews, magazines, and newspapers are largely conceived in the evangelical spirit. The average contributor, when not a foreigner, suggests a Sunday-school superintendent who has (perhaps) missed his vocation. Where the subject excludes the pedantry of the professors, the tone is intensely moral, and the more it is so the surer one may be that the writer is a colonel, a rear-admiral, or a civil officer of the State or Federal government. Imagination refuses to conceive these functionaries as fulfilling their duties efficiently in any service, other than that of the Salvation Army or a revivalist campaign.

The stage of culture which these phenomena presuppose cannot but be hostile to artistic development in such as escape contamination. It has already been postulated that the just claims of ethics and æsthetics are hopelessly confounded in America, to the evident detriment of art in all its branches. To the poor quality of the current political and social philosophy corresponds an equally mediocre body of literary criticism. A recent historian of American literature accords a high place amongst contemporary critics, to the author of “Shelburne Essays,” and other works. These volumes are dignified as “our nearest approach to those ‘Causeries du Lundi’ of an earlier age,” and may well be taken as representative. Typical of the cold inhumanity which a certain type of “cultured person” deems essential is the circumstance related, by Mr. Paul Elmer More himself, in explanation of the genesis of these essays. “In a secluded spot,” he writes, “in the peaceful valley of the Androscoggin I took upon myself to live two years as a hermit,” and “Shelburne Essays” was the fruit of his solitary mediations. The historian is mightily impressed by this evidence of superiority. “In another and far more unusual way he qualified himself for his high office of critic,” says Professor Pattee, “he immured himself for two years in solitude.”... “The period gave him time to read leisurely, thoughtfully, with no nervous subconsciousness that the product of that reading was to be marketable.”

What a revelation of combined timidity and intellectual snobbishness there is in this attitude so fatuously endorsed by a writer for the schools! We can imagine what the effect of such a pose must be upon the minds of the students whom the professor would constrain to respect. Only a young prig could pretend to be favourably impressed by this pseudo-Thoreau in the literary backwoods. The impulse of most healthy young men would be to turn in contempt from an art so unnatural as this conception of criticism implies. How are they to know that the Taines, Sainte-Beuves, Brunetières, and Arnolds of the world are not produced by expedients so primitive as to suggest the mise en scène of some latter-day Messiah, a Dowie, or a Mrs. Baker Eddy? The heralds of new theologies may find the paraphernalia of asceticism and aloofness a useful part of their stock in trade—neither is associated with the great criticism of literature. The causeries of Sainte-Beuve were not written in an ivory tower, yet they show no traces of that “nervous subconsciousness” which our professor finds inseparable from reading that is “marketable.”

The suspicion of insincerity in this craving for the wilderness will be strengthened by reference to the first of Mr. More’s volumes. Whatever may have been the case of its successors, this work was certainly the product of his retirement. What, then, are the subjects of such a delicate nature that they could not be discussed within the sound of “the noisy jargon of the market-place”? Of the eleven essays, only four deal with writers whose proximity to the critic’s own age might justify a retreat, in order that they be judged impartially, and without reference to popular enthusiasm and the prevalent fashion of the moment. The seven most substantial studies in the book are devoted to flogging horses so dead that no fear of their kicking existed. “A Hermit’s Notes on Thoreau,” “The Solitude of Nathaniel Hawthorne,” “The Origins of Hawthorne and Poe,” “The Influence of Emerson,” “The Spirit of Carlyle”—these are a few of the startling topics which Mr. More could discuss only with fasting and prayer! Any European schoolmaster could have written these essays in the leisure moments of his Sunday afternoons or Easter vacation.

No more remarkable profundity or originality will be found in the critic’s essays in contemporary literature. His strictures upon Lady Gregory’s versions of the Irish epic, and his comments upon the Celtic Renaissance in general are the commonplaces of all hostile English criticism. “The shimmering hues of decadence rather than the strong colours of life” is the phrase in which he attempts to estimate the poetry of the Literary Revival in Ireland. In fact, for all his isolation Mr. More was obsessed by the critical cant of the hour, as witness his readiness to apply the term “decadent” to all and sundry. The work of Arthur Symons is illuminated by this appellation, as is also that of W. B. Yeats. The jargon of the literary market-place, to vary Mr. More’s own cliché, is all that he seems to have found in that “peaceful valley of the Androscoggin.” Even poor Tolstoy is branded as “a decadent with the humanitarian superimposed,” an application of the word which renders its previous employment meaningless. As a crowning example of incomprehension may be cited Mr. More’s opinion that the English poet, Lionel Johnson, is “the one great ... and genuinely significant poet of the present Gaelic movement.” In the circumstances, it is not surprising that he should pronounce Irishmen incapable of exploiting adequately the themes of Celtic literature. For this task he considers the Saxon genius more qualified.

With these examples before us it is unnecessary to examine the remaining volumes of “Shelburne Essays.” Having started with a distorted conception of the critical office, the author naturally contributed nothing helpful to the literature of American criticism. His laborious platitudes do not help us to a better appreciation of the dead, his dogmatic hostility nullifies his judgments upon the living. Not once has he a word of discerning censure or encouragement for any rising talent. Like most of his colleagues, Mr. More prefers to exercise his faculties at the expense of reputations already established, save when he condescends to repeat the commonplaces of complaint against certain of the better known modern writers. He is so busy with Mrs. Gaskell, Charles Lamb, Milton, Plato, and Dickens that he can find time to mention only some fifteen Americans, not one of them living.

Such is the critic whom Professor Pattee salutes as “consistent” and “courageous,” having “standards of criticism” which make him comparable to Sainte-Beuve. As editor of “the leading critical review of America,” we are assured that Mr. More had “a dominating clientèle and a leader’s authority.” Alas! There can be no doubt as to this, though it is very doubtful if the fact can be regarded as “one of the most promising signs for that new literary era which already is overdue.” That era will long continue overdue while criticism remains absorbed in the past, aloof from life and implacably hostile to every manifestation of originality. If the new literary generation were merely ignored its lot would be comparatively happy. But the mandarins come down periodically from their Olympic communings with George Eliot and Socrates, to fill the reviews with verbose denunciations of whatever is being written independently of their idols. The oracles having spoken, the newcomers are left with an additional obstacle in the way of their reaching the indifferent ear of the crowd. The crowd wallows in each season’s literary novelties, satisfied that whatever is well advertised is good. Rather than face the subjects endorsed by the frigid enthusiasm of Mr. Paul Elmer More or Stuart Sherman, Mr. W. C. Brownell and Professor Brander Matthews, it takes refuge in fields where the writ of pedantry does not run. Meanwhile, the task of welcoming new talent is left to amiable journalists, whose casual recommendations, usually without any background of critical experience, are accepted as the judgments of competent experts. The “colyumist” has to perform the true function of the critic.

Although anæmia is the dominant characteristic of intellectual life in the United States, the reaction against that condition is none the less worthy of notice. When we remember that the fervour of righteousness is the very breath of current philosophy, we are also reminded that crudeness, sensationalism, and novelty are commonly held by Europeans to be the quintessence of America. It might be replied, in answer to this objection, that Hearst newspapers, and the vaudeville theology of Billy Sunday, are the only alternatives to the prim conventionality of authoritative journalism, and the sanctimoniousness of popular leaders. The man in the street obtains the illusion of strenuous cerebral activity when he contrasts the homely qualities of those prophets of democracy with the spinster-like propriety and beatific purity of prominent publicists and statesmen. He likes to hear his master’s voice, it is true, but he likes even more to hear his own, especially where his personal interests are at issue. The æsthetic obiter dicta of the professors, like the language of diplomacy, are concerned with questions sufficiently remote to make sonority an acceptable substitute for thought.

In the realm of ideas, nevertheless, there is a more or less articulate expression of reaction, mainly concentrated in the larger cities of the East. There the professional supermen and their female counterparts have come together by tacit agreement, and have attempted to shake off the incubus of respectability. The extremists impress one as being overpowered by a sense of their own sinful identity. In a wild burst of hysterical revolt they are plunged into a debauch of ideas from which they are emerging in a very shaken and parlous condition. For the most part their adventures, mental and otherwise, have been in the domain of sex, with a resultant flooding of the “radical” market by varied tomes upon the subject. What the bookstores naïvely catalogue as the literature of advanced thought is a truly wonderful salade russe, in which Krafft-Ebbing and Forel compete with Freud and Eugene Debs. Karl Marx, and Signora Montessori, Professor Scott Nearing, and Havelock Ellis engage the same attention as the neo-Malthusian pamphleteers, and the young ladies whose novels tell of what Flaubert called “les souillures du mariage et les platitudes de l’adultère.”

The natural morbidity of the Puritan mind is exasperated in advanced circles, whose interest is nothing if not catholic. Let Brieux discourse of venereal disease, or Strindberg expound his tragedies of prurience, their success is assured amongst those who would believe them geniuses, rather than risk the ignominy of agreement with the champions of orthodoxy. So long as our European pornographers are serious and inartistic, they need have no fear of America. Unbalanced by prolonged contemplation of the tedious virtues of New England, a generation has arisen whose great illusion is that the transvaluation of all values may be effected by promiscuity. Lest they should ever incur the suspicion of conservatism the emancipated have a permanent welcome for everything that is strange or new. The blush on the cheek of the vice-crusader is their criterion of excellence.

By an irony of fate, however, they are condemned to the disheartening spectacle of their moral bogies being received into a society but one removed from the Olympians themselves. In recent years it has been the practice of the latter to accept certain reputations, when they have passed through the sieve of the literary clubs and drama leagues. In fact, candidates for academic immortality frequently serve on the board of these literary filtration plants. While the mandarins execute their ritual in the cult of Longfellow and Bryant, and excommunicate heretical moderns, their servitors are engaged upon an ingenious task. They discover the more innocuous subjects of “radical” enthusiasm, deprive them of whatever sting of originality their work possessed, and then submit the result discreetly to the official pundits. When these judges have satisfied themselves as to the sterility of the innovations, their imprimatur is granted, and another mediocrity is canonized. Ibsen is saluted because of his “message,” and “Anna Karenina” becomes a masterpiece, because Tolstoy was a Christian. While remarkable talents at home are ignored or vilified, the fifth-rate European is in the process of literary naturalization. Mr. Masefield receives the benediction of Paul Elmer More, who in the same breath tries to convince us that he is qualified to pronounce “The Spoon River Anthology” a bad joke.

Nothing more clearly demonstrates the futility and disrepute of criticism in this country than the constant surrenders to the prestige of the foreigner. A cheap fashion in European literature has only to be thrust with sufficient publicity upon the women’s literary clubs, and parish meeting-houses, to ensnare the uneasy wearers of the academic crown. Give them time and they will be found praising a translated French poet for precisely those qualities which offend them in the protégés of Miss Harriet Monroe. The young Englishman, Rupert Brooke, might have contributed to “Poetry” for ten years without securing any more recognition than did the American, Robert Frost. But now both reputations, made in England, are widely accepted, and the inevitable professor is found to tread respectfully where Henry James rushed in. Compare the critical essays which James wrote during a period of thirty years with the stereotyped Bostonian theses of the men he left behind him. Yet nobody will accuse James of a disregard for tradition.

The American word “standpatter” is curiously precise as a designation of the species. The conservative critic in Europe, Brunetière, for example, is never so purely negative as his counterpart on this side of the Atlantic. When Brunetière adversely criticized the Symbolist movement in French poetry he did so intelligently, not in that laboriously facetious fashion which is affected by the Stuart Shermans and W. H. Boyntons when they are moved to discuss les jeunes. Brunetière, in a word, was a man of education and culture, capable of defending rationally his own theories, without suggesting that the unfamiliar was necessarily bad. He condemned the excesses of the new school, not the school itself. If he had been in America, he would have denied the Symbolists even the right to exist. Edward Dowden might also be cited as a similar example, in English literature, of enlightened conservatism. Dowden was partly responsible for bringing Whitman to the favourable notice of the English public, and his work stands as a proof that respect for the classics does not involve hostility to the moderns. Just as he was able to write a masterpiece of Shakespearean criticism without retiring into hermitage, so he was qualified to appreciate original genius when it presented itself. He was not paralyzed, in short, by the weight of his literary traditions and conventions.

A thousand and one reasons have been advanced to explain the absence of a genuine American literature, and all of them are probably true. The country is comparatively young, and its energies have been, are still, directed chiefly towards the exploitation of material resources and the conquest of natural difficulties. Racially the nation is in an embryonic stage, and until some homogeneity is attained the creation of a native tradition must be slow. Moreover, the conflict of diverse races implies, in a broad sense, the clash of two or more civilizations, one of which must impose its culture if any organized progress is to be made. The language of the Hyphenated States is English, but to what extent will the nation in being evolve in accordance with this linguistic impulse? Will it be Anglo-Saxon, Teutonic, Latin, or Slav? These are a few of the problems which have a direct bearing upon the intellectual development of the country. They must be solved before America can give her imprint to the arts. They cannot be solved by the assumption that the Anglo-Saxon hyphen is alone authentic. The permanent hypothesis of Colonialism must be abandoned, if “Americanization” is ever to be more than the silliest political cant. Puritanism must be confined to the conventicles, to its natural habitat. It must not be allowed to masquerade as art, philosophy, and statesmanship. The evangelical tyranny exists elsewhere, but only in America has it invaded every branch of the national life. In the more impatient and realistic generation which has emerged from the world war this monstrous extension of prohibitions is arousing a violent reaction. It is rare now to find a young American who does not cry out against American civilization.

To the disinterested European, this spectacle is an affecting illustration of what may be called the enchantment of distance. Evidently these disconsolate citizens imagine that there is a way of escape from the Presbyterian wilderness, an oasis in the desert of one hundred per cent. Americanism, where every prospect pleases and man is only relatively vile. One listens to the intelligentsia, rendered more than usually loquacious by generous potations of unconstitutional Scotch whiskey, cursing the subtle blow to the arts administered by the Volstead denial of the necessary ambrosia. Advanced thinkers revelling in the delights of a well-organized polygamy, have taken me aside to explain how the prophets of Methodism have laid waste this fair land. I have read desperate appeals to all young men of spirit to shake off the yoke of evangelistic philistinism by expatriation to more urbane centres of culture.

These are brave words, coming as they do, for the most part, from those who are in no wise incommoded by the ukases of the gospel-tent tyrants, and who have taken appropriate measures to defeat the Eighteenth Amendment. Back of all their plaints is the superstition that Europe is free from the blight which makes America intolerable in their eyes. They do not know that the war has almost destroyed the Europe of a civilized man’s affections. Socially, politically, and intellectually that distracted continent is rapidly expiring in the arms of profiteers and class-conscious proletarians, who have decided between them to leave not a blade of culture upstanding. The leisured class, which was rarely the wealthiest, is being ground out of existence by the plutocracy and the proletariat. That was the class which made the old Europe possible, yet there are Americans who go on talking as if its extinction did not knock the bottom out of their utopia. Most of these disgruntled Americans are radicals, who strive to forward the designs of the plain people and their advocates.

Yet, every European knows that if prohibition is making the headway it surely is, the chief reason must be sought in the growth of radicalism. From Bernard Shaw to Trotsky, our revolutionaries are “dry.” Their avowed ideal is a state of society in which the allurements of love are reduced to a eugenic operation, the mellowing influences of liquor are abolished, and compulsory labour on the Taylor efficiency plan of scientific management is substituted. In fine, by the benign workings of democratic progress Europe is moving steadily toward the state of affairs attributed here by disillusioned intellectuals to the sinister machinations of Wall Street and the evangelists.

No doubt America was a purer and happier place in 1620 than in 1920. No Sumner was needed to keep the eyes of the settlers from the dimpled knees of Ziegfeld’s beauties, and the platitudes of the Wilsonian epoch were the brightest flowers of wisdom in 1776. Alas! that it should be so, and in every country of our Western World. If the Magna Charta were to be offered for signature in London now, some nasty Bolshevik would be sure to prove that the document was drawn up in a private conclave of the international financiers. If Lincoln were to make his Gettysburg speech to-day the world would snicker irreverently, and a dreadfully superior person, with a Cambridge accent (like John Maynard Keynes, C.B.), would publish the “Economic Consequences of the Civil War,” full of sardonic gibes at the innocent evangelism of Springfield. As for the Declaration of Independence—well, during “the late unpleasantness” we saw what happened to such un-American sedition-mongers. In fine, things are not what they used to be; we pine for what is not, and so forth. Of this only we may be sure, that America corresponds neither more nor less than any other country to the dreams of its ancestors.

Indeed, to be more affirmative in this plea for America, it is probable that this country has followed more closely the intentions of its founders than the critics will admit. Unlike most European nations, the Americans have preserved, with an almost incomprehensible reverence, the constitution laid down to meet conditions entirely unlike those of the 20th century. Ancestor worship is the cardinal virtue of America and surpasses that of China and Japan, where revolutionary changes have been made in the whole social and political structure. America was created as a political democracy for the benefit of staunch individualists, and both these ends have been achieved to perfection. Everything against which the super-sensitive revolt has come about planmaessig, and existed in the germ from the day when the Pilgrim Fathers first brought the blessings of Anglo-Saxon civilization to the shores of Cape Cod.

In the South alone were traces of a Weltanschauung which might have given an impulse in another direction, but the South went under, in obedience to the rules of democratic Darwinism. Once the dissatisfied American can bring himself to look the facts of his own history and of contemporary Europe in the face, he may be forced to relent. He will grant, at least, that it is useless to cherish the notion that the ills the American mind is heir to are spared to other peoples. He may even come to recognize the positive virtues of this country, where the stories in the Saturday Evening Post actually come true. Here a man can look his neighbour straight in the eye and subscribe—without a smile—to the romantic credo that all men are equal, in so far as it is possible by energy, hard work, and regular attendance at divine service, to reach the highest post in any career. Class barriers are almost unknown, and on all sides there is an endlessly generous desire to learn, to help, and to encourage. The traditional boy can still arrive from the slums of Europe and finish up in the editorial chair of a wealthy newspaper. If he ever fails to do so it can only be because he starts by reading the Liberator, and devotes to the deciphering of Thorstein Veblen’s hieroglyphics of socialism the time which should have been given to mastering the more profitable technique of Americanism.

Ernest Boyd