The American Mind / The E. T. Earl Lectures

by Bliss Perry

It is not merely in literature that this message of fellowship is brought to our generation. Let me quote a few sentences from the recent address of George Gray Barnard, the sculptor, in explaining the meaning of his marble groups now placed at the entrance to the Capitol of Pennsylvania. "I resolved," says Barnard, "that I would build such groups as should stand at the entrance to the People's temple ... the home of those visions of the ever-widening and broadening brotherhood that gives to life its dignity and its meaning. Life is told in terms of labor. It is fitting that labor, its triumphs, its message, should be told to those who gaze upon a temple of the people. The worker is the hope of all the future. The needs of the worker, his problems, his hopes, his untold longings, his sacrifices, his triumphs, all of these are the field of the art of the future. Slowly we are groping our way towards the new brotherhood, and when that day dawns, men will enter a world made a paradise by labor. Labor makes us kin. It is for this reason that there has been placed at the entrance of this great building the message of the Adam and Eve of the future, the message of labor and of fraternity."

That there are defects in this gospel and programme of American fellowship, every one is aware. If the obstacle to effective individualism is lack of discipline, the obstacles to effective fellowship are vagueness, crankiness, inefficiency, and the relics of primal selfishness. Nobody in our day has preached the tidings of universal fellowship more fervidly and powerfully than Tolstoï. Yet when one asks the great Russian, "What am I to do as a member of this fellowship?" Tolstoï gives but a confused and impractical answer. He applies to the complex and contradictory facts of our contemporary civilization the highest test and standard known to him: namely, the principles of the New Testament. But if you ask him precisely how these principles are to be made the working programme of to-morrow, the Russian mysticism and fanaticism settle over him like a fog. We pass Tolstoïans on the streets of our American cities every day; they have the eyes of dreamers, of those who would build, if they could, a new Heaven and a new Earth. But they do not know exactly how to go about it. Our practical Western minds seize upon some actual plan for constructive labor. Miss Jane Addams organizes her settlements in the slums; Booker Washington gives his race models of industrial education; President Eliot has a theory of university reform and then struggles successfully for forty years to put that theory into practice. Compared with the concrete performance of such social workers as these, the gospel according to Whitman and Tolstoï is bound to seem vague in its outlines, and ineffective in its concrete results. That such a gospel attracts cranks and eccentrics of all sorts is not to be wondered at. They come and go, but the deeper conceptions of fraternalism remain.

A further obstacle to the progress of fellowship lies in selfishness. But let us see how even the coarser and rawer and cruder traits of the American character may be related to the spirit of common endeavor which is slowly transforming our society, and modifying, before our eyes, our contemporary art and literature.

"The West," says James Bryce, "is the most American part of America, that is to say the part where those features which distinguish America from Europe come out in the strongest relief." We have already noted in our study of American romance how the call of the West represented for a while the escape from reality. The individual, following that retreating horizon which we name the West, found an escape from convention and from social law. Beyond the Mississippi or beyond the Rockies meant to him that "somewheres east of Suez" where the Ten Commandments are no longer to be found, where the individual has free rein. But by and by comes the inevitable reaction, the return to reality. The pioneer sobers down; he finds that "the Ten Commandments will not budge"; he sees the need of law and order; he organizes a vigilance committee; he impanels a jury, even though the old Spanish law does not recognize a jury. The new land settles to its rest. The output of the gold mines shrinks into insignificance when compared with the cash value of crops of hay and potatoes. The old picturesque individualism yields to a new social order, to the conception of the rights of the state. The story of the West is thus an epitome of the individual human life as well as the history of the United States.

We have been living through a period where the mind of the West has seemed to be the typical national mind. We have been indifferent to traditions. We have overlooked the defective training of the individual, provided he "made good." We have often, as in the free silver craze, turned our back upon universal experience. We have been recklessly deaf to the teachings of history; we have spoken of the laws of literature and art as if they were mere conventions designed to oppress the free activity of the artist. Typical utterances of our writers are Jack London's "I want to get away from the musty grip of the past," and Frank Norris's "I do not want to write literature, I want to write life."

The soul of the West, and a good deal of the soul of America, has been betrayed in words like those. Not to share this hopefulness of the West, its stress upon feeling rather than thinking, its superb confidence, is to be ignorant of the constructive forces of the nation. The humor of the West, its democracy, its rough kindness, its faith in the people, its generous notion of "the square deal for everybody," its elevation of the man above the dollar, are all typical of the American way of looking at the world. Typical also, is its social solidarity, its swift emotionalism of the masses. It is the Western interest in the ethical aspect of social movements that is creating some of the moving forces in American society to-day. Experiment stations of all kinds flourish on that soil. Chicago newspapers are more alive to new ideas than the newspapers of New York or Boston. No one can understand the present-day America if he does not understand the men and women who live between the Allegheny Mountains and the Rocky Mountains. They have worked out, more successfully than the composite population of the East, a general theory of the relation of the individual to society; in other words, a combination of individualism with fellowship.

To draw up an indictment against this typical section of our country is to draw up an indictment against our people as a whole. And yet one who studies the literature and art produced in the great Mississippi Valley will see, I believe, that the needs of the West are the real needs of America. Take that commonness of mind and tone, which friendly foreign critics, from De Tocqueville to Bryce, have indicated as one of the dangers of our democracy. This commonness of mind and tone is often one of the penalties of fellowship. It may mean a levelling down instead of a levelling up.

Take the tyranny of the majority,—to which Mr. Bryce has devoted one of his most suggestive chapters. You begin by recognizing the rights of the majority. You end by believing that the majority must be right. You cease to struggle against it. In other words, you yield to what Mr. Bryce calls "the fatalism of the multitude." The individual has a sense of insignificance. It is vain to oppose the general current. It is easier to acquiesce and to submit. The sense of personal responsibility lessens. What is the use of battling for one's own opinions when one can already see that the multitude is on the other side? The greater your democratic faith in the ultimate rightness of the multitude, the less perhaps your individual power of will. The easier is it for you to believe that everything is coming out right, whether you put your shoulder to the wheel or not.

The problem of overcoming these evils is nothing less than the problem of spiritualizing democracy. There are some of our hero-worshipping people who think that that vast result can still be accomplished by harking back to some such programme as the "great man" theory of Carlyle. Another theory of spiritualizing democracy, no less familiar to the student of nineteen-century literature, is what is called "the divine average" doctrine of Walt Whitman. The average man is to be taught the glory of his walk and trade. Round every head there is to be an aureole. "A common wave of thought and joy, lifting mankind again," is to make us forget the old distinction between the individual and the social group. We are all to be the sons of the morning.

We must not pause to analyze or to illustrate these two theories. Carlyle's theory seems to me to be outworn, and Whitman's theory is premature. But it is clear that they both admit that the mass of men are as yet incompletely spiritualized, not yet raised to their full stature. Unquestionably, our American life is, in European eyes at least, monotonously uniform. It is touched with self-complacency. It is too intent upon material progress. It confuses bigness with greatness. It is unrestful. It is marked by intellectual impatience. Our authors are eager to write life rather than literature. But they are so eager that they overlook the need of literary discipline. They do not learn to write literature and therefore most of them are incapable of interpreting life. They escape, perhaps, from "the musty grip of the past," but in so doing they refuse to learn the inexorable lessons of the past. Hence the fact that our books lack power, that they are not commensurate with the living forces of the country. The unconscious, moral, and spiritual life of the nation is not back of them, making "eye and hand and heart go to a new tune."