Interesting, is it not? These gentlemen, no doubt, were not typical Canadians. But they were not the least intelligent men I have met on this continent. And when they had finally landed me in my sleeping-berth in the train, and I was left to my own reflections in that most uncomfortable of all situations, I began to consider how odd it was that in matters educational we are always endeavouring to reform the only part of our system that excites the admiration of foreigners.
I do not intend, however, to plunge into that controversy. The point that interests me is the view of my Canadian friends that in America there is no "culture." And, in the sense they gave to that term, I think they are right. There is no culture in America. There is instruction; there is research; there is technical and professional training; there is specialisation in science and industry; there is every possible application of life, to purposes and ends; but there is no life for its own sake. Let me illustrate. It is, I have read, a maxim of American business that "a man is damned who knows two things." "He is almost a dilettante," it was said of a student, "he reads Dante and Shakespeare"! "The perfect professor," said a College President, "should be willing to work hard eleven months in the year." These are straws, if you like, but they show the way the wind blows. Again, you will find, if you travel long in America, that you are suffering from a kind of atrophy. You will not, at first, realise what it means. But suddenly it will flash upon you that you are suffering from lack of conversation. You do not converse; you cannot; you can only talk. It is the rarest thing to meet a man who, when a subject is started, is willing or able to follow it out into its ramifications, to play with it, to embroider it with pathos or with wit, to penetrate to its roots, to trace its connexions and affinities. Question and answer, anecdote and jest are the staple of American conversation; and, above all, information. They have a hunger for positive facts. And you may hear them hour after hour rehearsing to one another their travels, their business transactions, their experiences in trains, in hotels, on steamers, till you begin to feel you have no alternatives before you but murder or suicide. An American, broadly speaking, never detaches himself from experience. His mind is embedded in it; it moves wedged in fact. His only escape is into humour; and even his humour is but a formula of exaggeration. It implies no imagination, no real envisaging of its object. It does not illuminate a subject, it extinguishes it, clamping upon every topic the same grotesque mould. That is why it does not really much amuse the English. For the English are accustomed to Shakespeare, and to the London cabby.
This may serve to indicate what I mean by lack of culture. I admit, of course, that neither are the English cultured. But they have culture among them. They do not, of course, value it; the Americans, for aught I know, value it more; but they produce it, and the Americans do not. I have visited many of their colleges and universities, and everywhere, except perhaps at Harvard—unless my impressions are very much at fault—I have found the same atmosphere. It is the atmosphere known as the "Yale spirit," and it is very like that of an English Public School. It is virile, athletic, gregarious, all-penetrating, all-embracing. It turns out the whole university to sing rhythmic songs and shout rhythmic cries at football matches. It praises action and sniffs at speculation. It exalts morals and depresses intellect. It suspects the solitary person, the dreamer, the loafer, the poet, the prig. This atmosphere, of course, exists in English universities. It is imported there from the Public Schools. But it is not all-pervading. Individuals and cliques escape. And it is those who escape that acquire culture. In America, no one escapes, or they are too few to count. I know Americans of culture, know and love them; but I feel them to be lost in the sea of philistinism. They cannot draw together, as in England, and leaven the lump. The lump is bigger, and they are fewer. All the more honour to them; and all the more loss to America.
Whether, from all this, any conclusion is to be drawn about the proper policy to be pursued at our universities, is a question I will not here discuss. Culture, I think, is one of those precious things that are achieved by accident, and by accident may be destroyed. The things we do to maintain it might kill it; the things we do to kill it might preserve it. My Canadian friends may be quite wrong in their diagnosis of the causes that engender or destroy it. But they are right in their sense of its importance; and it will be an interesting result of imperial unity if we find, to our astonishment, that the Dominions beyond the seas rally round exactly those things in England which we expect them to declare effete. The Rhodes scholars go to Oxford, not to Birmingham or Liverpool. And it is Cambridge that peoples the universities of the Empire with professors.
XI
ANTÆUS
I saw to-day some really remarkable landscapes by an American artist. So, at least, they seem to me. They have, at any rate, a quality of imagination which one does not expect to find in this country. "One does not expect"—why not? Why, in this respect, is America, as undoubtedly she is, so sterile? Artists must be born here as much as elsewhere. American civilisation, it is true, repels men of reflection and sensitiveness, just as it attracts men of action; so that, as far as immigration is concerned, there is probably a selection working against the artistic type. But, on the other hand, men of action often produce sons with a genius for the arts; and it is to be supposed that they do so as much in America as elsewhere. It must be the environment that is unfavourable. Artists and poets belong to the genus I have named "Mollycoddle"; and in America the Mollycoddle is hardly allowed to breathe. Nowhere on that continent, so far as I have been able to see, is there to be found a class or a clique of men, respected by others and respecting themselves, who also respect not merely art but the artistic calling. Broadly, business is the only respectable pursuit; including under business Politics and Law, which in this country are only departments of business. Business holds the place in popular esteem that is held by arms in Germany, by letters in France, by Public Life in England. The man therefore whose bent is towards the arts meets no encouragement; he meets everywhere the reverse. His father, his uncles, his brothers, his cousins, all are in business. Business is the only virile pursuit for people of education and means, who cannot well become chauffeurs. There is, no doubt, the professorial career; but that, it is agreed, is adopted only by men of "no ambition." Americans believe in education, but they do not believe in educators. There is no money to be made in that profession, and the making of money is the test of character. The born poet or artist is thus handicapped to a point which may easily discourage him from running at all. At the best, he emigrates to Europe, and his achievement is credited to that continent. Or, remaining in America, he succumbs to the environment, puts aside his creative ambition, and enters business. It is not for nothing that Americans are the most active people in the world. They pay the penalty in an atrophy of the faculties of reflection and representation.
Things are different in Europe, and even in England. There, not only are artists and men of letters honoured when they are successful—they are, of course, honoured at that stage in America; but the pursuit of literature and art is one which a young man need not feel it discreditable to adopt. The contemporaries of a brilliant youth at Oxford or at Cambridge do not secretly despise him if he declines to enter business. The first-class man does not normally aspire to start life as a drummer. Public life and the Church offer honourable careers; and both of them have traditional affinities with literature. So has the Law, still in England a profession and not a trade. One may even be a don or a schoolmaster without serious discredit. Under these conditions a young man can escape from the stifling pressure of the business point of view. He can find societies like-minded with himself, equally indifferent to the ideal of success in business, equally inspired by intellectual or æsthetic ambitions. He can choose to be poor without feeling that he will therefore become despicable. The attitude of the business classes in England, no doubt, is much the same as that of the business classes in America. But in England there are other classes and other traditions, havens of refuge from the prevalent commercialism. In America the trade-wind blows broad, steady, universal over the length and breadth of the continent.
This, I believe, is one reason for the sterility of America in Art. But it is not the only one. Literature and Art in Europe rest on a long tradition which has not only produced books and pictures, but has left its mark on the language, the manners, the ideas, the architecture, the physical features of the country. The books and the pictures can be transplanted, but the rest cannot. Thus, even though in every art the technical tradition has been interrupted, there remains in Europe what I will call the tradition of feeling; and it is this that is absent in America. Art in Europe is rooted; and there still persists into the present something of the spirit which fostered it in the past. Not only is Nature beautiful, she is humanised by the works of Man. Politics are mellowed by history, business tempered by culture. Classes are more segregated, types more distinct, ideals and aims more varied. The ghost of a spiritual life still hovers over the natural, shadowing it with the beat of solemn wings. There are finer overtones for a sensitive ear to catch; rainbow hues where the spray of life goes up. All this, it is true, is disappearing in Europe; but in America it has never existed. A sensitive European, travelling there, feels at once starved and flayed. Nothing nourishes, and everything hurts. There is natural beauty, but it has not been crowned and perfected by the hand of man. Whatever he has touched he has touched only to defile. There is one pursuit, commerce; one type, the business man; one ideal, that of increasing wealth. Monotony of talk, monotony of ideas, monotony of aim, monotony of outlook on the world. America is industrialism pure and simple; Europe is industrialism superimposed on feudalism; and, for the arts, the difference is vital.