It cannot be claimed, however, that the foregoing account of the relation between the individual and a nationalized democracy is even yet entirely satisfactory. No relation can be satisfactory which implies such a vast amount of individual suffering and defeat and such a huge waste of social and individual effort. The relation is only as satisfactory as it can be made under the circumstances. The individual cannot be immediately transformed by individual purpose and action into a consummate social type, any more than society can be immediately transformed by purposive national action into a consummate residence for the individual. In both cases amelioration is a matter of intelligent experimental contrivance based upon the nature of immediate conditions and equipped with every available resource and weapon. In both cases these experiments must be indefinitely continued, their lessons candidly learned, and the succeeding experiments based upon past failures and achievements. Throughout the whole task of experimental educational advance the different processes of individual and social amelioration will be partly opposed, partly supplementary, and partly parallel; but in so far as any genuine advance is made, the opposition should be less costly, and coöperation, if not easier, at least more remunerative.
The peculiar kind of individual self-assertion which has been outlined in the foregoing sections of this chapter has been adapted, not to perfect, but to actual moral, social, and intellectual conditions. For the present Americans must cultivate competent individual independence somewhat unscrupulously, because their peculiar democratic tradition has hitherto discouraged and under-valued a genuinely individualistic practice and ideal. In order to restore the balance, the individual must emancipate himself at a considerable sacrifice and by somewhat forcible means; and to a certain extent he must continue those sacrifices throughout the whole of his career. He must proclaim and, if able, he must assert his own leadership, but he must be always somewhat on his guard against his followers. He must always keep in mind that the very leadership which is the fruit of his mastery and the condition of his independence is also, considering the nature and disposition of his average follower, a dangerous temptation; and while he must not for that reason scorn popular success, he must always conscientiously reckon its actual cost. And just because a leader cannot wholly trust himself to his following, so the followers must always keep a sharp lookout lest their leaders be leading them astray. For the kind of leadership which we have postulated above is by its very definition and nature liable to become perverse and distracting.
But just in so far as the work of social and individual amelioration advances, the condition will be gradually created necessary to completer mutual confidence between the few exceptional leaders and the many "plain people." At present the burden of establishing any genuine means of communication rests very heavily upon the exceptionally able individual. But after a number of exceptionally able individuals have imposed their own purposes and standards and created a following, they will have made the task of their successors easier. Higher technical standards and more adequate forms of expression will have become better established. The "public" will have learned to expect and to appreciate more simple and appropriate architectural forms, more sincere and better-formed translations of life in books and on the stage, and more independent and better equipped political leadership. The "public," that is, instead of being as much satisfied as it is at present with cheap forms and standards, will be prepared to assume part of the expense of establishing better forms and methods of social intercourse. In this way a future generation of leaders may be enabled to conquer a following with a smaller individual expenditure of painful sacrifices and wasted effort. They can take for granted a generally higher technical and formal tradition, and they themselves will be freed from an over-conscious preoccupation with the methods and the mechanism of their work. Their attention will naturally be more than ever concentrated on the proper discrimination of their subject-matter; and just in so far as they are competent to create an impression or a following, that impression should be more profound and the following more loyal and more worthy of loyalty.
Above all, a substantial improvement in the purposes and standards of individual self-expression should create a more bracing intellectual atmosphere. Better standards will serve not only as guides but as weapons. In so far as they are embodied in competent performances, they are bound also to be applied in the critical condemnation of inferior work; and the critic himself will assume a much more important practical job than he now has. Criticism is a comparatively neglected art among Americans, because a sufficient number of people do not care whether and when the current practices are really good or bad. The practice of better standards and their appreciation will give the critic both a more substantial material for his work and a larger public. It will be his duty to make the American public conscious of the extent of the individual successes or failures and the reasons therefor; and in case his practice improves with that of the other arts, he should become a more important performer, not only because of his better opportunities and public, but because of his increase of individual prowess. He should not only be better equipped for the performance of his work and the creation of a public following, but he should have a more definite and resolute conviction of the importance of his own job. It is the business of the competent individual as a type to force society to recognize the meaning and the power of his own special purposes. It is the special business of the critic to make an ever larger portion of the public conscious of these expressions of individual purpose, of their relations one to another, of their limitations, and of their promises. He not only popularizes and explains for the benefit of a larger public the substance and significance of admirable special performance, but he should in a sense become the standard bearer of the whole movement.
The function of the critic hereafter will consist in part of carrying on an incessant and relentless warfare on the prevailing American intellectual insincerity. He can make little headway unless he is sustained by a large volume of less expressly controversial individual intellectual self-expression; but on the other hand, there are many serious obstructions to any advancing intellectual movement, which he should and must overthrow. In so doing he has every reason to be more unscrupulous and aggressive even than his brethren-in-arms. He must stab away at the gelatinous mass of popular indifference, sentimentality, and complacency, even though he seems quite unable to penetrate to the quick and draw blood. For the time the possibility of immediate constructive achievement in his own special field is comparatively small, and he is the less responsible for the production of any substantial effect, or the building up of any following except a handful of free lances like himself. He need only assure himself of his own competence with his own peculiar tools, his own good-humored sincerity, and his disinterestedness in the pursuit of his legitimate purposes, in order to feel fully justified in pushing his strokes home. In all serious warfare, people have to be really wounded for some good purpose; and in this particular fight there may be some chance that not only a good cause, but the very victim of the blow, may possibly be benefited by its delivery. The stabbing of a mass of public opinion into some consciousness of its active torpor, particularly when many particles of the mass are actively torpid because of admirable patriotic intentions,—that is a job which needs sharp weapons, intense personal devotion, and a positive indifference to consequences.
Yet if the American national Promise is ever to be fulfilled, a more congenial and a more interesting task will also await the critic—meaning by the word "critic" the voice of the specific intellectual interest, the lover of wisdom, the seeker of the truth. Every important human enterprise has its meaning, even though the conduct of the affair demands more than anything else a hard and inextinguishable faith. Such a faith will imply a creed; and its realizations will go astray unless the faithful are made conscious of the meaning of their performances or failures. The most essential and edifying business of the critic will always consist in building up "a pile of better thoughts," based for the most part upon the truth resident in the lives of their predecessors and contemporaries, but not without its outlook toward an immediate and even remote future. There can be nothing final about the creed unless there be something final about the action and purposes of which it is the expression. It must be constantly modified in order to define new experiences and renewed in order to meet unforeseen emergencies. But it should grow, just in so far as the enterprise itself makes new conquests and unfolds new aspects of truth. Democracy is an enterprise of this kind. It may prove to be the most important moral and social enterprise as yet undertaken by mankind; but it is still a very young enterprise, whose meaning and promise is by no means clearly understood. It is continually meeting unforeseen emergencies and gathering an increasing experience. The fundamental duty of a critic in a democracy is to see that the results of these experiences are not misinterpreted and that the best interpretation is embodied in popular doctrinal form. The critic consequently is not so much the guide as the lantern which illuminates the path. He may not pretend to know the only way or all the ways; but he should know as much as can be known about the traveled road.
Men endowed with high moral gifts and capable of exceptional moral achievements have also their special part to play in the building of an enduring democratic structure. In the account which has been given of the means and conditions of democratic fulfillment, the importance of this part has been under-estimated; but the under-estimate has been deliberate. It is very easy and in a sense perfectly true to declare that democracy needs for its fulfillment a peculiarly high standard of moral behavior; and it is even more true to declare that a democratic scheme of moral values reaches its consummate expression in the religion of human brotherhood. Such a religion can be realized only through the loving-kindness which individuals feel toward their fellow-men and particularly toward their fellow-countrymen; and it is through such feelings that the network of mutual loyalties and responsibilities woven in a democratic nation become radiant and expansive. Whenever an individual democrat, like Abraham Lincoln, emerges, who succeeds in offering an example of specific efficiency united with supreme kindliness of feeling, he qualifies as a national hero of consummate value. But—at present—a profound sense of human brotherhood is no substitute for specific efficiency. The men most possessed by intense brotherly feelings usually fall into an error, as Tolstoy has done, as to the way in which those feelings can be realized. Consummate faith itself is no substitute for good work. Back of any work of moral conversion must come a long and slow process of social reorganization and individual emancipation; and not until the reorganization has been partly accomplished, and the individual released, disciplined and purified, will the soil be prepared for the crowning work of some democratic Saint Francis.
Hence, in the foregoing account of a possible democratic fulfillment, attention has been concentrated on that indispensable phase of the work which can be attained by conscious means. Until this work is measurably accomplished no evangelist can do more than convert a few men for a few years. But it has been admitted throughout that the task of individual and social regeneration must remain incomplete and impoverished, until the conviction and the feeling of human brotherhood enters into possession of the human spirit. The laborious work of individual and social fulfillment may eventually be transfigured by an outburst of enthusiasm—one which is not the expression of a mood, but which is substantially the finer flower of an achieved experience and a living tradition. If such a moment ever arrives, it will be partly the creation of some democratic evangelist—some imitator of Jesus who will reveal to men the path whereby they may enter into spiritual possession of their individual and social achievements, and immeasurably increase them by virtue of personal regeneration.
Be it understood, however, that no prophecy of any such consummate moment has been made. Something of the kind may happen, in case the American or any other democracy seeks patiently and intelligently to make good a complete and a coherent democratic ideal. For better or worse, democracy cannot be disentangled from an aspiration toward human perfectibility, and hence from the adoption of measures looking in the direction of realizing such an aspiration. It may be that the attempt will not be seriously made, or that, if it is, nothing will come of it. Mr. George Santayana concludes a chapter on "Democracy" in his "Reason in Society" with the following words: "For such excellence to grow general mankind must be notably transformed. If a noble and civilized democracy is to subsist, the common citizen must be something of a saint and something of a hero. We see, therefore, how justly flattering and profound, and at the same time how ominous, was Montesquieu's saying that the principle of democracy is virtue." The principle of democracy is virtue, and when we consider the condition of contemporary democracies, the saying may seem to be more ominous than flattering. But if a few hundred years from now it seems less ominous, the threat will be removed in only one way. The common citizen can become something of a saint and something of a hero, not by growing to heroic proportions in his own person, but by the sincere and enthusiastic imitation of heroes and saints, and whether or not he will ever come to such imitation will depend upon the ability of his exceptional fellow-countrymen to offer him acceptable examples of heroism and saintliness.