under its influence are truly amazing. “If a temperate wise man should look over our American society,” he said in a lecture, “I think the first danger which would excite his alarm would be the European influences on this country.... See the secondariness and aping of foreign and English life that runs through this country, in building, in dress, in eating, in books.”
This rejection savours of the contempt with which some young men turn their backs on the fathers who fashioned them. “Let the passion for America,” he cried, “cast out the passion for Europe. Here let there be what the earth waits for—exalted manhood.” He gives a picture of the finished man, the gentleman who will be born in America. He defines the superiority of such a man to the Englishman:
Freer swing his arms; farther pierce his eyes, more forward and forthright his whole build and rig than the Englishman's, who, we see, is much imprisoned in his backbone.
It is difficult to surmise the exact meaning of being imprisoned in one's backbone. The possession of plenty of backbone is generally held to be a decided advantage. Emerson
may have had special and transcendental prejudices against strongly fashioned vertebræ.
The freaks of nationalism are as remarkable as the freaks of internationalism. There is a constant interplay between the two, and the ascendancy of the one or the other often seems strangely capricious. Nationalism is weak where it should be strong, and rigid where common sense would make it fluid. The painful position of most royal families in time of war is an example of the readiness with which nations submit to foreign rulership and influence. Thrones, one would think, should represent the purely national spirit in its more intimate and sacred aspect. Yet the abundance of crowned rulers, past and present, attached by solemn selection or marriage, who are not by blood and tradition of the people, shows the fallacy of this supposition. Napoleon was an Italian who learnt French with some difficulty, and who was at first hostile to the French and somewhat contemptuous of their ways. Maréchal Bernadotte—French to his finger-tips—became King of Sweden. Pierre Loti, interviewing the charming and beloved Queen of the Belgians during the present war, remembers that the martyred lady before him
is a Bavarian princess. The delicate and painful subject is mentioned. “It is at an end,” says the Queen; “between them and me has fallen a curtain of iron which will never again be lifted.”
Prominent statesmen, who, one would also think, should be bone of the bone of the nations for which they speak, have often been of alien birth or of mixed racial composition. Bismarck was of Slav origin; Beaconsfield was a Jew. The most picturesque example of such irregularities of the national consciousness is perhaps the presence of General Smuts in the War Cabinet. Once the alert and brave enemy in arms against this country, he is now its trusted guide, philosopher, and friend.
Writers whom posterity classes as typical representatives of the national genius have often been of mixed racial strain, as were Tennyson, Browning, Ibsen, Kant, Victor Hugo, Dumas, Longfellow, and Whitman. The “bastards” of internationalism, so offensive to some nationalist fire-eaters, are not produced by the simple and natural processes by which races are mixed. They are self-created, their minds are set on gathering the varied fruit of all the nations. Genealogically they may be
as uninteresting as the snail in the cabbage-patch, spiritually they are provocative and arresting. Romain Rolland and George Brandes challenge and outrage the champions of nationalism by the very texture of their minds. Joseph Conrad, a Pole, stands side by side with Thomas Hardy in his mastership of contemporary English fiction. Conrad in his consummate interpretation of sea-life is, if anything, more English than Hardy.