Civilization in the United States: An inquiry by thirty Americans

by Unknown

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.