By an irony of fate, however, they are condemned to the disheartening spectacle of their moral bogies being received into a society but one removed from the Olympians themselves. In recent years it has been the practice of the latter to accept certain reputations, when they have passed through the sieve of the literary clubs and drama leagues. In fact, candidates for academic immortality frequently serve on the board of these literary filtration plants. While the mandarins execute their ritual in the cult of Longfellow and Bryant, and excommunicate heretical moderns, their servitors are engaged upon an ingenious task. They discover the more innocuous subjects of “radical” enthusiasm, deprive them of whatever sting of originality their work possessed, and then submit the result discreetly to the official pundits. When these judges have satisfied themselves as to the sterility of the innovations, their imprimatur is granted, and another mediocrity is canonized. Ibsen is saluted because of his “message,” and “Anna Karenina” becomes a masterpiece, because Tolstoy was a Christian. While remarkable talents at home are ignored or vilified, the fifth-rate European is in the process of literary naturalization. Mr. Masefield receives the benediction of Paul Elmer More, who in the same breath tries to convince us that he is qualified to pronounce “The Spoon River Anthology” a bad joke.
Nothing more clearly demonstrates the futility and disrepute of criticism in this country than the constant surrenders to the prestige of the foreigner. A cheap fashion in European literature has only to be thrust with sufficient publicity upon the women’s literary clubs, and parish meeting-houses, to ensnare the uneasy wearers of the academic crown. Give them time and they will be found praising a translated French poet for precisely those qualities which offend them in the protégés of Miss Harriet Monroe. The young Englishman, Rupert Brooke, might have contributed to “Poetry” for ten years without securing any more recognition than did the American, Robert Frost. But now both reputations, made in England, are widely accepted, and the inevitable professor is found to tread respectfully where Henry James rushed in. Compare the critical essays which James wrote during a period of thirty years with the stereotyped Bostonian theses of the men he left behind him. Yet nobody will accuse James of a disregard for tradition.
The American word “standpatter” is curiously precise as a designation of the species. The conservative critic in Europe, Brunetière, for example, is never so purely negative as his counterpart on this side of the Atlantic. When Brunetière adversely criticized the Symbolist movement in French poetry he did so intelligently, not in that laboriously facetious fashion which is affected by the Stuart Shermans and W. H. Boyntons when they are moved to discuss les jeunes. Brunetière, in a word, was a man of education and culture, capable of defending rationally his own theories, without suggesting that the unfamiliar was necessarily bad. He condemned the excesses of the new school, not the school itself. If he had been in America, he would have denied the Symbolists even the right to exist. Edward Dowden might also be cited as a similar example, in English literature, of enlightened conservatism. Dowden was partly responsible for bringing Whitman to the favourable notice of the English public, and his work stands as a proof that respect for the classics does not involve hostility to the moderns. Just as he was able to write a masterpiece of Shakespearean criticism without retiring into hermitage, so he was qualified to appreciate original genius when it presented itself. He was not paralyzed, in short, by the weight of his literary traditions and conventions.
A thousand and one reasons have been advanced to explain the absence of a genuine American literature, and all of them are probably true. The country is comparatively young, and its energies have been, are still, directed chiefly towards the exploitation of material resources and the conquest of natural difficulties. Racially the nation is in an embryonic stage, and until some homogeneity is attained the creation of a native tradition must be slow. Moreover, the conflict of diverse races implies, in a broad sense, the clash of two or more civilizations, one of which must impose its culture if any organized progress is to be made. The language of the Hyphenated States is English, but to what extent will the nation in being evolve in accordance with this linguistic impulse? Will it be Anglo-Saxon, Teutonic, Latin, or Slav? These are a few of the problems which have a direct bearing upon the intellectual development of the country. They must be solved before America can give her imprint to the arts. They cannot be solved by the assumption that the Anglo-Saxon hyphen is alone authentic. The permanent hypothesis of Colonialism must be abandoned, if “Americanization” is ever to be more than the silliest political cant. Puritanism must be confined to the conventicles, to its natural habitat. It must not be allowed to masquerade as art, philosophy, and statesmanship. The evangelical tyranny exists elsewhere, but only in America has it invaded every branch of the national life. In the more impatient and realistic generation which has emerged from the world war this monstrous extension of prohibitions is arousing a violent reaction. It is rare now to find a young American who does not cry out against American civilization.
To the disinterested European, this spectacle is an affecting illustration of what may be called the enchantment of distance. Evidently these disconsolate citizens imagine that there is a way of escape from the Presbyterian wilderness, an oasis in the desert of one hundred per cent. Americanism, where every prospect pleases and man is only relatively vile. One listens to the intelligentsia, rendered more than usually loquacious by generous potations of unconstitutional Scotch whiskey, cursing the subtle blow to the arts administered by the Volstead denial of the necessary ambrosia. Advanced thinkers revelling in the delights of a well-organized polygamy, have taken me aside to explain how the prophets of Methodism have laid waste this fair land. I have read desperate appeals to all young men of spirit to shake off the yoke of evangelistic philistinism by expatriation to more urbane centres of culture.
These are brave words, coming as they do, for the most part, from those who are in no wise incommoded by the ukases of the gospel-tent tyrants, and who have taken appropriate measures to defeat the Eighteenth Amendment. Back of all their plaints is the superstition that Europe is free from the blight which makes America intolerable in their eyes. They do not know that the war has almost destroyed the Europe of a civilized man’s affections. Socially, politically, and intellectually that distracted continent is rapidly expiring in the arms of profiteers and class-conscious proletarians, who have decided between them to leave not a blade of culture upstanding. The leisured class, which was rarely the wealthiest, is being ground out of existence by the plutocracy and the proletariat. That was the class which made the old Europe possible, yet there are Americans who go on talking as if its extinction did not knock the bottom out of their utopia. Most of these disgruntled Americans are radicals, who strive to forward the designs of the plain people and their advocates.
Yet, every European knows that if prohibition is making the headway it surely is, the chief reason must be sought in the growth of radicalism. From Bernard Shaw to Trotsky, our revolutionaries are “dry.” Their avowed ideal is a state of society in which the allurements of love are reduced to a eugenic operation, the mellowing influences of liquor are abolished, and compulsory labour on the Taylor efficiency plan of scientific management is substituted. In fine, by the benign workings of democratic progress Europe is moving steadily toward the state of affairs attributed here by disillusioned intellectuals to the sinister machinations of Wall Street and the evangelists.
No doubt America was a purer and happier place in 1620 than in 1920. No Sumner was needed to keep the eyes of the settlers from the dimpled knees of Ziegfeld’s beauties, and the platitudes of the Wilsonian epoch were the brightest flowers of wisdom in 1776. Alas! that it should be so, and in every country of our Western World. If the Magna Charta were to be offered for signature in London now, some nasty Bolshevik would be sure to prove that the document was drawn up in a private conclave of the international financiers. If Lincoln were to make his Gettysburg speech to-day the world would snicker irreverently, and a dreadfully superior person, with a Cambridge accent (like John Maynard Keynes, C.B.), would publish the “Economic Consequences of the Civil War,” full of sardonic gibes at the innocent evangelism of Springfield. As for the Declaration of Independence—well, during “the late unpleasantness” we saw what happened to such un-American sedition-mongers. In fine, things are not what they used to be; we pine for what is not, and so forth. Of this only we may be sure, that America corresponds neither more nor less than any other country to the dreams of its ancestors.
Indeed, to be more affirmative in this plea for America, it is probable that this country has followed more closely the intentions of its founders than the critics will admit. Unlike most European nations, the Americans have preserved, with an almost incomprehensible reverence, the constitution laid down to meet conditions entirely unlike those of the 20th century. Ancestor worship is the cardinal virtue of America and surpasses that of China and Japan, where revolutionary changes have been made in the whole social and political structure. America was created as a political democracy for the benefit of staunch individualists, and both these ends have been achieved to perfection. Everything against which the super-sensitive revolt has come about planmaessig, and existed in the germ from the day when the Pilgrim Fathers first brought the blessings of Anglo-Saxon civilization to the shores of Cape Cod.
In the South alone were traces of a Weltanschauung which might have given an impulse in another direction, but the South went under, in obedience to the rules of democratic Darwinism. Once the dissatisfied American can bring himself to look the facts of his own history and of contemporary Europe in the face, he may be forced to relent. He will grant, at least, that it is useless to cherish the notion that the ills the American mind is heir to are spared to other peoples. He may even come to recognize the positive virtues of this country, where the stories in the Saturday Evening Post actually come true. Here a man can look his neighbour straight in the eye and subscribe—without a smile—to the romantic credo that all men are equal, in so far as it is possible by energy, hard work, and regular attendance at divine service, to reach the highest post in any career. Class barriers are almost unknown, and on all sides there is an endlessly generous desire to learn, to help, and to encourage. The traditional boy can still arrive from the slums of Europe and finish up in the editorial chair of a wealthy newspaper. If he ever fails to do so it can only be because he starts by reading the Liberator, and devotes to the deciphering of Thorstein Veblen’s hieroglyphics of socialism the time which should have been given to mastering the more profitable technique of Americanism.