Civilization in the United States: An inquiry by thirty Americans

by Unknown

As we see, then, the creative will in this country is a very weak and sickly plant. Of the innumerable talents that are always emerging about us there are few that come to any sort of fruition: the rest wither early; they are transformed into those neuroses that flourish on our soil as orchids flourish in the green jungle. The sense of this failure is written all over our literature. Do we not know what depths of disappointment underlay the cynicism of Mark Twain and Henry Adams and Ambrose Bierce? Have we failed to recognize, in the surly contempt with which the author of “The Story of a Country Town” habitually speaks of writers and writing, the unconscious cry of sour grapes of a man whose creative life was arrested in youth? Are we unaware of the bitterness with which, in certain letters of his later years, Jack London regretted the miscarriage of his gift? There is no denying that for half a century the American writer as a type has gone down in defeat.

Now why is this so? Why does the American writer, relatively speaking, show less resistance than the European writer? Plainly, as I have just said, because he has been insufficiently equipped, stimulated, nourished by the society into which he has been born. If our creative spirits are unable to grow and mature, it is a sign that there is something wanting in the soil from which they spring and in the conditions that surround them. Is it not, for that matter, a sign of some more general failure in our life?

“At the present moment,” wrote Mr. Chesterton in one of his early essays (“The Fallacy of the Young Nation”), struck by the curious anæmia of those few artists of ours who have succeeded in developing themselves, usually by escaping from the American environment; “at the present moment the matter which America has very seriously to consider is not how near it is to its birth and beginning, but how near it may be to its end.... The English colonies have produced no great artists, and that fact may prove that they are still full of silent possibilities and reserve force. But America has produced great artists and that fact most certainly means that she is full of a fine futility and the end of all things. Whatever the American men of genius are, they are not young gods making a young world. Is the art of Whistler a brave, barbaric art, happy and headlong? Does Mr. Henry James infect us with the spirit of a school-boy? No, the colonies have not spoken, and they are safe. Their silence may be the silence of the unborn. But out of America has come a sweet and startling cry, as unmistakable as the cry of a dying man.” That there is truth behind this, that the soil of our society is at least arid and impoverished, is indicated by the testimony of our own poets; one has only to consider what George Cabot Lodge wrote in 1904, in one of his letters: “We are a dying race, as every race must be of which the men are, as men and not accumulators, third-rate”; one has only to consider the writings of Messrs. Frost, Robinson, and Masters, in whose presentation of our life, in the West as well as in the East, the individual as a spiritual unit invariably suffers defeat. Fifty years ago J. A. Froude, on a visit to this country, wrote to one of his friends: “From what I see of the Eastern states I do not anticipate any very great things as likely to come out of the Americans.... They are generous with their money, have much tenderness and quiet good humour; but the Anglo-Saxon power is running to seed and I don’t think will revive.” When we consider the general colourlessness and insipidity of our latter-day life (faithfully reflected in the novels of Howells and his successors), the absence from it of profound passions and intense convictions, of any representative individuals who can be compared in spiritual force with Emerson, Thoreau, and so many of their contemporaries, its uniformity and its uniform tepidity, then the familiar saying, “Our age has been an age of management, not of ideas or of men,” assumes indeed a very sinister import. I go back to the poet Lodge’s letters. “Was there ever,” he writes, “such an anomaly as the American man? In practical affairs his cynicism, energy, and capacity are simply stupefying, and in every other respect he is a sentimental idiot possessing neither the interest, the capacity, nor the desire for even the most elementary processes of independent thought.... His wife finds him so sexually inapt that she refuses to bear him children and so drivelling in every way except as a money-getter that she compels him to expend his energies solely in that direction while she leads a discontented, sterile, stunted life....” Is this to be denied? And does it not in part explain that extraordinary lovelessness of the American scene which has bred the note of a universal resentment in so much of our contemporary fiction? As well expect figs from thistles as any considerable number of men from such a soil who are robust enough to prefer spiritual to material victories and who are capable of achieving them.

It is unnecessary to go back to Taine in order to realize that here we have a matrix as unpropitious as possible for literature and art. If our writers wither early, if they are too generally pliant, passive, acquiescent, anæmic, how much is this not due to the heritage of pioneering, with its burden of isolation, nervous strain, excessive work and all the racial habits that these have engendered?

Certainly, for example, if there is anything that counts in the formation of the creative spirit it is that long infancy to which John Fiske, rightly or wrongly, attributed the emergence of man from the lower species. In the childhood of almost every great writer one finds this protracted incubation, this slow stretch of years in which the unresisting organism opens itself to the influences of life. It was so with Hawthorne, it was so with Whitman in the pastoral America of a century ago: they were able to mature, these brooding spirits, because they had given themselves for so long to life before they began to react upon it. That is the old-world childhood still, in a measure; how different it is from the modern American childhood may be seen if one compares, for example, the first book (“Boyhood”) of “Pelle the Conqueror” with any of those innumerable tales in which our novelists show us that in order to succeed in life one cannot be up and doing too soon. The whole temper of our society, if one is to judge from these documents, is to hustle the American out of his childhood, teaching him at no age at all how to repel life and get the best of it and build up the defences behind which he is going to fight for his place in the sun. Who can deny that this racial habit succeeds in its unconscious aim, which is to produce sharp-witted men of business? But could anything be deadlier to the poet, the artist, the writer?

Everything in such an environment, it goes without saying, tends to repress the creative and to stimulate the competitive impulses. A certain Irish poet has observed that all he ever learned of poetry he got from talking with peasants along the road. Whitman might have said almost as much, even of New York, the New York of seventy years ago. But what nourishment do they offer the receptive spirit to-day, the harassed, inhibited mob of our fellow-countrymen, eaten up with the “itch of ill-advised activity,” what encouragement to become anything but an automaton like themselves? And what direction, in such a society, does the instinct of emulation receive, that powerful instinct of adolescence? A certain visitor of Whitman’s has described him as living in a house “as cheerless as an ash-barrel,” a house indeed “like that in which a very destitute mechanic” might have lived. Is it not symbolic, that picture, of the esteem in which our democracy holds the poet? If to-day the man of many dollars is no longer the hero of the editorial page and the baccalaureate address, still, or rather more than ever, it is the “aggressive” type that overshadows every corner of our civilization; the intellectual man who has gone his own way and refused to flatter the majority was never less the hero or even the subject of intelligent interest; at best ignored, at worst (and usually) pointed out as a crank, he is only a “warning” to youth, which is exceedingly susceptible in these matters. But how can one begin to enumerate the elements in our society that contribute to form a selection constantly working against the survival of the creative type? By cutting off the sources that nourish it, by lending prestige to the acquisitive and destroying the glamour of the creative career, everything in America conspires to divert the spirit from its natural course, seizing upon the instincts of youth and turning them into a single narrow channel.

Here, of course, I touch upon the main fact of American history. That traditional drag, if one may so express it, in the direction of the practical, which has been the law of our civilization, would alone explain why our literature and art have never been more than half-hearted. To abandon the unpopular and unremunerative career of painting for the useful and lucrative career of invention must have seemed natural and inevitable to Robert Fulton and Samuel Morse. So strong is this racial compulsion, so feeble is the hold which Americans have upon ultimate values, that one can scarcely find to-day a scientist or a scholar who, for the sake of science or scholarship, will refuse an opportunity to become the money-gathering president of some insignificant university. Thus our intellectual life has always been ancillary to the life of business and organization: have we forgotten that the good Washington Irving himself, the father of American letters, thought it by no means beneath his dignity to serve as a sort of glorified press-agent for John Jacob Astor?

It is certainly true that none of these unfavourable factors of American life could have had such a baleful effect upon our literature if there had been others to counteract them. An aristocratic tradition, if we had ever had it, would have kept open among us the right of way of the free individual, would have preserved the claims of mere living. “It is curious to observe,” writes Nietzsche in one of his letters, “how any one who soon leaves the traditional highway in order to travel on his own proper path always has more or less the sense of being an exile, a condemned criminal, a fugitive from mankind.” If that is true in the old world, where society is so much more complex and offers the individual so much more latitude, how few could ever have had the strength in a society like ours, which has always placed such an enormous premium on conformity, to become and to remain themselves? Is it fanciful indeed to see in the famous “remorse” of Poe the traces left by this dereliction of the tribal law upon the unconscious mind of an artist of unique force and courage? Similarly, a tradition of voluntary poverty would have provided us with an escape from the importunities of bourgeois custom. But aside from the fact that even so simple a principle as this depends largely for its life on precedent (Whitman and the painter Ryder are almost alone among latter-day Americans in having discovered it for themselves), aside from the fact that to secede from the bourgeois system is, in America, to subject oneself to peculiar penalties (did it ever occur to Mark Twain that he could be honourably poor?)—aside from all this, poverty in the new world is by no means the same thing as poverty in the old: one has only to think of Charles Lamb and all the riches that London freely gave him, all the public resources he had at his disposal, to appreciate the difference. With us poverty means in the end an almost inevitable intellectual starvation. Consider such a plaint as Sidney Lanier’s: “I could never describe to you” (he writes to Bayard Taylor) “what a mere drought and famine my life has been, as regards that multitude of matters which I fancy one absorbs when one is in an atmosphere of art, or when one is in conversational relationship with men of letters, with travellers, with persons who have either seen, or written, or done large things. Perhaps you know that, with us of the younger generation in the South since the war, pretty much the whole of life has been merely not dying.” That is what poverty means in America, poverty and isolation, for Lanier, whose talent, as we can see to-day, was hopelessly crippled by it, was mistaken if he supposed that there was anything peculiar to the South in that plight of his: it has been the plight of the sensitive man everywhere in America and at all times. Add to poverty the want of a society devoted to intellectual things and we have such a fate as Herman Melville’s in New York. “What he lacked,” wrote Mr. Frank Jewett Mather the other day, explaining the singular evaporation of Melville’s talent, “was possibly only health and nerve, but perhaps even more, companionship of a friendly, critical, understanding sort. In London, where he must have been hounded out of his corner, I can imagine Melville carrying the reflective vein to literary completion.” Truly Samuel Butler was right when he jotted down the following observation in his note-book: “America will have her geniuses, as every other country has, in fact she has already had one in Walt Whitman, but I do not think America is a good place in which to be a genius. A genius can never expect to have a good time anywhere, if he is a genuine article, but America is about the last place in which life will be endurable at all for an inspired writer of any kind.”

To such circumstances as these, I say, the weakness of our literary life is due. If we had lacked nothing else indeed, the lack of great leaders, of a strong and self-respecting literary guild, even of an enlightened publishing system would have sufficed to account for much of it. To consider the last point first: in the philosophy of American publishing, popularity has been regarded not only as a practical advantage but as a virtue as well. Thanks to the peculiar character of our democracy, our publishers have been able to persuade themselves that a book which fails to appeal to the ordinary citizen cannot be good on other grounds. Thus, if we had had to depend on the established system, the present revival in our letters, tentative as it is, would have been still more sadly handicapped. The history of Mr. Dreiser’s “Sister Carrie” is enough to suggest what may well have been the fate of many an incipient author less persistent than he. It is certain, in any case, that many another, at a critical moment, has drifted away from literature because of the lack in our publishing world of those opportunities for a semi-creative hack-work which have provided countless European writers with a foothold and even a guideway. The Grub Street of London and Paris is a purgatory, but as long as it exists, with its humble instrumentalities, translating, editing, reviewing, one can at least survive until one has either lost or found oneself: it scarcely needs to be pointed out that the American magazine, with its mechanical exactions, which levy such a terrible toll upon one’s individuality, is anything but an advantageous substitute. Till one has found oneself, the less one is subjected to such powerful, such essentially depolarizing influences, the better; the most mediocre institutions, if they enable one at the same time to maintain one’s contact with literature and to keep body and soul together, are as life is to death beside them. How many English writers owe their ultimate salvation to such trivial agencies as T. P.’s Weekly? In America, where nothing of the kind has existed until lately, or nothing adequate to the number of those who might have benefitted by it, the literary aspirant is lost unless his powers mature at once.

But the lack of great leaders, of a strong and self-respecting literary guild (the one results from the other)—is not this our chief misfortune? In the best of circumstances, and considering all the devils that beset the creative spirit, a strong impulse is scarcely enough to carry one through: one must feel not only that one is doing what one wishes to do but that what one is doing matters. If dozens of American writers have fallen by the wayside because they have met with insuperable obstacles, dozens of others have fallen, with all their gifts, because they have lost interest in their work, because they have ceased to “see the necessity” of it. This is just the point where the presence of a leader, of a local tradition, a school, a guild makes all the difference. “With the masters I converse,” writes Gauguin in his journal. “Their example fortifies me. When I am tempted to falter I blush before them.” If that could have been true of Gauguin, the “Wolf,” who walked by himself as few have walked, what shall we say of other men whose artistic integrity, whose faith in themselves, is exposed every day to the corroding influences of a third-rate civilization? It would be all very well if literature were merely a mode of “having a good time;” I am speaking of those, the real artists, who, with Nietzsche, make a distinction (illusory perhaps) between “happiness” and “work,” and I say that these men have always fed on the thought of greatness and on the propinquity of greatness. It was not for nothing that Turgeniev bore in his memory, as a talisman, the image of Pushkin; that Gorky, having seen Tolstoy once, sitting among the boulders on the seashore, felt everything in him blending in one happy thought, “I am not an orphan on the earth, so long as this man lives on it.” The presence of such men immeasurably raises the morale of the literary life: that is what Chekhov meant when he said, “I am afraid of Tolstoy’s death,” and is it not true that the whole contemporary literature of England has drawn virtue from Thomas Hardy? The sense that one is working in a great line: this, more than anything else perhaps, renews one’s confidence in the “quaint mania of passing one’s life wearing oneself out over words,” as Flaubert called it, in the still greater folly of pursuing one’s ego when everything in life combines to punish one for doing so. The successful pursuit of the ego is what makes literature; this requires not only a certain inner intensity but a certain courage, and it is doubtful whether, in any nation, any considerable number of men can summon up that courage and maintain it unless they have seen the thing done. The very notion that such a life is either possible or desirable, the notion that such a life exists even, can hardly occur to the rank and file: some individual has to start the ball rolling, some individual of extraordinary force and audacity, and where is that individual to be found in our modern American literature? Whitman is the unique instance, for Henry James, with all his admirable conscience, was at once an exile and a man of singularly low vitality; and Whitman was not only essentially of an earlier generation, he was an invalid who folded his hands in mid-career.