The American Mind Part 6

Despite the universality of the objects of contemporary American humor, despite, too, its prevalent method of caricature, it remains true that its character is, on the whole, clean, easy-going, and kindly. The old satire of hatred has lost its force. No one knows why. "Satire has grown weak," says Mr. Chesterton, "precisely because belief has grown weak." That is one theory. The late Henry D. Lloyd, of Chicago, declared in one of his last books: "The world has outgrown the dialect and temper of hatred. The style of the imprecatory psalms and the denunciating prophets is out of date. No one knows these times if he is not conscious of this change." That is another theory. Again, party animosities are surely weaker than they were. Caricatures are less personally offensive; if you doubt it, look at any of the collections of caricatures of Napoleon, or of George the Fourth. Irony is less often used by pamphleteers and journalists. It is a delicate rhetorical weapon, and journalists who aim at the great public are increasingly afraid to use it, lest the readers miss the point. In the editorials in the Hearst newspapers, for instance, there is plenty of invective and innuendo, but rarely irony: it might not be understood, and the crowd must not be left in doubt.

Possibly the old-fashioned satire has disappeared because the game is no longer considered worth the candle. To puncture the tire of pretence is amusing enough; but it is useless to stick tacks under the steam road-roller: the road-roller advances remorselessly and smooths down your mischievous little tacks and you too, indifferently. The huge interests of politics, trade, progress, override your pa.s.sionate protest. "Shall gravitation cease when you go by?" I do not compare Colonel Roosevelt with gravitation, but have all the satirical squibs against our famous contemporary, from the "Alone in Cubia" to the "Teddy-see," ever cost him, in a dozen years, a dozen votes?

Very likely Mr. Lloyd and Mr. Chesterton are right. We are less censorious than our ancestors were. Americans, on the whole, try to avoid giving pain through speech. The satirists of the golden age loved that cruel exercise of power. Perhaps we take things less seriously than they did; undoubtedly our attention is more distracted and dissipated. At any rate, the American public finds it easier to forgive and forget, than to nurse its wrath to keep it warm. Our characteristic humor of understatement, and our equally characteristic humor of overstatement, are both likely to be cheery at bottom, though the mere wording may be grim enough. No popular saying is more genuinely characteristic of American humor than the familiar "Cheer up. The worst is yet to come."

Whatever else one may say or leave unsaid about American humor, every one realizes that it is a fundamentally necessary reaction from the pressure of our modern living. Perhaps it is a handicap. Perhaps we joke when we should be praying. Perhaps we make fun when we ought to be setting our shoulders to the wheel. But the deeper fact is that most American shoulders are set to the wheel too often and too long, and if they do not stop for the joke they are done for. I have always suspected that Mr. Kipling was thinking of American humor when he wrote in his well-known lines on "The American Spirit":--

"So imperturbable he rules Unkempt, disreputable, vast-- And in the teeth of all the schools I--I shall save him at the last."

That is the very secret of the American sense of humor: the conviction that something is going to save us at the last. Otherwise there would be no joke! It is no accident, surely, that the man who is increasingly idolized as the most representative of all Americans, the burden-bearer of his people, the man of sorrows and acquainted with grief, should be our most inveterate humorist. Let Lincoln have his story and his joke, for he had faith in the saving of the nation; and while his Cabinet are waiting impatiently to listen to his Proclamation of Emanc.i.p.ation, give him another five minutes to read aloud to them that new chapter by Artemus Ward.

VI

Individualism and Fellowship

It would be difficult to find a clearer expression of the old doctrine of individualism than is uttered by Carlyle in his London lecture on "The Hero as Man of Letters." Listen to the grim child of Calvinism as he fires his "Annandale grapeshot" into that sophisticated London audience: "Men speak too much about the world.... The world's being saved will not save us; nor the world's being lost destroy us. We should look to ourselves.... For the saving of the world I will trust confidently to the Maker of the world; and look a little to my own saving, which I am more competent to!"

Carlyle was never more soundly Puritanic, never more perfectly within the lines of the moral traditions of his race than in these injunctions to let the world go and to care for the individual soul.

We are familiar with the doctrine on this side of the Atlantic. Here is a single phrase from Emerson's _Journal_ of September, 1833, written on his voyage home from that memorable visit to Europe where he first made Carlyle's acquaintance. "Back again to myself," wrote Emerson, as the five-hundred-ton sailing ship beat her way westward for a long month across the stormy North Atlantic:--"Back again to myself.--A man contains all that is needful to his government within himself. He is made a law unto himself. All real good or evil that can befall him must be from himself.... The purpose of life seems to be to acquaint a man with himself."

In the following August he is writing:--

"Societies, parties, are only incipient stages, tadpole states of men, as caterpillars are social, but the b.u.t.terfly not. The true and finished man is ever alone."

On March 23, 1835:--

"Alone is wisdom. Alone is happiness. Society nowadays makes us low-spirited, hopeless. Alone is Heaven."

And once more:--

"If aeschylus is that man he is taken for, he has not yet done his office when he has educated the learned of Europe for a thousand years. He is now to approve himself a master of delight to me. If he cannot do that, all his fame shall avail him nothing. I were a fool not to sacrifice a thousand aeschyluses to my intellectual integrity."

These quotations have to do with the personal life. Let me next ill.u.s.trate the individualism of the eighteen-thirties by the att.i.tude of two famous individualists toward the prosaic question of paying taxes to the State. Carlyle told Emerson that he should pay taxes to the House of Hanover just as long as the House of Hanover had the physical force to collect them,--and not a day longer.

Henry Th.o.r.eau was even more recalcitrant. Let me quote him:--

"I have paid no poll-tax for six years. I was put into a jail once on this account, for one night; and, as I stood considering the walls of solid stone, two or three feet thick, the door of wood and iron, a foot thick, and the iron grating which strained the light, I could not help being struck with the foolishness of that inst.i.tution which treated me as if I were mere flesh and blood and bones, to be locked up. I wondered that it should have concluded at length that this was the best use it could put me to, and had never thought to avail itself of my services in some way. I saw that, if there was a wall of stone between me and my townsmen, there was a still more difficult one to climb or break through before they could get to be as free as I was. I did not for a moment feel confined, and the walls seemed a great waste of stone and mortar. I felt as if I alone of all my townsmen had paid my tax. They plainly did not know how to treat me, but behaved like persons who are underbred. In every threat and in every compliment there was a blunder; for they thought that my chief desire was to stand on the other side of that stone wall. I could not but smile to see how industriously they locked the door on my meditations, which followed them out again without let or hindrance, and _they_ were really all that was dangerous. As they could not reach me, they had resolved to punish my body; just as boys, if they cannot come at some person against whom they have a spite, will abuse his dog. I saw that the State was half-witted, that it was timid as a lone woman with her silver spoons, and that it did not know its friends from its foes, and I lost all my remaining respect for it, and pitied it."

Here is Th.o.r.eau's att.i.tude toward the problems of the inner life. The three quotations are from his _Walden_:--

"Probably I should not consciously and deliberately forsake my particular calling to do the good which society demands of me, to save the universe from annihilation."

"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so st.u.r.dily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion."

"It is said that the British Empire is very large and respectable, and that the United States are a first-rate power. We do not believe that a tide rises and falls behind every man which can float the British Empire like a chip, if he should ever harbor it in his mind."

All of these quotations from Emerson and Th.o.r.eau are but various modes of saying "Let the world go." Everybody knows that in later crises of American history, both Th.o.r.eau and Emerson forgot their old preaching of individualism, or at least merged it in the larger doctrine of identification of the individual with the acts and emotions of the community. And nevertheless as men of letters they habitually laid stress upon the rights and duties of the private person. Upon a hundred brilliant pages they preached the gospel that society is in conspiracy against the individual manhood of every one of its members.

They had a right to this doctrine. They came by it honestly through long lines of ancestral heritage. The republicanism of the seventeenth century in the American forests, as well as upon the floor of the English House of Commons, had a.s.serted that private persons had the right to make and unmake kings. The republican theorists of the eighteenth century had insisted that life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness were the birthright of each individual. This doctrine was related, of course, to the doctrine of equality. If republicanism teaches that "I am as good as others," democracy is forever hinting "Others are as good as I." Democracy has been steadily extending the notion of rights and duties. The first instinct, perhaps, is to ask what is right, just, lawful, for me? Next, what is right, just, lawful for my crowd? That is to say, my family, my clan, my race, my country.

The third instinct bids one ask what is right and just and lawful, not merely for me, and for men like me, but for everybody. And when we get that third question properly answered, we can afford to close school-house and church and court-room, for this world's work will have ended.

We have already glanced at various phases of colonial individualism. We have had a glimpse of Cotton Mather prostrate upon the dusty floor of his study, agonizing now for himself and now for the countries of Europe; we have watched Jonathan Edwards in his solitary ecstasies in the Northampton and the Stockbridge woods; we have seen Franklin preaching his gospel of personal thrift and of getting on in the world.

Down to the very verge of the Revolution the American pioneer spirit was forever urging the individual to fight for his own hand. Each boy on the old farms had his own ch.o.r.es to do; each head of a family had to plan for himself. The most tragic failure of the individual in those days was the poverty or illness which compelled him to "go on the town." To be one of the town poor indicated that the individualistic battle had been fought and lost. No one ever dreamed, apparently, that a time for old-age pensions and honorable retiring funds was coming.

The feeling against any form of community a.s.sistance was like the bitter hatred of the workhouse among English laborers of the eighteen-forties.

The stress upon purely personal qualities gave picturesqueness, color, and vigor to the early life of the United States. Take the persons whom Parkman describes in his _Oregon Trail_. They have the perfect clearness of outline of the portraits by Walter Scott and the great Romantic school of novelists who loved to paint pictures of interesting individual men. There is the same stress upon individualistic portraiture in Irving's _Astoria_; in the humorous journals of early travellers in the Southern States. It is the secret of the curiosity with which we observe the gamblers and miners and stage-drivers described by Bret Harte. In the rural communities of to-day, in the older portions of the country, and in the remoter settlements of the West and Southwest, the individual man has a sort of picturesque, and, as it were, artistic value, which the life of cities does not allow.

The gospel of self-reliance and of solitude is not preached more effectively by the philosophers of Concord than it is by the backwoodsmen, the spies, and the sailors of Fenimore Cooper.

Individualism as a doctrine of perfection for the private person and individualism as a literary creed have thus gone hand in hand. "Produce great persons, the rest follows," cried Walt Whitman. He was thinking at the moment about American society and politics. But he believed that the same law held good in poetry. Once get your great man and let him abandon himself to poetry and the great poetry will be the result. It was almost precisely the same teaching as in Carlyle's lecture on "The Hero as Poet."

Well, it is clear enough nowadays that both Whitman and Carlyle underrated the value of discipline. The lack of discipline is the chief obstacle to effective individualism. The private person must be well trained, or he cannot do his work; and as civilization advances, it becomes exceedingly difficult to train the individual without social cooperation. A Paul or a Mahomet may discipline his own soul in the Desert of Arabia; he may there learn the lessons that may later make him a leader of men. But for the average man and indeed for most of the exceptional men, the path to effectiveness lies through social and professional discipline. Here is where the frontier stage of our American life was necessarily weak. We have seen that our ancestors gained something, no doubt, from their spirit of unconventionally and freedom. But they also lost something through their dislike for discipline, their indifference to criticism, their ineradicable tendency, whether in business, in diplomacy, in art and letters and education, to go "across lots." A certain degree of physical orderliness was, indeed, imposed upon our ancestors by the conditions of pioneer life. The natural prodigality and recklessness of frontier existence was here and there sharply checked. Order is essential in a camp, and the thin line of colonies was all camping. A certain instinct for order underlay that resourcefulness which impresses every reader of our history. Did the colonist need a tool? He learned to make it himself. Isolation from the mother country was a stimulus to the inventive imagination. Before long they were maintaining public order in the same ingenious fashion in which they kept house. Appeals to London took too much time. "We send a complaint this year," ran the saying, "the next year they send to inquire, the third year the ministry is changed." No wonder that resourcefulness bred independent action, stimulated the Puritan taste for individualism, and led the way to self-government.

Yet who does not know that the inherent instinct for political order may be accompanied by mental disorderliness? Even your modern Englishman--as the saying goes--"muddles through." The minds of our American forefathers were not always lucid. The mysticism of the New England Calvinists sometimes bred fanaticism. The practical and the theoretical were queerly blended. The essential unorderliness of the American mind is admirably ill.u.s.trated by that "Father of all the Yankees," Benjamin Franklin. No student of Franklin's life fails to be impressed by its happy casualness, its cheerful flavor of the rogue-romance. Gil Blas himself never drifted into and out of an adventure with a more offhand and imperturbable adroitness. Franklin went through life with the joyous inventiveness of the amateur. He had the amateur's enthusiasm, coupled with a clairvoyant penetration into technical problems such as few amateurs have possessed. With all of his wonderful patience towards other men, Franklin had in the realm of scientific experiment something of the typical impatience of the mere dabbler. He was inclined to lose interest in the special problem before it was worked out. His large, tolerant intelligence was often as unorderly as his papers and accounts. He was a wonderful colonial Jack-of-all-trades; with a range of suggestion, a resourcefulness, a knack of a.s.similation, a cosmopolitan many-sidedness, which has left us perpetually his debtors. Under different surroundings, and disciplined by a more severe and orderly training, Franklin might easily have developed the very highest order of professional scientific achievement. His natural talent for organization of men and inst.i.tutions, his "early projecting public spirit," his sense of the lack of formal educational advantages in the colonies, made him the founder of the Philadelphia Academy, the successful agitator for public libraries. Academicism, even in the narrow sense, owes much to this LL.D. of St. Andrews, D.C.L. of Oxford, and intimate a.s.sociate of French academicians. But one smiles a little, after all, to see the bland printer in this academic company: he deserves his place there, indeed, but he is something more and other than his a.s.sociates. He is the type of youthful, inexhaustible colonial America; reckless of precedent, self-taught, splendidly alive; worth, to his day and generation, a dozen born academicians; and yet suggesting by his very imperfections, that the Americans of a later day, working under different conditions, are bound to develop a sort of professional skill, of steady, concentrated, ordered intellectual activity, for which Franklin possessed the potential capacity rather than the opportunity and the desire.

Yet there were latent lines of order, hints and prophecies of a coming fellowship, running deep and straight beneath the confused surface of the preoccupied colonial consciousness. In another generation we see the rude Western democracy a.s.serting itself in the valley of the Mississippi. This breed of pioneers, like their fathers on the Atlantic coast line, could turn their hands to anything, because they must. "The average man," says Mr. Herbert Croly, "without any special bent or qualifications, was in the pioneer states the useful man. In that country it was sheer waste to spend much energy upon tasks which demanded skill, prolonged experience, high technical standards, or exclusive devotion.... No special equipment was required. The farmer was obliged to be all kinds of a rough mechanic. The business man was merchant, manufacturer, and storekeeper. Almost everybody was something of a politician. The number of parts which a man of energy played in his time was astonishingly large. Andrew Jackson was successively a lawyer, judge, planter, merchant, general, politician, and statesman; and he played most of these parts with conspicuous success. In such a society a man who persisted in one job, and who applied the most rigorous and exacting standards to his work, was out of place and really inefficient. His finished product did not serve its temporary purpose much better than did the current careless and hasty product, and his higher standards and peculiar ways const.i.tuted an implied criticism on the easy methods of his neighbors. He interfered with the rough good-fellowship which naturally arises among a group of men who submit good naturedly and uncritically to current standards. It is no wonder, consequently, that the pioneer Democracy viewed with distrust and aversion the man with a special vocation and high standards of achievement."

The truth of this comment is apparent to everybody. It explains the still lingering popular suspicion of the "academic" type of man. But we are likely to forget that back of all that easy versatility and reckless variety of effort there was some sound and patient and constructive thinking. Lincoln used to describe himself humorously, slightingly, as a "mast-fed" lawyer, one who had picked up in the woods the scattered acorns of legal lore. It was a true enough description, but after all, there were very few college-bred lawyers in the Eighth Illinois Circuit or anywhere else who could hold their own, even in a purely professional struggle, with that long-armed logician from the backwoods.

There was once a "mast-fed" novelist in this country, who scandalously slighted his academic opportunities, went to sea, went into the navy, went to farming, and then went into novel-writing to amuse himself. He cared nothing and knew nothing about conscious literary art; his style is diffuse, his syntax the despair of school-teachers, and many of his characters are bores. But once let him strike the trail of a story, and he follows it like his own Hawkeye; put him on salt water or in the wilderness, and he knows rope and paddle, axe and rifle, sea and forest and sky; and he knows his road home to the right ending of a story by an instinct as sure as an Indian's. Professional novelists like Balzac, professional critics like Sainte-Beuve, stand amazed at Fenimore Cooper's skill and power. The true engineering and architectural lines are there. They were not painfully plotted beforehand, like George Eliot's. Cooper took, like Scott, "the easiest path across country,"

just as a bee-hunter seems to take the easiest path through the woods.

But the bee-hunter, for all his apparent laziness, never loses sight of the air-drawn line, marked by the homing bee; and your _Last of the Mohicans_ will be instinctively, inevitably right, while your _Daniel Deronda_ will be industriously wrong.

Cooper literally builded better than he knew. Obstinately unacademic in his temper and training, he has won the suffrages of the most fastidious and academic judges of excellence in his profession. The secret is, I suppose, that the lawlessness, the amateurishness, the indifference to standards were on the surface,--apparent to everybody,--the soundness and rightness of his practice were unconscious.

Franklin and Lincoln and Cooper, therefore, may be taken as striking examples of individuals trained in the old happy-go-lucky way, and yet with marked capacities for socialization, for fellowship. They succeeded, even by the vulgar tests of success, in spite of their lack of discipline. But for most men the chief obstacle to effective labor even as individuals is the lack of thoroughgoing training.

It is scarcely necessary to add that there are vast obstacles in the way of individualism as a working theory of society. Carlyle's theory of "Hero Worship" has fewer adherents than for half a century. It is picturesque,--that conception of a great, sincere man and of a world reverencing him and begging to be led by him. But the difficulty is that contemporary democracy does not say to the Hero, as Carlyle thought it must say, "Govern me! I am mad and miserable, and cannot govern myself!"

Democracy says to the Hero, "Thank you very much, but this is our affair. Join us, if you like. We shall be glad of your company. But we are not looking for governors. We propose to govern ourselves."

Even from the point of view of literature and art,--fields of activity where the individual performer has often been felt to be quite independent of his audience,--it is quite evident nowadays that the old theory of individualism breaks down. Even your lyric poet, who more than any other artist stands or sings alone, falls easily into mere lyric eccentricity if he is not bound to his fellows by wholesome and normal ties. In fact, this lyric eccentricity, weakness, wistfulness, is one of the notable defects of American poetry. We have always been lacking in the more objective forms of literary art, like epic and drama. Poe, and the imitators of Poe, have been regarded too often by our people as the normal type of poet. One must not forget the silent solitary ecstasies that have gone into the making of enduring lyric verse, but our literature proves abundantly how soon sweetness may turn to an Emily d.i.c.kinson strain of morbidness; how fatally the lovely becomes transformed into the queer. The history of the American short story furnishes many similar examples. The artistic intensity of a Hawthorne, his ethical and moral preoccupations, are all a part of the creed of individualistic art. But both Hawthorne and Poe would have written,--one dare not say better stories, but at least greater and broader and more human stories,--if they had not been forced to walk so constantly in solitary pathways. That fellowship in artistic creation which has characterized some of the greatest periods of art production was something wholly absent from the experience of these gifted and lonely men. Even Emerson and Th.o.r.eau wrote "whim" over their portals more often than any artist has the privilege to write it. Emerson never had any thorough training, either in philosophy, theology, or history.

He admits it upon a dozen smiling pages. Perhaps it adds to his purely personal charm, just as Montaigne's confession of his intellectual and moral weaknesses heightens our fondness for the Prince of Essayists.

But the deeper fact is that not only Emerson and Th.o.r.eau, Poe and Hawthorne, but practically every American writer and artist from the beginning has been forced to do his work without the sustaining and heartening touch of national fellowship and pride. Emerson himself felt the chilling poverty in the intellectual and emotional life of the country. He betrays it in this striking pa.s.sage from his _Journal_, about the sculptor Greenough:--

"What interest has Greenough to make a good statue? Who cares whether it is good? A few prosperous gentlemen and ladies; but the Universal Yankee Nation roaring in the capitol to approve or condemn would make his eye and hand and heart go to a new tune."

Those words were written in 1836, but we are still waiting for that new national anthem, sustaining the heart and the voice of the individual artist. Yet there are signs that it is coming.

It is obvious that the day for the old individualism has pa.s.sed.

Whether one looks at art and literature or at the general activities of American society, it is clear that the isolated individual is incompetent to carry on his necessary tasks. This is not saying that we have outgrown the individual. We shall never outgrow the individual. We need for every page of literature and for every adequate performance of society more highly perfected individuals. Some one said of Edgar Allan Poe that he did not know enough to be a great poet. All around us and every day we find individuals who do not know enough for their specific job; men who do not love enough, men in whom the power of will is too feeble. Such men, as individuals, must know and love and will more adequately; and this not merely to perfect their functioning as individuals, but to fulfill their obligations to contemporary society.

A true spiritual democracy will never be reached until highly trained individuals are united in the bonds of fraternal feeling. Every individual defect in training, defect in aspiration, defect in pa.s.sion, becomes ultimately a defect in society.

Let us turn, then, to those conditions of American society which have prepared the way for, and foreshadowed, a more perfect fellowship. We shall instantly perceive the relation of these general social conditions to the specific performances of our men of letters. We have repeatedly noted that our most characteristic literature is what has been called a citizen literature. It is the sort of writing which springs from a sense of the general needs of the community and which has had for its object the safe-guarding or the betterment of the community. Aside from a few masterpieces of lyric poetry, and aside from the short story as represented by such isolated artists as Poe and Hawthorne, our literature as a whole has this civic note. It may be detected in the first writings of the colonists. Captain John Smith's angry order at Jamestown, "He that will not work neither let him eat,"

is one of the planks in the platform of democracy. Under the trying and depressing conditions of that disastrous settlement at Eden in _Martin Chuzzlewit_ it is the quick wits and the brave heart of Mark Tapley which prove him superior to his employer. The same sermon is preached in Mr. Barrie's play, _The Admirable Crichton_: cast away upon the desert island, the butler proves himself a better man than his master.

This is the motive of a very modern play, but it may be ill.u.s.trated a hundred times in the history of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in America. The practical experiences of the colonists confirmed them in their republican theories. It is true that they held to a doctrine of religious and political individualism. But the moment these theories were put to work in the wilderness a new order of things decreed that this individualism should be modified in the direction of fellowship. Calvinism itself, for all of its insistence upon the value of the individual soul, taught also the principle of the equality of all souls before G.o.d. It was thus that the _Inst.i.tutes_ of Calvin became one of the charters of democracy. The democratic drift in the writings of Franklin and Jefferson is too well known to need any further comment. The triumph of the rebellious colonists of 1776 was a triumph of democratic principles; and although a Tory reaction came promptly, although Hamiltonianism came to stay as a beneficent check to over-radical, populistic theories, the history of the last century and a quarter has abundantly shown the vitality and the endurance of democratic ideas.