The Promise of American Life Part 19

There is only one way in which popular standards and preferences can be improved. The men whose standards are higher must learn to express their better message in a popularly interesting manner. The people will never be converted to the appreciation of excellent special performances by argumentation, reproaches, lectures, a.s.sociations, or persuasion. They will rally to the good thing, only because the good thing has been made to look good to them; and so far as individual Americans are not capable of making their good things look good to a sufficient number of their fellow-countrymen, they will on the whole deserve any neglect from which they may suffer. They themselves const.i.tute the only efficient source of really formative education. In so far as a public is lacking, a public must be created. They must mold their followers after their own likeness--as all aspirants after the higher individual eminence have always been obliged to do.

The manner in which the result is to be brought about may be traced by considering the case of the contemporary American architect--a case which is typical because, while popular architectural preferences are inferior, the very existence of the architect depends upon his ability to please a considerable number of clients. The average well-trained architect in good standing meets this situation by designing as well as he can, consistent with the building-up an abundant and lucrative practice. There are doubtless certain things which he would not do even to get or keep a job; but on the whole it is not unfair to say that his first object is to get and to keep the job, and his second to do good work. The consequence is that, in compromising the integrity of his work, he necessarily builds his own practice upon a shifting foundation.

His work belongs to the well-populated cla.s.s of the good-enough. It can have little distinctive excellence; and it cannot, by its peculiar force and quality, attract a clientele. Presumably, it has the merit of satisfying prevailing tastes; but the architect, who is designing only as well as popular tastes will permit, suffers under one serious disadvantage. There are hundreds of his a.s.sociates who can do it just as well; and he is necessarily obliged to face demoralizing compet.i.tion.

Inasmuch as it is not his work itself that counts, he is obliged to build up his clientele by other means. He is obliged to make himself personally popular, to seek social influence and private "pulls"; and his whole life becomes that of a man who is selling his personality instead of fulfilling it. His relations with his clients suffer from the same general condition. They have come to him, not because they are particularly attracted by his work and believe in it, but, as a rule, because of some accidental and arbitrary reason. His position, consequently, is lacking in independence and authority. He has not enough personal prestige as a designer to insist upon having his own way in all essential matters. He tends to become too much of an agent, employed for the purpose of carrying out another man's wishes, instead of a professional expert, whose employer trusts his judgment and leans loyally on his advice.

Take, on the other hand, the case of the exceptional architect who insists upon doing his very best. a.s.suming sufficient ability and training, the work of the man who does his very best is much more likely to possess some quality of individual merit, which more or less sharply distinguishes it from that of other architects. He has a monopoly of his own peculiar qualities. Such merit may not be noticed by many people; but it will probably be noticed by a few. The few who are attracted will receive a more than usually vivid impression. They will talk, and begin to create a little current of public opinion favorable to the designer.

The new clients who come to him will be influenced either by their appreciation of the actual merit of the work or by this approving body of opinion. They will come, that is, because they want _him_ and believe in his work. His own personal position, consequently, becomes much more independent and authoritative than is usually the case. He is much less likely to be embarra.s.sed by ignorant and irrelevant interference. He can continue to turn out designs genuinely expressive of his own individual purpose. If he be an intelligent as well as a sincere and gifted designer, his work will, up to a certain point, grow in distinction and individuality; and as good or better examples of it become more numerous, it will attract and hold an increasing body of approving opinion. The designer will in this way have gradually created his own special public. He will be molding and informing the architectural taste and preference of his admirers. Without in any way compromising his own standards, he will have brought himself into a constructive relation with a part at least of the public, and the effect of his work will soon extend beyond the sphere of his own personal clientele. In so far as he has succeeded in popularizing a better quality of architectural work, he would be by way of strengthening the hands of all of his a.s.sociates who were standing for similar ideals and methods.

It would be absurd to claim that every excellent and competent special performer who sticks incorruptibly to his individual purpose and standard can succeed in creating a special public, molded somewhat by his personal influence. The ability to succeed is not given to everybody. It cannot always be obtained by sincere industry and able and single-minded work. The qualities needed in addition to those mentioned will vary in different occupations and according to the accidental circ.u.mstances of different cases; but they are not always the qualities which a man can acquire. Men will fail who have deserved to succeed and who might have succeeded with a little more tenacity or under slightly more favorable conditions. Men who have deserved to fail will succeed because of certain collateral but partly irrelevant merits--just as an architect may succeed who is ingenious about making his clients' houses comfortable and building them cheap. In a thousand different ways an individual enterprise, conceived and conducted with faith and ability, may prove to be abortive. Moreover, the sacrifices necessary to success are usually genuine sacrifices. The architect who wishes to build up a really loyal following by really good work must deliberately reject many possible jobs; and he must frequently spend upon the accepted jobs more money than is profitable. But the foregoing is merely tantamount to saying, as we have said, that the adventure involves a real risk. A resolute, intelligent man undertakes a doubtful and difficult enterprise, not because it is sure to succeed, but because if it succeeds, it is worth the risk and the cost, and such is the case with the contemporary American adventurer. The individual independence, appreciation, and fulfillment which he secures in the event of success are a.s.suredly worth a harder and a more dangerous fight than the one by which frequently he is confronted. In any particular case a man, as we have admitted, may put up a good fight without securing the fruits of victory, and his adventure may end, not merely in defeat, but in self-humiliation. But if any general tendency exists to shirk, or to back down, or to place the responsibility for personal inept.i.tude on the public, it means, not that the fight was hopeless, but that the warriors were lacking in the necessary will and ability.

The case of the statesman, the man of letters, the philanthropist, or the reformer does not differ essentially from that of the architect.

They may need for their particular purposes a larger or a smaller popular following, a larger or smaller amount of moral courage, and a more or less peculiar kind of intellectual efficiency; but wherever there is any bridge to be built between their own purposes and standards and those of the public, they must depend chiefly upon their own resources for its construction. The best that society can do to a.s.sist them at present is to establish good schools of preliminary instruction.

For the rest it is the particular business of the exceptional individual to impose himself on the public; and the necessity he is under of creating his own following may prove to be helpful to him as his own exceptional achievements are to his followers. The fact that he is obliged to make a public instead of finding one ready-made, or instead of being able by the subsidy of a prince to dispense with one--this necessity will in the long run tend to keep his work vital and human.

The danger which every peculiarly able individual specialist runs is that of overestimating the value of his own purpose and achievements, and so of establishing a false and delusive relation between his own world and the larger world of human affairs and interests. Such a danger cannot be properly checked by the conscious moral and intellectual education of the individual, because when he is filled too full of amiable intentions and ideas, he is by way of attenuating his individual impulse and power. But the individual who is forced to create his own public is forced also to make his own special work attractive to a public; and when he succeeds in accomplishing this result without hauling down his personal flag, his work tends to take on a more normal and human character.

It tends, that is, to be socially as well as individually formative. The peculiarly competent individual is obliged to accept the responsibilities of leadership with its privileges and fruits. There is no escape from the circle by which he finds himself surrounded. He cannot obtain the opportunities, the authority, and the independence which he needs for his own individual fulfillment, unless he builds up a following; and he cannot build up a secure personal following without making his peculiar performances appeal to some general human interest.

The larger and more general the interest he can arouse, the more secure and the more remunerative his personal independence becomes. It by no means necessarily follows that he will increase his following by increasing the excellence of his work, or that he will not frequently find it difficult to keep his following without allowing his work to deteriorate. No formula, reconciling the individual and the popular interest, can be devised which will work automatically. The reconciliation must always remain a matter of victorious individual or national contrivance. But it is none the less true that the chance of fruitful reconciliation always exists, and in a democracy it should exist under peculiarly wholesome conditions. The essential nature of a democracy compels it to insist that individual power of all kinds, political, economic, or intellectual, shall not be perversely and irresponsibly exercised. The individual democrat is obliged no less to insist in his own interest that the responsible exercise of power shall not be considered equivalent to individual mediocrity and dependence.

These two demands will often conflict; but the vitality of a democracy hangs upon its ability to keep both of them vigorous and a.s.sertive. Just in so far as individual democrats find ways of a.s.serting their independence in the very act of redeeming their responsibility, the social body of which they form a part is marching toward the goal of human betterment.

It cannot be claimed, however, that the foregoing account of the relation between the individual and a nationalized democracy is even yet entirely satisfactory. No relation can be satisfactory which implies such a vast amount of individual suffering and defeat and such a huge waste of social and individual effort. The relation is only as satisfactory as it can be made under the circ.u.mstances. The individual cannot be immediately transformed by individual purpose and action into a consummate social type, any more than society can be immediately transformed by purposive national action into a consummate residence for the individual. In both cases amelioration is a matter of intelligent experimental contrivance based upon the nature of immediate conditions and equipped with every available resource and weapon. In both cases these experiments must be indefinitely continued, their lessons candidly learned, and the succeeding experiments based upon past failures and achievements. Throughout the whole task of experimental educational advance the different processes of individual and social amelioration will be partly opposed, partly supplementary, and partly parallel; but in so far as any genuine advance is made, the opposition should be less costly, and cooperation, if not easier, at least more remunerative.

The peculiar kind of individual self-a.s.sertion which has been outlined in the foregoing sections of this chapter has been adapted, not to perfect, but to actual moral, social, and intellectual conditions. For the present Americans must cultivate competent individual independence somewhat unscrupulously, because their peculiar democratic tradition has. .h.i.therto discouraged and under-valued a genuinely individualistic practice and ideal. In order to restore the balance, the individual must emanc.i.p.ate himself at a considerable sacrifice and by somewhat forcible means; and to a certain extent he must continue those sacrifices throughout the whole of his career. He must proclaim and, if able, he must a.s.sert his own leadership, but he must be always somewhat on his guard against his followers. He must always keep in mind that the very leadership which is the fruit of his mastery and the condition of his independence is also, considering the nature and disposition of his average follower, a dangerous temptation; and while he must not for that reason scorn popular success, he must always conscientiously reckon its actual cost. And just because a leader cannot wholly trust himself to his following, so the followers must always keep a sharp lookout lest their leaders be leading them astray. For the kind of leadership which we have postulated above is by its very definition and nature liable to become perverse and distracting.

But just in so far as the work of social and individual amelioration advances, the condition will be gradually created necessary to completer mutual confidence between the few exceptional leaders and the many "plain people." At present the burden of establishing any genuine means of communication rests very heavily upon the exceptionally able individual. But after a number of exceptionally able individuals have imposed their own purposes and standards and created a following, they will have made the task of their successors easier. Higher technical standards and more adequate forms of expression will have become better established. The "public" will have learned to expect and to appreciate more simple and appropriate architectural forms, more sincere and better-formed translations of life in books and on the stage, and more independent and better equipped political leadership. The "public," that is, instead of being as much satisfied as it is at present with cheap forms and standards, will be prepared to a.s.sume part of the expense of establishing better forms and methods of social intercourse. In this way a future generation of leaders may be enabled to conquer a following with a smaller individual expenditure of painful sacrifices and wasted effort. They can take for granted a generally higher technical and formal tradition, and they themselves will be freed from an over-conscious preoccupation with the methods and the mechanism of their work. Their attention will naturally be more than ever concentrated on the proper discrimination of their subject-matter; and just in so far as they are competent to create an impression or a following, that impression should be more profound and the following more loyal and more worthy of loyalty.

Above all, a substantial improvement in the purposes and standards of individual self-expression should create a more bracing intellectual atmosphere. Better standards will serve not only as guides but as weapons. In so far as they are embodied in competent performances, they are bound also to be applied in the critical condemnation of inferior work; and the critic himself will a.s.sume a much more important practical job than he now has. Criticism is a comparatively neglected art among Americans, because a sufficient number of people do not care whether and when the current practices are really good or bad. The practice of better standards and their appreciation will give the critic both a more substantial material for his work and a larger public. It will be his duty to make the American public conscious of the extent of the individual successes or failures and the reasons therefor; and in case his practice improves with that of the other arts, he should become a more important performer, not only because of his better opportunities and public, but because of his increase of individual prowess. He should not only be better equipped for the performance of his work and the creation of a public following, but he should have a more definite and resolute conviction of the importance of his own job. It is the business of the competent individual as a type to force society to recognize the meaning and the power of his own special purposes. It is the special business of the critic to make an ever larger portion of the public conscious of these expressions of individual purpose, of their relations one to another, of their limitations, and of their promises. He not only popularizes and explains for the benefit of a larger public the substance and significance of admirable special performance, but he should in a sense become the standard bearer of the whole movement.

The function of the critic hereafter will consist in part of carrying on an incessant and relentless warfare on the prevailing American intellectual insincerity. He can make little headway unless he is sustained by a large volume of less expressly controversial individual intellectual self-expression; but on the other hand, there are many serious obstructions to any advancing intellectual movement, which he should and must overthrow. In so doing he has every reason to be more unscrupulous and aggressive even than his brethren-in-arms. He must stab away at the gelatinous ma.s.s of popular indifference, sentimentality, and complacency, even though he seems quite unable to penetrate to the quick and draw blood. For the time the possibility of immediate constructive achievement in his own special field is comparatively small, and he is the less responsible for the production of any substantial effect, or the building up of any following except a handful of free lances like himself. He need only a.s.sure himself of his own competence with his own peculiar tools, his own good-humored sincerity, and his disinterestedness in the pursuit of his legitimate purposes, in order to feel fully justified in pushing his strokes home. In all serious warfare, people have to be really wounded for some good purpose; and in this particular fight there may be some chance that not only a good cause, but the very victim of the blow, may possibly be benefited by its delivery. The stabbing of a ma.s.s of public opinion into some consciousness of its active torpor, particularly when many particles of the ma.s.s are actively torpid because of admirable patriotic intentions,--that is a job which needs sharp weapons, intense personal devotion, and a positive indifference to consequences.

Yet if the American national Promise is ever to be fulfilled, a more congenial and a more interesting task will also await the critic--meaning by the word "critic" the voice of the specific intellectual interest, the lover of wisdom, the seeker of the truth.

Every important human enterprise has its meaning, even though the conduct of the affair demands more than anything else a hard and inextinguishable faith. Such a faith will imply a creed; and its realizations will go astray unless the faithful are made conscious of the meaning of their performances or failures. The most essential and edifying business of the critic will always consist in building up "a pile of better thoughts," based for the most part upon the truth resident in the lives of their predecessors and contemporaries, but not without its outlook toward an immediate and even remote future. There can be nothing final about the creed unless there be something final about the action and purposes of which it is the expression. It must be constantly modified in order to define new experiences and renewed in order to meet unforeseen emergencies. But it should grow, just in so far as the enterprise itself makes new conquests and unfolds new aspects of truth. Democracy is an enterprise of this kind. It may prove to be the most important moral and social enterprise as yet undertaken by mankind; but it is still a very young enterprise, whose meaning and promise is by no means clearly understood. It is continually meeting unforeseen emergencies and gathering an increasing experience. The fundamental duty of a critic in a democracy is to see that the results of these experiences are not misinterpreted and that the best interpretation is embodied in popular doctrinal form. The critic consequently is not so much the guide as the lantern which illuminates the path. He may not pretend to know the only way or all the ways; but he should know as much as can be known about the traveled road.

Men endowed with high moral gifts and capable of exceptional moral achievements have also their special part to play in the building of an enduring democratic structure. In the account which has been given of the means and conditions of democratic fulfillment, the importance of this part has been under-estimated; but the under-estimate has been deliberate. It is very easy and in a sense perfectly true to declare that democracy needs for its fulfillment a peculiarly high standard of moral behavior; and it is even more true to declare that a democratic scheme of moral values reaches its consummate expression in the religion of human brotherhood. Such a religion can be realized only through the loving-kindness which individuals feel toward their fellow-men and particularly toward their fellow-countrymen; and it is through such feelings that the network of mutual loyalties and responsibilities woven in a democratic nation become radiant and expansive. Whenever an individual democrat, like Abraham Lincoln, emerges, who succeeds in offering an example of specific efficiency united with supreme kindliness of feeling, he qualifies as a national hero of consummate value. But--at present--a profound sense of human brotherhood is no subst.i.tute for specific efficiency. The men most possessed by intense brotherly feelings usually fall into an error, as Tolstoy has done, as to the way in which those feelings can be realized. Consummate faith itself is no subst.i.tute for good work. Back of any work of moral conversion must come a long and slow process of social reorganization and individual emanc.i.p.ation; and not until the reorganization has been partly accomplished, and the individual released, disciplined and purified, will the soil be prepared for the crowning work of some democratic Saint Francis.

Hence, in the foregoing account of a possible democratic fulfillment, attention has been concentrated on that indispensable phase of the work which can be attained by conscious means. Until this work is measurably accomplished no evangelist can do more than convert a few men for a few years. But it has been admitted throughout that the task of individual and social regeneration must remain incomplete and impoverished, until the conviction and the feeling of human brotherhood enters into possession of the human spirit. The laborious work of individual and social fulfillment may eventually be transfigured by an outburst of enthusiasm--one which is not the expression of a mood, but which is substantially the finer flower of an achieved experience and a living tradition. If such a moment ever arrives, it will be partly the creation of some democratic evangelist--some imitator of Jesus who will reveal to men the path whereby they may enter into spiritual possession of their individual and social achievements, and immeasurably increase them by virtue of personal regeneration.

Be it understood, however, that no prophecy of any such consummate moment has been made. Something of the kind may happen, in case the American or any other democracy seeks patiently and intelligently to make good a complete and a coherent democratic ideal. For better or worse, democracy cannot be disentangled from an aspiration toward human perfectibility, and hence from the adoption of measures looking in the direction of realizing such an aspiration. It may be that the attempt will not be seriously made, or that, if it is, nothing will come of it.

Mr. George Santayana concludes a chapter on "Democracy" in his "Reason in Society" with the following words: "For such excellence to grow general mankind must be notably transformed. If a n.o.ble and civilized democracy is to subsist, the common citizen must be something of a saint and something of a hero. We see, therefore, how justly flattering and profound, and at the same time how ominous, was Montesquieu's saying that the principle of democracy is virtue." The principle of democracy _is_ virtue, and when we consider the condition of contemporary democracies, the saying may seem to be more ominous than flattering. But if a few hundred years from now it seems less ominous, the threat will be removed in only one way. The common citizen can become something of a saint and something of a hero, not by growing to heroic proportions in his own person, but by the sincere and enthusiastic imitation of heroes and saints, and whether or not he will ever come to such imitation will depend upon the ability of his exceptional fellow-countrymen to offer him acceptable examples of heroism and saintliness.