The Spirit of America Part 15

It is in this last form that I wish to put the question, just now, in order to follow logically the line marked by the general t.i.tle of these lectures. The Spirit of America is to be understood not only by the five elements of character which I have tried to sketch in outline,--the instinct of self-reliance, the love of fair-play, the energetic will, the desire of order, the ambition of self-development. It has also certain temperamental traits; less easy to define, perhaps; certainly less clearly shown in national and social inst.i.tutions, but not less important to an intimate acquaintance with the people.

These temperamental traits are the very things which are most distinctive in literature. They give it colour and flavour. They are the things which touch it with personality. In American literature, if you look at it broadly, I think you will find four of these traits most clearly revealed,--a strong religious feeling, a sincere love of nature, a vivid sense of humour, and a deep sentiment of humanity.

(1) It may seem strange to say that a country which does not even name the Supreme Being in its national const.i.tution, which has no established form of worship or belief, and whose public schools and universities are expressly disconnected from any kind of church control, is at the same time strongly religious, in its temperament. Yet strange as this seems, it is true of America.

The entire independence of Church and State was the result of a deliberate conviction, in which the interest of religion was probably the chief consideration. In the life of the people the Church has been not less, but more, potent than in most other countries. Professor Wendell was perfectly right in the lectures which he delivered in Paris four years ago, when he laid so much emphasis upon the influence of religion in determining the course of thought and the character of literature in America. Professor Munsterberg is thoroughly correct when he says in his excellent book _The Americans_, "The entire American people are in fact profoundly religious, and have been, from the day when the Pilgrim Fathers landed, down to the present moment."

The proof of this is not to be seen merely in outward observance, though I suppose there is hardly any other country, except Scotland, in which there is so much church-going, Sabbath-keeping, and Bible-reading. It is estimated that less than fifteen of the eighty millions of total population are entirely out of touch with any church. But all this might be rather superficial, formal, conventional. It might be only a hypocritical cover for practical infidelity. And sometimes when one reads the "yellow journals" with their flaming exposures of social immorality, industrial dishonesty, and political corruption, one is tempted to think that it may be so.

Yet a broader, deeper, saner view,--a steady look into the real life of the typical American home, the normal American community,--reveals the fact that the black spots are on the surface and not in the heart of the country.

The heart of the people at large is still old-fashioned in its adherence to the idea that every man is responsible to a higher moral and spiritual power,--that duty is more than pleasure,--that life cannot be translated in terms of the five senses, and that the attempt to do so lowers and degrades the man who makes it,--that religion alone can give an adequate interpretation of life, and that morality alone can make it worthy of respect and admiration. This is the characteristic American way of looking at the complicated and interesting business of living which we men and women have upon our hands.

It is rather a sober and intense view. It is not always free from prejudice, from bigotry, from fanaticism, from superst.i.tion. It is open to invasion by strange and uncouth forms of religiosity. America has offered a fertile soil for the culture of new and queer religions. But on the whole,--yes, in immensely the larger proportion,--the old religion prevails, and a rather simple and primitive type of Christianity keeps its hold upon the hearts and minds of the majority.

The consequence of this is (to quote again from Professor Munsterberg, lest you should think me a prejudiced reporter), that "however many sins there are, the life of the people is intrinsically pure, moral, and devout." "The number of those who live above the general level of moral requirement is astonishingly large."

Now this habit of soul, this tone of life, is reflected in American literature. Whatever defects it may have, a lack of serious feeling and purpose is not among them. It is pervaded, generally, by the spiritual preconception. It approaches life from the point of view of responsibility. It gives full value to those instincts, desires, and hopes in man which have to do with the unseen world.

Even in those writers who are moved by a sense of revolt against the darkness and severity of certain theological creeds, the attempt is not to escape from religion, but to find a clearer, n.o.bler, and more loving expression of religion. Even in those works which deal with subjects which are non-religious in their specific quality,--stories of adventure, like Cooper's novels; poems of romance, like the ballads of Longfellow and Whittier,--one feels the implication of a spiritual background, a moral law, a Divine providence,--

"Standeth G.o.d within the shadow, keeping watch above his own."

This, hitherto, has been the characteristic note of the literature of America. It has taken for granted that there is a G.o.d, that men must answer to Him for their actions, and that one of the most interesting things about people, even in books, is their moral quality.

(2) Another trait which seems to me strongly marked in the American temperament and clearly reflected in American literature is the love of nature. The attractions of the big out-of-doors have taken hold upon the people. They feel a strong affection for their great, free, untended forests, their swift-rushing rivers, their bright, friendly brooks, their wooded mountain ranges of the East, their snowy peaks and vast plains and many-coloured canyons of the West.

I suppose there is no other country in the world where so many people break away from the fatigues of civilization every year, and go out to live in the open for a vacation with nature. The business of making tents and camp outfits for these voluntary gypsies has grown to be enormous. In California they do not even ask for a tent. They sleep _a la belle etoile_.

The Audubon societies have spread to every State. You will not find anywhere in Europe, except perhaps in Switzerland, such companies of boys and girls studying the wild flowers and the birds. The interest is not altogether, nor mainly, scientific. It is vital and temperamental.

It is the expression of an inborn sympathy with nature and a real delight in her works.

This has found an utterance in the large and growing "nature-literature"

of America. John James Audubon, Henry Th.o.r.eau, John Burroughs, Clarence King, John Muir, Ernest Seton, Frank Chapman, Ernest Ingersoll,--these are some of the men who have not only carefully described, but also lovingly interpreted, "nature in her visible forms," and so have given to their books, beyond the value of accurate records of observation, the charm of sympathetic and illuminative writing.

But it is not only in these special books that I would look for evidence of the love of nature in the American temperament. It is found all through the poetry and the prose of the best writers. The most perfect bit of writing in the works of that stern Calvinist, Jonathan Edwards, is the description of an early morning walk through a field of wild flowers. Some of the best pages of Irving and Cooper are sketches of landscape along the Hudson River. The scenery of New England is drawn with infinite delicacy and skill in the poetry of Bryant, Whittier, and Emerson. Bret Harte and Joaquin Miller make as see the painted desert and the ragged Sierras. James Lane Allen shows us the hemp fields of Kentucky, George Cable the bayous of Louisiana. But the list of ill.u.s.trations is endless. The whole literature of America is filled with pictures of nature. There is hardly a familiar bird or flower for which some poet has not tried to find a distinct, personal, significant expression in his verse.

(3) A third trait of the American temperament is the sense of humour.

This is famous, not to say notorious. The Americans are supposed to be a nation of jokers, whose daily jests, like their ready-made shoes, have a peculiar oblique form which makes it slightly difficult for people of other nationalities to get into them.

There may be some truth in the latter part of this supposition, for I have frequently observed that a remark which seemed to me very amusing only puzzled a foreigner. For example, a few years ago, when Mark Twain was in Europe, a despatch appeared in some of the American newspapers giving an account of his sudden death. Knowing that this would trouble his friends, and being quite well, he sent a cablegram in these words, "Report of my death grossly exaggerated, Mark Twain." When I repeated this to an Englishman, he looked at me pityingly and said: "But how could you exaggerate a thing like that, my dear fellow? Either he was dead, or he was alive, don't you know." This was perfectly incontestable, and the statement of it represented the English point of view.

But to the American incontestable things often have a double aspect: first that of the solemn fact; and then that of the curious, unreal, pretentious shape in which it is dressed by fashion, or vanity, or stupid respectability. In this region of incongruities created by the contrast between things as they really are and the way in which dull or self-important people usually talk about them, American humour plays.

It is not irreverent toward the realities. But for the conventionalities, the absurdities, the pomposities of life, it has a habit of friendly satire and good-tempered raillery. It is not like the French wit, brilliant and pointed. It is not like the English fun, in which practical joking plays so large a part. It is not like the German joke, which announces its arrival with the sound of a trumpet. It usually wears rather a sober face and speaks with a quiet voice. It delights in exposing pretensions by gravely carrying them to the point of wild extravagance. It finds its material in subjects which are laughable, but not odious; and in people who are ridiculous, but not hateful.

Its favourite method is to exaggerate the foibles of persons who are excessive in certain directions, or to make a statement absurd simply by taking it literally. Thus a Yankee humorist said of a certain old lady that she was so inquisitive that she put her head out of all the front windows of the house at the same time. A Westerner claimed the prize of inventiveness for his town on the ground that one of its citizens had taught his ducks to swim on hot water in order that they might lay boiled eggs. Mr. Dooley described the book in which President Roosevelt gave his personal reminiscences of the Spanish-American War under the t.i.tle "_Alone in Cubea_."

Once, when I was hunting in the Bad Lands of North Dakota, and had lost my way, I met a solitary horseman in the desert and said to him, "I want to go to the Cannonball River." "Well, stranger," he answered, looking at me with a solemn air of friendly interest, "I guess ye can go if ye want to; there ain't no string on ye." But when I laughed and said what I really wanted was that he should show me the way, he replied, "Why didn't ye say so?" and rode with me until we struck the trail to camp.

All this is typical of native American humour, quaint, good-natured, sober-faced, and extravagant. At bottom it is based upon the democratic a.s.sumption that the artificial distinctions and conventional phrases of life are in themselves amusing. It flavours the talk of the street and the dinner-table. It makes the Americans inclined to prefer farce to melodrama, comedietta to grand opera. In its extreme and degenerate form it drifts into habitual buffoonery, like the crude, continuous jests of the comic supplements to the Sunday newspapers. In its better shape it relieves the strenuousness and the monotony of life by a free and kindly touch upon its incongruities, just as a traveller on a serious errand makes the time pa.s.s by laughing at his own mishaps and at the queer people whom he meets by the way.

You will find it in literature in all forms: in books of the professional humorists from Artemus Ward to Mr. Dooley: in books of _genre_ painting, like Mark Twain's _Huckleberry Finn_ and _Pudd'nhead Wilson_, or like _David Harum_, which owed its immense popularity to the lifelike portrait of an old horse trader in a rural town of central New York: in books of sober purpose, like the essays of Lowell or Emerson, where a sudden smile flashes out at you from the gravest page. Oliver Wendell Holmes shows it to you, in _The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table_, dressed in the proper garb of Boston; you may recognize it on horseback among the cowboys, in the stories of Owen Wister and O. Henry; it talks the Mississippi River dialect in the admirable pages of Charles D. Stewart's _Partners with Providence_, and speaks with the local accent of Louisville, Kentucky, in _Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch_.

Almost everywhere you will find the same general tone, a compound of mock gravity, exaggeration, good nature, and inward laughter.

You may catch the spirit of it all in a letter that Benjamin Franklin sent to a London newspaper in 1765. He was having a little fun with English editors who had been printing wild articles about America. "All this," wrote he, "is as certainly true as the account, said to be from Quebec, in all the papers of last week, that the inhabitants of Canada are making preparations for a cod and whale fishery this summer in the upper Lakes. Ignorant people may object that the upper Lakes are fresh, and that cod and whales are salt-water fish; but let them know, Sir, that cod, like other fish, when attacked by their enemies, fly into any water where they can be safest; that whales, when they have a mind to eat cod, pursue them wherever they fly; and that the grand leap of the whale in the chase up the Falls of Niagara is esteemed, by those who have seen it, as one of the finest spectacles in Nature."

(4) The last trait of the American temperament on which I wish touch briefly is the sentiment of humanity.

It is not an unkind country, this big republic, where the manners are so "free and easy," the _tempo_ of life so quick, the pressure of business so heavy and continuous. The feeling of philanthropy in its broader sense,--the impulse which makes men inclined to help one another, to sympathize with the unfortunate, to lift a neighbour or a stranger out of a tight place,--good will, in short,--is in the blood of the people.

When their blood is heated, they are hard hitters, fierce fighters. But give them time to cool down, and they are generous peacemakers. Abraham Lincoln's phrase, "With malice toward none, with charity for all,"

strikes the key-note. In the "mild concerns of ordinary life" they like to cultivate friendly relations, to show neighbourliness, to do the useful thing.

There is a curious word of approbation in the rural dialect of Pennsylvania. When the country folk wish to express their liking for a man, they say, "He is a very common person,"--meaning not that he is low or vulgar, but approachable, sympathetic, kind to all.

Underneath the surface of American life, often rough and careless, there lies this widespread feeling: that human nature everywhere is made of the same stuff; that life's joys and sorrows are felt in the same way whether they are hidden under homespun and calico or under silk and broadcloth; that it is every man's duty to do good and not evil to those who live in the world with him.

In literature this feeling has shown itself in many ways. It has given a general tone of sympathy with "the under dog in a fight." It has led writers to look for subjects among the plain people. It has made the novel of American "high life" incline generally to satire or direct rebuke. In the typical American romance the hero is seldom rich, the villain seldom poor.

In the weaker writers the humane sentiment dwindles into sentimentality.

In the stronger writers it gives, sometimes, a very n.o.ble and manly note. In general you may say that it has impressed upon American literature the mark of a moral purpose,--the wish to elevate, to purify, to fortify the mind, and so the life, of those who read.

Is this a merit or a fault in literature? Judge for yourselves.

No doubt a supremely ethical intention is an insufficient outfit for an author. His work may be

"Chaste as the icicle That's curded by the frost from purest snow And hangs on Dian's temple,"

and yet it may be without savour or permanence. Often the desire to teach a good lesson bends a book from the straight line of truth-to-the-facts, and makes a so-called virtuous ending at the price of sincerity and thoroughgoing honesty.

It is not profitable to real virtue to dwell in a world of fiction where miracles are worked to crown the good and proper folk with unvarying felicity and to send all the rascals to prison or a miserable grave. Nor is it a wise and useful thing for literature to ignore the lower side of life for the sake of commending the higher; to speak a false and timid language for fear of shocking the sensitive; to evade the actual problems and conflicts which men and women of flesh and blood have to meet, for the sake of creating a perfectly respectable atmosphere for the imagination to live in.

This mistaking of prudery for decency, this unwillingness to deal quite frankly with life as it is, has perhaps acted with a narrowing and weakening effect upon the course of American literature in the past. But just now there seems to be a reaction toward the other extreme. Among certain English and American writers, especially of the female s.e.x, there is a new fashion of indiscriminate candour which would make Balzac blush. But I suppose that this will pa.s.s, since every extreme carries within itself the seed of disintegration.

The _morale_ of literature, after all, does not lie outside of the great circle of ethics. It is a simple application of the laws which embrace the whole of human life to the specific business of a writer.

To speak the truth; to respect himself and his readers; to do justly and to love mercy; to deal with language as a living thing of secret and incalculable power; not to call good, evil, or evil, good; to honour the n.o.ble and to condemn the base; to face the facts of life with courage, the humours of life with sympathy, and the mysteries of life with reverence; and to perform his task of writing as carefully, as lovingly, as well as he can,--this, it seems to me, is the whole duty of an author.

This, if I mistake not, has been the effort of the chief writers of America. They have spoken surely to the heart of a great people. They have kept the fine ideals of the past alive in the conflicts of the present. They have lightened the labours of a weary day. They have left their readers a little happier, perhaps a little wiser, certainly a little stronger and braver, for the battle and the work of life.

The measure of their contribution to the small group of world-books, the literature that is universal in meaning and enduring in form, must be left for the future to determine. But it is sure already that American literature has done much to express and to perpetuate the Spirit of America.