The Spirit of America Part 2

There is now, and there has been since before the Revolution, a Spirit of America, the soul of a people, and it is this which has made the United States and which still animates and controls them.

I shall try to distinguish and describe a few, four or five of the essential features, qualities, ideals,--call them what you will,--the main elements of that spirit as I understand it. I shall also speak of two or three other traits, matters of temperament, perhaps, more than of character, which seem to me distinctly American. Then because I am neither a politician nor a jurist, I shall pa.s.s from the important field of civil government and national inst.i.tutions, to consider some of the ways in which this soul of the American people has expressed itself in education and in social effort and in literature.

In following this course I venture to hope that it may be possible to correct, or at least to modify, some of the inaccuracies and inconsistencies in the popular view of America which prevails in some quarters of Europe. Perhaps I may be able to suggest, even to Americans, some of the real sources of our national unity and strength.

"_Un Americain_" says Andre Tardieu, in his recent book, "_est toujours plus proche qu'on ne croit d'un contradicteur Americain_."

Why?

That is what I hope to show in these lectures. I do not propose to argue for any creed, nor to win converts for any political theory. In these conferences I am not a propagandist, nor a preacher, nor an advocate.

Not even a professor, strictly speaking. Just a man from America who is trying to make you feel the real spirit of his country, first in her life, then in her literature. I should be glad if in the end you might be able to modify the ancient proverb a little and say, _Tout comprendre, c'est un peu aimer_.

II

SELF-RELIANCE AND THE REPUBLIC

II

SELF-RELIANCE AND THE REPUBLIC

The other day I came upon a new book with a t.i.tle which seemed to take a good ideal for granted: _The New American Type_.

The author began with a description of a recent exhibition of portraits in New York, including pictures of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries. He was impressed with the idea that "an astonishing change had taken place in men and women between the time of President Washington and President McKinley; bodies, faces, thoughts, had all been transformed. One short stairway from the portraits of Reynolds to those of Sargent ushered in changes as if it had stretched from the first Pharaoh to the last Ptolemy." From this interesting text the author went on into an acute and sparkling discussion of the different pictures and the personalities whom they presented, and so into an attempt to define the new type of American character which he inferred from the modern portraits.

Now it had been my good fortune, only a little while before, to see another exhibition of pictures which made upon my mind a directly contrary impression. This was not a collection of paintings, but a show of living pictures: a Twelfth Night celebration, in costume, at the Century Club in New York. Four or five hundred of the best-known and most influential men in the metropolis of America had arrayed themselves in the habiliments of various lands and ages for an evening of fun and frolic. There were travellers and explorers who had brought home the robes of the Orient. There were men of exuberant fancy who had made themselves up as Roman senators or Spanish toreadors or Provencal troubadours. But most of the costumes were English or Dutch or French of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The astonishing thing was that the men who wore them might easily have been taken for their own grandfathers or great-grandfathers.

There was a Puritan who might have fled from the oppressions of Archbishop Laud, a Cavalier who might have sought a refuge from the severities of Cromwell's Parliament, a Huguenot who might have escaped from the pressing attentions of Louis XIV in the Dragonnades, a Dutch burgher who might have sailed from Amsterdam in the _Goede Vrouw_. There were soldiers of the Colonial army and members of the Continental Congress who might have been painted by Copley or Stuart or Trumbull or Peale.

The types of the faces were not essentially different. There was the same strength of bony structure, the same firmness of outline, the same expression of self-reliance, varying from the tranquillity of the quiet temperament to the turbulence of the stormy temperament. They looked like men who were able to take care of themselves, who knew what they wanted, and who would be likely to get it. They had the veritable air and expression of their ancestors of one or two hundred years ago. And yet, as a matter of fact, they were intensely modern Americans, typical New Yorkers of the twentieth century.

Reflecting upon this interesting and rather pleasant experience, I was convinced that the author of _The New American Type_ had allowed his imagination to run away with his judgment. No such general and fundamental change as he describes has really taken place. There have been modifications and developments and degenerations, of course, under the new conditions and influences of modern life. There have been also great changes of fashion and dress,--the wearing of mustaches and beards,--the discarding of wigs and ruffles,--the sacrifice of a somewhat fantastic elegance to a rather monotonous comfort in the ordinary costume of men. These things have confused and misled my ingenious author.

He has been bewildered also by the alteration in the methods of portraiture. He has mistaken a change in the art of the painters for a change in the character of their subjects. It is a well-known fact that something comes into a portrait from the place and the manner in which it is made. I have a collection of pictures of Charles d.i.c.kens, and it is interesting to observe how the Scotch ones make him look a little like a Scotchman, and the London ones make him look intensely English, and the American ones give him a touch of Broadway in 1845, and the photographs made in Paris have an unmistakable suggestion of the _Boulevards_. There is a great difference between the spirit and method of Reynolds, Hoppner, Latour, Vanloo, and those of Sargent, Holl, Duran, Bonnat, Alexander, and Zorn. It is this difference that helps to conceal the essential likeness of their sitters.

I was intimately acquainted with Benjamin Franklin's great-grandson, a surgeon in the American navy. Put a fur cap and knee breeches on him, and he might easily have sat for his great-grandfather's portrait. In character there was a still closer resemblance. You can see the same faces at any banquet in New York to-day that Rembrandt has depicted in his "Night-Watch," or Franz Hals in his "Banquet of the Civic Guard."

But there is something which interests me even more than this persistence of visible ancestral features in the Americans of to-day. It is the continuance from generation to generation of the main lines, the essential elements, of that American character which came into being on the Western continent.

It is commonly a.s.sumed that this character is composite, that the people who inhabit America are a mosaic, made up of fragments brought from various lands and put together rather at haphazard and in a curious pattern. This a.s.sumption misses the inward verity by dwelling too much upon the outward fact.

Undoubtedly there were large and striking differences between the grave and strict Puritans who peopled the sh.o.r.es of Ma.s.sachusetts Bay, the pleasure-loving Cavaliers who made their tobacco plantations in Virginia, the liberal and comfortable Hollanders who took possession of the lands along the Hudson, the skilful and industrious Frenchmen who came from old Roch.e.l.le to New Roch.e.l.le, the peaceful and prudent Quakers who followed William Penn, the stolid Germans of the Rhine who made their farms along the Susquehanna, the vigorous and aggressive Scotch-Irish Presbyterians who became the pioneers of western Pennsylvania and North Carolina, the tolerant Catholics who fled from English persecution to Lord Baltimore's Maryland. But these outward differences of speech, of dress, of habits, of tradition, were, after all, of less practical consequence than the inward resemblances and sympathies of spirit which brought these men of different stocks together as one people.

They were not a composite people, but a blended people. They became in large measure conscious of the same aims, loyal to the same ideals, and capable of fighting and working together as Americans to achieve their destiny.

I suppose that the natural process of intermarriage played an important part in this blending of races. This is an affair to which the conditions of life in a new country, on the frontiers of civilization, are peculiarly favourable. Love flourishes when there are no locksmiths.

In a community of exiles the inclinations of the young men towards the young women easily overstep the barriers of language and descent. Quite naturally the English and Scotch were united with the Dutch and French in the holy state of matrimony, and the mothers had as much to do as the fathers with the character-building of the children.

But apart from this natural process of combination there were other influences at work bringing the colonists into unity. There was the pressure of a common necessity--the necessity of taking care of themselves, of making their own living in a hard, new world. There was the pressure of a common danger--the danger from the fierce and treacherous savages who surrounded them and continually threatened them with pillage and slaughter. There was the pressure of a common discipline--the discipline of building up an organized industry, a civilized community in the wilderness.

Yet I doubt whether even these potent forces of compression, of fusion, of metamorphosis, would have made one people of the colonists quite so quickly, quite so thoroughly, if it had not been for certain affinities of spirit, certain ideals and purposes which influenced them all, and which made the blending easier and more complete.

Most of the colonists of the seventeenth century, you will observe, were people who in one way or another had suffered for their religious convictions, whether they were Puritans or Catholics, Episcopalians or Presbyterians, Quakers or Anabaptists.

The almost invariable effect of suffering for religion is to deepen its power and to intensify the desire for liberty to practise it.

It is true that other motives, the love of adventure, the desire to attain prosperity in the affairs of this world, and in some cases the wish to escape from the consequences of misconduct or misfortune in the old country, played a part in the settlement of America. Nothing could be more absurd than the complacent a.s.sumption that all the ancestors from whom the "Colonial Dames" or the "Sons of the Revolution" delight to trace their descent were persons of distinguished character and fervent piety.

But the most characteristic element of the early emigration was religious, and that not by convention and conformity, but by conscience and conviction. There was less difference among the various colonies in this respect than is generally imagined. The New Englanders, who have written most of the American histories, have been in the way of claiming the lion's share of the religious influence for the Puritans. But while Ma.s.sachusetts was a religious colony with commercial tendencies, New Amsterdam was a commercial colony with religious principles.

The Virginia parson prayed by the book, and the Pennsylvania Quaker made silence the most important part of his ritual, but alike on the banks of the James and on the sh.o.r.es of the Delaware the ultimate significance and value of life were interpreted in terms of religion.

Now one immediate effect of such a ground-tone of existence is to increase susceptibility and devotion to ideals. The habit of referring constantly to religious sanctions is one that carries with it a tendency to intensify the whole motive power of life in relation to its inward conceptions of what is right and desirable. Men growing up in such an atmosphere may easily become fanatical, but they are not likely to be feeble.

Moreover, the American colonists, by the very conditions of natural selection which brought them together, must have included more than the usual proportion of strong wills, resolute and independent characters, people who knew what they wanted to do and were willing to accept needful risks and hardships in order to do it. The same thing, at least to some extent, holds good of the later immigration into the United States.

Most of the immigrants must have been rich in personal energy, clear in their conviction of what was best for them to do. Otherwise they would have lacked the force to break old ties, to brave the sea, to face the loneliness and uncertainty of life in a strange land. Discontent with their former condition acted upon them not as a depressant but as a tonic. The hope of something unseen, untried, was a stimulus to which their wills reacted. Whatever misgivings or reluctances they may have had, upon the whole they were more attracted than repelled by the prospect of shaping a new life for themselves, according to their own desire, in a land of liberty, opportunity, and difficulty.

We come thus to the first and most potent factor in the soul of the American people, _the spirit of self-reliance_. This was the dominant and formative factor of their early history. It was the inward power which animated and sustained them in their first struggles and efforts.

It was deepened by religious conviction and intensified by practical experience. It took shape in political inst.i.tutions, declarations, const.i.tutions. It rejected foreign guidance and control, and fought against all external domination. It a.s.sumed the right of self-determination, and took for granted the power of self-development.

In the ignorant and noisy it was aggressive, independent, c.o.c.ksure, and boastful. In the thoughtful and prudent it was grave, firm, resolute, and inflexible. It has persisted through all the changes and growth of two centuries, and it remains to-day the most vital and irreducible quality in the soul of America,--_the spirit of self-reliance_.

You may hear it in its popular and somewhat vulgar form--not without a characteristic touch of humour--in the Yankee's answer to the intimation of an Englishman that if the United States did not behave themselves well, Great Britain would come over and whip them. "What!" said the Yankee, "ag'in?" You may hear it in deeper, saner, wiser tones, in Lincoln's n.o.ble a.s.severation on the battle-field of Gettysburg, that "government of the people, by the people, for the people _shall not_ perish from the earth." But however or whenever you hear it, the thing which it utters is the same,--the inward conviction of a people that they have the right and the ability, and consequently the duty, to regulate their own life, to direct their own property, and to pursue their own happiness according to the light which they possess.

It is obvious that one may give different names to this spirit, according to the circ.u.mstances in which it is manifested and observed.

It may be called the spirit of independence when it is shown in opposition to forces of external control. Professor Barrett Wendell, speaking from this chair four years ago, said that the first ideal to take form in the American consciousness was "the ideal of Liberty." But his well-balanced mind compelled him immediately to limit and define this ideal as a desire for "the political freedom of America from all control, from all coercion, from all interference by any power foreign to our own American selves." And what is this but self-reliance?

Professor Munsterberg, in his admirable book, _The Americans_, calls it "the spirit of self-direction." He traces its influence in the development of American inst.i.tutions and the structure of American life.

He says: "Whoever wishes to understand the secret of that baffling turmoil, the inner mechanism and motive behind all the politically effective forces, must set out from only one point. He must appreciate the yearning of the American heart after self-direction. Everything else is to be understood from this."

But this yearning after self-_direction_, it seems to me, is not peculiar to Americans. All men have more or less of it by nature. All men yearn to be their own masters, to shape their own life, to direct their own course. The difference among men lies in the clearness and the vigour with which they conceive their own right and power and duty so to do.

Back of the temper of independence, back of the pa.s.sion for liberty, back of the yearning after self-direction, stands the spirit of self-reliance, from which alone they derive force and permanence. It was this spirit that made America, and it is this spirit that preserves the republic. Emerson has expressed it in a sentence: "We will walk on our own feet; we will work with our own hands; we will speak our own minds."

It is undoubtedly true that the largest influence in the development of this spirit came from the Puritans and Pilgrims of the New England colonies, bred under the bracing and strengthening power of that creed which bears the name of a great Frenchman, John Calvin, and trained in that tremendous sense of personal responsibility which so often carries with it an intense feeling of personal value and force. Yet, after all, if we look at the matter closely, we shall see that there was no very great difference among the colonists of various stocks and regions in regard to their confidence in themselves and their feeling that they both could and should direct their own affairs.

The Virginians, languishing and fretting under the first arbitrary rule of the London corporation which controlled them with military severity, obtained a "Great Charter of Privileges, Orders, and Laws" in 1618. This gave to the little body of settlers, about a thousand in number, the right of electing their own legislative a.s.sembly, and thus laid the foundation of representative government in the New World. A little later, in 1623, fearing that the former despotism might be renewed, the Virginia a.s.sembly sent a message to the king, saying, "Rather than be reduced to live under the like government, we desire his Majesty that commissioners be sent over to hang us."

In 1624 the Virginia Company was dissolved, and the colony pa.s.sed under a royal charter, but they still preserved and cherished the rights of self-rule in all local affairs, and developed an extraordinary temper of jealousy and resistance towards the real or imagined encroachments of the governors who were sent out by the king. In 1676 the Virginians practically rebelled against the authority of Great Britain because they conceived that they were being reduced to a condition of dependence and servitude. They felt confident that they were able to make their own laws and to choose their own leaders. They were distinctly not conscious of any inferiority to their brethren in England, and with their somewhat aristocratic tendencies they developed a set of men like Lee and Henry and Washington and Bland and Jefferson and Harrison, who had more real power than any of the royal governors.

In New Amsterdam, where the most liberal policy in regard to the reception of immigrants prevailed, but where for a long time there was little or no semblance of popular government, the inhabitants rebelled in 1649 against the tyranny of the agents of the Dutch West India Company which ruled them from across the sea,--ruled them fairly well, upon the whole, but still denied free play to their spirit of self-reliance. The conflicts between the bibulous and dubious Director van Twiller and his neighbours, between the fiery and arbitrary William Kieft and his Eight Men, between the valiant, obstinate, hot-tempered, and dictatorial Peter Stuyvesant and his Nine Men, have been humorously narrated by Washington Irving in his _Knickerbocker_. But underneath the burlesque chronicle of bickerings and wranglings, complaints and protests, it is easy to see the stirrings of the st.u.r.dy spirit which confides in self and desires to have control of its own affairs.