Documenti di Didattica
Documenti di Professioni
Documenti di Cultura
Gift of
YALE UNIVERSITY
With the
aid of the
ROCKEFELLER FOUNDATION
1949
The
Golden Day
Study in American Experience and Culture
LEWIS MUMFORD
HORACE LIVERIGHT
CL^^)
Publisher
(T^^J)
NEW YORK
MCMXXVI
First print
K,
ig,
November, 1926
February, 1927 April, 1927 September, 1^28 Sixth prii t tig, March, 1929 Sir til prin ing, January, 1932
r K ,
NOTE
THIS book rounds out the study
begun
in Sticks
of
American
life
and Stones.
Where
in the first
book
have
treated
imaginative
literature
and philosophy as a key to our culture. Civilization and culture, the material fact and the
;
for one
is
and
and
The substance
series of lectures
of tins
in
These
lee-,
the Gerr&va
Federation; and
I gratefully record
my
debt to Mr.
sympathy.
Van Wyck Brooks has made, it would have been impossible to make the connected
explorations Mr.
J.
E.
final
more than one page would Imve been the poorer. The first chapter appeared in The American Mercury.
LEWIS MTJMFORB.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER
I.
PACK
THE
MIND
11
II.
THE ROMANTICISM
OF THE PIONEER
47
85
III.
IV.
...
.157
199
V.
VI.
233
VII.
273
EMERSON.
CHAPTER ONE
THE
ence
unscttlement of Europe.
exist-
The
the
dissociation, the
displacement,
and
finally,
disintegration
of
European culture became most apparent in the New World: but the process itself began in Europe, and
the interests that eventually dominated the Ameri-
can scene
all
in the
Old World.
The
explorer,
man
all
these
types appeared in Europe before they rallied together to form the composite American.
If
we can
understand the forces that produced them, we shall The fathom the origins of the American mind.
settlement of the Atlantic seaboard was the culmination of one process, the breakup of medieval culture,
If the disintegration
ture, rather
than for
relentless exploitation of
To mark
World broke down, and to discover what places a new one has arisen are the two
Something of value disappeared
Why
did
it dis-
Something of value was created. How did that come about? If I do not fully answer these
appear?
questions, I purpose, at least, to put
them a
little
more sharply, by tracing them to their historic beginnings, and by putting them in their social
context,
n
In the Thirteenth Century the European heritage
of medieval culture
was
still
intact.
By
the end of
the
Seventeenth
it
fragments, and
men showed,
not
by their professions, that it no longer had a hold over their minds. What had happened?
If one tries to
sum up
the world as
it
appeared
to the contemporaries of
The Origins
one
is
of the
American Mind
The physical
:
it
it
stretched the
and promises.
The
dream of
world of
and
castles
little
more than the forestage on which the prologue was The drama itself did not properly open spoken.
until the curtains of
the illusion of
life
Ages the
visible
duties,
down.
Over
hierarchy of
human
that
life
was
significant only
on condition that
was prolonged,
next world.
The
for
roughly
thousand
;
years.
one by one
all
together started
to dissolve.
When
itself
sects.
At what
down?
"With the
did
it
Renaissance,"
merely an evasion.
When
is
The answer
that a good
part of
it
is still
But
One may
hint of change
came
in the Thir-
European community when it turned its back upon contemporary experience and failed at last to
absorb the meanings of that experience, or to modify
its
nature.
The Church's
inability to control
usury
The Origins
of the American
;
Mind
the unreadi-
new
interests
and
the feudal
ment
It
is
and the monasteries by the central governthese are some of the stigmata of the decline.
all
of them; but
it is
Century one or another had come to pass in every part of Europe. In countries like England, which
were therefore "advanced,"
pass.
It is fairly easy to follow the general succession
all of
of events.
of
hold over
men's minds.
and
belfries,
to
record
the
passing
hour.
Immersed
in traffic or handicraft,
proud of
his city
of
them.
tolling
It
was an innocent enjoyment, this regular of the hour, but it had important conseIngenious workmen in Italy and Southern
invented
clocks,
quences.
Germany
rigorous
mechanical
to metal.
measuring time
of
of spatial explora-
The
side.
interests in time
side
by
In
the
Fifteenth
mapmakers
surface,
As
and henceforward even ordinary men, without the special skill and courage of a Marco Polo or a Leif
Ericsson, could travel to distant lands.
So time
and space took possession of the European's mind. Why dream of heaven or eternity, while the world was
still
so wide,
if
up promised,
bells tolled,
novelty,
and
if
not
So the
set sail.
Secure in his
The Origins
outward
in
of the
American Mind
sense
of
the
belief in
in time.
An
interest
in
archaeology
Utopias
char-
The City
Sun were
The
fall
Greek literature had not, perhaps, such a formative influence on this change as the historian once
and the image of historic Greece and Rome gave the mind a temthought.
it,
porary
dwelling-place.
it
Plainly,
the
knowledge
no longer
aside,
sufficed
if
thrown
up the spaces they had left open. The European turned aside from his traditional cathedrals and began to build according
of classic literature, to
to Vitruvius.
He
too,
human body,
and Leonardo's
St.
John was
so
changing a feature.
The Virgin
of
Venus.
What had
to
Thomas Aquinas
Phaedo.
to
say
about theology?
What
Tuscan
there.
had
Aristotle
about
natural
history?
fossils in the
upon
They had
Here and Eternity: they were Yonder and Yesterday and since
;
way
off
and
we'll
"be damnably
morrow
as a substitute.
it
hard to shake
off
dream
that enthroned
in the daily
As
Protestants,
inception.
They
believed in the
Eucha-
Supper.
They
believed
in the
Her
The Origins
motherhood.
of the
American Mind
They
which grew up by the shores of Galilee, but, using their private judgment and taking the bare words
as the
Thomas which
and melted
the Protes-
When
under works
all
and magnificence.
intensified
What
remained of the
first
was perhaps
during the
few
one cannot
of
and
vitality
!
the
but alas
so little remained
Geneva one has the beginnings of that hard barracks architecture which formed the stone-tenements of
Seventeenth Century Edinburgh, set a pattern for
the austere meeting-houses of
Main
Street.
The meagerness
which
finally
Odd
Fellows, Elks,
Wood-
that
in a Chartres, a Strasbourg,
Durham
the Protestant
word.
Did he
suffer
any hardship
at
all.
New World?
the Old
None
World
book.
in this, at least,
from the later protest ant canons, perpetrated by Joseph Smith or Mrs. Mary Baker
differed
Eddy.
of
So, in
many
respects, Protestant
society
ceased to be civilized.
m
Our
critical eyes are usually
little
dimmed by
itself.
sance
we forget that
it
quickly spent
Far
little
spirit
The Origins
among
palace.
of the
American Mind
The
give
of
command over
the
workaday routine
great
the
Thus
was only to espouse that segment called Protestantism. Tailors and tinkers, almost by definition, could not be humanists. Morethe established church,
over,
medieval culture.
the
criticism
of
the
pagan
theology,
it
many minds from Catholic did not orient them toward what was
"new" and "practical" and "corning." The Renaissance was not, therefore, the launching out of a new
epoch:
ruption
it
simply witnessed the breakdown and disthe existing science, myth, and
fable.
of
When
London
in
Once the European, indeed, had abandoned the dream of medieval theology, he could not live very
long on the
lost its
memory
make connec-
new experiences in time and space. Leaving both behind him, he turned to what seemed to him a hard and patent reality the external world.
tions with his
:
The
ways
of living,
had become
a blank.
tions,
and reduced the rich actuality of things to a bare description of matter and motion. Along this path went the early scientists, or natural philosophers.
By
they extracted
from the complicated totality of everyday experience just those phenomena which
measured, generalized, and,
if
could be observed,
necessary, repeated.
Applying
this
exact method-
more accurately the movements of the heavenly bodies, to describe more precisely the fall of a stone and the flight of a bullet,
ology, they learned to predict
composition
of
a fragment
of
"matter."
Rule,
these things
were
all
The Origins
of the American
Mind
At
reformed;
and
if
the
scientists
themselves
were
conclusion:
science
man's estate.
With
But
human
life
"matter," and if they touched upon life at all, it was through a post-mortem analysis, or by following Descartes and arbitrarily treating the human
organism as
if
it
determined under
these
all conditions.
For
the scientists,
full
of meaning and
very helpful;
tinents of knowledge.
For
as
realm.
new
C23IJ
was
accepted
less
it
because
had ever baked any bread science was ready, not merely to bake the bread, but increase the yield of the wheat, grind the flour and
none of these
activities
Even
of
the plain
this
man
could ap-
preciate consequences
believing.
order.
Seeing was
By
tury
all
imaginatively grasped.
many
things that
may
not
To them
now
that
come after
us, it
may
may
The
now comparatively
The Origins
may
culture."
of the
American Mind
from
late
not improbably
be effected
agri-
rsr
The
of Protestantism as
an attempt to
;
isolate,
deform,
it
became habitual
;
and
it
The extended
service, likewise
began during
this
same period of
that
in
disintegration.
Need
emphasize
their
were
all
liberating influences?
They took
the place
Need
We
must not
raise
our eyebrows
scientist like
Newton
in
we pass by,
is
as a quaint coincidence,
home
of
Jean Calvin and as the great center of watches and clocks. These connections are not mystical nor fac-
The new
financial order
growth of the new theological and scientific views. First came a mechanical method of measuring time: then a method of measuring space: finally, in money,
to apply an abstract
way
of
human
activity.
European from
limitations.
and economic
No
ants
to
have
he would
potential pheasants
manner born.
Economic
activity ceased to
It
abstraction
means to
Rotarian
this
supreme end.
When
some incipient
is
"Time
money,"
The Origins
of the
American Mind
it
does in Berg-
Does
life?
all this
On
the contrary,
activity.
The
as the late T. E.
Hulme pointed
out,
is
a difference
If
we
The
that from
field
was invaded by
this
process of abstraction.
The
Roman
men
like
Lamarck,
Wordsworth,
Goethe,
Comte.
Last and most plainly of all, the disintegration of medieval culture became apparent in politics. Just
as "matter/*
when examined by
the physicist
is
ab-
human
tain
society.
He
his
omnipresent relations
with
city,
family,
and
office:
he became
Having abstracted
he had,
of course, no
a cherub
in the
How
shall
we
find
restore
him to society?
for
somehow we always
is,
in
human
beings.
The
solution
is
endowed
into
society,
as
the
This
by a parliament.
The
torical
continuity in Europe.
;
It
challenged
the
vested interests
it
exist-
it
C28]
The Origins
away the
of the
American Mind
and nets of
privi-
traditional associations
On
tion,
and
free investigation,
for the abuses of the past were genuine and the griev-
to the consequences of
these displacements
and dissociations.
them
is
Perhaps
the briefest
of characterizing
inevitable.
to say that
To
it
those
who were
engaged
political
criticism,
seemed that a
genuine political order had been created in the setting up of free institutions
;
politi-
By 1852 Henry
James,
Sr.,
was
keen enough to see what had happened: "Democracy," he observed, "is not so
political life as a dissolution
of
of
and disorganization
It is simply
a resolution of govern-
and a recommitit is
ment of
it
by no
C293
Now we begin
of
to see a little
more
mind out
The
physical causes
important to at work at was recognize that a cultural necessity the same time. The old culture of the Middle Ages
it is
"backward" and "unprogressive" countries Italy and Spain, which drifted outside the main
Men's interests beexternalized and abstract.
came externalized
They
Intelli-
an old and complete culture, and the new culture, which in origin was thin, partial, absilized shell of
stract,
and deliberately
indifferent to man's
proper
interests.
the
in
second,
our Europeans
America.
persecution, let the times get hard, let them fall out
let
come swarming over the ocean. The groups that had most completely shaken off the old symbolisms were those that were most
and they
will
The Origins
of the American
Mind
the external
environment.
To them matter
results
alone mattered.
disintegration
of
The
ultimate
of
this
European culture did not come out, in America, But its immediate until the Nineteenth Century.
consequence became
visible,
first
hundred and
tlement.
in
fifty
set-
first colonists
Massachusetts, the
New
first
Netherlands, Virginia
thin trickle of hunters
Boone
Europe:
with them.
During
thought
munity itself the house, the town, the farm were still modeled after patterns formed in Europe. It was
not a great age, perhaps, but
it
had found
its
form.
manor house
in
Maryland f
To
tell
habits; and
if
it
On
as they
had
lived in
In the
first
There was no
the
hymn
European ideas, and there was an American equivalent for every new European type.
the sphere of
amusing to follow the leading biographies of the time. Distinguished American figures step onto
It
is
if
the
Muse
exits.
of History
had
Their arrange-
ment
is
of the
European mind.
The
first
figured in
The Origins
itor of Calvinism.
of the
American Mind
like
Edwards wrote
is
man
is
in a
trance,
who
;
at bottom
aware that he
talking
nonsense
like
was caught
thought to
destination.
its
tantism lost
intellectual
oped into the bloodless Unitarianism of the early Nineteenth Century, which is a sort of humanism
without courage, or
it
name
of evangelical Chris-
threw
itself
qualities;
self-help,
upon
thrift,
upon the
evils of "idleness'*
many
gratuitous
contributions
industrial
revolution.
When
C833
religious
little
creed:
the
testimony loses
nothing by being a
belated.
Every-
The imagination
religion but
not
the
contrary
led the
is
mere
sense.
No
mountebanks to promote factory morale nor are these thoughts far from that fine combinarevivalist
tion of commercial zeal and pious effort which characterize such auxiliaries as the Y.
fictions of
M.
C. A.
The
and
the
bugbears
Gradgrind,
Bounderby,
M'Choakumchild
dustrialism
:
forth
made
tant mind a
dreary and
futile.
It
was not
killed the
devel-
The Origins
in which art
of the
American Mind
and myth grow up, and create new forms for man's activities. Hence the fury of effort
of the
The capacity
to do
Did
If
Word
goods,
why not
dollars?
The next
scene stood
forces.
figure
that dominated
the
American
new
even more
completely
for these
He
man, and
in his
ma-
as the
and
of scholars like
citizen,
bach.
As a
by
of
Philadelphia,
He
went into
The
line
from Frank-
latest advertise-
C35J
income,
in
the
is
Franklin's ownership,
is
life
was
more
fully rounded.
scientist.
and
in
penny by any
of his discoveries.
in fact,
on
his last
his death,
all
the "gothick
and unworthy to the quick minds of the Eighteenth Century which meant that he was completely absorbed in the domi-
so puerile
his
own
time, namely,
He
accepted
is money; the must be conquered; the money money must be made and he
;
The Origins
advantages of a
of the
American Mind
lose
man may
life.
most of the
civilized
As a young man,
Although Franklin's sagacity as a statesman can hardly be overrated, for he had both patience and
principle, the political side of the
of his time
is
best
summed up
in
Thomas
Paine.
Paine's
name has
served so
many
way
into our
were incapable of enjoying a sound English style, or of following, with any pleasure, an honest system
of thought, clearly expressed.
is
The Rights
;
of
Man
it
contains, I
know
of
humbug
that surrounds
a good
many
theories of government.
Said Paine:
"Almost everything appertaining to the circumstances of a nation has been absorbed and confounded under the general and mysterious word government. Though it avoids taking to its account
C373
it
occasions,
not to arrogate to
appearance of prosperity.
the cause of
and purloins from the general character of man the merits that appertain to him as a social
being."
in
The Rights
of
Man
and
The Age
ness.
of
Reason
is
and here
was a genuine opportunity to apply them. He summed up the hope in reason and in human conalone,
Without
love
makes
own
life,
with
all
its
lapses
and
and
affections, alle-
Unfortunately, a
not more truly a
man man he
:
without a background
is
proper shape.
C38H
The Origins
If
of the
American Mind
will find
that he has
made up
of
shadows that linger in the memory, or he is uneasy and restless, settles down, moves on, comes home
again, lives on hopeless to-morrows, or sinks back
into
mournful yesterdays.
War of Independence
all
up
and a
Rights
they forfeited
the habits
arbitrary misrule.
willingly,
new country,
is
something that we
may
well doubt.
When
aged to maintain an effective cultural life; when they came alone, as "free individuals," they gained
more than cheap land and the privileges of the ballot box. The land itself was all to the good
little
felt
any
lack, so
Fourth
by
Europe
labored.
That was
the error of his school, for the absence of these harmful or obsolete institutions left a
vacancy in society,
filled
by busy work, which fatigued the body and diverted the mind from the things which
should have enriched
this externalism.
it.
People sought to
by
politics
alone;
the National
The
flag,
supplanted the cross, and the Fathers of the Constitution the Fathers of the Church.
The
illustrated in Paine's
life
as
and he turned
from
his
answer
lution.
Edmund
"The
War
.
of
impossibilities.
The Origins
tion, I
of the
American Mind
[juiet life,
undertook to
That
words
idle!
What a
used
to
tale those
aristocracy
was
in
the
ascendant,
patient
hirelings
apply their
working of fountains,
chess-
clocks which
little
birds to
and wag
the operas.
and played selections from It was to such inane and harmless pertheir tails,
skills in
put.
;
ied on
of the
The bored patron was amused life plodnothing was altered. But in the freedom
indifferent to
the
to
and became
intelligent, industrious
men
like
Justification
by
faith: that
was
politics: the
and parliamentary deJustification by works: that was invention. bate. No frivolities entered this new religion. The new
lished
by regular
and
in
one
temporary
of his environment.
From
men with
an imaginative bias like Morse, the pupil of Benjamin West, men like Whitney, the school-teacher^ like
Fulton, the miniature painter, turned to invention
or at least the commercial exploitation of inventions
to
Not
ments of the Industrial Revolution: the great outbreak of technical patents began, in fact,
England about 1760, and the first inklings of the movement were already jotted down in Leonardo da Vinci's
in
notebooks.
The point
is
that
in
Europe heavy
Scholars, literary
still felt
no need of justify-
C42]
The Origins
activities.
of the
American Mind
worn
it
thin,
and
in the
No
in.
When
it
Stendhal wrote
L 'Amour
by-word
he refers to
with contempt.
exploitation
of
the
physical
environment was,
it
would seem,
tion,
inevitable.
Protestantism, science,
all
invert'
political
democracy,
;
of these institutions
all of
them, by denial or by
Thus
in
of
Eu-
If the Nineteenth
it
was not
it
was
all
up by
surface
of
Europe.
;
stripped European
Europe
past.
It
was to America
wander
in the wilderness
and here
exile,
[44]
CHAPTER TWO
THE
but
before he
made
appearance here.
Pioneering
may
in
in
action.
peculiar behavior, one must not merely study his relations with the Indians, with the trading companies,
policies
one must
understand
the
to
Amerin
Savoy,
moors.
in the
became
now
takes
more
than a
little
Chateaubriand and
Mark Twain,
or Rousseau and
William James.
The pioneer
that
an inward necessity. It is the inward necessity most of our commentators upon Mm have
neglected.
its
made
its
first
Many
of
The
guilds
privileges,
The church,
in
England and
in
France,
who
believed only in
the
all
mundane
qualities of bread
and wine.
In fact,
in a state
Europe were
ing fruit.
Adam
an
intelligent
man
The Romanticism
have cared to carry away.
of the Pioneer
Once the
old shelters
and
landmarks
could
people turn?
The
classic
been found
There remained one great and permanent source of culture, and with a hundred different gestures the Eighteenth Century acclaimed
it
Nature.
The
had
Precisely at
moment,
the coun-
Rousseau's, or
by mincing little country lanes, like that which led Marie Antoinette to build an English village in Versailles,
If one
hills
of
Cum-
atmosphere heightened by an
Nature over man's puny handiwork. If one were middle class, one built a villa, called Idle Hour, or
of
The Hermitage; at the very least, one took country tvalks, or dreamed of a superb adventurous manhood
[n
America.
In the mind of the great leader of this movement,
European
the
culture:
it
was a
complete
substitute
for
existing
institutions,
Rousseau began
and
sciences
had the
:
effect of
he
won
the
by the academy at Dijon by affirming tendency to corrupt and from that time on;
any decrease
of
contemporary
:
civilization in
return
to
shun society:
enjoy solitude.
a sys-
by Providence,
nice
human mind by
mathe-
The Romanticism of
matical calculations.
the Pioneer
By Nature
Rousseau meant
background
of his birthplace; he
meant the
fields,
like those
of Savoy,
The
an unsound
one.
As an
was recognized at
least as early as
it lias
The
Bucolics,
and the
ticated
fucian
philosophy
developed
Bamboo
Grove.
in
his
Nature almost inevitably becomes dominant the mind when the powers of man himself to mold
fortunes and
make over
his
institutions
all, it is
seem
feeble
necessary
human
pas-
order.
What made
so immense,
in
what made
life,
European
European in America a Nature that was primitive and undefiled. In the purely mythical continent
the
Red
and
life
of physical dignity
Sachem was an
Marcus Aurelife
was
by the time the French Revolution came, the peasant had a word
or two to say about
of Nature in the
it
himself
human
nature, his
painfully acquired and transmitted knowledge might be laid to instinctive processes in short, he became a
;
pure
ideal.
of
The Romanticism
of the Thames.
of the Pioneer
if
In America,
to walk half a
if
society
was
futile,
day to escape
it; in
Europe,
if
one
re-
If
and health and cheerfulness, what place could be richer than America? Once Romanticism turned its
eyes across the ocean,
It
it
it left
embryo of the future; it renounced its hoarded capital and began to live on its current income it forfeited the old and the tried
;
This transforma-
an immense physiologi-
and
an
essentially
man, who possesses, physiologically speaking, a maximum of the art and power of adaptation as his typical distinction."
myth
But
it
sole influence
society
was
divided in the
who thought
rotten: the
side,
essentially
Benthams and the Turgots were on one the Rousseaus and Blakes on the other, and the
The
perfection-
believed in progress,
;
science, laws,
education,
and comfort
The
followers of
Rousseau believed
of sense, they
in
Instead
wanted
;
tion, spontaneity
and an
open
field.
If the pioneer
child of
the
Romantic Movement, he belonged to the other school by adoption. He wanted Nature and he
;
wanted comfort no
less.
He
itself to
a perpetual
its
machinery
The Romanticism
could be perfected
notions.
of the Pioneer
He
believed with
is
good naturally, and that by institutions only is he made bad." And if the Yankees who first settled in
Illinois
full of
"notions" because
quickly absorbed.
took
its
place in
these ideas turned him from the past, and enabled him
was any physical necessity for filling up the raw lands of the West. The movement across the Alleghanies began long before the East was fully occupied:
it
New Guide
to
al-
the
most a habit."
New England
migration to
which caused so
many
settlers to pull
up
stakes and
move
into Illinois
and so
beyond, until
movement temporarily to an end. This restless search was something more than a prospecting of resources
;
it
Soli-
tude,
The
Primitive Life
may
be obscured by
Winter
in the
West
is
the
563
The Romanticism
of painted
in
of the Pioneer
pomp, to the silence which has reigned these dim groves since the first fiat of Creation
the difference between this movement and
first
was spoken?"
Mark
setts
first
that which
or Pennsylvania in the
New World.
In the
and keep up the religious practices which were threatened by economic innovations and political infringements in Europe. The
nearly his proper
self,
drift to the
West, America became, on the contrary, a place where the European could be swiftly transformed
into something different: where the civil
become a hardy savage, where the social become an "individual," where the settled
could
could
could
become a nomad, and the family man could forget his old connections. With pioneering, America
ceased to be an outpost of Europe.
The Western
and
communities
relapsed
into
an
earlier
more
C67H
noted, however,
is
that,
uninfluenced
by peasant work of
woodman, arid hunter led to unmitigated destruction and pillage. What happened was just
the miner,
the reverse of the old barbarian invasions, which
The movement
European
into
into a barbarian.
The
was described
by Crevecoeur and Cooper long before Professor Turner summed them up in his classic treatise on
the passing of the frontier.
"In
all societies,"
says
By
living
the neighborhood.
The
to
kill their
The surrounding
into their hands
kill
gun
they
some; and thus, by defending their property, this is the they soon become professed hunters
;
The
;
The Romanticism
of the Pioneer
Equipped with
his
ax and
down
slaughtering
its living
creatures.
Instead of seek-
obstreperous passion.
No
The
In these prac-
back to a phase of European exwhich had perience lingered on chiefly in the archaic hunts of a predatory aristocracy and in the ab;
sence of
any
practices sank
more deeply
this
;
contemporary description of the pioneering period without finding a flowery account of the new life,
put in contrast to
beautiful
in
wretched,
despotic,
foolishly
Europe; and this animus was echoed even the comments that Hawthorne and Emerson, to
Mark Twain,
Let
me put
by side. The first is from a pamphlet by George Lunt called Three Eras of New England (1857) "Whenever this is the state of man the impertinent
:
fictions
and sophisms of
life
die out.
The borrowaway
human
creature fall
from him under the rigid discipline of primeval necessities, as the encrusting dirt, which bedimmed the
diamond,
veals
is
re-
and confirms
inestimable price.
The
voice
mock
them away and fastened them cliff, or bore them onhail its
... So
far, therefore, as
in-
become diluted or perverted by the sophistications of social being, they may require an actual
refreshment and renewal, under the severe and inevitable trials of colonial existence.
.
This, then,
is
all
it
and
The Romanticism
superfluities
of the Pioneer
of artificial
life,
and founds
its
new
existence
of natural society.
Against
pioneer
this
life, let
lish settler
me
set the
comment
of a
men
in the spring of
is less
re-
am
jected to culture.
The
you
will
never
feel, until
you
ride in these
till
you
wilder-
ness shine."
The hand
and
there,
of
man was
particularly
Ohio,
Kentucky and
day but
;
its
heaviest burdens
the stream
civil life
moved further west, the traditions of a disappeared, and the proportion of scalabullies,
and gamblers
There are plenty of exceptions to this generalization, it goes without saying; but Texas and
hand.
Nevada were
tended to run.
scured in
The
but
many
of agriculturists
it
is
in
The shock
mark
an aftermath
Civil
of
the pioneer's
experience left
its
in one or
of regretful reminiscence.
The
postIt,
War
writers
who
deal with
Roughing
Son
Hoosier School-
The Romanticism
of the Pioneer
abandoned the scene of the pioneer's efforts and had returned to the East they made copy of their early
:
life,
it,
because
For
them, the pioneering experience could be recapitulated in a night around a camp-fire or a visit to the
in-
New York
in a
day when
West was
still
in fact wild.
a relevant
so easily
in
;
way
of life
and the thin-skinnedness of the pioneer the face of criticism, and the eagerness of the
post-pioneer generation
Glaspell's play
The
Inheritors of Susan
One
is
elements in
career expressed
them-
selves in literature
western exodus
literature
of
the
rubber-stamp
pattern
from
C633
by James Fenimore Cooper. These new contacts, these new scenes, these adall,
new Natur-
He was
he shared
showed
in
and shyness that the Amerind perhaps the company of strangers and above the
;
The Deerslayer,
His eye
that
in
it
was only
instinct
is,
of course, no
ordinary bullet
it
Not every
pioneer, needless
was a Natty Bumpo; but the shy, reserved, taciturn, dryly humorous hunter was the sort of
to say,
first
stress of
Cooper himself
The Romanticism, of
the Pioneer
fact that he
had
Spy
of the Neutral
Ground, Harvey Birch, showed, I believe, that this figure had become a property of his unconscious.
First a hunter, then a scout, then a trapper,
first
smoke of
fire,
With
all
ative constructions, he
was plainly
live solely
seized
by a great
had been portrayed before in literature; but the hardness and craft of Leatherstocking brought forth a new quality, which came directly from the
woods and the
his
first
prairies.
When
political
barbarians or
This straightness
It
is
the great
if,
was as
after
its full
may
Old
to an agreeable conformity to a
undersized.
a
common mold, a
on
the
little
These
little
Hickories,
other
hand, grew scraggly and awkward; but in their reach, one would catch, occasionally, a hint
of the innate possibilities of the species.
In the course of the Nineteenth Century, Leatherstocking was joined by an even more authentic folk
hero, Paul
fire in
shack.
;
was an axmari
and identify himself more completely with the prime activities of the new American type, he was also a
great inventor.
All
his
He
figures
on a continental
is
scale.
portant
if it is
The
habit
of counting
663
The Romanticism
"reckoning" and "guessing"
of the Pioneer
the habit, that
is
is,
of
in
expressed
of Bunyan's exploits.
In a day when no
town as a proof
of
the
qualitative
statistical
money
that lent
large figures.
began to appreciate
its
comic quality
in the
Bun-
yan
tales it
is
a device of
humor
as well as of heroic
exaggeration.
quietly growing
For many
and expanding, Paul Bunyan lurked under the surface of our life we lived by his light,
:
even
like
we were ignorant of his legend. He, too, Leatherstocking, was aloof from women and
if
;
this fact
is
woman
and though the pioneer might carry his family with him, bedstead, baby, and all, they were sooner or
later
settle
down.
Woman
was the
chief
enemy
of the pioneer:
new
side
by
side in the
or in the
When Whitman
not at
first
think of
woman:
in
so far
from indicating
it is
Whitman,
rather a
tribute to his imaginative identification with the collective experience of his generation.
At
He
;
and the story that brought him forth was a rather commonplace fantasy of an earlier day. Yet the
history of Rip
Irving' s
tale
was written about him as early as the eighteenthirties was remodeled by succeeding generations
of
American actors,
form by
How did this happen? The Joseph Jefferson. reason, I think, was that Rip's adventures and disappointments stood for that of the typical American
of the pioneer period.
harried
by
his
wife,
gun.
He
The Romanticism
enchanted.
At the end
of twenty years he
The
old land;
marks have gone the old faces have disappeared all the outward aspects of life have changed. At
the bottom, however.
for he has been
drunk and
all
in-
it
not
still
majority of Americans,
dreams of a
In our
as
moments,
we may think
or
two-fisted
of
ourselves
like
Leatherstockings,
fellows
Paul
Bunyan; but
in the
bottom
of our hearts,
we are
disconsolate Rips.
He saw
no way of
"up
and moving" seemed written in the skies. In his disappointment and frustration, he became maudlin.
It
is
songs
teenth Century.
At
the
moment when
the eagle
Rowdy
Journal, and Scadder, the real-estate gambler, were joining voices in a Hallelujah of triumph, it was
made
their
way
into the
of the mid-century
was "Don't
you remember Sweet Alice, Ben Bolt?" but the truth that Alice was merely a name to start the tears
rolling.
It
manly heart grieved: what hurt was the fact that in the short space of twenty years, the mill-wheel had
fallen
had tumbled
in,
the
felled,
and
in the
and golden grain. In short, ruin and change lay wake of the pioneer, as he went westering.
"There
is
change
Ben
Bolt,
somehow
had an uneasy
What
up
bosom!
He
pulls
Home
Sweet Home.
He
sells his
who
will
C70U
The Romanticism
is
of the Pioneer
guts out the forest?
no place
like
home."
He
tree,
"Woodman,
now."
spare that
it
bough, in youth
protect
it
And
in the
is
Red Varmints he
the
driving to the
Land
of the Sunset
Song of Hiawatha slips from his hip-pocket. Does this seem to exaggerate the conflict? Be assured that it was there. The Mark Twains, Bret
Hartes, and Artemus
the old solidities of
Wards would
Europe
so ingratiating, taught
as they were to despise Europe's cities and institutions as the relics of a miserable
if
the
life
IV
With
War
behind us,
Nature."
war automatically
if
either
they
resist, unfits
them for
carrying on their
civil
duties in a whole-hearted
manner.
In
the
every member of
in justifica-
Romantic Movement
in
"To
to-morrow
finds us farther
sum
who
re-
The non-combatants
in
Boston,
Philadelphia, and
New York
who
ex-
pects at
any moment
Some
of them, like C. F.
Civil
when the
into a
War
;
turned the
George Perkins Marsh confessed that "in our place and day the scholar
others, like
command
hath no vocation," and made plain with what reluctance they turned their backs upon science and the
humane
of
scales,
to
weigh over
against a
The Romanticism
In these, and
raphies,
of the Pioneer
many
and
more
and
sensitive
minds
many
of our
bowed to
an imaginary necessity.
as far
The
has become a commonplace of literary criticism during the last half-generation; the weakness of this
criticism has been the failure to grasp the difference
in origin
inventor-business man.
the
The Puritan
way
what he
The
pioneer debased
ture,
but
was only in the habits he had developed, so to say, on the road, that he turned aside from the proper goal of the Romantic Movement, which was to find
power.
man came
Europe's
through
the
;
breakdown
of
develop to
its
Average American.
America of the Eighteenth Century, which was still attached umbilically to the older Europe, and the
America of the pioneer, tinctured by the puritan and the industrialist, one might perhaps compare two representative men, Thomas Jefferson and Mark
Twain.
had not
fitted
him for
any sort
governments.
When
among
his peers
Mark
Twain might have done, because it was effete and feudal, but because it was even more barbarous than
that of the American provinces.
To Mark Twain,
The Romanticism
in the light of
of the Pioneer
call
a good
Rogers with another invention, the chief attraction he emphasized was its potential monopoly. Jefferson's concern with the practical arts,
on the other
esthetic
he was an active
him
in the design
The death
came
moment when
In two
men
of the fol-
Morse defended
his prein
mood
"If I
am to
am
fitted for
it,
why
should
I not glory as
much
in felling trees
As
literature
the displacement
in the
community's
With no
life
about
have no desire
nor of his
skill
in the
Poe was
and as an
esthetic ex-
perimentalist his
own arrangements
in prose pre-
rationalistic
its
mind
fitted his
inner
characteristics far
superficial
look at
it
In him, the
frozen
springs of
human
desire
:
had not
so
much
up
as turned to metal
his
Watt and
mechan-
and
his
mind worked
like a
ical hopper, even when there were no appropriate It happened to be a materials to throw into it.
it
The Romanticism
able to
of the Pioneer
work upon, as
on small ingenuities
puzzles,
like
ciphers
and
"scientific"
or he created a
apparent dissociation from the actualities that surrounded him. The criticism of Poe's fan>
its
is
tasies
are equally so
the criticism
is
Poe's mind
Terror and cruelty dominated and terror and cruelty leave a scar on
life.
The emotional
pioneer's fact
will
not strain
my
point by trying to
make out a
is
else.
That
the equivalence
not
a meretricious presumption on
I think,
my
part,
is
attested,
eration later in
Ambrose
Bierce.
No
sensitive
mind can undergo warfare or pioneering, with all the raw savagery of human nature developed to the
The massacres,
all
impressions.
There
in
is
a mock-
Romantic Movement
horror stories
of
literature
in
the
;
Mrs. Radcliffe
Man
and though he may return to unbroken nature as a relief from all the
after
all,
a domestic animal
sobrieties of existence, he
in the
wilderness
only
essential
human
species.
Poe had
the wilderness.
dream had
There
is
of
Poe.
this
nightmare.
The
finds
.estimony
all
the
more
salient
when one
The Romanticism
Mark Twain
innocence, without a
of the Pioneer
word
of criticism,
and then, by
a psychic transfer, becoming ferociously indignant over the same things when he finds them in his im-
gap between the hope of the Romantic Movement and the reality of the pioneer period is
vast
The
On
one
tury,
a fresh
start,
and
its
attempt to
it,
achieve a
new
culture.
And
over against
the epic
it
march
of the covered
de-
and exhausted souls that engraved their epitaphs Mr. Masters* Spoon River Anthology. Against
movement, and against the real gains
panied
that
it
this
social well-being,
must be
life,
set
off
the crudities of
swilling
the pioneer's
sexual
his
bestial
and
"a
fierce dull
biped
standing in
our way."
under
by
belligerent
The truth
and
is
that the
life
of the pioneer
was bare
Divorced from
its
social
That
why, perhaps, he kept on changing his occupation and his habitat, for as long as he could keep on
moving he could forget that, in his own phrase, he was not "getting anywhere." He had no end of
experiences
:
But
there was,
too
literally,
that
is,
no op-
In
a
the
if
to barter
his
streets
and starched
collars
The Romanticism of
other
insignia
of
the Pioneer
truly
high
and
progressive
civilization.
The return
more of the
^>r
to
promote institutions of compulsory good fellowship. So much for an experience that failed either to absorb an old culture or create a new one!
CHAPTER THREE
one
in the early
part of the
arrangements of
life
men were on
the brink of
a great change.
lution
The rumble
in
was heard
who
were
Some
of
was
combined
with
an
extraordinary
;
amount of economic sagacity and statesmanship some of them became disciples of Fourier and sought
men's various capacities more fully than the utilitarian community.
the slum
made
its
ap-
strange
politics
traditions
altered
the
balance
of
power;
lions
who
by the end
of
the
fifties
an
editorial writer in
Harper's Weekly
who might
In general,
all
Civil
War
existed in
At
the
soil
at the hour
when the
old
ways are breaking up that men step outside them sufficiently to feel their beauty and significance:
lovers are often closest at the
moment
of parting.
In
New England,
had become a
shell; but,
drying up,
it left
it
behind
had a
in the
felt
spirit.
Before the
it
collapsed,
men
in
their imagination.
C86H
tious but
narrow
activity,
perfection.
Goodyear brought
Thoreau brought
to
like
Barnum grew
out
same sort
Bronson Alcoti:
organized
lik*
Young
Utah
whilst
nonentities
Pierce and
During
Day
mind; the
weaknesses
developed
in
the
pioneer,
in-
and partly because of the volcanic eruption of the Civil War had up to 1890 little more
C87]
foreboding
it
that
every
intelligent
mind
felt
when
its
Before the
ex-
War
Westward march
panded the sense of achievement that came over the Eastern States ; and men faced the world with a confidence that
that was by
and jetsam that had been washed into the slums of London, Manchester, and Birmingham on the wave
of "industrial prosperity."
One might
live in
this
one
plaint,
and even
if
fellows, as
Thoreau
among them,
Transcendentalism might
fossilized
The testimony
as one might
unqualified.
of this country,
...
It
is
a country
no past
all
spective look."
The
voice of
:
Whitman
echoed Emer-
less
"God has
things
in
predestinated,
our souls.
The
must soon
;
be in our rear.
We
new path
is
in the
New
World that
is
ours.
In our youth
our strength;
"Every
man."
institution
is
the lengthened
in
shadow of a
its
America during
Golden
man who
left
They
no labor-saving machines, no
library or a hospital
much
less
what they left was something and much more than that an heroic conlife.
ception of
their
They peopled
in
own shapes.
America before or
since.
Up
when
it
American communities were provinwas over, they had lost their base, and
over the landscape, deluged with new-
spreading
all
Wo rid
is
customs, they lost that essential likea necessary basis for intimate communifirst
ness which
cation.
The
were
;
still
in balance in the
opened up
activities
When
Ticknor was preparing to go to Germany, in the first decade of the century, there was but one German
dictionary, apparently, in
New England.
Within
European
classics
were published
and importa-
tions
by
its tea.
C903
the American
merchantman across
Living lustily in
all
these
steamboats
railroads
telegraphs
rubber
raincoats: reapers:
them, the
retreat, he retired
Within the
circle
of
needed only a
little
boldness to con-
new po-
An
imaginative
to birth during
this period, a
new hemisphere
in the
geography of
the mind.
experience.
What
preceded led up to
it
;
what
fol-
lowed, dwindled
away from
empty ges-
tures of frivolity.
The American
rose to
if
it.
men
;
The
events attended
on eagerly with
there
is
it.
When
all is
nothing in the
not
man,
Melville,
and Hawthorne.
said,
reached a verge.
They
conclusion:
the
critical
creeds,
and
institutions,
which
protestantism,
could
not go
much
But
an unpreempted soil, molded by fresh contact with forest and sea and the more ingenious works of man, already
this
fell into,
and
led
new philosophy, formed on the basis of a wider past than the European, caught
new
art, a
capable of seizing.
was the organic break with Europe's past that enabled the American to go on; just as the immiIt
all
American past widened sufficiently to bring Eastern and Western cultures into a common focus. The American went
on.
Whereas,
new basis for culture, Nietzsche went back to preSocratic Greece, Carlyle to Abbot Samson, Tolstoi
and Dostoevsky to primitive Christianity, and Wagner to the early Germanic fables, Emerson, Thoreau,
and Whitman went forward leaning on the experiences about them, using the past as the logger
uses the corduroy road, to push further into the
wilderness and
still
They fathomed
were
What
is
vital in the
American writers of the Golden Day grew out life which opened up to them every part of
social heritage.
of a
their
And
and
fifty million
Emerson
by many or few particulars. It is the spiritual fact of American experience that we shall examine
during the period of
its clearest
expression.
who shared
in this large
;
their
;
Civil
War
came
The
all,
them
first
was Ralph Waldo Emerson. He was the American philosopher with a fresh doctrine he
:
first
he
American prose writer to escape, by way the Elizabethan dramatists and the Seventeenth
first
Century preachers, from the smooth prose of Addison or the stilted periods of Johnson. He was an
original, in the sense that he
serene, ample-
bosomed lake of
Whitman. He
loses a little
by
this
is
so
satisfied
with a
platforms.
His
;
very
coldness
seems
familiar
to
and for too long they appropriated him, as one of them they forgot that his coldness is
academic minds
:
burns
of his
life
was mild
there are
the distance
Mont Blanc
sweet
man
Emerson was
sort
of
living
essence.
The
New
England
freeholder,
yes,
from him
eternity.
recon-
New England:
a handful of to supply for us and fauna, and the new Irish immigrants who
finally
be everything of importance in
things.
The weaknesses
bookishness,
its
too:
its
failure, as
of
Emerson, to
kiss
its
New England
trine, for he
touched
it
life
on many
sides,
and what
is
is
more, he touched
ist,
freshly, so
though he
a Platon-
one
will
essay on Art
in a
very derivative
way
the
bottom of
With most
of the resources
ness
his
central doctrine
tellectual,
or cultural, nakedness
it
means afresh
in one's
own
Emerson applied the same method a more sweeping way, and buoyed up by his faith
Catholic cult:
the
in in
future of America
but
all politics;
life.
aspect of
Emerson
seized
it
divested everything of
afresh, to
life
its
associations,
and
make what
as-
sociations
it
As a
result,
:
each
had perhaps as much to give as Christ Hafiz could teach him as much as Shakespeare or Dante. More:
over, every
associated
fragment of present experience lost its towards the established values, too
:
no longer, perhaps, could exhibit the original power of sword or spade, he extended the democratic challenge: perhaps
mit of
new experiences belonged to the sumaristocracy, and old lines were dying out, or
Emerson saw
re-think
life,
He
"Nothing
is
at last sacred
but the integrity of your own mind. ... I remember an answer which when quite young I was
adviser,
who was
On my
saying,
'What have
if
I to
do
live
wholly
from within?
pulses
'
my
friend suggested,
may
plied,
me
to be such; but
am
Devil.'
No
my
Nature."
"Life only avails, not the having lived."
is
There
liance: it
day
of his confidence
but as a
the
old
forms.
in
The transcendental
young photographer,
dingy security, never really fitting the needs of any family, but that which originally conceived and
An
uncreative age
is
may
be cruder than
may
these
afraid.
Emerson
re-
and
in the
institutions,
of those he discarded.
a custom might
fall
what
of it?
inexhaustible
and
it
might
all
It
nakedness
itself
was
so desirable
cheap
Why
life
nourished Emersons?
"We
always
set so
"on a few
We
who repeat by
and
grow older, of the men and character they chance to see, painfully recollecting the exact words they spoke afterwards, when
tutors, and, as they
;
of talents
who
and are willing to let the words go for at any time, they can use words as good when the occasion comes. When we have new perceptions, we shall
. . .
memory
of its
hoarded treas-
in
The Platonism
emphasized
;
of Emerson's
it
or rather,
mean that he
truth
is,
The
was a matter
thought.
forms as
Emerson's, as
if
They were
was a with-
but
it
might be available
later, if
they
Both
about
life
period of transition.
with the
little details
and so
make
about
Emerson wrote
Man
the Reformer
sect
any
political
or cult.
The
blight of
Negro
slavery awakened his honest anger, and his essay on the Knownothings is an excellent diatribe but
:
even this great issue did not cause him to lose his
perspective: he sought to abolish the white slaves
institution.
I see
no
more or
less
grudgingly
given such a place by current philosophic commentators, because on a superficial examination there
is
no originality in
his
metaphysics
Kant had
of ideas,
symbols
so ancient
in
it
when reemployed
outlines of
Emerbody
work give no
The
contents of
Em-
much
richer, I think,
;
than that
any of
his contemporaries
and he
is
denied a high
is
uated twilight of academic groves, as philosophy, Hegel and Comte and Spencer, Emerson's contemporaries,
had
all
or
they
were
querulous
invalids,
like
by
a railroad engineer.
live
Em-
a healthy and
symmetrical
life:
essential greatness
In him, phiexperience
gamut
of
human
had known
in
time, consists
in
sci-
H102]
tive
role
of ideas, and he
"dialectic" in placing
exist,
fact."
The occasion
man was
Century empiricism
ob-
was the ground for contention between and science, a quarrel which religion lost by
a superstition,
is
all
poetry a
puerility,,
and
all
art itself
raphy and mechanical drawing. Emerson's affirmation of both physics and dialectic, of both science and myth, an affirmation which
justified
saint,
make
proper department.
the
Origin
of
the
facts
man
of science, accepted
;
insulated
Nature but
in the
mind of
Emerson was untroubled by Agassiz's reluctance: the function of "God" was perpetually being
God.
in the
man; and there was nothing in his philosophy to make him deny an orderly sequence in Nature. For Emerson, matter and spirit were not
enemies in conflict: they were phases of man's experience: matter passed into spirit and became a
it
through which man lived and fulfilled his proper Who was there among Emerson's contempobeing.
raries in the Nineteenth
central
office
of philosophy.
Emerson's thought does not seal the world up into a few packets, tied with a formula, and place them
In the past,
it
what they were, but as so many added colors for his palette. The past for Emerson was neither a
prescription nor a burden:
experience.
it
was rather an
esthetic
Being no
that
is,
living at
Corpus Christi or a place at court, the past could be entertained freely and experimentally. It
and the paradox of Brahma became as acceptable as the paradox that the meek
could be revalued
;
The
not
in
does
meridian, but
The promise
of America, of an
"Do
discredit
on what I do not, as
I pretended
to settle
No
me
[1053
Why
into the
new hour?
Nothing
is
secure but
love
it
life,
No
can be
against a
it
No
may
be
The vigor
new Ameri-
future
feel
that this
is
what was
dis-
and what was salutary, for all its incidental defects, in the dumb physical bravado of the pioneer?
ence,
it
further:
They completed
the
Emerof
the
air.
IV
THE DAWN
THE
pioneer
who broke
what
our living connection to-day with the Conestoga wagon, whose drivers used to roll cigars as the first
is
What
the pioneer
felt, if
he
;
felt
anything, in the
if
what he dreamt,
he
dreamt anything; all these things we must surmise from a few snatches of song, from the commonplace reports issued as the trail was nearing its end, by
the generation of
Garland,
John G. Neihardt's,
criti-
Susan GlaspclPs, or wistfully Those sordid, like Edgar Lee Masters' Anthology. who really faced the wilderness, and sought to make
something out of
it,
Henry David Thoreau was perhaps the only man who paused to give a report of the full experience.
In a period when men were on the move, he remained
still
;
when
town rowdy, by
disobedience
sheer neglect,
Thoreau practiced
civil
War,
Law, and slavery itself. Thoreau and letters shows what the pioneer move-
ment might have come to if this great migration had sought culture rather than material conquest,
and an intensity of
over the continent.
life,
Concord about half a generation after Emerson, Thoreau found himself without the prein
Born
liminary
searchings
clergyman.
and Teachings of the young He started from the point that his
;
and where
custom
up and
justify
its
existence.
"A
native
of
the
United States,"
De
if
and he
is
He
Thoreau completely reversed this process: it was because he wanted to live fully that he turned away
from everything that did not serve towards
end.
this
He
town
a spring day by
fill
maker
warm and
active.
Thoreau
seized the
human
life
was; he sought,
in
Walden, to
find
shelter, labor
It
was
all
that
condition of
the
What
that
Thoreau was completely oblivious to the dominant myths that had been bequeathed by the Seventeenth Century.
Indifferent to the illusion of
mag-
Waldcn Pond,
rightly viewed,
fields
and swamps of Concord were as inexhaustible as the Dark Continent. In his study of Nature, he had
recourse on occasion to the scientific botanists and
zoologists
;
and
it is
easier for
would
Like Wordsworth
"we murder to
dissect,"
and he
"Not a
single scientific
term or
You would
You must
it
is
to be.
Your
greatest success
you
Royal Society/'
in nature
all
and
up a system.
The
esthetic qualities of
a fern
number
of spores on a frond
it
let
the
of science,
meas-
urements,
forms of understanding.
fashion,
is
truly part of a
humane
life,
and a Darwin
slide in his
microscope, or a
Pupin, finding the path to physics through his contemplation of the stars he watched as a herd-boy
through the night, are not poorer scientists but richer ones for these joys and delights: they merely
bow
when they
leave
In his attitude
toward
scientific
truth
may do honor
to
The
He
captained huckleberry parties as he might have led a battle, and was just as much the leader in one as
he would have been in the other.
His courage he
mock Emerson
As
for his
it
with
the
shifting
territorial
this,
boundaries
of
the
National State.
In
Hawthorne himself
giance.
Thoreau was not deceived by the rascality of politicians, who were ready to wage war for a
;
up the
valuable.
friends,
What
his
and
companions in the
when the
Political State
might go to the
devil.
was just the opposite to that of the progressive pioneer. The latter did not care what sort of landnote,
scape he "located"
in,
Thoreau,
to com-
religious a
man
power and he
;
by
as
men have
ab-
it,
as
men preserve
cere-
The
to the ar-
life itself
was
One
life
"There
is
not one of
lived a
my
readers," he ex-
claimed,
whole
human
life."
up over
its
fostered, in order to
its
ever-too-
get our sleepers and forge rails and devote long days
and nights to work," he observed ironically, "but go tinkering with our lives to improve them, who
will
build
the
railroads?"
liv-
he wanted to obey
levels
this
ab-
sorbed in the practice of living on beans, or breathing deeply, or wearing clothes of a vegetable origin:
simplification did not lead in
Thoreau to the
cult of
simplicity:
it
What
was no cynical contempt for the things beyond his reach. "Before we can adorn our houses with beautiful objects,
lives
and beautiful
taste for
now, a
the beautiful
is
no house, and no housekeeper." The primeval woods were a favorable beginning for
the search; but
The land
he wrote :
itself,
his imagination
Att things invite this earth's inhabitants To rear their lives to an unheard of height,
And
"The expectation
that phrase, or
piece of early
its
American thought. One thinks of moorland pastures by the sea, dark with bayberries and sweet fern, breaking out among the lichened
rocks ; and the tidal rivers bringing their weedy tang
to the low meadows, wide and open in the sun; the
hum
into clusters
and upland pastures where the blue, purple, lavender and green of the huckleberry bushes give way in autumn to the fringe of sumach by the
;
the yel-
in
uneasy
CUB 3
to rest.
To
and
feel
an un-
was the challenge of babyhood: how will it grow up and what will become of it? Partly, it was the
of innocence
;
charm
or again,
it
mighty variety that the whole continent gives, as if between the two oceans every possible human habitat
might be
built,
perience fathomed.
What
the
young earth, Thoreau absorbed; what the new settlers had given her, the combing of the plow,
the cincture of the stone fence or the row of planted
elms, these things he absorbed too
;
for Thoreau,
life of
one might go there for fortification, for a quickening of the senses, for a tightening of
all
the muscles
is
more
culti-
vated
and
civilized,
not
in
order
to
return
to
crudities that
discarded.
Looking
He
wrote:
"The kings
of
their forests
Why
may
game
self
still exist,
and not be
the earth,'
also,
and not in
idle
These pregnant suggestions of Thoreau, which were to be embodied only after two generations in
our National and State Parks, and in projects
of
like
the Mr. Benton Mackaye's great conception Appalachian trail, make the comments of those who
him only an arch-individualist, half-Diogenes, half-Rousseau, seem a little beside the point. The
see in
individualism of an
it
was what
from their neighbors. He wrote for his fellow-townsmen and his notion of the good life was one that should carry to a higher pitch the
differed
;
existing polity
itself.
"As
to
his
culture
genius
books
paintings
statuary
music
do
and three
select-
To
act collectively
institutions
;
is
and
am
Do
New England,
of Individualistic America?
Taking America as
it
what
institu-
tions of
the
New England
He
understood
the precise
The
experiment at Walden
at least
.
this,
that
if
common
hours.
...
In proportion as he sim-
less
you
air,
Now
put the
in rational
and
did.
;
The pioneer
sities
all
filling
filled
With
the same
common ground
be-
initial feeling
towards Nature,
men may
still
in the
image of Thoreau.
!
What
behind, alas
HIGH NOON
"HE
that by
me spreads a wider
breast than
my
own proves the width of my own." So Walt Whitman chanted in the Song of Myself; and in the greatness of Whitman the genius of Emerson was
justified.
inclusive
tive
:
and taut: he
the
In
figures
of
men who
women who
give themselves
With Emerson,
the air
is rarefied,
Whitman
proved by the seen, till that becomes unseen, and receives proofs of its own."
Whitman absorbed
him, that he
is
so
much
of the
America about
is
more than a
Pushing
single writer: he
his
almost a literature.
larval
way
like
some
of Puritanism, in which he
Temperance Tracts, through the shell of republicanism in which he glorified all the new political
institutions,
of
finally
achieved his
own
American
scene.
The
tradictions in
Whitman's work
full
and
if
we are to
appreciate his
Freneau.
of
Whitman's thought, assumed a mystical beauty and centrality: he wrote about the United States
Mexican
Americans by the inevitable drag of our Manifest Here Whitman was confusing spiritual Destiny.
with temporal dominion.
spiritual
He had
to
in
conceived
the
new
patterns,
appropriate
fulfilled
modern,
of his
which were to be
the America
dreams
and
it
was hard to
of
political
bandits.
In this mood, to
when one sums up Whitman's observations upon the Union and upon the political
Nevertheless,
state of the country, no one surely ever ranted with
so
many
reservations
lines
and
it
is
bombastic
qualifies
them.
The
political
reality that
was so
precious to
Whitman was
man who
is
a difference
realize
and by 1879 Whitman had come to that his democracy was one that had been
C1233
and that
failure
ical structure.
of
poor,
looming upon us of late years steadily, even if slowly, eating into them like a cancer of lungs or
stomach
standing
surface-successes,
. .
is
at heart
all.
an
unhealthy
failure.
."
"By
the unprecedented open-up of humanity enmasse in the United States in the last hundred years, under
our institutions, not only the good qualities of the race, but just as much the bad ones, are prominently
brought forward.
Man
is
dom."
That saving and irrefragable common sense was what ballasted all of Whitman's hopes and expectations.
He
America he dreamed of
and Cotton supplant not merely the older ones who ruled by divine right but the new one
Oil
and
elected
America of
his
power to create a new one he saw the sickly barbers and perfumers of the New York literary schools of
:
who
fit
the fat
in the seventies: he
and denied nothing. No critic ferreted out the weaknesses and pettinesses of America with
saw
all this,
his
what could be said against dream, Whitman said, with the staunch candor
Democratic Vistas
:
of a friend.
But
his
If
it
poems;
and
his
poems were
still
America.
In Leaves of Grass
in
Whitman had
fulfilled
Emerson
There
either of
them suspected.
prosody of Whitman; but whereas Emerson's poems, at their best, remain fragmentary and
warping the metes and measures Emerson respected and clung to, in Whitman, at his best, these new
Whitman had
discovered Emerson's
He
himself had
stammered and stuttered so long as he kept to the old metres his early work was weak and sentimental
:
Whitman tagged
New
Whitman
the Weltanschauung
who saw
bad and the good as part of the total meaning of the universe the electric doctrine of Emerson, which
;
his
up for
as
great as the
whom
the fall of an
portance.
Empire are of precisely the same imOut of the discussions of the Fourierists,
Free Lovers, and women who
and the
societies of
Whitman got
of
restraints of
who
its
passages and Thoreau, who, like Natty Bumpo and Paul Bunyan, averted himself from any passion more intense than friendship.
Whitman took
came out
in his
poems was none of these things it was a new essence none of the ordinary labels
:
described
science;
it.
It
of reality which
was
it
had
largeness
of
comprehension
and
it
life itself.
Whitman found no
his
need
experience: to
sense
to
transcribe
translate.
him was
in
the
highest
full-bodied
and full-minded men and women tended toward enlarging the significance of every single activity, no
appearance was as mysterious and beautiful as anything behind the veil. Perhaps it was all Maya, all illusion; or
The
veil of
was
like
one
removed the outer box of appearance, and discovered another box appearance. What of it? A single
blade
of
;
grass
11
the
atheists
and whatever
own
bones.
Such
:
faith does
it
mocks at
the source of
such testimony.
call
Whitman's poems
poetry
it
is
useless to
If
sacred literature.
poetry,
it is
only
because not
VI
Literature
may
ence,
and
calls
new ones
forth.
Day
responded to Longfellow
and Whittier; for these men caught his ordinary mood, measured off and rhymed and even when
;
set in motion.
It is
amusing to note the way in which ante-bellum AmerEmerson and Thoreau ica responded to Whitman.
were quick to
see his genius, even to
proclaim
it.
Whitman
vocal,
society
and
their
who would
bolster
up
Whitman was
who, mid
all his
he was a
man
of genius
ing, type-setting
no more certain of
his
vocation.
Whitman was
Pygmalion to
self,
his
The imperturbable
aplomb
withdrawn
in the crowd,
or on a mountain top
Whitman
the
extracted from
Every
poem
of
Whitman's
is
man;
man
reader
into
of
Whitman without
re-forming
oneself
an approximation of this new shape. Only art the works of reflect everyday commonplace
personality of the reader: the supreme works always
show or hint
of
the new
may
One might
remove Longfellow without changing a single possibility of American life; had Whitman died in the
cradle, however, the possibilities
of
American
life
would
have
been
definitely
impoverished.
He
The work
he conceived
still
He was
conscious of
Europe
through
had
lost a
good
democracy: the work of the old rnakkars was crumbling away; at best, it was recovery,
science,
finer
passages
an aristocratic minority. "Note to-day," Whitman observed in Democratic Vistas, "a curious spectacle
[130]
Science,
testing
absolutely
all
thoughts,
most illuminating, most But against it, glorious, surely never again to set.
world
a
sun, mounting,
stitious,
tive ages of
Whitman saw
of sacred literature
was no longer being performed ; or at all events, that those who were pursuing it were not fully conscious
of
cither
the
need
or
the
opportunity.
hugely.
Vulgar
literature
was,
indeed,
growing
"To-day,
cially
novelists,
success
(so-called)
flat
is
for him or
and
common
It
What
to offset this.
literature, in
was to establish a central point in terms of science and the modern, that
:
Whitman
created
in
was to
crystallize our
most
In the Western
World
by the gospels
classes,
Homer,
Corneille,
Horace,
played
Dante,
Shakespeare,
lively but
minor part.
The
the various
regions
of
Europe was
was lacking in both the Hebrew and the classic traditions, and in the literature which was directly
founded upon them.
direct historic
What was
of
life.
and a
special
way
It
is
true
that
all
literature has
certain
common
characters, and no
;
Whitman
is
rooted
profoundest meanings, of
classic
and Hebraic
had partly achieved this Wordsworth alone, however, had created new forms without relying on a
mythic-materialistic past.
universal
in
all
these
efforts,
Whitman
could
sympathize:
Homer and
Shake-
He
sought to do for
for the
contemporary and the ordinary-heroic, what Shakespeare had achieved in his great images of the
aristocratic
life.
In America, in modern
life,
on
company with
majestic
men,
capacious
and broad-bosomed
women
and Testaments.
Whitman
overvalued,
if
anything,
but that
if
was only a
thing,
effort
;
first
step; he overcountenanced,
any-
step.
was for him anything but a prelude to the third stage, rising out of the two previous ones, and creating a "native expression spirit" and an abundance of
rich personalities.
C133]
Whitman
in
evidences
on
his
Western
stuff: it led
His Hcgelianism was dangerous him to identify the Real and the Ideal,
continuous.
yere
dynamically
Whitman was
meaning of
all
current
it
;
activity
lay only in
Forms or symbols
poses
:he
it
embodied
work
modern
as
Democracy waits for its through first-class metaphysicians and speculative philosophs laying the
)ascments
and
foundations
for
these
new,
more
\merican poems."
;o
To
open up these new relationships, Whitman wrote I can think of no one in whom the unlis poems.
conscious
in
one.
So
Whitman
So far as he went
Adam,
and never
lived
to complete
it.
The Leaves
plementary volume which would center mainly on the spiritual and the inactual upon death and immortality
and
final
meanings
the
Alas
it
the Civil
War
came.
He
as
a hospital
visitor, giving
themselves in the
camp and on
the
revenge
fully
recovered
physical
:
powers,
his
mental
at their
fitfully
if
they are
still
summit
in
in the later
his
it
and
round
it
out.
What
he meant to create
is
implied
of it
expressed.
Whitman
himself
had
felt
that the
War
for the
American Union was the Odyssey of his generation; but except for himself and Herman Melville, no one
lived to write
about
it
in those
terms
the stories of
Ambrose
in this vein.
As
it
the
human
spirit
it
was almost
would have
the victory as
An
:
industrial transformation
ments
the
Eastern
steadily
The
justifiable
ante-bellum
smile.
optimism
of
lost
Emerson turned
his full
into a
waxen
Whitman
his prime.
C1863
go through the routine of living. But before the Golden Day was over, the American mind had lived
through a somber and beautiful hour, the hour of
Hawthorne and
Melville.
With them,
the
sun
if
distorted humanity.
137 3
VII
TWILIGHT
HAWTHORNE was
Century.
as a spiritual force.
esting minds.
Men
like
of
philosophy,
absolute
idealists
those
who
did
Puritan-
ism
left its
mark on America
its
War
Haw-
chiefly
through
ances
in this sense,
still
with us.
In
still
glowed
but
its
Haw-
the silver
moldy drawers.
frightened
Hawthorne was
no
longer
by the
[1383
human
weakness and
its
esthetician of sin.
Century
New England,
own day.
One does not perhaps recognize the Scarlet Letter and in The House of the Seven
;
they are
Annas and Nastasyas that the great Russians are portraying. Did you think that the
Scarlet Letter was placed
upon
the
waxen breast
flesh
is
of
dummy? Do
not be deceived.
The
tender,
beats.
The characters
were
in
Hawthorne's
tragedy
both
symbolic
and
real:
he was
within
its
also
deterministic
Puritanism,
caught
session of
to which
it
lately
and
a
grudgingly wedded.
The young
minister
was
sweet, neurotic soul, impotent through conflict, where Chillingworth was impotent through denial: he was the prototype of the Ruskins and Amiels who
haunted the century: he was likewise the figure of a weak and spindly idealism which faints at the first
the child
has begotten.
by the temporary union with Transcendentalism it did not take Hawthorne long to discover the insufficiency of
Brook Farm
and
husband or
I have perhaps
bear pondering:
it
is
am
absurd
in the
self
was, when he
made a note
might
At
heart, the
American
novelists were
transcendental.
The
they were
pointed to something
more important.
of the
House
of Usher,
and the
These writers
sin,
death, eternity
these
!
There
is
a tragic moment in
all
experience, which
good health cannot overcome, which good institutions cannot avert. Hawthorne was conscious of
this inescapable thread of evil,
complicated arabesque
it
does
sometimes
life
it is
fate,
and inscrutable malevolence has only made a childish Hawthorne followed reckoning of its possibilities.
its last
a physiologist
What
left
make
of this
doctrine?
Was
it
on the walls of old New England buildings? Would it not be removed by central heating, a fresh
coat of paint, or some other external improvement?
Who
life
who dared
of
New Eden
The
doubled every
five
America
There was no tragedy in the program of the pioneer and the industrialist: there was just sucing.
cess
doing
so, it
summons
There
Golden Day, than the two tragedies, The Scarlet Letter and Moby Dick, which issued out of it. The sunlight had in
I have called the
what
to every spot,
intense.
glacier with
Emerson, one might also fall into the One climbed high; and when abyss with Melville. one fell, the fall was deep.
VIII
The waters
that lined
and the
rivers,
hundred years of boat-building, the clipper-ship, designed in the shipyards of New York and Boston
carrying
ice
cut during
to cool
of
up cargoes
and
silks,
Long
Island
or
New
a girl
sails
difficult illness,
making
all
keel, the
mind
is
insights
Morse
and Colt makes a wooden model of the deadly revolver: those who are more reflective than ingenious
mix their thoughts with adventure and derring-do: a ship opens the mind of a young lawyer
it
on board ship
the beginning of
Henry
Every year these quiet inlets launched their ships the clipper was the supreme esthetic achievement of
day and
land, better
by
On board and
life
in port, the
Put
all this
life
of
New York
depths
He
Such heights and such who had touched them knew too well
!
that no
Herman
born in
New York
a
in the
same
dying,
too,
within
year
of
Whitman,
Herman
ties
age of our seamanship, tasted for himself the qualiof both Odysseus and
Homer.
From
his personal
Typee.
[1443
on the contrary, considered merely as animal existence, there was a more beautiful and
possess
:
hard
pragmatic
routine
of
our
urban
money-
warrens.
Finally, at the
age of
:
the
called
Moby
Dick.
The
the fate of
Moby
Dick throw an interesting light upon the cast of mind that characterized the age. After the usual
brief success Melville's books almost all enjoyed,
it
was tossed
an existence as a boy's
book of adventure.
fate,
Swift's satire
this
whom
make no impression,
consciousness.
more puerile
recognized,
critic,
as a
great book,
is
Moby
poetry.
The
jolly
and warm bellywash, could not produce such a work: the genius of its great writers, its Dickenses and Thackcrays, was of quite
composed of
felt slippers
another cut.
To
find
a parallel for
Moby Dick
one
must go back to Dekker, Heywood, Webster, Marlowe, and Thomas Browne; men who translated the
drab events of the outer
ate dialect of their own.
ville.
life
Seventeenth
great
rhythms,
monplace description and out onto the rolling waters of the grand style. In Whitman and Melville letters
again became as racy as the jabber of a waterside
saloon
as
;
good as pages of the best of Melville's prose. Moby Dick was not merely poetry it was a prod;
life
and
free-will.
I cannot for-
down.
It takes rise
from an after-
making
of a
mat.
"As I kept on passing and repassing the or woof of marline between the long yarns
warp, using
as
if this
filling
of the
my hand
...
it
seemed
were the
Loom
a shuttle mechanically weaving away at the Fates. There lay the fixed threads of the warp subject to
but one
single, ever-returning,
unceasing vibration,
own.
I,
necessity,
and
here,
thought
I ply
my own
these
shuttle
and weave
threads.
my own
destiny
into
unalterable
Meantime, Queequeeg's impulsive, indifferent sword, sometimes hitting the woof slantingly, or crookedly,
or strongly, or weakly, as the case might be
;
and
by
aspect of the
I,
which thus
finally
woof;
aye,
chance,
free
all
will,
and necessity
working
compatible
interweavingly
The
from
straight
warp
its ultimate
course
and chance,
lines
though restricted in
its
by
by turn
rules either,
last featuring
blow
at events."
If this generation did not
produce any
skilled proit
fessional philosophers, I
am
alto-
who was a
friend
and
neighbor
of
Hawthorne
wrote into an
work a true
"There
in
is
humanity which,
We
mean
human thought in its and native, profounder working. We think that in no recorded mind has the intense feeling of the usemore deeply than into this man's by useable truth we mean the apprehension
able truth ever entered of the absolute condition of present things as they
strike the eye of the
own unbiased,
man who
fears
the
man who
de-
amid
the
and earth.
He may
perish
basis.'*
The
what
the
absolute
condition
of
present
things
was
and
down
in the fable
myth
of the
White Whale.
of the sea,
and be irritated by the lengthy description of whales and whaling; one may read it as a treatise on the whaling industry, and be
irritated
Dick as a story
figure of
Ahab, or
may
read
it
as
an epic of the
its
human
Whale
symthe
bolism in one's
is
own
consciousness.
For me,
man
sells in
Nature that
But with
all this
is
White Whale
calls
man and
That part
captured,
forth
all his
drawn and quartered and sold. In sheer savagery or was it perhaps in play?
less
Whale
way, as the great philosophers and poets have been impatient of the little harpoonings and dickerings
of science and the practical
is life.
con-
flicts
contradictions united
;
into
no,
the White
Whale
only
who
White Whale;
the end
of
conquers
it
man
In
is itself
its
antago-
nist
on even terms.
Moby Dick
voyage
are
Men
Man
[ISO]
own experience and the blank reality of the verse and everything else becomes meaningless
self
de-
inevitable: the
White Whale
will
To
appre-
White Whale
is
to see more
man
puts be-
Meaning,
part
;
of the universe
man
the
cul;
and primitive
had achieved
this
meaning and
lived happily
Melville,
the meanings
by a blank: he peered behind the curtain, and heard the dim rattle of his breath echoing through the abyss nothing was
:
there
If
it
spirit
returns at
all, it is
On
Moby Dick
Melville
In
Dei
man; and at
There are tortured fragments of Melville in Mardi and Pierre; but the depth and bottom of the man
in
Moby
Dick.
From
that time
His mar-
wandering through the Near East, his innone of these could heal terest in the Civil War
his spirit.
He
burden of supporting
of his
part
manhood he clung
Street.
tenaciously, like
a ghost
Customs House
Fame, ambitions, friends, travel, love, nothing was left him in all this he had exhausted their possibilities before he was thirty;
at Gansevoort
five.
For
of
man
Poe's,
halted.
whose processes of decomposition were He died twice nothing in the drab and
:
dapper America after the Civil War could recall him to the advantages of an earthly existence. The
forms and
they?
activities
of the new
day
what were
he treat
Mark Twain
written, "is
as
an equal?
of
"Life,"
Haw-
thorne had
Melville,
made up
who had
the
mud overwhelm
it
The American had faced the deeper and deeper. tragedy of the White Whale. lie was now to retire
to nearer and shallower waters.
Whitman,
Melville,
yes,
words
will
lasted.
CHAPTER FOUR
THE
The
Civil
War
arose in a mess of
muddy
issues.
upon slavery, full of moral and oblivious to the new varieties of righteousness that were slavery being practiced under industrialabolitionists' attack
self-
righteous, even
more
blind.
Twenty years
it
of fierce
slaveholder
all
was
meas-
tied
and their
to preserve
throats throttled.
slavery by extending territory was natural: and then, to muddle matters worse, the
issue
was mixed up with Centralism versus State's Rights. There were honest abolitionists who desired
that the Union should break
up
reluctant
The smoke
When
it
and
Union
as a
mask for
all its
depredations.
What
what we may
call equally
Local
life
declined.
The
financial
centers
grew:
proof
The
Civil
War
On
of
an Elizabethan daring
adjustment of farm
on the
sea, of a well-balanced
and factory
in the East, of
ture, operating
mind had flourished and had begun to find itself. When the curtain rose on the post-bellum scene, this
old
all
ished:
had
entered
overnight,
had
oil,
natural
made
without
relief
or mitigation.
line
On
many
fine
in battle,
ways
died, too.
Some
of
Mark Twain,
after a
a paid substitute.
Happy
the dead
The
had served
the
C159]
lie:
'Tis only
like
and the son of the Great Emancipator became the head of the Pullman Corporation. H. G. Eastman
founded the business school in 1855, and by the end
of the
sie
established in Poughkeeppupils.
The Massa-
1861 and dedicated to the practical application of science in the arts, agriculture, manufacture and
commerce; when
it
was opened
in
gram.
The
nessed the
new orientation
in
industry
and
life.
"We
do not properly
live in these
"but everywhere, with patent inventions and complex arrangements, are getting ready to
live.
The
end
is lost in
the means,
life is
ances."
re-
it
sought.
all
them
if
terialist
Pack, as they
One
and children,
in
Henry James
drastically, in
his
far more
and he became
an interesting thinker: in an age that found Spencer too mystical and difficult, he was
ince of education,
walking
embodiment
of
Plato
and
Plotinus.
worshiped
on a lower
level to the
Her
realistic
hitter, merciless
:
tongue were at
Of
all
for us.
made
possible
silly
by the
her father's
ways had
Little
:
Women
:
w as the picture
r
of a
yet
it
contained so
happy childhood that was all much of what every child had
became
child-
that
it
universal.
memory with
:
all its
scrimp-
reality
All
to Little
had been
offer
them;
was only
make a
Boyhood meant home: maturity meant, not a larger home, but exile. Observe that the beam
lived.
had
cast
Duty
of Civil
be happy.
!
That was a
that
smarted
Those who were born after 1850 scarcely knew what they were missing; but those who had reached
their
it
nonage a
little
"How
wrote under the spell of that fine frenzy!" have found," wrote another, " 'realizing the
"We
ideal,'
is
But
'idealizing the
real,'
as
shall
maintain,
is
There
is
a wise sentence
which says,
'If
our
"
get.'
Excellent
little
wordly
wisdom
Doubtless
it
made one a
more comfortable
as one tossed
been.
The post-war generation idealized the real, in its novels, which depicted so much of actual existence
phi-
could be assimilated to
its
feeble desires.
As
for
fig-
of
humanity,
the
macabre Bierce.
and
in the
innermost rooms
from the
light in front
and
the light in the rear, their souls dwelt too, unused to either
prospects.
"Per-
haps you know," wrote Lanier to Bayard Taylor, "that with us of the younger generation in the South
since the war, pretty
much
That
the whole of
life
has been
North as
A good part
of their life
Each
America,
Mark Twain, Ambrose Bierce, Henry James, William Dean Howells, William James, was
the remains of a man.
None was
quite able to
fill
his
own
shape.
a Golden
Day
had once dawned but they had only to look around Well might the to discover the Gilt of their own.
heroine of
and then you stop. Why will not somebody grow to be a tree and cast a shadow?"
grow
Wyck
its
Brooks
first called
life,
American
with
transcendentalists and
the Civil
The gap between them widened after War; for the war left behind a barbarhad probably
lost
more
civil
course of forty.
inner elegance."
The
anything
else
sufficiently
In a
of his convictions
The post-war
gen-
like
How-
but no Melvilles.
It
is
C1653
put
it
were gone.
The
it all
is
to gather into
day,
all
that
is
vital
in the practical
all
that
intelligible in science,
that
is
drift of convention
and habit
and
routine.
dream and deed when one appears without the other, we can look forward to a shrinkage,
rhythm
a lapse, a devitalization.
for this mission;
it is
Idealism
is
a bad name
it
real-
ism
since it
is
and so humanizing the rough chaos of existence. That belief had vanished it no longer seemed a genuing,
:
ine possibility.
must
idealize
As Moncure Conway had said: we the real. There was the work of a
It
was an act of
grand acquiescence.
Transcendentalism, as Emer-
was a paralysis.
it
it
swam with
it
mind dwelt lovingly on telephonic broadcasting, upon perfect public restaurants, and upon purchase
his
by sample,
stir the
all excellent
mind out of
its
Bellamy a certain Danish bishop began to institute the cooperative commonwealth by reviving the folk-ballads of his countrymen.
in
If only he
if
full
for
if
ticularly American.
Impos-
The
dimmed by
tears, undistorted
whose
sensibilities
its
preciated
snobbery,
and
its
cruelty
will
towards
But
social
good
was
might be preferable, if it led to beauties and excellences that mere good will neglected to achieve.
Howells' characters were
unheroic
see
;
all
life-sized,
medium,
them
Alas
maybe
as he
The
:
conscientious littleness of
as
much
Mixing
beyond the
his splendid
and
terrible folly.
academic
critics
The
inner
ele-
own personality and as a result, even the best novels, The Rise of Silas Lapham, never quite
;
and these
which almost
all his
from
Altruria saw
all
degradations of American
it
in
was
The
Age had
some imagined human excellence: the point was that he had not succeeded in establishing a merely human life. It was this perception that
later enabled
is
entirely lacking
Through
and
the
Eye
of
The
for Silas
Lapham
in one department;
his con-
tempt for the abject and futile society the Laphams were creating in another; the result is that the fall
of Silas
Lapham was
it
was too
Howells*
imagination and his conscience did not work together: his figures all lack that imaginative distor-
when a deep emotion or a strong feeling plays upon some actuality, like a blow-torch on metal, and enables the mind to twist
tion which takes place
the
is
is
thing before
it
into
new shape.
Babbitt
;
quite as
human a
figure as Silas
Lapham
his
but he
more than
apparent
The
an
essential failure as
artist,
and enables us to
see
how
tightly he
class
America,
Mark Twain's
rebellion, in the
may
flavor of reality.
But
as a matter of fact,
Mark
and the pioneer as any of his contemporaand if he gloried in being captured, he suffered,
from
its
consequences.
Mark
boy-
hood and young manhood on the Mississippi before the Civil War: his life as a pilot had given him his
one and only glimpse of the aristocratic
man
the
man who
pilots
by the play
carries
the
man who
defied the
scurvy
mob
in
Huckleberry Finn.
Mark Twain
Europe
with him
brandts or Correggios.
Mark Twain's
Howells' optimism.
his
that took
Mark Twain
made by
civil
:
from
the impressions
he had been
ideal their
among
in the
as his
more
these types
with
an amplitude
of meaning,
and because of
their works,
and
infinitely greatest
and worthiest of
all
the
But
at the
bottom
of his soul,
tacle: he transferred
memory
He
may
have existed
in
Eu-
up
in post-
bellum America.
No:
for
Mark Twain
seriously
to rob
life
of its chief
comfort was
Mark Twain
Com-
mood
to
might accompany the system which produced it Mark Twain's naive worship of the paleotechnic
age was summed up in the
classic, the
marvelous, the
in behalf
Walt Whitman
of a
little
seventieth birthday.
one wonder a
read
little
;
whether
it
ever
Whitman and
special
Here
it
is:
man and
by any
What
great
births
The
phonograph,
and
for
of anesthesia to surgery-practice,
cient dominion of pain, which
created
life,
you have seen monarchy banished from France and reduced in England to a machine which makes an imposing
you have seen the slave
show
of diligence
isn't
much
yet to come.
Wait
!
You
shall see
marvels upon
shall see
full
formidable
man
at
almost his
stature at last!
while
and
.
still
you
his
look.
Wait
you
upon
may
depart
satisfied, as
knowing you have seen him for whom the earth was
will
proclaim that
human wheat
tares,
human
MARK TWAIN.
The
thirty years duly passed! the marvels
dirigibles
came
aeroplanes and
cities
;
that
assailed
helpless
Towards
the end
men
applied, in a
black rage of warfare, more satanic ingenuities than Mark Twain himself had dreamed of when he rigged
up
Yankee made
men by
full
Man
almost at his
stature at last
That
have
the saturnine
commentary on
come so punctually within the allotted generation but that Mark Twain is no doubt only an accident
;
all these
physical improve-
Poor Dante
!
Poor Shakespeare
of all
Alas happy Whitman the jokes Mark Twain ever labored to utter,
:
thrice
from
his
am
may
cling
IV
Mark Twain
was afraid of
he
felt
his imagination.
an impulse towards poetry or beauty, he caught himself up short and mocked at it and this mockery, this sudden passage from the sublime to
the grotesque, became one of the stock ingredients
of his humor. pulses to?
ests
What
he abruptly fortell
the reader
factories
have
been
started
in
Memphis, or he turns aside from the spectacle of the Hawaiian landscape to record the price of a
canoe ride, or the
difficulties
of hiring
a horse.
C176]
In
had been to
tell
tall lies
it
:
well in
admirable anecdotes
but he
tell
even
this
with a sudden
grimace of embarrassment.
The
futility
its
of
frustrated
imaginative
and had
sacrificed
every legitimate
human
desire
of
Mark Twain
a bad thing, but not the best thing," in order to make himself more acceptable to his fellow-country-
men
Mark Twain's
In an
is
futility of
mankind
itself.
es-
always
buoyed up
in his
weak moments by
the traditions of
he
may come
again.
Men
were corrupt:
every
man had
town was a special and temporary phenomenon, something that had followed the breakdown of a
great
truly
culture;
and
no more
representative
of a
human
away from
culture
is
cultivation.
The point
is
that
human
a continuous
hardy and fecund weeds which have no value except their own rank life. "Choosing is creating, hear
that, ye creating ones !"
process,
human
state
it
and
is
empty,
man's
meaningless,
unattractive.
Cultivation
;
is
raw
empty.
Like
all his
generation,
He
human
values
realize
C178]
bile
of despair.
Man
worked upon him. That he had also been a creator, and might be so once again Mark
forces that
believe this.
When
he exercized
alone,
it
aristocratic
capacities
for standing
An automaton
should
human
The depth
of
Mark
Am-
and
all
like sullied
black opals.
his
War
and
with an honest
images remained with him, and colored his imaginative life. The potion Bierce brewed was too bitter
contemporaries to swallow and his work remained in relative obscurity, which perhaps only
for his
;
increased
his
sense
of
aloof
contempt:
Bierce's
readers preferred
a sentimental realist
like
Bret
and though they have an independent value as literature, in certain moods, one thinks of them
here as an emblem of the dismal vacancy left in the
Civil
War
it.
and the
Bierce's
mental
Warfare
ter;
is in
killing
mat-
his time, so
Was
the pioneer
happy?
Was
the returned
happy? Was the defeated idealist happy? And what of the industrialists who turned manufacsoldier
1803
and hired
armed thugs to defend their plants against strikers were they or their workmen in a smiling mood?
of
Grant's
administration,
Tweed
and
filth of
towns
all
Men
like
kin, might be
and they did not fancy that the followers of Watt and Smiles were the highest types of humanity the earth had
;
known.
triumphs
But what
of
the
of people
who did
believe in the
who thought
works the
their
glory of
They might quote statistics till the cows came home they had only to look around them
:
real estate
:
went up
money
these
all
women
dom.
On
the
contrary,
the
nervous,
irritable,
scarred faces of
Thomas Eakins*
portraits cannot
little
Whitman's body, or the wiry grace of Thoreau, the noblest figures of the Gilded Age sagged and
little.
twitched a
and their
integrity before
universe.
much
less
abroad, like
Henry James.
gave
As for
those
He
name he
called
it
thing
in
which
that
philosophy
was
deeply
if
[1823
became a philos>pher by a long, circuitous route, which began with hcmistry, physiology, and medicine, and first flourWilliam James, born
in
184*2,
shed in its
own
n end.
s
As
a youth,
an
artist,
As a mature
Jiilosophy
The
from
a young man of twenty-eight. Equipped with a osmopolitan education, and a wide variety of cons
Europe, James returned to his own soil with he wan longing of an exile. Every time he greeted
acts in
lurope, apparently,
ickness.
its
charms increased
his
home-
He had
resisted
Europe: he accepted
America,
and
of Cambridge, he returned to
it,
and breathed
it,
s if it
One searches James's pages in vain for a Weltnschauung: but one gets an excellent view of
C183]
He had
it
the
notion
that
:
pragmatism
would
effect
was that
an overturn in philosophy but the fact killed only what was already dead, the
vacant absolutism of
idealists
who chose
to
take
it
a rational content.
James's lack
much
In the
crisis
his
newly attained
belief in
Hence
philosophy.
dom and
day, James
it
had im-
peded
his progress
towards Philosophy
field of
existence,
James was
prehensive ideas
made up for his lack of comby the brilliance and the whimsical
He
divested phi-
C1843
its
his presence
made
it
human
of
effect
moribund ideas
and the
full-
reader
through
this
temporary transfusion.
He was
above
an attempt to cut through a personal dilemma and still preserve logical consistency
it
was
not?
God
scientific
method
in the fields
where
it
had proved
valuable.
He
ways
to
man."
am
not sure
may
prove in
depauperate phases.
The
use of ether
came as a parlor sport in dull little American communities that had no good wine to bring a milder oblivion from their boredom; and
first
may
all
their
by the
way.
The
fact
is
anesthetic.
If one could reconstruct
New England
recover
in
Emerof
son, one
could,
think,
great tracts
ist
in
Dewey.
James's insistence
upon the importance of novelty and freshness echoes on a philosophic plane the words of Mark Twain.
"What
is it
!
Discovery
To know
To
.
To
find
a new planet,
to
way
make
the
To
be the
first
that
is
the idea/'
had to be worked
we do not
feel
that
and natural,
what was
all this,
dialectic?
do not say
:
this to belittle
James's interest in
these notions
of an experience of
and the
feeling of boundless
The
point
it
is
good to include
it
is
these, but
if
it
still
the
must be ready to supply: the Spartan element in Plato's Republic was not familiar or genial to the
Athenian temperament but in the dry-rot of Athenian democracy it was the one element that might have restored it, and Plato went outside his familiar
;
it
and supply
it.
In Eu-
dis<-
course.
Age he
:
did not
make a
fresh
was possibly his technical analysis of radical empiricism, which put relations and abstract qualities on
the same plane as physical objects or the so-called external world: both were given in experience. the
totality
of
But
James's
philosophy
has
to-day
chiefly
an
illustrative value:
tries to live
by
it,
or find in
able existence.
The new
ideas that
James achieved
were not so influential as those he accepted and rested upon ; and the latter, pretty plainly, were the
protestantism, the individualism, the scientific distrust of "values," which
in
unbroken
Mill.
James referred
to
pragmatism
as
"an alteration
protestant reformation.
And
as, to
papal minds,
protestantism has
often
seemed
mere
mess of
anarchy and confusion, such, no doubt, will pragmatism seem to ultra-rationalist minds in philosophy.
But
life
wags on
all
its
How
was compassing its ends That was just the point: that was what any one with a sense of history was forced to doubt when he contemplated the "prosperity" of Manchester, Essen, Glas-
gow,
Lille,
or Pittsburgh:
its
life,
distinctly,
was not
compassing
in particulars,
but
The
particulars
delve
were
all
men must
and
spin and weave and smelt and fetch and carry and
build
;
instead of ministering to
life
exists
The very words James used to recommend pragmatism should make us suspicious of its pre-
tensions.
"For my part," cried William James, "I do not know what sweat and blood, what the tragedy of
this life
this
if life is
not a strug-
gle in
is
something gained
no more than
which gains
amusement."
What
is
this universe
Is
it
not, perhaps,
vir-
concept of "the
by a boy scout's doing one good turn per day? The Hindu guru, the Platonic philosopher, aloof
tue
from
James's sense;
neither
the activity
of
these creatures,
what
is it
but
life
would
still
be
amusing and
quito exterminated!
To
find
significance only in
was the
it
is
the temper of
this is its
great
but
crisis in
order to
humane
life
does not
demand
it
this
wilderness outside.
With
all
was
and
belief
reality,
in the
The
carefully limited
area
The
Will-to-Believe was
colleagues
into
transformed by ever-so-witty
Will-to-make-believe.
the
was trans-
and practical
results
as
if
he were
these
reactions
betrayed
little
more than the ingrained bias of James's academic and yet, as I say, the caricature was colleagues
;
metaphors he was himself not a little responsible for it. James's thought was permeated with the
cial
Age: one
feels
in
it
the com-
were what
words reenforced
big organizations
such,
all
national
ones
first
and
foremost
and
against
was nothing
An
old-fashioned
often, like
Lord
sec-
financiers,
but had no interest in art or science ; the third generation were complete duffers, and good for neither
activity.
Something
like
this
There
is
come employees
in
advertising
agencies,
or bond
them
is
There was
still
in his
personality a touch of an
the America of
Emer-
man might
But
whom James
Age
;
and
it
re-
As
touched by the
As for
cannot doubt
whether the
that
it
worked.
What
one doubts
valuable.
is
results of this
work were
VI
It
circle of the
Gilded
Age that
come to
seem
:
dominating figures Albert Pinkham Ryder in painting, Emily Dickinson in poetry, and Charles Pierce
in
philosophy.
The overtones
of
the pioneering
it
was for
much
that
Pierce
shifts of
own
life,
and made
As a
and
his
needed.
It
remained
for
Professor
Morris
how fresh and appropriate they are, almost two generations after the first of them was
Pierce had no part in the pragmatic
published.
acquiescence.
He
who
was
lost
the pragmatists,
by the foreground
It is these
fill
who
sought, in their
own way,
to
up the
Henry James
remarkable
brothers,
CHAPTER FIVE
THE
raffish vitality of
the Gilded
by manufacturing and gambling and astute corporate financiering. The pragmatists had
quite exhausted
ism
permost but they offered no clue as to what made a proper human life outside the mill of practical
activity.
The great
captains
of
industry
were
who worked
for
them.
resolution
down
:
at Oxford or some
was
and every sort of ideality; and to withdraw from industry was to become incapacitated for any further life.
adventure, worship, art,
Sooner or
later,
however,
the
reckoning
was
The
the
money had been accumulated; the sons and daughters had come into leisure well, what was to be done
with it?
In the Gilded
Age
this question
concerned
only a handful of people; but now that a vast accession of energies threatens the ancient economic
practices, based on
thrift,
it
army of workers, and not merely upon the minority who have escaped work altogether. The answer
made by
the Gilded
;
Age
is
still
answer in America
per-
The pragmatists
and oneinto leisure
had
tried to
of a partial
sided experience
those
who came
and
money during
the Gilded
7
Age sought
to achieve a
Sometime during
preda-
It
was
strictly accu-
but
it
was
When
the
time came to spend these accumulations, this generation turned out to have a predatory notion of
The
culture.
Chicago, Pittsburgh, or
New York,
between 1870
and 1900, those who had the money and the special animus began to look abroad for a cultural background.
The merely
practical
men were
still
con-
or they threw
ing
up
standard or prohibition or
trust regulation, or, with a daring sense of adventure, the initiative, the referendum
and the
recall.
continued
to
pursue them in
sublimated
lives,
forms.
up the tedium by spending money instead of earning it. What they had over from sport and fashion
fill
went into
art,
its
ancient practices.
this
Pierpont
Morgan
and
movement was
reflected in
Where
the
eastward
and sheepish.
this
At bottom,
custom
this return to
Europe and
absorption in the
and
social
:
filled
the daily
the less
The new
pioneers in
on the move because they were touring or sightseeing; nor were they the less interested in pecuniary
goods
efforts,
But
little
more
active,
and with
all their
several incapacities,
among
all
a good mu-
[202]
The Pillage
ii
of the Past
its
possessions, or
by
lacks.
On
country
is
and
definite
connections,
without
the
civil
community.
Those who
feel
make up
craftsmanship.
fly tables
were
in the attic,
had become apparent by the middle of the Nineteenth Century. Henry James has given his
own
testimony.
"I saw
my
parents homesick, as I
inconvenienced by
many
of the
more immediate
feaus,
[203]
greater
Henry James,
:
among
Turning away from Nature, externalized and unassimilated, the new generation turned towards
1870.
an equally foreign and externalized culture. The ugliness and sordidness of the contemporary urban
scene could not be exaggerated
;
itself,
instead of confrontit.
For
new personalities that had begun to humanize America did not exist art and culture meant the past
:
it
meant Europe:
it
away.
not
Whitman was
Henry Adams
himself,
shrewdest
most pa-
reason, too?
fell
back
was himself and not the appearances; it was the poet and not the banker." Well might he call this
C2043
The
heresy
feel
is
;
when the poet and philosopher no longer at the bottom of their hearts that their world
for
essential part of that which surrounds them,
it is
an
that
life
which
main of
significance
when
this
conviction
fails
genu-
in the seventies
a Ryder, a Koebling, a
son, a Sullivan,
American
civilization
The prag-
their
Seventeenth
whilst those
who espoused
culture turned
ceous
soil of
Europe's
ancient
cultures
Europe, valuable, because they could not be produced in our own day, except by patent tricksters.
this pillage
it.
[205]
the novels of
Henry James.
away a
gainful
young manhood
social
dense tissue
serve as a
of
custom
this
figure
might
watermark for the general effort. James himself settled down in Europe and spent his whole
life
He
sought
do in Nature
and impalpability.
finish as the
He
its
raw-
ness
he had no
desire to assimilate it
and make
it
over.
Emerson,
become part of English society without wasting one's efforts in an attempt to transform it he felt that identification would
said that one could not
;
had
mean a
social
what was most precious in his own heritage, and that struggle, for an outsider,
loss of
futile.
would be quite
to
Europe
it,
he wished rather to
206]
The
Hardy;
for
James to think
terne's legs
illusion
obliquely of
of
which, deliberately,
he en-
meshed himself.
What
It
nice distinctions,
was
so exquisitely
Life might be
things in
his
Europe
many whom
imagination dwelt
It
had pre-
cisely
the implica-
a complete departure.
Henry
way, the perplexities and delights that the cartoonists in Life were touching in the eighties: he answered the question:
"How
in
was
useless
this
acceptance
of
Europe
C207]
What was
alive in the
Europe
and precedent.
That
Europe was
dry and
sterile,
because what
community, because
the results of
new forms
of
culture,
provinces
religion.
once
adequately
occupied
by
art
of
and
the
Europe of Nietzsche than he was of the America of Emerson: neither of these thinkers made any difference to him.
As
it
of new
life,
the present.
ion,
When
is
nothing new
is
good
is
In
short,
Henry James
treated
its
Europe
as
museum.
its
By communing
with
show-cases and
Europe was precisely as inconvenient and distressing as the modern of his America. Europe's past was
of course richer than America's
no thanks, how-
2083
The
since the
Seventeenth Century.
soil:
common
to
Western
was only in a mood of excessive self-abasement that the American need forCivilization,
and
it
Bartram
to
munity had continued to produce figures which could stand easily on the same pedestal as the modern
European.
in
America but
;
where West-
Europe and
people
What
had quickly come to call the Americanization of Europe what was that but a falling away of the
old garments of culture, and the exposure of the
ton without
flesh,
random motions?
Europe had become more conscious of its physiplight under the new regime in industry, and had
Marx, to denounce
in the
C209;]
American was equally conscious of the fact that the old culture had become impovold, the
and that, though it had served well in its own day, it no longer sufficed. "The New Americans ." said Henry Adams, "must, whether they
erished, too,
. .
were
fit
With
They
with the aid of Baedeker, in the European they went a step further, they began to collect
its
past
and embalm
its
own phase
of
country
a public museum.
of
The
leader of
movement,
if
this distinction
among
The
Jack Gardner, the builder of Fenway Court in Boston. She embodied the dream of her generation.
She was in her time for "culture" what Mrs.
Eddy
m
The dream
to
of Mrs.
She
was born
1840; she thus escaped the cruditievS of the what-not period, when living rooms became
filled
with picturesque
memoranda
in bric-a-brac.
Nuremberg.
of this departure,
John La Farge was beginning experiments with glass, and that Richardson was valiantly training
a corps of stone-cutters, wood-carvers, painters, and
sculptors during this period: after a spell of in-
life
promising men.
Mrs.
first
Can]
all
her inter-
and energy in works of art which were, culturally, which had been on the market a long securities
time,
certified
by
and
entrails of palaces
fied
satisit
gave
had not a
little
of the cruder
At
it satisfied
a starved
step or two in
and raised the pursuer an estimable the social scale. It would be hard,
in fact, to find a
of the
Gardner gave vent to in her search for treasures and of course, she was not alone I have selected her
;
:
and
intelligence
things
untutored
as
Western
millionaires
or that
The
Mr.
J. P.
Morgan, or Mr.
The
and their
the
life
another.
of
creative
At
best,
it
They wanted an
it.
money:
collection furnished
could appreciate
it
in
or in what was
They
up American heritage and they did that, not by cultivating more intensively what they had, in fertile
contact with present and past, but by looting from
Europe the
finished objects
museum.
Museum,
of foreign conquest:
filled
an irrelevant
and abstract conception of culture for our own day quite divorced from history and common experience.
For note
this
the
museum
in
America
led inevita-
There are
two meanings to the word reproduction. One has to do with the results of bringing together two different individualities which mingle
to
this
is
mechanical
reproduction,
it
which
a dozen, a
museum
rational purpose.
When an
both the old culture and the new die together, for
the finished products of an earlier age cannot take
change, modify
itself,
new
desires
and demands.
It
The Pillage
tered objects
of the Past
She
seized scat-
lugged them to Boston; and enthroned them in a building which was one hardly knows
call it
which to
it
As a home,
became a pattern for the homes of rich people in America for a whole generation; and so, at tenth
hand,
villa,
it
with
Her home
in
Boston could,
open the doors and place a keeper at the entrance to convert it into a splendid museum.
for one
to
had only
That
and
is
this
Mrs. Jack
bravely towards.
Was
it
Adams
sat
more or
in
less obediently at
She
had established
elusive
to
respectfully,
quaintly
pondered
in
America before, something almost indisan original becomtinguishable from the original
little
ing a
she
and
of
had done
Was
this not a
The compromise
was
culture
it
is,
past culture
a
because
established
decent and
When Mr.
Henry Ford
Observing
restored the
this activity
can
from palaces, churches, and houses in the Old World to the homes and museums of the New was not, precisely, a creative act;
Age
nor to have bothered any one if it did and those who still remain fixed in the pattern of the seventies
carry on this pious tradition without so much as a
quiver of doubt.
raw present remained raw: one was futile, the other was overwhelming. That culture had ever been alive,
or that the
human
The Pillage
of the Past
this
no one could
believe.
How
all,
and the
ideal,
Henry Adams.
No
one
nomena
tion,
of his
immersed
in
With
all his
IV
historian.
Almost alone
among
to
his-
217}
a more
intelligible
This at-
tempt to achieve scientific precision did not make him forfeit his imaginative penetration of the living
moments of the
past.
and Chartres which he began at a late period of his life, after having written about current events and
the political character and fate of certain periods in
in
historic reconstruction: he
his
of
of
period,
built
into
and
stained
glasses
of the churches he
examined the
common
people.
so thoroughly into the
Since
was, however, so
When
he came
own day,
From
The
ment
ever, was but one activity: had Adams projected himself back into the Seventeenth Century he would have been conscious, not of space annihilating ma-
cation
portance.
The
increased or decreased
all
with
the
this
his essay
on the
no real bearing on human history, since from the standpoint of life what mattered was what was done
with these energies before they ran down
the
whether
pigment that go into a painting, or the picric acid that annihilates a comchemicals
the
make
C2193
of
men
in warfare.
men
is
will in
Qualitatively speaking, a
as eternity
;
may
hold as
much
to have existed at
if
all
may
be quite as important as
of knowledge to understand,
sires to express.
and an
infinity of de-
hearty, an intelligent, a believing age acts from day to day on the theory that it
may
die
die
to-morrow.
tion, as in
may
is
well
death
not
a frustration.
realize
it,
eternity
life is signifi-
can be prolonged.
The
endurance
is
can be pragmatically
justified:
life
is
when
life is
a blank anyway.
Life, as
Emerson
said,
is
days.
The
tion
He
looked forward to
the sink of energy at zero potential, or to the operation of the phase rule in history, as necessities which
pang and penalty of human efforts. history moved inexorably from one phase to
another, in the
way that a
solid,
ditions of temperature
and then a gas, what mattered it that one was helpless that one's generation was helpless? The inexorability of the law salved the laxity
tration.
and the
frus-
To
As Adams's mind ran inevitably back to the past soon as he faced his own day, his mind jumped, as it
and beyond predicting a catastrophe in 1917, as Western Civilization passed from a mechanical to an electrical phase, he saw nothing.
were, off the page
;
same
level as intelligence.
!
And
The products
of
human
only
what accident had taught him in the Nineteenth Century," he wrote, "could know next to nothing,
since science
his horizon,
but
Ming
aters,
Its
major
efforts
unknown to
acts
by the application
and to the human community, in sociology, science was breaking outside its Seventeenth Century shell and raising problems which the
ganic
life,
in biology,
logical
of even expressing,
much
less
carrying further.
As
still
much
and the
species
and
mechanical technique
field,
or by
222]
The Pillage
The
of the Past
field
ment, of organic
had
still
to claim a place
But with
all its
made
Science was
and
all its
"is just a
mode
as the matter-of-fact
The
truth
its
is, Henry Adams's generation had forfeited desires, and it was at loose ends. It treated those
and masteries
impotently.
and Tintoret-
and
had worn;
it
rested
But
inevitable!
"The attempt
of the
Congressman of 1800, except so far as he the forces would had learned his ignorance
of the
.
.
"
was to the
social
Henry Adams's
with-
ered Calvinism.
For him,
;
memory.
self-renewing,
limits,
art moldered
places
lesson
away and nothing new ever took their then Adams might well read only a dreary
the
in
progress
Unity to Twentieth Century Multiplicity. Europe's spiritual capital was being spent ; even those who
guarded it and hoarded it could not be sure that what they called, for example, Catholicism was more
than a remnant of the
grated every aspect of
spirit
inte-
from the marriage bed to the tomb. Steadily, Europe's fund of culture was vanishing; and its fresh acquisitions were scattered,
life
from covering every human The American could not live long even on
insecure, far
activity.
his
most
extravagant
acquisitions
of
European
culture.
[2243
The
plain
;
Europe
still
produced, an Ibsen, a
Dostoyevsky, were far from getting complete sustenance from their own day
it,
;
institutions of religion
dream
new Christ or a newer Superman. Neither the nor the more had than a bare American European
vestige of a faith or a plan of
life.
Yet we have Gods, for even our strong nerve Falters before the Energy we own. Which shall be Master? Which of us shall serve? Which wear the fetters? Which shall bear the crown?
Impotent to answer his own questions, Henry Adams was still intelligent enough to ask them. But
he did not look for the answer in the only place
where
it
may
be found
he looked for
it
in the stars,
materialistic past.
He
it
in the
it
had
Mammon; and
which
and
life-fulfilling
[225]
and completion of these two phases of American development came in the first decade
criticism
of the Twentieth Century.
criticism,
The
The instrument
was
of this
in
Mr.
George
in
Santayana,
born
Harvard and
its
Berlin.
He
characteristic
European society redoubled their hold upon the mind of this spiritual exile one could almost describe what was absent in America by
to
:
What was
That was
up again
the nature of
the sense
of beauty?
What was
the
unseemly question
in
Mr.
Santayana broke away from the two main philosophic traditions of America, the highbrow and the
lowbrow, the idealist and the empiricist, and re-
[226]
The Pillage
Aristotle,
of the Past
Far more
than William James, Mr. Santayana brought together the tender-minded and the toughsuccessfully
minded.
He
by declaring
the existence
upon the
mind
of man's
lutism)
creatively, as the
mode
in
Thus taken,
idealism
:
is
not the
will-
it
respite
from practical
struggle,
is
activities
intenser
in
different
;
medium.
but
it
This
struggle
does not
human
thought.
came to
an end with
son.
its
consummation
in
The
Life of Rea-
areas, but as
series of
an idea
it
227]
was
in actuality
in
was only
the
vague intention
by
it
Mr. Santa;
it
was
new
its
fruits.
In
its
it
justness of selection,
its
balance,
completeness,
of the Gilded
their
Age were
:
own
walls
it is still,
they
may
Mr. Santa-
richness of material,
was content with an impoverished dialectic, and the academic philosophers, whose chief glory is to make
bread out of straw, have frequently looked upon both thinkers as little better than amateurs and
The Pillage
dilettantes,
of the Past
had no roots
and
this is
weakness
his vanity
and
Hence Mr. Santayana's attitude towards the original and the conhis
complete failure of
in-
man, a Bergson. Catholicity is something more than an arranged gesture of the mind it must grow out
;
of a
life
that
is
itself
complete.
lives,"
"Could a better
our
Lacking such a
life,
no wonder Mr. Santayana's thought bears a taint of priggishness and artful effort: it was only,
as
it
were,
by a
was able to
new order
in
Reason does not impel us toward a our own day, it nevertheless shows
efforts of culture
produced
of
all
We
cannot, indeed,
229]
ways
in
will
become more
con-
will,
fresh modes,
When we
are integrated, we
grow like the tree: the solid trunk of the past, and the cambium layer where life and growth take place, are unified and necessary to each other. If the
pragmatists had read this lesson from history, they
would not have sunk entirely into the contemporary scene; and if the pillagers of the past had realized
this truth, their efforts to establish a
background
superficial.
230]
CHAPTER SIX
WITH
swell
special source of
American experience dried up: the which between 1860 and 1890 had reached the
and had cast ashore
its
Pacific Coast
flotsam in a
a Muir,
now retreated:
result, the in-
As a
popular imagination once occupied by Davy Crockett and Buffalo Bill. In books written for children
there
is
The
change of the previous generation very faithfully earliest children's books of the Nineteenth Cen;
tury were moral tracts they recorded the moment of Puritanism. The dime novel came in in the sixties,
to echo the earliest exploits of the
outlaw; this was supplemented in the seventies by the books of Horatio Alger, written purely in the
ideology of the Eighteenth Century, preaching
help, thrift, success.
self-
set
the
by
stories in
Here
is
a brief
dominant
idola.
With
a similar concentration
nineties
The
eighties
and
first
rude
combustion engine,
which paved the way for the automobile and the Unfortunately, finance did not lag beaeroplane.
hind technology; and the directors of finance found
from land,
scientific
and the common technological processes, for the benefit of the absentee owner rather than for the
ization,
common
The
The
great captains of industry controlled the fabrication of profits with a military discipline
:
they waged
campaigns against their competitors which needed only the actual instruments of warfare to equal that
art in ruthlessness
their
;
police
establishments;
they
planted
spies
The Shadow
among
their workers
;
of the Muck-rake
Her-
ism
itself
might
be militarized, any more than he had seen that warfare might eventually be mechanized
;
but between
all
these things
came
to pass.
The
Party or
in
the Knights
captains of the American Federation of Labor permitted themselves to be handicapped by jurisdictional disputes
and factional jealousies; and important new industries, like oil and steel, languished
What happened
all
in industry
happened
likewise in
life.
This
same period witnessed the vast mechanical accretion of Columbia University and Harvard, and the establishment of Leland
Stanford
(oil).
(railroads)
and the
University of Chicago
in his
of
ruthlessness
Mr. Rockefeller never got hold and pipe lines with more adroit piracy.
versity:
of oil wells
The con-
natural accompaniment
of the
what the
Civil
War had
begun
in politics.
The
was a pretty complete regimentation of our American cities and regions. While the process
result
was fostered
in the
name
of Efficiency, the
name
re-
were
profits,
achieved
in
manufacture
of
monopoly
through special
privilege, corpo-
money.
In spite of
its
wholesale con-
own boast:
it
sufficient
quan-
own Judged purely by standards, industrialism had fallen short. The one
tity of material goods.
its
The Shadow of
the
Muck-rake
ard of consumption
For the
controllers of in-
produced considerable
of
the population
it
made psychologically
by meretricious luxuries, once the sole property of a higher pecuniary caste. The Pittsburgh Survey ably documented current industrialism in every civic aspect
in cold print actualities
;
but
it
and
annual
incomes
into
their
concrete
equivalents.
It
is
Army
regime,
this
human norm
if
human
development.
;
The
pioneer, at worst,
had
tomaton.
What
feel
is
Well might Mark Twain ask in despair, Man? "I have seen the granite face of
Hawthorne," exclaimed Henry James, Senior, "and what the new race may be !" In less than two
and dignity had been wiped out. of the time was that caricature of humanity, a heman,
shrill,
human
ones, were
Fields.
They
came from men who were caught Middle West and who, whatever
;
maw
of the
their background,
of this callow yet
in mechanical con-
had been fed with the spectacle finished civilization, the last word
F. P.
Dunne, George Ade, Ed Howe, Hamlin Garland, Theodore Dreiser, Edgar Lee Masters, Frank Norris,
Robert Herrick
these were
spirit
the writers
of this
who
interreg-
num and
;
nearly
all of these
of
The Shadow
the Middle West, or
resting
years.
of the
Muck-rake
least a
had had at
temporary
formative
place
in
Chicago during
their
to this
Jack London and Upton Sinclair belonged group in spirit, if not in locality. These
not from
Age,
if
its
pragmatic bias
they challenged
bosom
of
Europe
in the
name
of a coarse
around them.
Born between
and 1880, by the place of their birth they had inherited the memories of the pioneer, by the
Civil
War
new immigrant. Mawkish middle-class writers, Meredith Nicholson and Booth Tarkington saw
life
like
this
parlors
virile representatives
of this
period knew
top of
n
The shadow
That was
usual and the
of the
muck-rake
fell
to its credit.
But
business went
on as
muck
remained.
[239]
conduct
of
and short-sighted heaping up of very evanescent material goods were inclined to blame the muck-rake for the existence of the muck,
just as they would blame the existence of labor
agitators for the troubles they attempt to combat
which
is
very much
like
the plague.
As a
wash cans and deodorizing solutions came into general use philanthropic bequests became more numer:
social
If
modern
industrial society
had
would
these remedial
from Owen to
Marx, were steadily being recognized. Frank Norris, in The Octopus and The
ton Sinclair in
Pit,
Up-
in the
240 3
The Shadow
documented
the
its
of the
Muck-rake
little
as keenly
The work
that
scarcely be called a
the reader the same
spiritual catharsis
for
;
it left
it
was rather a regurgitaTo their credit, they confronted the life about tion. them: thev neither fled to Europe nor fancied that
that
it
man
found him
American aspects were smiling ones. But these vast cities and vacant countrysides were not someall
it
They were
re-
more pre-
With
the
dug
into
and brought to light corruption, debasement, bribery, greed, and foul aims. Fight corruption! Combat
greed!
plicit
admonition.
They took
these
symptoms
of a deep
itself
they
action
or, if necessary,
Perhaps the most typical writers of this period were implicated in political programs for reform and revolution. In their reaction against the vast
welter of undirected forces about them, they sought
to pave the
way
itself
Upton
Sinclair's
The
The Jungle
the smell of
hung in the air was typical of what was good and what was inadequate in these programs. To Mr. Sinclair, as to Edward Bellamy
Army
to Cuba,
still
Commonwealth,
He
arrival within
With Mr.
Sinclair's
aim to establish a
more rational industrial order, in which function would supplant privilege, in which trained intelli242 3
The Shadow
of the
Muck-rake
prime end of every economic activity, I am in hearty sympathy. What was weak in Mr. Sinclair's pro-
gram was
good
society possessed
social order.
On
assumption,
all
that was
necessary was a change in power and control: the Social Commonwealth would simply diffuse and extend
all
extended
its
waterworks
ists, like
Daniel
De Leon, who
of
porate organization
which every one would have the comforts and conveniences of the middle classes, without the suffering,
toil,
known to the
unskilled
worker.
What was
was a con-
C243H
existing order.
without millionaires,
cities
They were
ready to upset every aspect of modern industrial society except the fragmentary culture which had
brought
it
into existence.
Now, were
was required of a better social order, the answer of capitalism was canny and logical the existing regime could diffuse values, too. Did not bank ac:
counts spread
and movies
and
What more
Why
Commonwealth when,
a free hand,
things?
it
Thus
actually
The
evils of
The Shadow
of the
Muck-rake
poverty of America was a qualitative poverty, one which cut through the divisions of rich and poor;
and
it
more complicated in America but not more significant life was richer
society.
Life was
in material
in creative energies.
These
The
of the muddle.
any formative
a victim, and
only attempt
extent of always
treating him
as
The
create
it
was
McGregor
in
Sherwood Anderson's
figure in
an imper-
What
was
:
the
in literature
and large
C245]
his distressing
state
and
own
bound eventually to
subservient condition
him out
of his
mean and
odds
were
always against
analysis
doubtful
whether
science;
all
this
it
could
called
accurate
For
in lifting the
am
not sure
but that the rowdy, impoverished lyrics of the woband that blies were not more stirring and formative
they
may
in
this
Jack London, who created his own Superman, and Mr. Theodore Dreiser, who depicted the whole American scene without any propagandist bias.
They do not
they
The Shadow
of the
Muck-rake
their
when pushed to
Jack London came to maturity in the nineties; and after a career as oyster pirate in San Francisco
Bay, as a tramp with Coxey's army, as an adventurer in Alaska, after participating in
all
the coarse
offer itself to a
and went
hood.
in for writing, as
an easier kind of
liveli-
He
He had
only to
it in
over again
to
make a story of
of the big
urban populations which now began to swallow the five, ten, and fifteen cent magazines.
sort
of
his
London became a
literature,
traveling
salesman of
offering
writing
to
market,
"red
He
supremacy of the Nordics, who were then quaintly called Anglo-Saxons, and
Burden, believed
in the
clung to socialism,
it
would seem,
chiefly to give
an
and romanticism
[24711
in the Klondike.
Superficially
London perhaps
his
chemical
and
Super-
man.
The
career of the
spectacle.
Superman
in
America
is
an
instructive
He
sprang, this
it
overman,
of a
and Montaignes. Caught up by Nietzsche, and colored by the dark natural theology Darwin had
inherited
he served
morality" of Christianity.
is
The point
to
that in both
is
Superman
London,
mark
of his genius is
capacities.
human
The Shadow
New England
writers.
of the
Muck-rake
Superman and attempted to turn it into a And what did he become? Nothing less reality.
than a preposterous bully,
like
Wolf,
like
turer, like
Burning Daylight, the miner and advenhis whole gallery of brutal and brawny
men
gift of
a magnificent animality, and the absence of a which would prevent them from
their neighbors.
little
social code
this gift
inflicting
In short, London's
infantile
dream
of the messenger
boy or the barroom tough or the nice, respectable clerk whose muscles will never quite stand up under strain. He was the social platitude
of the old West, translated into a literary epigram.
What London
as he
called
"white logic,"
which he
was empty. The logic was faultless; the insight was just; but as a writer and a mythmaker it remained for him to fill it up, to
had found
it,
more
:
significant pat-
To do
this
he was impotent
determinism.
am
capped and limited American artist to his environment. He held a mirror up to society ; and to read
the mind of a
London or a Dreiser
about him
is
to read what
or, vice-versa,
was passing
in the streets
parade of men,
women,
rail-
downtowns, waterfronts,
suburbs,
muzzy
novels of
immediate contemporaries.
Across
the
panorama
his
Huge
figures,
titans of finance,
in the pursuit of
art's sake"
or "geniuses" in art,
who
are business
men
medium,
these
dominate
the
scene;
they
wander
about,
in the ooze
reflect
this
[250]
The Shadow
as
of the Muck-rake
:
they are as
full
of
a day's
potamus yawn
you might
find in his
books
wagon
in
women's gloves
1902,
how one
cashes a
modern
a criminal prosecution.
material?
By what means docs he handle this What makes it significant? There are no
schedule covers everything.
means; or
There
is
a superficial
;
but Zola,
had some conception of what a humane might be, and not for a second was he unconof his
scious
purpose to
evils
criticize
the church, to
portray the
of
brutalities of the
farm or the
works
he had the
advantage of describing a society that had known better days, and these days were his implicit point
of reference.
is
simply
that exhibits
believing in
critical of
women; but
down; and
and defalls
any consequence.
is
It
is
a picture of society
paper.
yes
but so
the
Sunday newsMr.
re-
He
is
from conventional
est physician
in the day's
;
work.
He
any conse-
The
women seem
up!
his
revolt
against
"morality,"
Mr.
on "confessions," fabricated or
real,
men and women, without any more sense of direction or purpose or humane standards than
of ordinary
His novels
[252]
The Shadow
are
of the
so
is
Muck-rake
human documents;
is
a pair of shoestrings,
chief thing they
But the
the
modern
industrial
was
all
that kept
in this crass
new
life,
of
any
many
ramifications
is
a working
civil-
mere hacking and gnawing at and bones, but an occasion for sociability and
ceremonies, to the extent that the ceremony
itself
into a separate
drama,
its
so every act
own
it
:
are esthetic
life
more
To
community
cultured; to
is
barbarous.
The
hurried business
man who
and
2533
Experience of this
remains on the level
it
and unimportant, and must be succeeded by new stimuli, which eventually become stale, too. Culture,
on the other hand, implies the
possibilities of repeti-
tion.
Like
fine
an act
so, life
were not
would be intolerable
and
because
it is so, it is
Mr. Dreiser portrays find all their adventures stale, and all their different achievements tending towards
a deadly sameness.
lust
Their
lives
turned to rafine
ends
and produces
efficient
industries,
or sexual passion
its
friendship,
salon,
its
home,
theater in
of social
life.
IV
Among
in
the group of
New Englanders
established
[2543
The Shadow
of the Muck-rake
distinguished.
Among
all
mere welter of
existence.
From
instrumentalism
but,
dif-
in spite of similarities of
men which
of
bottom
reflected
Dewey.
Dreiser, Dewey, the
school,
style.
commanding
writers
of
its
There objects, was as fuzzy and formless as lint. is a homely elegance in James's writing, a beautj
in the presentation of the thought, even
if
the con;
in
its
literary
is
The comedown
is serious.
Style
the
indication of a
happy mental
rhythm, as
a firm
grip and a red cheek are of health. Lack of style is a lack of organic connection: Dreiser's pages are
as formless as a dumpheap
:
Randolph Bourne once characterized this quality of Mr. Dewey's mind as "protective coloraMr.
tion;" and the phrase
is
accurate enough
identified
if
one
himself in
environment.
No
one has
plumbed the bottom of Mr. Dewey's philosophy who does not feel in back of it the shapclessness, the
faith in the current
utilitarian
produced the best of the early skyscrapers, the Chicago exposition, Burnham's grandiose city plan,
the great park and playground system, the clotted
Mr. Dewey's philosophy represents what is still positive and purposeful in that limited circle of ideas
in
is
home
in the
its
upon
procedure, tech-
and deliberate experiment; and he embraces technology with the same esthetic faith that Mr.
nique,
it.
AboA e
all,
Mr. Dewey
his
The Shadow
many
of the
;
Muck-rake
what had been pro-
duced by the mass of men must somehow be right, and must somehow be more significant than the
interests
In Mr.
were,
its
Dewey
circle,
and returned to
its
origin, amplifying,
by
To
ideas,
essentially antagonistic,
or at least unsympathetic.
and just critic of conventional education; and he has undermined conceptions of philosophy, art, and
religion
but
his
an unqualified
procedures of
common
"is
found
It is
is
an active process,
quite another defi-
That
nition of happiness than the equilibrium, the point of inner rest, which the mystic, for example, seeks ;
Dewey a
less
active kind
of happi-
from
re-
[257]
means for Mr. Dewey what it meant for the pioneer a preparation for something else. He scarcely can
conceive that activity
circle
may
follow the
mode
of the
train.
In spite of
would be absurd
performed; for
it
has
crystallized
in
philosophic
form one of the great bequests of science and modern technology the respect for cooperative thinking and
:
for
manual
activity
in
The notion
itself
of the
superstition.
Creative thought
fling of observations,
that
is
man
thinking
pletely operative
in various
and at various stages every part of his organism, down to his viscera, and every available
degrees
from the finger which might trace a geometrical theorem in the sand to the logarithm
form of
tool,
The
otiose, leisure-
that
it is
the reflection
268 3
The Shadow
of the
Muck-rake
by hearsay from
which
by the work
exact
of
the
field
and
the
measurement,
and cooperative
With
human
this
beings
loss, per-
by
one.
Mr. Dewey
brought out
its
seized
upon
this
achievement
and
significance admirably.
Its implica-
According to Dewey,
it
is
thought
is
not
mature
until
has
passed into
it
that
has
fre-
that
its
actions
are unintelligent
an
unreflective procedure.
Action
is
not opposed to
ideas: the
result
means are not one thing, and the final of attending to them quite another: they are
[259]
in the
same house.
sary to
meaning."
high ground poor humanity cannot stand on it, or an empiricism which takes such low ground that it
introduces no excellence into brute existence
these things are inimical to
it
life,
both
and absurd
and
way
to a
more complete
and
desires, achieve
In
its flexibilit}^
itself,
with the
its
environment,
Mr.
Dcwey's
philosophy
of
continuously
formative
part
our
American experience.
speaking,
history
is
New World
In so far as
his
it is
260 ]
The Shadow
of the Muck-rake
:
and experiment are good in themselves there are times when it is necessary to be as stiff as a ramrod and as dogmatic as a Scotch dominie
experience of
but these
cate-
gories in philosophy
to extend
its
boundaries.
The
deficiencies
of
and although he has written about the influence of Darwinism on philosophy, and has done some of his
best
work
his
own
habits of think-
The
Bacon
;
in
appreciations of Locke,
The
thinkers
who saw
existence,
it
in terms
of
his environ-
He
if
away with
the imagi-
nation
itself
more tangible results of invention! This aspect of Mr. Dewey's instrumentalism is bound up with a certain democratic indiscriminatestitute for the
Goodyear and a
Morse seem
to
him as high
in the scale of
human
development as a
raincoat
life
is
Whitman and
a Tolstoi: a rubber
perhaps a
finer contribution to
human
is
What
indeed
his
in his
own
words.
is
a device
in experimentation, carried
a specialized use, use being a training of new modes of perception. The creators of such works are entitled, when succation.
It exists for the sake of
cessful, to the gratitude that
we give to inventors
and microphones ; in the end they open new objects to be observed and enjoyed." This is a fairly back-handed eulogy, unless one rememof microscopes
bers
all
mechani-
cal instruments.
The Shadow
"intrinsic
of the Muck-rake
is,
of
who
is
ipso
it
facto an
is
poem, a dance, a beautiful conception of the uniA well-designed verse, are good for what they are,
machine
may
mechanic or engineer
is
not the
purpose of
its
a Duchamps-Villon or a
Man Ray
wants to create
employ an engineer, but goes through the same process he would undergo to model the figure of a
man.
things,
and
it is
all
the
scene in nature
the dance
may
may promote
that
it is
An
still
be a poor one:
in
the same breath as poetry shows the deeply anesthetic and life-denying quality of the utilitarian
philosophy.
[263]
deficiency.
In Reconstruction in Phi-
he was
appreciative,
to
with
its
loving
The weakness
of
Mr. Dewey's
in-
strumentalism
is
He
humane
which
it
lowers
who practice
American
ritual of
life.
of the academic
critic,
art
as
an
life
and
he
forgets
Mr.
Babbitt
treats
same way
as
if
life
What
Mr. Dewey has done in part has been to bolster up and confirm by philosophic statement tendencies
which are already strong and well-established
in
American
fident
life,
be introduced
[264
The Shadow of
into our scheme of things
the
if
Muck-rake
is
it
to
significant.
What
to his disciple.
Randolph Bourne, one of Mr. Dewey's most ardent and talented disciples, found himself
had once seemed
left
all-
its
counsel
of
adjustment
him
re-
the war-technique.
finger
Bourne put
his
"To
to technique.
We
means
fell
And Dewey,
of course, always
meant
his philosophy,
when taken as a philosophy of life, to start with But there was always that unhappy amvalues.
265 3
how
values were
and
it
The
his philosophy,
has habitu-
tent
with
getting
it
was the desirable place to get. You must have your vision, and you must have your
closely whether
. .
technique.
The
practical effect
of Dewey's
phi-
values,
the
values
all
dressed up,
up
of medieval
culture,
such interludes
supplied,
as
men have
arrangements
have completely canalized the imagination itself into This has led the practical channels of invention.
not alone to the conquest of the physical environ-
of
human pur-
in this
2663
The Shadow
more impossible
it
of the Muck-rake
becomes for them to recognize the part that vision must play in bringing all their prac
tical activities into
a common focus.
Their external
determinism
is
As Bourne
said, the
is
and instrumentalism
expression
result
is
only
highest conscious
;
and the
from the
We
are living on
An
towards a whole
criticism
of
obsolete
which
are
We
culture
by
ignoring
tion,
or by palming
[267 3
excellent
in their place
is
as
to be adjustsaid,
well
"in
and no more.
.
You
never
transcend
out shoot
anything'.
Vision
must
constantly
usually
technique,
opportunist
efforts
An
will
will
philosophy of adjust-
ment
Brave words
de-
kingdom ceased to be a tangible one, and they knew no glory, except that which flowed out of their pursuit of power. Without
alone; so that the
vision, the
pragmatists perish.
And our
into
generation,
in particular,
who have
one,
into
commercial
administrative
War
our generation
JT268]
may
well
The Shadow
of the Muck-rake
"Things "and ride man-
said,
dnd."
We must
:
may
CHAPTER SEVEN
ENVOI
ENVOI
ENTERING our own day, one
culture and experience a
finds the relations of
little difficult
to trace out.
With
it is
how
and new stores of culture one cannot with any assurance tell. Is Robert Frost the evening star of New
England, or the
the
first
streak of a new
dawn?
Will
Dewey who
is
more passive and utilitarian thinker continue to dominate? Will our daily activities center more
completely in metropolises, for which the rest of the
will the
place to
is
programs
of regional development?
What
Mary
Austin?
What
is
universities like
New Mexico?
May we
C2783
re-settlement;
or
will
the
habits
of
nomadry, expansion, and standardization prevail? The notion that the forces that are now dominant
will inevitably
when they think this would be desirable, or hopes as facts, when they profess that it is unavoidable. The effort of an age may not lead to its proas hopes
longation
it
may
and
own
demise.
So the
stiffen-
Century did not lead to their persistence: they formed the thorny nest in which Romanticism was
hatched.
It
was
in
steam
it
was
Waverley
novels.
Romanticism, for
all its
super;
ficialities,
out
Wordsof
worth,
and
out
of
the
meretricious
Gothic
Walpole,
Hugo and
Romantic poets changed the course of industrialism ; but they altered the mood in which industrialism was
received
its
poten-
Envoi
tialities
for
evil,
which a
blind
and complacent
We
by two events
settlement and
of
the
soil
an
abstract
fragmentary
culture,
given
definitive
form by the Protestants of the Sixteenth Century, by the philosophers and scientists of the Seventeenth, and by the political thinkers of the
Faced with the experience of the American wilderness, we sought, in the capacity
Eighteenth Century.
of pioneers, to find a
new
primitive
tions
ways of
hunter,
forest
and
in the occupa-
of
woodman, miner
and
pastoral
nomad: but
by people
utili-
who were
as
much
influenced
by
the idola of
In
this situation,
and symmetrical life, tended to disappear from the minds of every one except the disciples of
Fourier; with the result that business, technology,
C275]
living sources
of
our own
Century wore on, we moved within an ever narrower circle of experience, living mean and illiberal lives.
foods:
it
For
three
Europe had either been trying to get nourishment from the leftovers of classic culture or the Middle Ages, or they had been
centuries the best minds in
order
to
supplement
their
bare
spiritual
fare.
Science built
up a new conception
its disciples
of the universe,
and
it
endowed
stand
but
tral
it
interests
ignoring
of
its
mode
man's
effort
human
ingenious
human
expedient.
In America,
it
was easy
far an
Emerson or a Whitman
Envoi
of welding together the interests which science represented, and those which, through the accidents of
its
guiding themselves by
own
day, these poets continued the old voyages of exploration on the plane of the mind, and, seeking passage
to India, found themselves coasting along strange
shores.
None
Golden
Day
Need
I recall that
Whitman
between
steamship
sailing
promptly
America and Europe might be as beautiful as a star, and that Thoreau, who loved to hear the wind
in the pine needles, listened with equal pleasure to
That
include in his
foundly true.
was ready to absorb and report upon the universe, was proIt is this awareness of new sources
American writ-
Golden
Day from
their contemporaries in
Europe.
provisional,
and
[2773
patent
generalizations
which
they
drew
directly
called,
These perceptions
was dealing more effectually with the instrumentalities of life, it became more necessary for the imagination to project more
in proportion as intelligence
The attempt
to pre-
grow out
planted
of
and
Day:
poems
all
Whitman, the
musings of Melville
None
of these
We
Emerson or Whitman
we attempted to do
But the principal writers of that time are essential links between our own lives and that earlier, that
basic, America.
under
[278;]
Envoi
the surface: and from their example,
readily find our
we can more
tracting chaos
wealth was in
its
place,
and science
and the deeper life of man began again to emerge, no longer stunted or frustrated by the instrumentalities it had conceived and set to was
in its place,
work.
the
For
us
who share
or
pragmatic we and acquiescence begin again equally impossible of what it means to live to dream Thoreau's dream
relapse
is
;
moribund,
into
the
a whole human
life.
good life; it permits the fullest use, or sublimation, of man's natural functions and activities. Confronted by the raw materials of existence, a culture
in
crossed by the
warp
its
of desire.
;
Love
in the
modes
and
who by
the
Henry Adams,
in
distinction
to
all
the
great
power of sex: he was aware of neither a Virgin nor a Venus. In the works of Sherwood Anderson,
the
Edna
Waldo Frank
this aversion
has disappeared
drawing
all
the
its
habits
prudences in
wake.
acters begin to perceive the weaknesses, the limitations, the sordidness of the life
Many
life,"
Marriages, that
the externalisms,
and factory, was in fact an unrelated figment, something which drew upon a boyish self that made sandpiles, whittled sticks,
Whereas the deep and disruptive force that rouses them, and makes beauty credible
to be captain.
and desire
have
it,
realizable,
is
a dream at
reality.
all,
during
Desire
to this,
real
2803
Envoi
why not every human desire? In full lust of life man is not merely a poor creature, wryly adjusting
himself
creator,
to
external
artist,
circumstances
he
is
also
an
Wil-
and
it
all
must be
a
of
and a
seed,
Art
in its
many forms
is
a union of imaginasocialized,
tive
desire,
:
desire sublimated
and
with
actuality
idiotic,
and
actualities
perhaps even a
little
more
so.
It
is
from
it:
but that
life is
mean when
it is
entirely ab-
sterility,
a boredom,
lust, is
a despair?
the
[281 3
an organism that
is
dead.
The power
to escape
from
this sinister
world can
come only by the double process of encountering more complete modes of life, and of reformulating
a more
vital tissue of ideas
human
existence.
We
in lieu
foreground those
and thought.
new exploration for they both suggest the groundwork of a philosophy which shall be oriented as com;
dominant thought since Descartes has been directed towards the Machine.
pletely towards Life as the
To
may know.
more imaginative than the dreams of the transcendentalist, more practical than the work of the
[282]
Envoi
pragmatists, more drastic than the criticisms of the
old social revolutionists,
our early attempts to possess the simulacra of culture. It is nothing less than the effort to conthan
all
ceive
a new world.
is
before
THE END
2833