Chapter 12

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

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

There was once a "mast-fed" novelist in this country, who scandalously slighted his academic opportunities, went to sea, went into the navy, went to farming, and then went into novel-writing to amuse himself. He cared nothing and knew nothing about conscious literary art; his style is diffuse, his syntax the despair of school-teachers, and many of his characters are bores. But once let him strike the trail of a story, and he follows it like his own Hawkeye; put him on salt water or in the wilderness, and he knows rope and paddle, axe and rifle, sea and forest and sky; and he knows his road home to the right ending of a story by an instinct as sure as an Indian's. Professional novelists like Balzac, professional critics like Sainte-Beuve, stand amazed at Fenimore Cooper's skill and power. The true engineering and architectural lines are there. They were not painfully plotted beforehand, like George Eliot's. Cooper took, like Scott, "the easiest path across country," just as a bee-hunter seems to take the easiest path through the woods. But the bee-hunter, for all his apparent laziness, never loses sight of the air-drawn line, marked by the homing bee; and your _Last of the Mohicans_ will be instinctively, inevitably right, while your _Daniel Deronda_ will be industriously wrong.

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

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

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

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

Even from the point of view of literature and art,--fields of activity where the individual performer has often been felt to be quite independent of his audience,--it is quite evident nowadays that the old theory of individualism breaks down. Even your lyric poet, who more than any other artist stands or sings alone, falls easily into mere lyric eccentricity if he is not bound to his fellows by wholesome and normal ties. In fact, this lyric eccentricity, weakness, wistfulness, is one of the notable defects of American poetry. We have always been lacking in the more objective forms of literary art, like epic and drama. Poe, and the imitators of Poe, have been regarded too often by our people as the normal type of poet. One must not forget the silent solitary ecstasies that have gone into the making of enduring lyric verse, but our literature proves abundantly how soon sweetness may turn to an Emily Dickinson strain of morbidness; how fatally the lovely becomes transformed into the queer. The history of the American short story furnishes many similar examples. The artistic intensity of a Hawthorne, his ethical and moral preoccupations, are all a part of the creed of individualistic art. But both Hawthorne and Poe would have written,--one dare not say better stories, but at least greater and broader and more human stories,--if they had not been forced to walk so constantly in solitary pathways. That fellowship in artistic creation which has characterized some of the greatest periods of art production was something wholly absent from the experience of these gifted and lonely men. Even Emerson and Thoreau wrote "whim" over their portals more often than any artist has the privilege to write it. Emerson never had any thorough training, either in philosophy, theology, or history. He admits it upon a dozen smiling pages. Perhaps it adds to his purely personal charm, just as Montaigne's confession of his intellectual and moral weaknesses heightens our fondness for the Prince of Essayists. But the deeper fact is that not only Emerson and Thoreau, Poe and Hawthorne, but practically every American writer and artist from the beginning has been forced to do his work without the sustaining and heartening touch of national fellowship and pride. Emerson himself felt the chilling poverty in the intellectual and emotional life of the country. He betrays it in this striking passage from his _Journal_, about the sculptor Greenough:--

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

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

It is obvious that the day for the old individualism has passed. Whether one looks at art and literature or at the general activities of American society, it is clear that the isolated individual is incompetent to carry on his necessary tasks. This is not saying that we have outgrown the individual. We shall never outgrow the individual. We need for every page of literature and for every adequate performance of society more highly perfected individuals. Some one said of Edgar Allan Poe that he did not know enough to be a great poet. All around us and every day we find individuals who do not know enough for their specific job; men who do not love enough, men in whom the power of will is too feeble. Such men, as individuals, must know and love and will more adequately; and this not merely to perfect their functioning as individuals, but to fulfill their obligations to contemporary society. A true spiritual democracy will never be reached until highly trained individuals are united in the bonds of fraternal feeling. Every individual defect in training, defect in aspiration, defect in passion, becomes ultimately a defect in society.

Let us turn, then, to those conditions of American society which have prepared the way for, and foreshadowed, a more perfect fellowship. We shall instantly perceive the relation of these general social conditions to the specific performances of our men of letters. We have repeatedly noted that our most characteristic literature is what has been called a citizen literature. It is the sort of writing which springs from a sense of the general needs of the community and which has had for its object the safe-guarding or the betterment of the community. Aside from a few masterpieces of lyric poetry, and aside from the short story as represented by such isolated artists as Poe and Hawthorne, our literature as a whole has this civic note. It may be detected in the first writings of the colonists. Captain John Smith's angry order at Jamestown, "He that will not work neither let him eat," is one of the planks in the platform of democracy. Under the trying and depressing conditions of that disastrous settlement at Eden in _Martin Chuzzlewit_ it is the quick wits and the brave heart of Mark Tapley which prove him superior to his employer. The same sermon is preached in Mr. Barrie's play, _The Admirable Crichton_: cast away upon the desert island, the butler proves himself a better man than his master. This is the motive of a very modern play, but it may be illustrated a hundred times in the history of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in America. The practical experiences of the colonists confirmed them in their republican theories. It is true that they held to a doctrine of religious and political individualism. But the moment these theories were put to work in the wilderness a new order of things decreed that this individualism should be modified in the direction of fellowship. Calvinism itself, for all of its insistence upon the value of the individual soul, taught also the principle of the equality of all souls before God. It was thus that the _Institutes_ of Calvin became one of the charters of democracy. The democratic drift in the writings of Franklin and Jefferson is too well known to need any further comment. The triumph of the rebellious colonists of 1776 was a triumph of democratic principles; and although a Tory reaction came promptly, although Hamiltonianism came to stay as a beneficent check to over-radical, populistic theories, the history of the last century and a quarter has abundantly shown the vitality and the endurance of democratic ideas.

One may fairly say that the decade in which American democracy revealed its most ugly and quarrelsome aspect was the decade of the eighteen-thirties. That was the decade when Washington Irving and Fenimore Cooper came home from long sojourns in Europe. They found themselves confronted at once by sensitive, suspicious neighbors who hated England and Europe and had a lurking or open hostility towards anything that savored of Old World culture. Yet in that very epoch when English visitors were passing their most harsh and censorious verdict upon American culture, Emerson was writing in his _Journal_ (June 18, 1834) a singular prophecy to the effect that the evils of our democracy, so far as literature was concerned, were to be cured by the remedy of more democracy. Is it not striking that he turns away from the universities and the traditional culture of New England and looks towards the Jacksonism of the new West to create a new and native American literature? Here is the passage:--

"We all lean on England; scarce a verse, a page, a newspaper, but is writ in imitation of English forms; our very manners and conversation are traditional, and sometimes the life seems dying out of all literature, and this enormous paper currency of Words is accepted instead. I suppose the evil may be cured by this rank rabble party, the Jacksonism of the country, heedless of English and of all literature--a stone cut out of the ground without hands;--they may root out the hollow dilettantism of our cultivation in the coarsest way, and the new-born may begin again to frame their own world with greater advantage."

From that raw epoch of the eighteen-thirties on to the Civil War, one may constantly detect in American writing the accents of democratic radicalism. Partly, no doubt, it was a heritage of the sentiment of the French Revolution. "My father," said John Greenleaf Whittier, "really believed in the Preamble of the Bill of Rights, which re-affirmed the Declaration of Independence." So did the son! Equally clear in the writings of those thirty years are echoes of the English radicalism which had so much in common with the democratic movement across the English Channel. The part which English thinkers and English agitators played in securing for America the fruits of her own democratic principles has never been adequately acknowledged.

That the outcome of the Civil War meant a triumph of democratic ideas as against aristocratic privilege, no one can doubt. There were no stancher adherents of the democratic idea than our intellectual aristocrats. The best Union editorials at the time of the Civil War, says James Ford Rhodes, were written by scholars like Charles Eliot Norton and James Russell Lowell. I think it was Lowell who once said, in combatting the old aristocratic notion of white man supremacy, that no gentleman is willing to accept privileges that are inaccessible to other men. This is precisely like the famous sentence of Walt Whitman which first arrested the attention of "Golden Rule Jones," the mayor of Toledo, and which made him not only a Whitmaniac for the rest of his life but one of the most useful of American citizens. The line was, "I will accept nothing which all may not have their counterpart of on the same terms."

This instinct of fellowship cannot be separated, of course, from the older instincts of righteousness and justice. It involves, however, more than giving the other man his due. It means feeling towards him as towards another "fellow." It involves the sentiment of partnership. Historians of early mining life in California have noted the new phase of social feeling in the mining-camps which followed upon the change from the pan--held and shaken by the solitary miner--to the cradle, which required the coöperation of at least two men. It was when the cradle came in that the miners first began to say "partner." As the cradle gave way to placer mining, larger and larger schemes of coöperation came into use. In fact, Professor Royce has pointed out in his _History of California_ that the whole lesson of California history is precisely the lesson most necessary to be learned by the country as a whole, namely, that the phase of individual gain-getting and individualistic power always leads to anarchy and reaction, and that it becomes necessary, even in the interests of effective individualism itself, to recognize the compelling and ultimate authority of society.

What went on in California between 1849 and 1852 is precisely typical of what is going on everywhere to-day. American men and women are learning, as we say, "to get together." It is the distinctly twentieth-century programme. We must all learn the art of getting together, not merely to conserve the interests of literature and art and society, but to preserve the individual himself in his just rights. Any one who misunderstands the depth and the scope of the present political restlessness which is manifested in every section of the country, misunderstands the American instinct for fellowship. It is a law of that fellowship that what is right and legitimate for me is right and legitimate for the other fellow also. The American mind and the American conscience are becoming socialized before our very eyes. American art and literature must keep pace with this socialization of the intelligence and the conscience, or they will be no longer representative of the true America.

Literary illustrations of this spirit of fraternalism lie close at hand. They are to be found here and there even in the rebellious, well-nigh anarchic, individualism of the Concord men. They are to be found throughout the prose and verse of Whittier. No one has preached a truer or more effective gospel of fellowship than Longfellow, whose poetry has been one of the pervasive influences in American democracy, although Longfellow had but little to say about politics and never posed in a slouch hat and with his trousers tucked into his boots. Fellowship is taught in the _Biglow Papers_ of Lowell and the stories of Mrs. Stowe. It is wholly absent from the prose and verse of Poe, and it imparts but a feeble warmth to the delicately written pages of Hawthorne. But in the books written for the great common audience of American men and women, like the novels of Winston Churchill; and in the plays which have scored the greatest popular successes, like those of Denman Thompson, Bronson Howard, Gillette, Augustus Thomas, the doctrine of fellowship is everywhere to be traced. It is in the poems of James Whitcomb Riley and of Sam Walter Foss; in the work of hundreds of lesser known writers of verse and prose who have echoed Foss's sentiment about living in a "house by the side of the road" and being a "friend of man."

To many readers the supreme literary example of the gospel of American fellowship is to be found in Walt Whitman. One will look long before one finds a more consistent or a nobler doctrine of fellowship than is chanted in _Leaves of Grass_. It is based upon individualism; the strong body and the possessed soul, sure of itself amid the whirling of the "quicksand years"; but it sets these strong persons upon the "open road" in comradeship; it is the sentiment of comradeship which creates the indissoluble union of "these States"; and the States, in turn, in spite of every "alarmist," "partialist," or "infidel," are to stretch out unsuspicious and friendly hands of fellowship to the whole world. Anybody has the right to call _Leaves of Grass_ poor poetry, if he pleases; but nobody has the right to deny its magnificent Americanism.

It is not merely in literature that this message of fellowship is brought to our generation. Let me quote a few sentences from the recent address of George Gray Barnard, the sculptor, in explaining the meaning of his marble groups now placed at the entrance to the Capitol of Pennsylvania. "I resolved," says Barnard, "that I would build such groups as should stand at the entrance to the People's temple ... the home of those visions of the ever-widening and broadening brotherhood that gives to life its dignity and its meaning. Life is told in terms of labor. It is fitting that labor, its triumphs, its message, should be told to those who gaze upon a temple of the people. The worker is the hope of all the future. The needs of the worker, his problems, his hopes, his untold longings, his sacrifices, his triumphs, all of these are the field of the art of the future. Slowly we are groping our way towards the new brotherhood, and when that day dawns, men will enter a world made a paradise by labor. Labor makes us kin. It is for this reason that there has been placed at the entrance of this great building the message of the Adam and Eve of the future, the message of labor and of fraternity."

That there are defects in this gospel and programme of American fellowship, every one is aware. If the obstacle to effective individualism is lack of discipline, the obstacles to effective fellowship are vagueness, crankiness, inefficiency, and the relics of primal selfishness. Nobody in our day has preached the tidings of universal fellowship more fervidly and powerfully than Tolstoï. Yet when one asks the great Russian, "What am I to do as a member of this fellowship?" Tolstoï gives but a confused and impractical answer. He applies to the complex and contradictory facts of our contemporary civilization the highest test and standard known to him: namely, the principles of the New Testament. But if you ask him precisely how these principles are to be made the working programme of to-morrow, the Russian mysticism and fanaticism settle over him like a fog. We pass Tolstoïans on the streets of our American cities every day; they have the eyes of dreamers, of those who would build, if they could, a new Heaven and a new Earth. But they do not know exactly how to go about it. Our practical Western minds seize upon some actual plan for constructive labor. Miss Jane Addams organizes her settlements in the slums; Booker Washington gives his race models of industrial education; President Eliot has a theory of university reform and then struggles successfully for forty years to put that theory into practice. Compared with the concrete performance of such social workers as these, the gospel according to Whitman and Tolstoï is bound to seem vague in its outlines, and ineffective in its concrete results. That such a gospel attracts cranks and eccentrics of all sorts is not to be wondered at. They come and go, but the deeper conceptions of fraternalism remain.

A further obstacle to the progress of fellowship lies in selfishness. But let us see how even the coarser and rawer and cruder traits of the American character may be related to the spirit of common endeavor which is slowly transforming our society, and modifying, before our eyes, our contemporary art and literature.