Chapter 13

"The West," says James Bryce, "is the most American part of America, that is to say the part where those features which distinguish America from Europe come out in the strongest relief." We have already noted in our study of American romance how the call of the West represented for a while the escape from reality. The individual, following that retreating horizon which we name the West, found an escape from convention and from social law. Beyond the Mississippi or beyond the Rockies meant to him that "somewheres east of Suez" where the Ten Commandments are no longer to be found, where the individual has free rein. But by and by comes the inevitable reaction, the return to reality. The pioneer sobers down; he finds that "the Ten Commandments will not budge"; he sees the need of law and order; he organizes a vigilance committee; he impanels a jury, even though the old Spanish law does not recognize a jury. The new land settles to its rest. The output of the gold mines shrinks into insignificance when compared with the cash value of crops of hay and potatoes. The old picturesque individualism yields to a new social order, to the conception of the rights of the state. The story of the West is thus an epitome of the individual human life as well as the history of the United States.

We have been living through a period where the mind of the West has seemed to be the typical national mind. We have been indifferent to traditions. We have overlooked the defective training of the individual, provided he "made good." We have often, as in the free silver craze, turned our back upon universal experience. We have been recklessly deaf to the teachings of history; we have spoken of the laws of literature and art as if they were mere conventions designed to oppress the free activity of the artist. Typical utterances of our writers are Jack London's "I want to get away from the musty grip of the past," and Frank Norris's "I do not want to write literature, I want to write life."

The soul of the West, and a good deal of the soul of America, has been betrayed in words like those. Not to share this hopefulness of the West, its stress upon feeling rather than thinking, its superb confidence, is to be ignorant of the constructive forces of the nation. The humor of the West, its democracy, its rough kindness, its faith in the people, its generous notion of "the square deal for everybody," its elevation of the man above the dollar, are all typical of the American way of looking at the world. Typical also, is its social solidarity, its swift emotionalism of the masses. It is the Western interest in the ethical aspect of social movements that is creating some of the moving forces in American society to-day. Experiment stations of all kinds flourish on that soil. Chicago newspapers are more alive to new ideas than the newspapers of New York or Boston. No one can understand the present-day America if he does not understand the men and women who live between the Allegheny Mountains and the Rocky Mountains. They have worked out, more successfully than the composite population of the East, a general theory of the relation of the individual to society; in other words, a combination of individualism with fellowship.

To draw up an indictment against this typical section of our country is to draw up an indictment against our people as a whole. And yet one who studies the literature and art produced in the great Mississippi Valley will see, I believe, that the needs of the West are the real needs of America. Take that commonness of mind and tone, which friendly foreign critics, from De Tocqueville to Bryce, have indicated as one of the dangers of our democracy. This commonness of mind and tone is often one of the penalties of fellowship. It may mean a levelling down instead of a levelling up.

Take the tyranny of the majority,--to which Mr. Bryce has devoted one of his most suggestive chapters. You begin by recognizing the rights of the majority. You end by believing that the majority must be right. You cease to struggle against it. In other words, you yield to what Mr. Bryce calls "the fatalism of the multitude." The individual has a sense of insignificance. It is vain to oppose the general current. It is easier to acquiesce and to submit. The sense of personal responsibility lessens. What is the use of battling for one's own opinions when one can already see that the multitude is on the other side? The greater your democratic faith in the ultimate rightness of the multitude, the less perhaps your individual power of will. The easier is it for you to believe that everything is coming out right, whether you put your shoulder to the wheel or not.

The problem of overcoming these evils is nothing less than the problem of spiritualizing democracy. There are some of our hero-worshipping people who think that that vast result can still be accomplished by harking back to some such programme as the "great man" theory of Carlyle. Another theory of spiritualizing democracy, no less familiar to the student of nineteen-century literature, is what is called "the divine average" doctrine of Walt Whitman. The average man is to be taught the glory of his walk and trade. Round every head there is to be an aureole. "A common wave of thought and joy, lifting mankind again," is to make us forget the old distinction between the individual and the social group. We are all to be the sons of the morning.

We must not pause to analyze or to illustrate these two theories. Carlyle's theory seems to me to be outworn, and Whitman's theory is premature. But it is clear that they both admit that the mass of men are as yet incompletely spiritualized, not yet raised to their full stature. Unquestionably, our American life is, in European eyes at least, monotonously uniform. It is touched with self-complacency. It is too intent upon material progress. It confuses bigness with greatness. It is unrestful. It is marked by intellectual impatience. Our authors are eager to write life rather than literature. But they are so eager that they overlook the need of literary discipline. They do not learn to write literature and therefore most of them are incapable of interpreting life. They escape, perhaps, from "the musty grip of the past," but in so doing they refuse to learn the inexorable lessons of the past. Hence the fact that our books lack power, that they are not commensurate with the living forces of the country. The unconscious, moral, and spiritual life of the nation is not back of them, making "eye and hand and heart go to a new tune."

If we could have that, we should ask no more, for we believe in the nation. I heard a doctor say, the other day, that a man's chief lesson was to pull his brain down into his spinal cord; that is to say, to make his activities not so much the result of conscious thought and volition, as of unconscious, reflex action; to stop thinking and willing, and simply _do_ what one has to do. May there not be a hint here of the ultimate relation of the individual to the social organism; the relation of our literature to our national character? There is a period, no doubt, when the individual must painfully question himself, test his powers, and acquire the sense of his own place in the world. But there also comes a more mature period when he takes that place unconsciously, does his work almost without thinking about it, as if it were not his work at all. The brain has gone down into the spinal cord; the man is functioning as apart of the organism of society; he has ceased to question, to plan, to decide; it is instinct that does his work for him.

Literature and art, at their noblest, function in that instinctive way. They become the unconscious expression of a civilization. A nation passes out of its adolescent preoccupation with plans and with materials. It learns to do its work, precisely as Goethe bade the artist do his task, without talking about it. We, too, shall outgrow in time our questioning, our self-analysis, our futile comparison of ourselves with other nations, our self-conscious study of our own national character. We shall not forget the distinction between "each" and "all," but "all" will increasingly be placed at the service of "each." With fellowship based upon individualism, and with individualism ever leading to fellowship, America will perform its vital tasks, and its literature will be the unconscious and beautiful utterance of its inner life.

THE END.

The Riverside Press

CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS

U. S. A.

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Transcriber's Notes

Pages 53, 141: Changed the oe ligature to oe in the name Crèvecoeur: (Settlers like Crèvecoeur), (enthusiasm of a settler like Crèvecoeur)

Page 67: Changed compaign to campaign: (Their compaign of "exposure," during the last decade,)

Page 165: Retained the spaced 't is, to match original line of poetry: ("If my bark sinks, 't is to another sea.")

Page 222: Changed conciousness to consciousness: (the preoccupied colonial conciousness.)

Page 223: Changed explans to explains: (It explans the still lingering popular suspicion)

Page 232: Changed sojurns to sojourns: (Fenimore Cooper came home from long sojurns in Europe.)