Chapter 3

But blood will have its say sooner or later. No one knows how profoundly the strong mentality of the Jew, already evident enough in the fields of manufacturing and finance, will mould the intellectual life of the United States. The mere presence, to say nothing of the rapid absorption, of these millions upon millions of aliens, as the children of the Puritans regard them, is a constant evidence of the subtle ways in which internationalism is playing its part in the fashioning of the American temper. The moulding hand of the German university has been laid upon our higher institutions of learning for seventy years, although no one can demonstrate in set terms whether the influence of Goethe, read now by three generations of American scholars and studied by millions of youth in the schools, has left any real mark upon our literature. Abraham Lincoln, in his store-keeping days, used to sit under a tree outside the grocery store of Lincoln and Berry, reading Voltaire. One would like to think that he then and there assimilated something of the incomparable lucidity of style of the great Frenchman. But Voltaire's influence upon Lincoln's style cannot be proved, any more than Rousseau's direct influence upon Jefferson. Tolstoï and Ibsen have, indeed, left unmistakable traces upon American imaginative writing during the last quarter of a century. Frank Norris was indebted to Zola for the scheme of that uncompleted trilogy, the prose epic of the Wheat; and Owen Wister has revealed a not uncommon experience of our younger writing men in confessing that the impulse toward writing his Western stories came to him after reading the delightful pages of a French romancer. But all this tells us merely what we knew well enough before: that from colonial days to the present hour the Atlantic has been no insuperable barrier between the thought of Europe and the mind of America; that no one race bears aloft all the torches of intellectual progress; and that a really vital writer of any country finds a home in the spiritual life of every other country, even though it may be difficult to find his name in the local directory.

Finally, we must bear in mind that purely literary evidence as to the existence of certain national traits needs corroboration from many non-literary sources. If it is dangerous to judge modern Japan by the characteristics of a piece of pottery, it is only less misleading to select half a dozen excellent New England writers of fifty years ago as sole witnesses to the qualities of contemporary America. We must broaden the range of evidence. The historians of American literature must ultimately reckon with all those sources of mental and emotional quickening which have yielded to our pioneer people a substitute for purely literary pleasures: they must do justice to the immense mass of letters, diaries, sermons, editorials, speeches, which have served as the grammar and phrase-book of national feeling. A history of our literature must be flexible enough, as I have said elsewhere, to include "the social and economic and geographical background of American life; the zest of the explorer, the humor of the pioneer; the passion of old political battles; the yearning after spiritual truth and social readjustment; the baffled quest of beauty. Such a history must be broad enough for the _Federalist_ and for Webster's oratory, for Beecher's sermons and Greeley's editorials, and the Lincoln-Douglas debates. It must picture the daily existence of our citizens from the beginning; their working ideas, their phrases and shibboleths and all their idols of the forum and the cave. It should portray the misspelled ideals of a profoundly idealistic people who have been usually immersed in material things."

Our most characteristic American writing, as must be pointed out again and again, is not the self-conscious literary performance of a Poe or a Hawthorne. It is civic writing; a citizen literature, produced, like the _Federalist_, and Garrison's editorials and Grant's _Memoirs_, without any stylistic consciousness whatever; a sort of writing which has been incidental to the accomplishment of some political, social, or moral purpose, and which scarcely regards itself as literature at all. The supreme example of it is the "Gettysburg Address." Homeliness, simplicity, directness, preoccupation with moral issues, have here been but the instrument of beauty; phrase and thought and feeling have a noble fitness to the national theme. "Nothing of Europe here," we may instinctively exclaim, and yet the profounder lesson of this citizen literature of ours is in the universality of the fundamental questions which our literature presents. The "Gettysburg Address" would not to-day have a secure fame in Europe if it spoke nothing to the ear and the heart of Europe. And this brings us back to our main theme. Lincoln, like Franklin, like many another lesser master of our citizen literature, is a typical American. In the writing produced by such men, there cannot but be a revelation of American characteristics. We are now to attempt an analysis of these national traits, as they have been expressed by our representative writers.

Simple as the problem seems, when thus stated, its adequate performance calls for a constant sensitiveness to the conditions prevalent, during a long period, in English and Continental society and literature. The most rudimentary biographical sketch of such eminent contemporary American authors as Mr. Henry James and Mr. Howells shows that Europe is an essential factor in the intellectual life and in the artistic procedure of these writers. Yet in their racial and national relationships they are indubitably American. In their local variations from type they demand from the critic an understanding of the culture of the Ohio Valley, and of Boston and New York. The analysis of the mingled racial, psychological, social, and professional traits in these masters of contemporary American fiction presents to the critic a problem as fascinating as, and I think more complex than, a corresponding study of Meredith or Hardy, of Daudet or D'Annunzio. In the three hundred years that have elapsed since Englishmen who were trained under Queen Elizabeth settled at Jamestown, Virginia, we have bred upon this soil many a master of speech. They have been men of varied gifts: now of clear intelligence, now of commanding power; men of rugged simplicity and of tantalizing subtlety; poets, novelists, orators, essayists, and publicists, who have interpreted the soul of America to the mind of the world. Our task is to exhibit the essential Americanism of these spokesmen of ours, to point out the traits which make them most truly representative of the instincts of the tongue-tied millions who work and plan and pass from sight without the gift and art of utterance; to find, in short, among the books which are recognized as constituting our American literature, some vital and illuminating illustrations of our national characteristics. For a truly "American" book--like an American national game, or an American city--is that which reveals, consciously or unconsciously, the American mind.

II

The American Mind

The origin of the phrase, "the American mind," was political. Shortly after the middle of the eighteenth century, there began to be a distinctly American way of regarding the debatable question of British Imperial control. During the period of the Stamp Act agitation our colonial-bred politicians and statesmen made the discovery that there was a mode of thinking and feeling which was native--or had by that time become a second nature--to all the colonists. Jefferson, for example, employs those resonant and useful words "the American mind" to indicate that throughout the American colonies an essential unity of opinion had been developed as regards the chief political question of the day.

It is one of the most striking characteristics of the present United States that this instinct of political unity should have endured, triumphing over every temporary motive of division. The inhabitants of the United States belong to a single political type. There is scarcely a news-stand in any country of Continental Europe where one may not purchase a newspaper openly or secretly opposed to the government,--not merely attacking an unpopular administration or minister or ruler,--but desiring and plotting the overthrow of the entire political system of the country. It is very difficult to find such a newspaper anywhere in the United States. I myself have never seen one. The opening sentence of President Butler's admirable little book, _The American as He Is_, originally delivered as lectures before the University of Copenhagen, runs as follows:

"The most impressive fact in American life is the substantial unity of view in regard to the fundamental questions of government and of conduct among a population so large, distributed over an area so wide, recruited from sources so many and so diverse, living under conditions so widely different."

But the American type of mind is evident in many other fields than that of politics. The stimulating book from which I have just quoted, attempts in its closing paragraph, after touching upon the more salient features of our national activity, to define the typical American in these words:--

"The typical American is he who, whether rich or poor, whether dwelling in the North, South, East, or West, whether scholar, professional man, merchant, manufacturer, farmer, or skilled worker for wages, lives the life of a good citizen and good neighbor; who believes loyally and with all his heart in his country's institutions, and in the underlying principles on which these institutions are built; who directs both his private and his public life by sound principles; who cherishes high ideals; and who aims to train his children for a useful life and for their country's service."

This modest and sensible statement indicates the existence of a national point of view. We have developed in the course of time, as a result of certain racial inheritances and historic experiences, a national "temper" or "ethos"; a more or less settled way of considering intellectual, moral, and social problems; in short, a peculiarly national attitude toward the universal human questions.

In a narrower sense, "the American mind" may mean the characteristics of the American intelligence, as it has been studied by Mr. Bryce, De Tocqueville, and other trained observers of our methods of thinking. It may mean the specific achievements of the American intelligence in fields like science and scholarship and history. In all these particular departments of intellectual activity the methods and the results of American workers have recently received expert and by no means uniformly favorable assessment from investigators upon both sides of the Atlantic. But the observer of literary processes and productions must necessarily take a somewhat broader survey of national tendencies. He must study what Nathaniel Hawthorne, with the instinct of a romance writer, preferred to call the "heart" as distinguished from the mere intellect. He must watch the moral and social and imaginative impulses of the individual; the desire for beauty; the hunger for self-expression; the conscious as well as the unconscious revelation of personality; and he must bring all this into relation--if he can, and knowing that the finer secrets are sure to elude him!--with the age-long impulses of the race and with the mysterious tides of feeling that flood or ebb with the changing fortunes of the nation.

One way to begin to understand the typical American is to take a look at him in Europe. It does not require a professional beggar or a licensed guide to identify him. Not that the American in Europe need recall in any particular the familiar pictorial caricature of "Uncle Sam." He need not bear any outward resemblances to such stage types as that presented in "The Man From Home." He need not even suggest, by peculiarities of speech or manner, that he has escaped from the pages of those novels of international observation in which Mr. James and Mr. Howells long ago attained an unmatched artistry. Our "American Abroad," at the present hour, may be studied without the aid of any literary recollections whatever. There he is, with his wife and daughters, and one may stare at him with all the frankness of a compatriot. He is obviously well-to-do,--else he would not be there at all,--and the wife and daughters seem very well-to-do indeed. He is kindly; considerate--sometimes effusively considerate--of his fellow travellers; patient with the ladies of his family, who in turn are noticeably patient with him. He is genial--very willing to talk with polyglot headwaiters and chauffeurs; in fact the wife and daughters are also practised conversationalists, although their most loyal admirers must admit that their voices _are_ a trifle sharp or flat. These ladies are more widely read than "papa." He has not had much leisure for Ruskin and Symonds and Ferrero. His lack of historical training limits his curiosity concerning certain phases of his European surroundings; but he uses his eyes well upon such general objects as trains, hotel-service, and Englishmen. In spite of his habitual geniality, he is rather critical of foreign ways, although this is partly due to his lack of acquaintance with them. Intellectually, he is really more modest and self-distrustful than his conversation or perhaps his general bearing would imply; in fact, his wife and daughters, emboldened very likely by the training of their women's clubs, have a more commendable daring in assaulting new intellectual positions.

Yet the American does not lack quickness, either of wits or emotion. His humor and sentiment make him an entertaining companion. Even when his spirits run low, his patriotism is sure to mount in proportion, and he can always tell you with enthusiasm in just how many days he expects to be back again in what he calls "God's country."

This, or something like this, is the "American" whom the European regards with curiosity, contempt, admiration, or envy, as the case may be, but who is incontestably modifying Western Europe, even if he is not, as many journalists and globe-trotters are fond of asserting, "Americanizing" the world. Interesting as it is to glance at him against that European background which adds picturesqueness to his qualities, the "Man from Home" is still more interesting in his native habitat. There he has been visited by hundreds of curious and observant foreigners, who have left on record a whole literature of bewildered and bewildering, irritating and flattering and amusing testimony concerning the Americans. Settlers like Crèvecoeur in the glowing dawn of the Republic, poets like Tom Moore, novelists like Charles Dickens,--other novelists like Mr. Arnold Bennett,--professional travellers like Captain Basil Hall, students of contemporary sociology like Paul Bourget and Mr. H. G. Wells, French journalists, German professors, Italian admirers of Colonel Roosevelt, political theorists like De Tocqueville, profound and friendly observers like Mr. Bryce, have had, and will continue to have, their say.

The reader who tries to take all this testimony at its face value, and to reconcile its contradictions, will be a candidate for the insane asylum. Yet the testimony is too amusing to be neglected and some of it is far too important to be ignored. Mr. John Graham Brooks, after long familiarity with these foreign opinions of America, has gathered some of the most representative of them into a delightful and stimulating volume entitled _As Others See Us_. There one may find examples of what the foreigner has seen, or imagined he has seen, during his sojourn in America, and what he has said about it afterwards. Mr. Brooks is too charitable to our visitors to quote the most fantastic and highly colored of their observations; but what remains is sufficiently bizarre.

The real service of such a volume is to train us in discounting the remarks made about us in a particular period like the eighteen-thirties, or from observations made in a special place, like Newport, or under special circumstances, like a Bishop's private car. It helps us to make allowances for the inevitable angle of nationality, the equally inevitable personal equation. A recent ambitious book on America, by a Washington journalist of long residence here, although of foreign birth, declares that "the chief trait of the American people is the love of gain and the desire of wealth acquired through commerce." That is the opinion of an expert observer, who has had extraordinary chances for seeing precisely what he has seen. I think it, notwithstanding, a preposterous opinion, fully as preposterous as Professor Muensterberg's notion that America has latterly grown more monarchical in its tendencies,--but I must remember that, in my own case, as in that of the journalist under consideration, there are allowances to be made for race, and training, and natural idiosyncracy of vision.

The native American, it may be well to remember, is something of an observer himself. If his observations upon the characteristics of his countrymen are less piquant than the foreigner's, it is chiefly because the American writes, upon the whole, less incisively than he talks. But incisive native writing about American traits is not lacking. If a missionary, say in South Africa, has read the New York _Nation_ every week for the past forty years, he has had an extraordinary "moving picture" of American tendencies, as interpreted by independent, trenchant, and high-minded criticism. That a file of the _Nation_ will convey precisely the same impression of American tendencies as a file of the _Sun_, for instance, or the _Boston Evening Transcript_, is not to be affirmed. The humor of the London _Punch_ and the New York _Life_ does not differ more radically than the aspects of American civilization as viewed by two rival journals in Newspaper Row. The complexity of the material now collected and presented in daily journalism is so great that adequate editorial interpretation is obviously impossible. All the more insistently does this heterogeneous picture of American life demand the impartial interpretation of the historian, the imaginative transcription of the novelist. Humorist and moralist, preacher and mob orator and social essayist, shop-talk and talk over the tea-cup or over the pipe, and the far more illuminating instruction of events, are fashioning day by day the infinitely delicate processes of our national self-assessment. Scholars like Mr. Henry Adams or Mr. James Ford Rhodes will explain to us American life as it was during the administrations of Jefferson or in the eighteen-fifties. Professor Turner will expound the significance of the frontier in American history. Mr. Henry James will portray with unrivalled psychological insight the Europeanized American of the eighteen-seventies and eighties. Literary critics like Professor Wendell or Professor Trent will deduce from our literature itself evidence concerning this or that national quality; and all this mass of American expert testimony, itself a result and a proof of national self-awareness and self-respect, must be put into the scales to balance, to confirm, or to outweigh the reports furnished by foreigners.

I do not pretend to be able, like an expert accountant, to draw up a balance-sheet of national qualities, to credit or debit the American character with this or that precise quantity of excellence or defect. But having turned the pages of many books about the United States, and listened to many conversations about its inhabitants in many states of the Union, I venture to collect a brief list of the qualities which have been assigned to us, together with a few, but not, I trust, too many, of our admitted national defects.

Like that excellent German who wrote the History of the English Drama in six volumes, I begin with Physical Geography. The differentiation of the physical characteristics of our branch of the English race is admittedly due, in part, to climate. In spite of the immense range of climatic variations as one passes from New England to New Orleans, from the Mississippi Valley to the high plains of the Far West, or from the rainy Oregon belt southward to San Diego, the settlers of English stock find a prevalent atmospheric condition, as a result of which they begin, in a generation or two, to change in physique. They grow thinner and more nervous, they "lean forward," as has been admirably said of them, while the Englishman "leans back"; they are less heavy and less steady; their voices are higher, sharper; their athletes get more easily "on edge"; they respond, in short, to an excessively stimulating climate. An old-fashioned sea-captain put it all into a sentence when he said that he could drink a bottle of wine with his dinner in Liverpool and only a half a bottle in New York. Explain the cause as we may, the fact seems to be that the body of John Bull changes, in the United States, into the body of Uncle Sam.

There are mental differences no less pronounced. No adjective has been more frequently applied to the Anglo-Saxon than the word "dull." The American mind has been accused of ignorance, superficiality, levity, commonplaceness, and dozens of other defects, but "dulness" is not one of them. "Smartness," rather, is the preferred epithet of derogation; or, to rise a little in the scale of valuation, it is the word "cleverness," used with that lurking contempt for cleverness which is truly English and which long survived in the dialect of New England, where the village ne'er-do-well or Jack-of-all-trades used to be pronounced a "clever" fellow. The variety of employments to which the American pioneers were obliged to betake themselves has done something, no doubt, to produce a national versatility, a quick assimilation of new methods and notions, a ready adaptability to novel emergencies. An invaluable pioneer trait is curiosity; the settler in a new country, like Moses in the wilderness of Arabia, must "turn aside to see"; he must look into things, learn to read signs,--or else the Indians or frost or freshet will soon put an end to his pioneering. That curiosity concerning strangers which so much irritated Dickens and Mrs. Trollope was natural to the children of Western emigrants to whom the difference between Sioux and Pawnee had once meant life or death. "What's your business, stranger, in these parts?" was an instinctive, because it had once been a vital, question. That it degenerates into mere inquisitiveness is true enough; just as the "acuteness," the "awareness," essential to the existence of one generation becomes only "cuteness," the typical tin-pedler's habit of mind, in the generation following.