it would be difficult to find a clearer expression of the old doctrine of individualism than is uttered by carlyle in his london lecture on "the hero as man of letters." listen to the grim child of calvinism as he fires his "annandale grapeshot" into that sophisticated london audience: "men speak too much about the world.... the world's being saved will not save us; nor the world's being lost destroy us. we should look to ourselves.... for the saving of the world i will trust confidently to the maker of the world; and look a little to my own saving, which i am more competent to!"
carlyle was never more soundly puritanic, never more perfectly within the lines of the moral traditions of his race than in these injunctions to let the world go and to care for the individual soul.[pg 210]
we are familiar with the doctrine on this side of the atlantic. here is a single phrase from emerson's journal of september, 1833, written on his voyage home from that memorable visit to europe where he first made carlyle's acquaintance. "back again to myself," wrote emerson, as the five-hundred-ton sailing ship beat her way westward for a long month across the stormy north atlantic:—"back again to myself.—a man contains all that is needful to his government within himself. he is made a law unto himself. all real good or evil that can befall him must be from himself.... the purpose of life seems to be to acquaint a man with himself."
in the following august he is writing:—
"societies, parties, are only incipient stages, tadpole states of men, as caterpillars are social, but the butterfly not. the true and finished man is ever alone."
on march 23, 1835:—
"alone is wisdom. alone is happiness. society nowadays makes us low-spirited, hopeless. alone is heaven."
and once more:—
[pg 211]
"if ?schylus is that man he is taken for, he has not yet done his office when he has educated the learned of europe for a thousand years. he is now to approve himself a master of delight to me. if he cannot do that, all his fame shall avail him nothing. i were a fool not to sacrifice a thousand ?schyluses to my intellectual integrity."
these quotations have to do with the personal life. let me next illustrate the individualism of the eighteen-thirties by the attitude of two famous individualists toward the prosaic question of paying taxes to the state. carlyle told emerson that he should pay taxes to the house of hanover just as long as the house of hanover had the physical force to collect them,—and not a day longer.
henry thoreau was even more recalcitrant. let me quote him:—
"i have paid no poll-tax for six years. i was put into a jail once on this account, for one night; and, as i stood considering the walls of solid stone, two or three feet thick, the door of wood and iron, a foot thick, and the iron grating which strained the light, i could not help being struck with the foolishness of that institution which treated me as if i were mere[pg 212] flesh and blood and bones, to be locked up. i wondered that it should have concluded at length that this was the best use it could put me to, and had never thought to avail itself of my services in some way. i saw that, if there was a wall of stone between me and my townsmen, there was a still more difficult one to climb or break through before they could get to be as free as i was. i did not for a moment feel confined, and the walls seemed a great waste of stone and mortar. i felt as if i alone of all my townsmen had paid my tax. they plainly did not know how to treat me, but behaved like persons who are underbred. in every threat and in every compliment there was a blunder; for they thought that my chief desire was to stand on the other side of that stone wall. i could not but smile to see how industriously they locked the door on my meditations, which followed them out again without let or hindrance, and they were really all that was dangerous. as they could not reach me, they had resolved to punish my body; just as boys, if they cannot come at some person against whom they have a spite, will abuse his dog. i saw that the state was half-witted, that it was timid as a lone woman[pg 213] with her silver spoons, and that it did not know its friends from its foes, and i lost all my remaining respect for it, and pitied it."
here is thoreau's attitude toward the problems of the inner life. the three quotations are from his walden:—
"probably i should not consciously and deliberately forsake my particular calling to do the good which society demands of me, to save the universe from annihilation."
"i went to the woods because i wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if i could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when i came to die, discover that i had not lived. i did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did i wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. i wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience,[pg 214] and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion."
"it is said that the british empire is very large and respectable, and that the united states are a first-rate power. we do not believe that a tide rises and falls behind every man which can float the british empire like a chip, if he should ever harbor it in his mind."
all of these quotations from emerson and thoreau are but various modes of saying "let the world go." everybody knows that in later crises of american history, both thoreau and emerson forgot their old preaching of individualism, or at least merged it in the larger doctrine of identification of the individual with the acts and emotions of the community. and nevertheless as men of letters they habitually laid stress upon the rights and duties of the private person. upon a hundred brilliant pages they preached the gospel that society is in conspiracy against the individual manhood of every one of its members.
they had a right to this doctrine. they came by it honestly through long lines of ancestral heritage. the republicanism of the seventeenth century in the american forests, as well as upon[pg 215] the floor of the english house of commons, had asserted that private persons had the right to make and unmake kings. the republican theorists of the eighteenth century had insisted that life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness were the birthright of each individual. this doctrine was related, of course, to the doctrine of equality. if republicanism teaches that "i am as good as others," democracy is forever hinting "others are as good as i." democracy has been steadily extending the notion of rights and duties. the first instinct, perhaps, is to ask what is right, just, lawful, for me? next, what is right, just, lawful for my crowd? that is to say, my family, my clan, my race, my country. the third instinct bids one ask what is right and just and lawful, not merely for me, and for men like me, but for everybody. and when we get that third question properly answered, we can afford to close school-house and church and court-room, for this world's work will have ended.
we have already glanced at various phases of colonial individualism. we have had a glimpse of cotton mather prostrate upon the dusty floor of his study, agonizing now for[pg 216] himself and now for the countries of europe; we have watched jonathan edwards in his solitary ecstasies in the northampton and the stockbridge woods; we have seen franklin preaching his gospel of personal thrift and of getting on in the world. down to the very verge of the revolution the american pioneer spirit was forever urging the individual to fight for his own hand. each boy on the old farms had his own chores to do; each head of a family had to plan for himself. the most tragic failure of the individual in those days was the poverty or illness which compelled him to "go on the town." to be one of the town poor indicated that the individualistic battle had been fought and lost. no one ever dreamed, apparently, that a time for old-age pensions and honorable retiring funds was coming. the feeling against any form of community assistance was like the bitter hatred of the workhouse among english laborers of the eighteen-forties.
the stress upon purely personal qualities gave picturesqueness, color, and vigor to the early life of the united states. take the persons whom parkman describes in his oregon trail. they have the perfect clearness of outline[pg 217] of the portraits by walter scott and the great romantic school of novelists who loved to paint pictures of interesting individual men. there is the same stress upon individualistic portraiture in irving's astoria; in the humorous journals of early travellers in the southern states. it is the secret of the curiosity with which we observe the gamblers and miners and stage-drivers described by bret harte. in the rural communities of to-day, in the older portions of the country, and in the remoter settlements of the west and southwest, the individual man has a sort of picturesque, and, as it were, artistic value, which the life of cities does not allow. the gospel of self-reliance and of solitude is not preached more effectively by the philosophers of concord than it is by the backwoodsmen, the spies, and the sailors of fenimore cooper. individualism as a doctrine of perfection for the private person and individualism as a literary creed have thus gone hand in hand. "produce great persons, the rest follows," cried walt whitman. he was thinking at the moment about american society and politics. but he believed that the same law held good in poetry. once get your great man and[pg 218] let him abandon himself to poetry and the great poetry will be the result. it was almost precisely the same teaching as in carlyle's lecture on "the hero as poet."
well, it is clear enough nowadays that both whitman and carlyle underrated the value of discipline. the lack of discipline is the chief obstacle to effective individualism. the private person must be well trained, or he cannot do his work; and as civilization advances, it becomes exceedingly difficult to train the individual without social co?peration. a paul or a mahomet may discipline his own soul in the desert of arabia; he may there learn the lessons that may later make him a leader of men. but for the average man and indeed for most of the exceptional men, the path to effectiveness lies through social and professional discipline. here is where the frontier stage of our american life was necessarily weak. we have seen that our ancestors gained something, no doubt, from their spirit of unconventionally and freedom. but they also lost something through their dislike for discipline, their indifference to criticism, their ineradicable tendency, whether in business, in diplomacy, in art and[pg 219] letters and education, to go "across lots." a certain degree of physical orderliness was, indeed, imposed upon our ancestors by the conditions of pioneer life. the natural prodigality and recklessness of frontier existence was here and there sharply checked. order is essential in a camp, and the thin line of colonies was all camping. a certain instinct for order underlay that resourcefulness which impresses every reader of our history. did the colonist need a tool? he learned to make it himself. isolation from the mother country was a stimulus to the inventive imagination. before long they were maintaining public order in the same ingenious fashion in which they kept house. appeals to london took too much time. "we send a complaint this year," ran the saying, "the next year they send to inquire, the third year the ministry is changed." no wonder that resourcefulness bred independent action, stimulated the puritan taste for individualism, and led the way to self-government.
yet who does not know that the inherent instinct for political order may be accompanied by mental disorderliness? even your modern englishman—as the saying goes—"muddles[pg 220] through." the minds of our american forefathers were not always lucid. the mysticism of the new england calvinists sometimes bred fanaticism. the practical and the theoretical were queerly blended. the essential unorderliness of the american mind is admirably illustrated by that "father of all the yankees," benjamin franklin. no student of franklin's life fails to be impressed by its happy casualness, its cheerful flavor of the rogue-romance. gil blas himself never drifted into and out of an adventure with a more offhand and imperturbable adroitness. franklin went through life with the joyous inventiveness of the amateur. he had the amateur's enthusiasm, coupled with a clairvoyant penetration into technical problems such as few amateurs have possessed. with all of his wonderful patience towards other men, franklin had in the realm of scientific experiment something of the typical impatience of the mere dabbler. he was inclined to lose interest in the special problem before it was worked out. his large, tolerant intelligence was often as unorderly as his papers and accounts. he was a wonderful colonial jack-of-all-trades; with a range of suggestion, a resourcefulness,[pg 221] a knack of assimilation, a cosmopolitan many-sidedness, which has left us perpetually his debtors. under different surroundings, and disciplined by a more severe and orderly training, franklin might easily have developed the very highest order of professional scientific achievement. his natural talent for organization of men and institutions, his "early projecting public spirit," his sense of the lack of formal educational advantages in the colonies, made him the founder of the philadelphia academy, the successful agitator for public libraries. academicism, even in the narrow sense, owes much to this ll.d. of st. andrews, d.c.l. of oxford, and intimate associate of french academicians. but one smiles a little, after all, to see the bland printer in this academic company: he deserves his place there, indeed, but he is something more and other than his associates. he is the type of youthful, inexhaustible colonial america; reckless of precedent, self-taught, splendidly alive; worth, to his day and generation, a dozen born academicians; and yet suggesting by his very imperfections, that the americans of a later day, working under different conditions, are bound to develop a sort of professional[pg 222] skill, of steady, concentrated, ordered intellectual activity, for which franklin possessed the potential capacity rather than the opportunity and the desire.
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[pg 223] 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[pg 224] 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[pg 225] 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,[pg 226] 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[pg 227] 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[pg 228] 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?[pg 229] 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[pg 230] 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[pg 231] 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[pg 232] 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)[pg 233] 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[pg 234] 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[pg 235] 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 co?peration 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 co?peration came into use. in fact, professor royce has pointed out in his[pg 236] 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[pg 237] 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[pg 238] 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,[pg 239] 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[pg 240] 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 tolsto?. yet when one asks the great russian, "what am i to do as a member of this fellowship?" tolsto? 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 tolsto?ans 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[pg 241] 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 tolsto? 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.
"the west," says james bryce, "is the[pg 242] 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[pg 243] 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[pg 244] 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[pg 245] 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.[pg 246]
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[pg 247] 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[pg 248] 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[pg 249] 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.
