Certain Aspects of America

Gulliver. (Aside.) What is Lilliput doing ?

Lilliputian. (In Gulliver’s snuff-box.) The life of this Giant is very dark and snuffy.

I.

THERE is an opinion, at least a saying, current among us, that a great man steps forth when a nation needs him. This theory is very comfortable, especially in those parts of the world where great men are rare, for it follows that ordinary men behave themselves so wisely and so well that they have no need of a great man. It is a theory, however, that bristles with difficulties. Ancient nations have decayed and fallen to ruin; did not they need great men ? Some nations to-day are losing vigor and vitality; do not they need great men ? Has a nation ever been so great as it might have been, so noble as it might have been, so honorable as it might have been, or so rich and comfortable that it might not have been still more rich and yet more comfortable ? Nevertheless there is some truth in the saying, for certain needs do create great men. Our human nature is such that if its most sensitive children hear the cry of human needs, their faculties pass, as it were, through a fire, become purged, hardened, and of a temper to do those deeds which we call great. It is not every human need, unfortunately, that has that creative power. Mere barrenness and want cannot create great men ; neither can corporeal needs, they are too easily satisfied. Since Prometheus struck the first spark, neither corporeal needs, nor their derivatives, — ease, comfort, luxury, — have required great service. It is not a common need, but a penitential need, that brings forth the great man. Washington rose up, not because our forefathers needed to gain battles, but because they needed “ a standard to which the wise and the just could repair; ” Lincoln arose, not because our fathers needed statecraft, but because they needed “ malice towards none ; with charity for all.” When a nation’s want is deepened to desire, and desire is intensified into need, then that nation may hope that its need will create a great man. The fructifying need must be a yearning and a conscious need. In America we have no men whom we call great, not because we have no needs, for we have profound needs, but because we are not conscious of them. We walk about as in a hypnotic spell, all unaware of our destitution. When we shall open our minds to our needs, we shall do the first act toward ministering to them.

What is there to open our minds ? Nature has provided a means through our affections. For ourselves, we are too old to perceive that which we lack, our habits are adjusted to privation, we are unconscious of the great needs of life ; but if we let our thoughts dwell on those things which we desire for our children, then by constant brooding, by intense thinking, out of vague notions, out of uncertain hopes, out of dim ambitions, definite wants will take shape, grow hungrier and leaner, till they starve into needs that must be satisfied. What is a son to a father’s hope, — “in form and moving how express and admirable ! in action how like an angel! in apprehension how like a god ! ”

Hamlet gives our clue : our manners and behavior should be express and admirable ; our actions should be like the angels’, just and dutiful; our apprehension should be like the gods’, seeing the values of things as they truly are. Thus through affection we discover our real needs. But as they are only creations of imaginative insight, they are very placid. They do not disquiet us ; they do not make us wriggle on our chairs, nor lie awake at night; nor do they take from cakes and ale their pristine interest. What can we do to nurse these Barmecide wants, to convert these embryonic desires into organic needs ? Is not the first thing to speak out, and give them at least an existence in words; and having put them into words, is not the second thing to speculate as to how they are affected, whether for health or for disappearance, by our American civilization ? There is nothing unpatriotic in sociological inquiry. Civilization is organized effort to satisfy conscious needs, and we may naturally be curious to see how our American civilization affects unconscious needs, how it tends to make our manners gracious and admirable, to render our actions just and dutiful, to clarify our apprehension so that it shall behold life as it really is.

Yet there is a certain elementary feeling, akin to filial piety, which would naturally deter a right-minded man from any attempt at expressing even the adumbration of his opinions concerning his country. If a friend were about to tumble into such a pitfall, — properly set for foreigners, — one would buttonhole him, urge him to desist, explain that his project was temerarious, or, if need were, make use of still more violent means. One would catch at everything from superstition to coat-tails to prevent such a display of sentimental deficiency. But every man is wiser for his friends than for himself. We seldom listen to the modest voice of self-criticism ; we charge it with opportunism, cowardice, conservatism, and retrogression, and go on our own way.

The very difficulties and risks lend a zest to rashness. The America which I think I see may have been produced by applying a microscope to the street in which I live, till that be magnified to the requisite bulk; or it may be merely my own shadow cast on the clouds of my imagination by the simple machinery of ignorance and self-complacency. But when I consider my friend Brown, the manufacturer, and find that in his opinion America is the most magnificent of department stores ; or Jones, of the militia, who conceives her as a Lady Bountiful presenting liberty and democracy to Asia and Polynesia ; or Robinson, the shipbuilder, who beholds her, robed in oilskins, glorious queen of the seas, I reflect that perhaps to me, as well as to them, a little of the truth has been vouchsafed, and I am encouraged to use the American prerogative of looking with my own eyes to see what I can see.

II.

The aims to which we would aspire for our sons are various and require a various civilization, a manifold education. It is obvious, however, that our national life is not manifold but single. The nation embodies to an astonishing degree the motto, E Pluribus Unum. Our civilization is single, it centres about the conception of life as a matter of industrial energy. This conception, at first hazily understood and imperfectly mastered, has now been firmly grasped, and is incorporate in our national civilization. Its final triumph is due to the generation which has been educated since the Civil War. Under that guidance material prosperity has dug the main channel for the torrent of our activities, and the current of our life pours down, fragging even with the whiff and wind of its impetuosity the reluctance and sluggishness of conservatism. The combinations of business, the centralization of power, the growth of cities, the facility of locomotion, have decreed uniformity. Individuality, the creation of race and place, is wrenched from its home. The orange-grower from Florida keeps shop in Seattle, the schoolma’am from Maine marries a cowpuncher. All of us, under the assimilating influences of common ends, assume the composite type. The days of diversity are numbered. The Genius of industrial civilization defies the old rules by which life passed from homogeneity to heterogeneity : she takes men from all parts of Europe, — Latin, Teuton, Celt, and Slav, — trims, lops, and pinches, till she can squeeze them into the American mould. Miss Wilkins’s New Englanders, Bret Harte’s miners, Owen Wister’s ranchmen, are passing away. The variegated surface of the earth has lost its power over us. Mountain, prairie, and ocean no longer mark their sons, no longer breed into them the sap of pine, the honey of clover, the savor of salt. This moulding influence does its work thoroughly and well; it acts like that great process of nature in the insect world, which M. Maeterlinck calls l’esprit de la ruche. The typical American becomes a power house of force, of will, of determination. He dissipates no energy ; as a drill bites into the rock, so he bores into his task.

This mighty burst of American industry is as magnificent in its way as Elizabethan poetry, or Cinquecento painting; no wonder it excites admiration and enthusiasm. What brilliant manifestation of energy, of will, of courage, of devotion! Willy nilly we shout hurrah. There stands America, barearmed, deep-chested, with neck like a tower, engaged in this superb struggle to dominate Nature and put the elements in bondage to man. It is not strange that this spectacle is the greatest of influences, drawing the young like fishes in a net. Involuntarily all talents apply themselves to material production. No wonder that men of science no longer study Nature for Nature’s sake, they must perforce put her powers into harness ; no wonder that professors no longer teach knowledge for the sake of knowledge, they must make their students efficient factors in the industrial world; no wonder that clergymen no longer preach repentance for the sake of the kingdom of heaven, they must turn churches into prosperous corporations, multiplying communicants, and distributing Christmas presents by the gross. Industrial civilization has decreed that statesmanship shall consist of schemes to make the nation richer, that presidents shall be elected with a view to the stock market, that literature shall keep close to the life of the average man, and that art shall become national by means of a protective tariff.

The process of this civilization is simple ; the industrial habit of thought moulds the opinion of the majority which rolls along, abstract and impersonal, gathering bulk, till its giant figure is saluted as the national conscience. As in an ecclesiastical state of society, decrees of a council become articles of private faith, and men die for homoiousian or election, so, in America, the opinions of the majority once pronounced become primary rules of conduct. Take, for example, the central ethical doctrine of industrial thought, namely, that material production is the chief duty of man. That and other industrial dogmas, marshaled and systematized, supported by vigorous men whose interest is identical with that of the dogmas, grow and develop ; they harden and petrify ; they attack dissent and criticism. This is no outward habit, but an inward plasticity of mind; the nervous American organism draws sunshine and health from each new decree of public opinion. This appears in what is called our respect for law, — the recorded opinion of the majority, — in our submission to fashion, in the individual’s indecision and impassivity until the round-robin reaches him, in the way that private judgment waits upon the critics and the press, while these hurriedly count noses.

Such a society, such educating forces, produce men of great vigor, virility, and capacity, but do not tend to make manners and behavior gracious and admirable, nor actions just and dutiful, nor apprehensions which see life in its reality.

III.

If we pursue our examination of the educational tendencies of our industrial civilization, we perceive not only that they are single while the ends which we seek are multiple, but also that industrial civilization, so far as it is not with us, is against us. For, according to the measure in which industrial interests absorb the vital forces of the nation, other interests of necessity are neglected. This neglect betrays itself in feebleness, in monotony, in lack of individuality. Let us consider matters which concern the emotions, religion or poetry; matters which in order to attain the highest excellence require passion. Now, passion is only possible when vital energy is thrown into emotion, and as we have other uses for our vital energy, we find ourselves face to face with a dilemma; either to make up our minds to let our religion and our poetry — and all our emotional life — be without passion, or else to use a makeshift in its stead. What course have we chosen ? Look at our religion, read our poetry; witness our national joy, expressed in papier-maché arches and Dewey celebrations, our national grief vented in proclamations and exaggeration. We have not boldness enough to fling overboard our inherited respect for passion, and to proclaim it unnecessary in religion and poetry, in grief and joy ; and so we cast about for a makeshift, and adopt a conventional sentimentality, which apes the expressions of passion, — as in tableaux an actor poses for Laocoön, — and combines a sincere desire to ape accurately with an honest enjoyment in the occupation. Our conventional sentimentality is the consequence of economy of vital energy in our emotional life in order that we may concentrate all our powers in our industrial life.

Or let us look at our spiritual life, to see how that has been affected by this diversion of vital energy. Spiritual sturdiness shows itself in a close union between spiritual life and the ordinary business of living, while spiritual feebleness shows itself in the separation of spiritual life from the ordinary business of living. We get an inkling of the closeness of that union in this country by considering, for instance, our conception of a nation. In our hearts we believe that a nation consists of a multitude of men, joined in a corporate bond for the increase of material well-being, for the multiplication of luxury, for the free play of energy, at the expense, if need be, of the rest of the world. In countries which spare enough vital energy from industrial life to vivify spiritual life, other conceptions prevail. Mazzini defined a nation as a people united in a common duty toward the world; he even asserted that a nation has a right to exist only because it helps men to work together for the good of humanity. Our conception shows how our spiritual life holds itself aloof from this workaday world, and denies all concern with so terrestrial a thing as a nation. One cause of this spiritual feebleness is our irregularly developed morality, for spiritual life thrives on a complete and curious morality which essays all tasks, which claims jurisdiction over all things ; but our morality, shaped and moulded for industrial purposes, is uneven and lopsided, and, as industrial civilization has but a limited use for morality, asserts but a limited jurisdiction. It has certain great qualities, for industrial civilization exacts severe, if limited, service from it; it has resolution, perseverance, courage. Subject our morality to difficulty or danger, and it comes out triumphant; but seek of it service, such as some form of self-abnegation, some devotion to idealism, which it does not understand, and it fails. Cribbed and confined by a narrow morality, our spiritual life sits like an absentee landlord, far from the turmoil and sweat of the day’s work, enjoying the pleasures of rigid respectability.

Another proof of the lack of vitality in the parts and organs remote from the national heart is our formlessness. An industrial society is loath to spare the efforts necessary to produce form. The nice excellences which constitute form require an immense amount of work. The nearer the approach to perfection, the more intense is the labor, the less obvious the result, and to us who enjoy obvious results, who delight in the application of power to obvious physical purposes, the greater seems the waste of effort. The struggles of the artist to bridge the gap between his work and his idea look like fantastic writhings. We stare in troubled amazement at the idealist.

Read poetry, as the material in which form is readily perceived ; if we pass from the verse of Stephen Phillips, of Rostand, or of Carducci, to that of some American poet of to-day, we experience a sensation of tepidity and lassitude. Or, consider the formlessness of our manners, which share the general debility of non-industrial life. Our morality is too cramped to refine them, our sense of art too rough to polish them, our emotional life too feeble to endow them with grace. The cause is not any native deficiency. “ We ought,” as Lowell said fifty years ago, “ to have produced the finest race of gentlemen in the world,” nor is it lack of that cultivation which comes from books, but of that education which comes from looking on life as a whole, which a man acquires by regarding himself, not as an implement or tool to achieve this or that particular thing, but as a human being facing a threefold task, physical, intellectual, and spiritual.

IV.

The unequal development in this rapid evolution of the industrial type appears also in the contrast between different sets of our ideas. Those ideas which are used by industrial civilization are clear, definite, and exact; they show rigorous training and education, whereas ideas which have no industrial function to perform, being commonly out of work, degenerate into slatterns. Industrial civilization is like a schoolmaster with a hobby : it throws its pedagogical energies into the instruction which it approves, and slurs the rest; in one part of the affairs of life, the reason, the understanding, the intelligence are kept on the alert, in another part no faculty except the memory is used. The result is frequent discrepancy between ideas expressed in action and ideas expressed in language.

This discrepancy appears in our political life. We have all learned by heart the Declaration of Independence, snatches from old speeches, — “ give me liberty, or give me death ; ” tags from the Latin

and maxims concerning inalienable rights, natural justice, God’s will, — maxims whose use is confined to speech, — come from the memory trippingly to the tongue. Put us to action, make us do some political act, such as to adjust our relations with Cuba, and we uncover another set of maxims, those whose use is confined to action: “ the industrially fit ought to survive,” “ the elect of God are revealed by economic superiority,” “ Success is justified of her children,” “ the commandments of the majority are pure and holy.” If we are taxed with the discrepancy, we stare, and repeat the contrasted formulæ, one set in words, the other in actions ; we are conscious of no inconsistency, we will give up neither. This is not a case of hypocrisy. We believe what we say ; for belief with us is not necessarily a state of mind which compels action to accord with it, but often an heirloom to be treated with respect. Look at our Christianity: we honor riches, oppress our neighbors, keep a pecuniary account with righteousness, nor could even St. Paul persuade us to be crucified, and yet we honestly insist upon calling ourselves Christians.

It is the same with our social ideas. The American believes that all men are born free and equal, that they possess an inalienable right to pursue their own happiness, but if one questions his neighbor in the smoking-car on the way to Chicago as to his views on Socialism, he will reply, “ Socialism, sir, is the curse of this country. Czolgosz and Guiteau are enough for me; the Socialists must be suppressed. If they ever set up anarchy in these United States, I will emigrate, I ’ll go to Europe.” To which you reply, “ Certainly ; but may there not be something in their notions, that the accident of birth is unjust, that opportunities should be equal, that every man should receive pay according to his labor ? ” Then he will answer, “ In this country, sir, all men are equal; but if you think that my partner and me are to be treated equal to Herr Most or the late lamented Altgeld, or some of those Anarchists, I say no, not if I know it.”

Take our practice in ethics. We believe in “ millions for defense, but not one cent for tribute ; ” nevertheless, as directors or stockholders of a corporation, we buy immunity from hostile legislation. We believe in the brotherhood of man, but we use any means to save our corporate purse from removing stoves from, our cars, from putting electric power to use in our tunnels, from providing seats for our shopgirls. Even in science it is not beyond the mental elasticity of the American to harbor in one compartment of his mind the conclusions of biological evolution, and in another the texts of the Old Testament.

This capacity for self-deception extends far and wide, it honeycombs onr thoughts and theories. We call our lack of manners liberty, our lack of distinction fraternity, our formless homogeneity equality. We think that industrial society with its carrière ouverte aux talents is democracy ; in fact, it bears the relation to democracy which the Napoleonic empire bore to the ideals of the French Revolution. We are none the less honest, we are a people with a native love of phrases. Phraseology is that form of art which we understand the best. We cling to a phrase made by one of our patriot fathers, — a phrase of the best period, — and no more dream of parting with it because it does not represent any living idea, than a man would part with a Gainsborough portrait of his great-great-grandfather. It is like an ancestral chair in the parlor, not to be sat upon. We are justly proud of our heroic maxims ; we shall teach them to negroes, Filipinos, Cubans, perhaps to the Chinese ; we shall contribute them as our fine art to the world. Who can blame us? We have had our Revolution, our struggle with slavery; we have had Washington and Lincoln; we have had noble enthusiasms which have bequeathed to us a phraseology : and if we make parade of it, if we sentimentally cling to it, who shall find fault ?

V.

One has moods, and as they shift, the image of America shifts too. At one time it appears, like Frankenstein’s monster, to move its great joints and irresistible muscles under the influence of ambitions and purposes that seem incomprehensible, as Hamlet’s words about man drift through one’s mind. At another time it appears young, brilliant, powerful, flushed with hope, full of great projects, flinging all its abounding energy into its tasks, which to-day are physical, but tomorrow shall be intellectual, and thereafter spiritual. Now it looks the danger, and now the liberator, of the world. But whichever view be correct, whether America shall fulfill our hopes or our fears, we are bound to do those humble and commonplace acts which may help our sons to meet the difficulties that lie between them and our aspirations for them.

We see that absorption of our energies in material labor leaves great domains of human interest uncared for; we find that our emotional life is thin, that our sentimentality is ubiquitous; we find that our intelligence, when not devoted to business, is slovenly and trips us into self-deceit. The dangers are plain ; how can we help ourselves ? Surely with such an inexhaustible reservoir of will and energy, America might spare a little to free her from sentimentality and save her from self-deceit.

We accept sentimentality, because we do not stop to consider whether our emotional life is worth an infusion of blood and vigor, rather than that we have deliberately decided that it is not. We neglect religion, because we cannot spare time to think what religion means, rather than that we judge it only worthy conventionality and lip service. We think poetry effeminate, because we do not read it, rather than that we believe its effect to be injurious. We have been swept off our feet by the brilliant success of our industrial civilization, and, blinded by vanity, we enumerate the list of our exports, we measure the swelling tide of our material prosperity, but we do not stop even to repeat to ourselves the names of other things. If we were to stop, and reckon the values of idealism, of religion, of literature, if we were to weigh them in the balance against comfort, luxury, ease, we should begin to deliberate, and after deliberation some of us would be converted, for the difficulty confronting the typical American is not love of material things, but pride of power. He deems that will, force, energy, resolution, perseverance, in the nature of things must be put to material ends, and that whatever may be the qualities and capacities put to use in science, philosophy, literature, religion, they are not those. Once persuade him that will, energy, and their fellow virtues will find full scope in those seemingly effeminate matters, and he will give them a share, if not a fair share, of his attention ; for the American is little, if at all, more devoted to luxury, ease, and comfort than other men. But how is be to he buttonholed, and held long enough for arguments to be slipped into his ear? There is at hand the old, old helper, “ the Cherub Contemplation.” By its help man — for it takes him upon an eminence — sees all the great panorama of life at once, and discovers that it is a whole. Since the first conception of monotheism there has been no spiritual idea equal to that of the unity of life, for it asserts that spiritual things and material things are one and indivisible. Contemplation also teaches that action is not a substitute for virtue, that will, resolution, and energy take rank according to their aims ; it leads man little by little to fix his mind upon the notion that he ought to have a philosophy of life, and to live not unmindful of that philosophy, for a philosophy however imperfect is not likely to teach him that happiness and the meaning of life are to be found only in industrial matters, and if it should, well and good, for the aim of Contemplation is not to teach a man this belief or that, but to rescue him from the clutch of blind social forces, and let him choose his own path in life.

As our sentimentality is a sign that we have neglected great interests connected with the emotions, so our self-deceit is a sign that we have neglected great interests connected with the intellect. If our minds were used to study not merely material things, but also all other ideas that surround and vivify life, we should not be able to lead this amphibious existence of self-deceit, — half in words and half in deeds. As Contemplation is our help to see life as a whole, and our guide toward ripeness and completeness, so we may discover a help against self-deceit in the observance of Discipline. Discipline is the constant endeavor to understand, the continual grapple with all ideas, the study of unfamiliar things, the search for unity and truth ; it is the spirit which calls nothing common, which compels that deep respect for this seemingly infinite universe which the Bible calls the fear of the Lord. Discipline turns to account all labor, all experience, all pain ; it is the path up the mountain of purgatory from the top of which Contemplation shows man life as a whole. On the intellectual side Discipline teaches us to keep distinct and separate the permanent and the transitory ; on the moral side Discipline teaches us that right and wrong are not matters of sentimentality, that will and energy are untrustworthy guides. Discipline lies less in wooing success than in marriage to unsuccessful causes, unpopular aims, unflattering ends. Discipline is devotion to form ; it teaches that everything from clay to the thought of man is capable of perfect form, and that the highest purpose of labor is to approach that form. Discipline will not let us narrow life to one or two ideas ; it will not let us deceive ourselves, or put on the semblance of joy or grief like a Sunday coat.

Discipline and Contemplation bring life to that ripeness which is the foundation of happiness, of righteousness, of great achievement; they are the means by which, while we wait for the inspiration and leadership of great men, we may hope to piece out the brilliant but imperfect education provided by our industrial civilization, and help our sons to become, in Lowell’s proud words, “ the finest race of gentlemen in the world.”

H. D. Sedgwick, Jr.