Chapter XXII: Part 22

From two contrasting elements, a firm belief in a Law which was at the beginning, and a romantic mythology, a third characteristic of the American mind is thus engendered: a full confidence in the power of intellect conceived as a mechanism apt to contrive practical schemes for the accomplishment of ideal ends. This intellectual faith is similar in its static nature to the moral faith of the Puritan: it is the material weapon of Puritanism. Perfectibility is within its reach, but not the actual processes of evolution. The intellect that does not conceive itself as a process or function, but as a mechanism, can tend towards, and theoretically possess, a state of perfection, but will resent and condemn the gropings and failings of actual, imperfect growth and change. Not without reason, the greatest individual tragedy of the war, in a typically American mind confronted with the sins and misery of Europe, was a tragedy of intellectual pride: of the inability of a static intellect to become charitably active in the tragic flux of European life; a tragedy which a little moral and intellectual humility might well have spared to the generous hopes of America, and the childish, messianic faith which irradiated for only too short a time the bleeding soul of Europe.

* * * * *

If we have called Puritanism a culture, what name shall we reserve for that vast and complicated collection of mechanical contrivances which constitute the material body of American society to-day? We are in the presence of a technology, a more highly developed one, perhaps (with the possible exception of Germany before the war), than any that has ever existed in the world. Technologies have a logic of their own, and that logic is apt to take the place of higher spiritual constructions; either when conditions of life lend a miraculous character to the means of sustaining life itself and invest the practical actions of hunting or agriculture with a religious significance; or when the complexity of their organization is such that the workings of that practical logic inevitably transcend the power of observation of the individual agent, however highly placed in the machinery itself, and moral or intellectual myths are born of an imperfect knowledge. This is the case of America, and in America this technological or industrial mythology has crushed out of existence the rival myths of the farms and the prairie, allowing them a purely romantic value and decorative function, through the industrially controlled power of the press. Even pioneering, and the conquest of the West, a process in which Americans of another age found an energetic, if partly vicarious, satisfaction for certain moral and ideal yearnings, has receded, in the mind of Americans of to-day, into the shades of a fabulous and solemn background.

The industrial revolution followed in America the lines of development of its early English model. This commonwealth beyond the sea, agricultural and democratic, found in itself the same elements which gave birth in the original country to an industrial feudalism, grafting itself, without any solution of continuity, on a feudalism of the land. The ineradicable optimism of the American invested the whole process with the same halo of moral romance which had coloured the age of pioneering, and accepted as a useful substitute (or rather, as a new content) for Puritanic moralism the philosophy of opportunity and of success constantly commensurate with true merit. The conception of intellect as a mechanism to be used for moral and ideal ends, gave way to a similar though more complex conception, modelled not on the methods of pure science, from whose early conquests the revolution itself had been started, but on those of applied science or of practical machinery.

When, in the natural course of events, the bonds which kept together the purely economic elements of the country became more powerful and real than any system of political institutions, when, in fact, a financial syndicalism became the structure underlying the apparent organs of government, all the original ideals of America had already gathered to the defence of the new order. Hence the extraordinary solidity of the prevailing economic system in this country, when compared with any European country. Economic, as well as political systems, ultimately rest on convictions rather than on sheer force, and the radical in America, in all spheres of thought, is constantly in the necessity of fighting not mere institutions, as in Europe, but institutionalized ideals, organisms and personalities which establish their right on the same assumptions which prompt him in his rebellion. There is less difference in fundamentals between a Carnegie and a Debs than between any two individuals placed in similar positions in Europe.

An interesting by-product of this particular development is the myth of the captain of industry, possessed, in the popular imagination, of all the virtues. And a consequence of this myth is an unavoidable revision of the catalogue of virtues, from which some were expunged that do not lead to industrial success, and others were admitted because industrial success is thought to be impossible without them. This myth is not believed in by the aspiring multitudes only, but by a good many among the captains of industry themselves, who accept their wealth as a social trust, and conceive of their function in a manner not dissimilar from that of the old sovereign by the grace of God.

* * * * *

This transposition of ideals from the religious and moral field to the practical and economic, leaves only a very thin ground for personal piety and the religion of the Churches. Yet there is no country in the world (again, with the only possible exception of Northern Africa during the first centuries of the Christian Era) which has produced such a wealth and such a variety of religious movements as America. The substance of that very thin ground is diluted Puritanism, Puritanism which, in a vast majority of the population, converts itself, strangely enough, as we have seen, into social optimism, a belief sufficient to the great active masses, but not to the needs of “the heart,” when the heart is given enough leisure to consider itself, through either too much wealth or too little hope: through the discovery of its emptiness, when the possession of the means makes manifest the absence of an end, or through the spasms of its hunger, when means are beyond reach, in the hands of the supposed inferior and unworthy. In this second case, even a purely sensual craving dignifies itself with the name of the Spirit. The more or less official Churches, in an attempt to retain the allegiance of their vast congregations, have followed the masses in their evolution: they pride themselves essentially on their social achievements, a little doubtfully, perhaps, knowing that their particular God has no more reason to inhabit a church than a factory, and that the highest possible embodiment of their doctrine is an orderly and paternally governed industrial organization.

To the needs of “the heart” minister the innumerable sects (and here again, the American religious history repeats, in magnified proportions, the characteristics of English religious life). But because of the gradual impoverishment of the central religious tradition of the country, because of the scanty cultural background of both apostles and neophytes, it is hard to recognize in the whole movement an intimate spiritual dialectic which might lend strength and significance to the individual sects. A vague mysticism appropriates to itself, in a haphazard and capricious fashion, shadows and ghosts of religious experiences and opinions, whose germs of truth lie in other ages and other climates. The only common feature seems to be a distrust of intellect, derived from the original divorce of the intellectual from the spiritual in the Puritan, a distrust which at times becomes active in the denunciation of the supposed crimes of science. It is this fundamental common feature which will for ever prevent any of them from becoming what all sects fail to be, a religion.

The two states of mind which are nearer to-day to being true religions are, on one side, Americanism (a religion as a common bond), and on the other, Radicalism (a religion as a personal experience). Americanism is the more or less perfect expression of the common belief that American ideals realize themselves in American society. Radicalism is the more or less spasmodic protest against such a belief, sometimes coupled with an individual attempt at realizing those ideals in one’s life and actions. The sharpest contrast between the two attitudes is to be found in their ideas of political and spiritual freedom; which to one is a condition actually existing by the mere fact of the existence of American society such as it is, and to the other a dynamic principle which can never be permanently associated with any particular set of institutions.

The original spirit of Puritanism can hardly be said to be alive to-day in America. In a few intellectuals, it confuses itself with other high forms of moral discipline in the past, and reappears with a strange fidelity to form rather than substance, as Platonism, Classicism, Mediævalism, Catholicism, or any other set of fixed standards that can be accepted as a whole, and can give the soul that sense of security which is inherent in the illusion of possessing the final truth. The consequence of such a deviation is that these truly religious souls, after having satisfied themselves with a sufficiently vast and beautiful interpretation of their creed, resent any cruder and more dangerous form of intellectual experience much more keenly than they resent crudities and dangers actually present in the nature of things. They are intellectuals, but again, with no faith in intellect; they are truly isolated among their fellow-countrymen, and yet they believe in conformity, and assume the conformity of American society to be the conformity of their dreams.

Such a static apprehension of truth, such an identification of universal spiritual values with one or another particular tradition, is in fact as much an obstacle to the new life of the human spirit as the external conformity enforced by social optimism. But the polemic against the older intellectuals is carried on by younger men, many of them of recent immigrant blood, but all of them reared in the atmosphere of American culture, and who differ from them more in the objects of their preference than in the vastness or depth of their outlook. There is a way of clinging to the latest fashion in philosophy or in art which is not a progress in any sense in relation to older faiths; of combating a manifest logical fallacy by the use of the same sophism; of embracing sin with the same moral enthusiasm that in less enlightened times was kept in reserve for the highest virtues only.

More important, for their influence on certain phases of American life, than these intellectual echoes, are the moralistic remnants of Puritanism. It is always possible, for small groups of people, strongly endowed with the sense of other people’s duties, to intimidate large sections of public opinion into accepting the logical consequences of certain undisputed moral assumptions, however widely they may differ from the realities of American life. It is under such circumstances that the kind-hearted, easy-going American pays the penalty for his identification of realities with ideals, by being deprived of some very dear reality in the name of an ideal which had long since ceased to have any meaning for him.

* * * * *

From whatever side we look at American culture, we are constantly brought face to face with a disregard or distrust, or a narrow conception, of purely intellectual values, which seems to be the common characteristic of widely divergent spiritual attitudes. The American does not, as the Englishman, glory in his capacity for muddling through: he is proud of certain logical achievements, and has a fondness for abstract schemes, an earnest belief in their validity and efficiency; but no more than the English does he believe that intellect is an integral part of the human personality. He recognizes the identity of goodness and truth, provided that truth can be found out by other means than purely intellectual: by common sense, by revelation, by instinct, by imagination, but not by intellect. It is here that even the defenders, among Americans, of the classical tradition miss the true meaning of the message of Socrates and Plato, the foundation of humanism.

What is peculiarly American in the opinions of American philosophers is a clear and distinct expression of the common attitude. The official philosophy of America has repeated for a century the views of English empiricists and of German idealists, sometimes with very interesting and illuminating personal variations. It has even, and it is an original achievement, brought them to lose their peculiar accents and to coincide in new theories of knowledge. But the heart of American philosophy is not there: it is in pragmatism, in instrumentalism, in whatever other theory clearly establishes the purely functional character of truth, the mechanical aspect of intellect. Having put the criterion of truth outside the intellect, and considered intellect as the mere mechanism of belief, these doctrines try to re-establish the dignity of intellect by making of it a machine for the reproduction of morally or socially useful beliefs. The operation is similar to that of an anatomist who, having extracted the heart from a living body, would presume to reconstruct the body by artificially promoting the movements of the heart. The doctrine of the purely pragmatic or instrumental nature of intellect, which is the logical clarification of the popular conception, is a doctrine of radical scepticism, whatever the particular declarations of faith of the philosophers themselves might say to the contrary: it destroys not the objects of knowledge only, but the instrument itself.

American philosophers came to this doctrine through the psychological and sociological approach to the problems of the mind. Such an approach is in keeping with the general tendency towards assuming the form of natural and mathematical sciences, which moral sciences in American universities have been obeying during the last thirty or forty years, partly under the influence of a certain kind of European positivism, and partly because of the prestige that natural and mathematical sciences gained from their practical applications. Even now it is easier to find a truly humanistic mind, a sound conception of intellectual values, among the great American scientists than among the philosophers and philologists: but pure science has become the most solitary of occupations, and the scientist the most remote of men, since his place in society has been taken by the inventor and by the popularizer. Psychology and sociology, those half-literary, half-scientific disciplines, gave as a basis to philosophy not the individual effort to understand and to think, but the positive observation of the more or less involuntary processes of thought in the multitude. Intellect was sacrificed to a democratic idea of the equality of minds: how could the philosopher presume to think, I do not say better or more efficiently than, but differently from the multitude? To European philosophy the reproach has been made again and again, and with some justice, of imposing laws upon reality which are only the laws of individual philosophic thought; and yet what else does the scientist ultimately do? But both scientist and philosopher find their justification in their faith in the validity of their instruments: in a spirit of devotion and humility, not in a gratuitous presumption. The typical American philosopher has sold his birthright, not for a pottage of lentils, but for mere love.

* * * * *

I am painfully aware of the fact that, through the meshes of this necessarily abstract and sketchy analysis, a good deal of the beauty and vastness, the vigour and good-humour of American life inevitably escapes. The traveller from the old countries experiences here a sense of great spaces and of practically unbounded possibilities, which reflects itself in an unparalleled gaiety and openness of heart, and freedom of social intercourse. The true meaning of the doctrine of opportunity lies much more in these individual attitudes than in any difference between the structures of American and European societies. And I do not believe that the only explanation for them is in the prosperity of America when compared to the misery of Europe, because this generosity stands in no direct relation with individual wealth. The lumberman and the longshoreman are as good as, if not better than, the millionaire.

These individual attitudes find their collective expression in the idea of, and readiness for, service, which is universal in this country. Churches, political parties, movements for social reform, fraternal orders, industrial and business organizations, meet on this common ground. There is no material interest or spiritual prejudice that will not yield to an appeal for service: and whenever the object of service is clearly defined, action follows the impulse, intolerant of any delay. But Service is a means and not an end: you can serve a God, or a man, or a group of men, and in that man or group of men what you conceive to be his or their need, but you cannot serve Service. And the common end can only be given by a clear intellectual vision of the relations between a set of ideals and the realities of life.

This intrinsic generosity of the American people is the motive of the song, and the substance of the ideal, of the one great poet that America has added to the small family of European poets: Walt Whitman. In him that feeling and that impulse became a vision and a prophecy. There is a habit on the part of American intellectuals to look with a slight contempt on the admiration of Europeans for the poetry of Walt Whitman, as just another symptom of their ignorance of American things. But I, for one, will confess that what I have loved passionately, as little more than a boy, in that poetry, is that same quality whose presence I have now recognized as the human flower of American culture, and which makes me love this country as passionately as I loved that poetry.

It is one of the many paradoxes of American intellectual life that even the cultural preparation of a Walt Whitman should have been deeper and more substantial, if not more systematic, than that of any professor or writer of his times. These were minds which had as fully imbibed European thought and imagination as any professor or writer in Europe: but that thought, that imagination, transplanted to the new country, stood in no real relation with the new practical and moral surroundings, and were therefore thin and sterile. Walt Whitman knew and understood the great traditions of European civilization, and tried to express them in the original idiom, moral and literary, of his America.

But _nemo propheta_, and it takes centuries to understand a poet. Walt Whitman still waits for his own generation. The modern schools of American poetry, curious of all winds of fashion, working for the day rather than for the times, have not yet fully grasped, I do not say the spirit of his message, but even, for all their free-versifying, the mystery of his magnificent rhythms. His successors are rather among some of the younger novelists, and in a few men, spiritually related to them, who approach the study of American conditions from a combined economic and psychological point of view. The novelists are busy in discovering the actual traits of the American physiognomy, with sufficient faith in the future to describe the shades with as much care as the lights, and with a deeper passion; the economists are making way for the highest and purest American ideals by revealing the contingent and merely psychological basis of the supposedly scientific axioms of classical economics.

* * * * *

My own experience of American life, between the autumn of 1919 and the summer of 1921, has brought me in contact with all sorts and manners of people from one end to the other of the country, from the Atlantic to the Pacific. It is from this direct intercourse with Americans, rather than from my readings of American literature, continued for a much longer time, that I have formed the opinions expressed in this paper. But as my work has brought me in closer communion with colleges and universities than with any other kind of institutions, I feel a little more assured in writing of the educational aspect of the American problem.

A university is in any case more a _universitas studentium_ than a corporation of professors. I have enjoyed my life in American faculties, and I have gained a good deal from the many noble souls and intellects that I have met among them; but, whenever it has been possible to me, I have escaped from the faculties to the students and tried to understand the tendencies of the coming generations.

The students of the American college or university, from the comparatively ancient institutions of the East, to the young co-educational schools of the Middle and Far West, form a fairly homogeneous, though very widely representative, cross-section of the American community. They are, in a very precise and inclusive meaning, young America, the America of to-morrow. A good many of their intellectual and spiritual characteristics are the common traits of American culture which we have studied in the preceding paragraphs; and yet, because of the social separation of individuals according to ages, which is carried in this country much farther than in any European country, they develop also a number of independent traits, which are peculiar to each one of the “younger generations” in their turn. The life of the American boy or girl, up to the time of their entrance into college, is mainly the life of a beautiful and healthy young organism, not subject to any too strict intellectual or spiritual discipline. The High Schools seem to understand their function in a spirit which is substantially different from that of the European secondary schools, owing especially to certain prevailing educational doctrines founded on a fiction which is used also in many other fields of American life, but which in the field of education has wrought more harm than in any other one, the fiction of the public demand--in this particular case of one or another type of education. A fiction undoubtedly it is, and used to give prestige and authority to the theories of individual educationalists, since in no country and in no time there have existed educational opinions outside the circle of the educators themselves. But this fiction has unfortunately had practical consequences because American educators, subject to big business in the private institutions, and to the politicians in the State schools and universities, have not found in themselves the energy, except in a few isolated instances, to resist what came to them strengthened by such auspices. And the public itself was easily convinced that it wanted what it was told that it wanted. The students, more sinned against than sinning, enjoy the easy atmosphere of the school, and it is only when they reach college that they become aware of their absolute unpreparedness for the higher studies.

This consciousness of their inferiority manifests itself in an attitude of “low-browism,” which is not contempt of that which they think is beyond them, but rather an unwillingness to pretend that they are what they know they are not. It is practically impossible for them to acquire any standards in matters of scholarship, and they are thus forcibly thrown back on that which they know very well, the sports, and social life among themselves. A Chinese friend of mine once quaintly defined an American university as an athletic association in which certain opportunities for study were provided for the feeble-bodied. Now, in athletics and social life, the student finds something that is real, and therefore is an education: there is no pretence or fraud about football, and in their institutions within the college and the university the students obey certain standards and rules which are not as clearly justified as those of athletics, but still are made by themselves, and therefore readily understood. They are standards and rules that sometimes strangely resemble those of primitive society, as it is only too natural when the ground on which they grow is a community of the very young only, and yet undoubtedly they are a preparation for a life after college in which similar features are very far from being the exception. And besides, that social life has a freedom and beauty of its own, evident in one at least of its most hallowed institutions, the dance. American dances, with those captivating and vital rhythms which American music has appropriated for itself from the Negro, are a perfect expression of the mere joy of life. The older generations are shocked and mystified by these dances, and also by many other ways and by the implicit opinions of the young; but so they have been in all ages and countries. To a curious and passionate observer, the youth of America seems to be obscurely labouring at a liberation of the sexual life from pretences and unjustified inhibitions, and, through an original experience of the elements of love, at a creation of new values, perhaps of a new morality.

But the student is an object of perplexity and wonder to the professor, who generally ends by taking very seriously, very literally, as something that cannot be changed, his attitude towards athletics and the social life of the college. Starting from such an assumption, the professor becomes shy of teaching; that is, he keeps for himself whatever true intellectual and spiritual interests he may have, and deals out to the students in the classroom rations of knowledge, which go up to form a complicated system of units and credits symbolizing the process of education. There is, to my mind, no more tragic misunderstanding in American life.

My own experience (and I give it for what it is worth) tells me that athletics and the social life are vicarious satisfactions for much deeper spiritual and intellectual needs. The student receives from the common American tradition a desire for spiritual values; from his individual reaction to that tradition, a craving for intellectual clarity. But he is handicapped by his scholastic unpreparedness, and disillusioned by the aloofness of the professor, by the intricacies and aridity of the curriculum: by the fact, only too evident to him, that what he is given is not science or thought, but their scholastic version. Whenever a man stands before him, and without trying to “put himself at his level,” talks to him as one talks to a man, thinking for him as one thinks for oneself, there is no more ready and enthusiastic response to be had than from the American student. He is not afraid of the difficulties or dangers, but he must trust his guide, and know that his guide trusts him. There is evidence for this in the cases which are too frequent to be called mere exceptions, of those American professors who are truly popular in the colleges and universities. But until many more of them realize what splendid material is in their hands, what big thirst there is for them to quench, and go back to their work with this new faith, the gulf will not be bridged, and young America will have to attempt to solve her own problems without the help of the spiritual experience of the centuries.

* * * * *

This condition in the institutions of higher learning is a symbol and a mirror of the condition of the country. With an impoverished religious tradition, with an imperfect knowledge of the power of intellect, America is starving for religious and intellectual truth. No other country in the world has, as the phrase goes, a heart more full of service: a heart that is constantly _quaerens quem amet_. With the war, and after the war, America has wished to dedicate herself to the world, and has only withdrawn from action when she has felt that she could not trust her leaders, what was supposed to be her mind.

In a few years, the children of the recent millions of immigrants from all regions of Europe will come forward in American life and ask for their share in the common inheritance of American tradition, in the common work of American civilization. They will not have much to contribute directly from their original cultures, but they will add an unexampled variety of bloods, of intellectual and moral temperaments, to the population of America. Their Americanization, in habits and language and manners, is a natural process which, left to itself, invariably takes place in the second generation. America must clarify and intensify her tradition, the moral discipline of the Puritan, the moral enthusiasm of the Discoverers and Pioneers, for them, and they will gladly embrace her heritage; but this clarification and intensification is only possible through the revision of the original values in the light of the central humanistic tradition of European thought.

The dreams of the European founders of this Commonwealth of Utopia may yet come true, in the way in which human dreams come true, by becoming the active, all-pervading motive of spiritual effort, the substance of life. Exiles, voluntary or forced, from England and Ireland, from Russia and Italy, from Germany and Israel, children of one mother, unified in America as they will not be unified for centuries to come in Europe, will thus have a chance to anticipate, in the _civilitas americana_, the future developments of the _humana civilitas_.

And if this generation needs a motto, I would suggest one line of Dante:

_luce intellettual piena d’amore_:
the light of intellect, in the fulness of love.

RAFFAELLO PICCOLI

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTES

THE CITY

There is no adequate literature of cities in America. Some of the larger cities possess guide-books and local histories; but the most valuable illuminations on the history and development of the American city lie buried in contemporary papers, narratives of travel, and speeches. The reader who wishes to explore the ground farther should dip into volumes and papers drawn from all periods. The recent editions of “Valentine’s Manual” should be interesting to those who cannot consult the original “Manual of the Common Council of New York.” During the last twenty years a great many reports and surveys have been printed, by city planning commissions and other bodies: these are valuable both for showing the limitations of the established régime and for giving hints of the forces that are working, more or less, for improvement. “The Pittsburgh Survey” (Russell Sage Foundation) is the great classic in this field. A compendious summary of American city developments during the last generation is contained in Charles Zueblin’s “American Municipal Progress” (Macmillan). Standing by itself in this literature is a very able book by Paul Harlan Douglass, called “The Little Town,” published by Macmillan. (A book which shall deal similarly with the Great Town is badly needed.) The best general approach to the city is that of Professor Patrick Geddes in “Cities in Evolution” (Williams and Norgate, London.) Those who are acquainted with Professor Geddes’s “A Study in City Development” or his contributions to “Sociological Papers” (Macmillan, 1905, 1906, 1907) will perhaps note my debt to him: I hasten heartily to acknowledge this, as well as my debt, by personal intercourse, to his colleague, Mr. Victor V. Branford. If the lay reader can learn nothing else from Professor Geddes, he can learn the utility of throwing aside the curtains of second-hand knowledge and studying cities and social institutions by direct observation. The inadequacy of American civic literature will not be altogether a handicap if it forces the reader to obtain by personal explorations impressions which he would otherwise get through the blur of the printed page. Every city and its region is in a sense an exhibition of natural and social history. Let the reader walk the streets of our cities, as through the halls of a museum, and use the books that have been suggested only as so many tickets and labels. Americans have a reputation in Europe as voracious sightseers. One wonders what might not happen if Americans started to see the sights at home--not the Grand Canyon and the Yosemite, but a “Broadway,” and its back alleys, and the slums and suburbs that stretch beyond. If observation led to criticism, and criticism to knowledge, where might not knowledge lead?

L. M.

POLITICS

The standard works on the history of American politics are so well known (and so few) that they scarcely need mention. Bryce, Ostrogorski and de Tocqueville, I assume, have been read by all serious students, as have also such personal memoirs as those of Blaine and John Sherman. Bryce’s work is a favourite, but it suffers from the disingenuousness of the man. Dr. Charles A. Beard’s “Economic Interpretation of the Constitution” is less a complete treatise than a prospectus of a history that is yet to be written. As far as I know, the valuable suggestions in his preface have never inspired any investigation of political origins by other American historians, most of whom are simply unintelligent school-teachers, as their current “histories” of the late war well show. All such inquiries are blocked by the timorousness and stupidity that are so characteristic of American scholarship. Our discussion of politics, like our discussion of economics, deals chiefly with superficialities. Both subjects need ventilation by psychologists not dependent upon college salaries, and hence free to speak. Certainly the influence of religious enthusiasm upon American politics deserves a careful study; nevertheless, I have never been able to find a book upon it. Again, there is the difficult question of the relations between politics and journalism. My belief is that the rising power of newspapers has tended to drive intelligent and self-respecting men out of politics, for the newspapers are chiefly operated by cads and no such man wants to be at their mercy. But that sort of thing is never studied in the United States. We even lack decent political biography, so common in England. The best light to be obtained upon current politics is in the _Congressional Record_. It costs $1.50 a month and is well worth it. Soon or late the truth gets into the _Record_; it even got there during the war. But it seldom gets into the newspapers and it never gets into books.

H. L. M.

JOURNALISM

I know of no quite satisfactory book on American journalism. “History of Journalism in the United States” by George Henry Payne and “History of American Journalism” by James Melvin Lee are fairly good in their treatment of the past, but neither of them shows any penetration in analyzing present conditions. The innocence of Mr. Payne may be judged by his opinion that the Kansas City _Star_, under Nelson, exemplifies a healthier kind of “reform journalism” than the _Post_ under Godkin! “Liberty and the News” by Walter Lippmann is suggestive, but it does not pretend to contain any specific information. More specific in naming names and giving modern instances is a short essay by Hamilton Holt, “Commercialism and Journalism.” “The Brass Check” by Upton Sinclair contains much valuable material, and perhaps what I have said of it does not do it justice; certainly it should be read by everybody interested in this subject. Will Irwin published in _Collier’s Weekly_ from January to July, 1911, a valuable series of articles, “The American Newspaper: A Study of Journalism.” I cannot find that these articles have been reprinted in book form. There is some information in autobiographies and biographies of important journalists, such as “Recollections of a Busy Life” by Horace Greeley, “Life of Whitelaw Reid” by Royal Cortissoz, “Life and Letters of E. L. Godkin” by Rollo Ogden, “Life of Charles A. Dana” by J. H. Wilson, “Life and Letters of John Hay” by William Roscoe Thayer, “An Adventure with Genius: Recollections of Joseph Pulitzer,” by Alleyne Ireland; also “The Story of the _Sun_” by Frank M. O’Brien. Biographies, however, celebrate persons and only indirectly explain institutions. A useful bibliography, which includes books and magazine articles, is “Daily Newspapers in U. S.” by Wieder Callie of the Wisconsin University School of Journalism. But after all the best source of information is the daily newspaper, if one knows how to read it--and read between the lines.

J. M.

THE LAW

“Bryce’s Modern Democracies,” Chapter XLIII, is a recent survey of the American legal system; Raymond Fosdick, “American Police Systems,” Chapter I, states the operation of criminal law. For legal procedure, see Reginald Heber Smith, “Justice and the Poor,” published by the Carnegie Endowment for the Advancement of Teaching and dealing with legal aid societies and other methods of securing more adequate legal relief; Charles W. Eliot and others, “Efficiency in the Administration of Justice,” published by the National Economic League; Moorfield Storey, “The Reform of Legal Procedure;” and many other books and articles; the reports of the American and New York Bar Associations are of especial value. John H. Wigmore, “Evidence,” vol. V (1915 edition) discusses recent progress; see his “Cases on Torts, Preface,” on substantive law. A very wide range of topics in American law, philosophical, historical, procedural, and substantive, is covered by the writings of Roscoe Pound, of which a list is given in “The Centennial History of the Harvard Law School.” The same book deals with many phases of legal education; see also “The Case Method in American Law Schools,” Josef Redlich, Carnegie Endowment. For the position of lawyers, the best book is, Charles Warren, “A History of the American Bar;” a recent discussion of their work is Simeon E. Baldwin, “The Young Man and the Law.” No one interested in this field should fail to read the “Collected Legal Papers of Justice Holmes;” see also John H. Wigmore, “Justice Holmes and the Law of Torts” and Felix Frankfurter, “The Constitutional Opinions of Justice Holmes,” both in the _Harvard Law Review_, April, 1916, and Roscoe Pound, “Judge Holmes’s Contributions to the Science of Law,” _ibid._, March, 1921. A valuable essay on Colonial legal history is Paul S. Reinsch, “English Common Law in the Early American Colonies.” A mass of material will be found in the law reviews, which are indexed through 1907 by Jones, “Index to Legal Periodicals,” 3 vols., and afterwards in the _Law Library Journal_, cumulative quarterly.

Z. C., JR.

EDUCATION

The ideas contained in the article are so commonplace and of such general acceptance among educators that it is impossible to give specific authority for them. In addition to the articles mentioned, one of the latest by Dr. D. S. Miller, “The Great College Illusion” in the _New Republic_ for June 22, 1921, should be referred to. For the rest the report of the Committee of Ten of the National Education Association, and the reports of President Eliot and President Lowell of Harvard, President Meiklejohn of Amherst, and President Wilson of Princeton, may be cited, with the recognition that any such selection is invidious.

R. M. L.

SCHOLARSHIP AND CRITICISM

There has been no really fundamental discussion of American scholarship or American criticism. Those who merely seek a good historical sketch of our older literary scholarship, along conventional lines, will find one in the fourth volume of the “Cambridge History of American Literature” that is at all events vastly superior to the similar chapters in the “Cambridge History of English Literature.” But more illuminating than any formal treatise are the comments on our scholarly ideals and methods in Emerson’s famous address on “The American Scholar,” in “The Education of Henry Adams,” and in the “Letters” of William James. The “Cambridge History of American Literature” contains no separate chapter on American criticism, and the treatment of individual critics is pathetically inadequate. The flavour of recent criticism may be savoured in Ludwig Lewisohn’s interesting anthology, “A Modern Book of Criticism,” where the most buoyant and “modern” of our younger men are set side by side with all their unacademic masters and compeers of the contemporary European world. All that can be said in favour of the faded moralism of the older American criticism is urged in an article on “The National Genius” in the _Atlantic Monthly_ for January, 1921, the temper of which may be judged from this typical excerpt: “When Mr. Spingarn declares that beauty is not concerned with truth or morals or democracy, he makes a philosophical distinction which I have no doubt that Charles the Second would have understood, approved, and could, at need, have illustrated. But he says what the American schoolboy knows to be false to the history of beauty in this country. Beauty, whether we like it or not, has a heart full of service.” The case against the conservative and traditional type of criticism is presented with slapdash pungency in the two volumes of H. L. Mencken’s “Prejudices.” But any one can make out a case for himself by reading the work of any American classical scholar side by side with a book by Gilbert Murray, or any history of literature by an American side by side with Francesco de Sanctis’s “History of Italian Literature,” or the work of any American critic side by side with the books of the great critics of the world.

J. E. S.

SCHOOL AND COLLEGE LIFE

The “distinguished Englishman” to whom the Martian refers is of course Viscount Bryce, whose “American Commonwealth” discusses the external aspects of our uniformity, the similarity of our buildings, cities, customs, and so on. Our spiritual unanimity has been most thoroughly examined by George Santayana, both in his earlier essays--as notably in “The Genteel Tradition”--and in his recent “Character and Opinion in the United States.”

For all the welter of writing about our educational establishment, only infrequent and incidental consideration has been bestowed, either favourably or unfavourably, on its regimental effect. As custodians of a going concern, the educators have busied themselves with repairs and replacements to the machinery rather than with the right of way; and lay critics have pretty much confined themselves to selecting between machines whose slightly differing routes all lie in the same general direction. The exception that proves the rule is “Shackled Youth,” by Edward Yeomans.

But undergraduate life in America has a genre of its own, the form of fiction known as “college stories.” Nearly every important school has at some time had written round it a collection of tales that exploit its peculiar legends, traditions, and customs--for the most part a chafing-dish literature of pranks, patter, and athletic prowess whose murky and often distorted reflection of student attitudes is quite incidental to its business of entertaining. Owen Johnson’s Lawrenceville stories--“The Prodigious Hickey,” “Tennessee Shad,” “The Varmint,” “The Humming Bird”--are the classics of preparatory school life. Harvard has “Pepper,” by H. E. Porter, “Harvard Episodes” and “The Diary of a Freshman,” by Charles Flandrau, and Owen Wister’s “Philosophy 4,” the best of all college yarns. Yale has the books of Ralph D. Paine and of others. The Western universities have such volumes as “Ann Arbor Tales,” by Karl Harriman, for Michigan, and “Maroon Tales,” by W. J. Cuppy, for Chicago. George Fitch writes amusingly about life in the smaller Western colleges in “Petey Simmons at Siwash” and “At Good Old Siwash.”

The catalogue of serious college fiction is brief, and most of the novels are so propagandist that they are misrepresentative. For example, Owen Johnson’s “Stover at Yale,” which was some years out of date when it was published, misses the essential club spirit in New Haven by almost as wide a margin as Arthur Train’s “The World and Thomas Kelly” departs from the normal club life in Cambridge; both authors set up the straw man of snobbery where snobs are an unimportant minority. Two recent novels, however, deal more faithfully with the college scene for the very reason that their authors were more interested in character than in setting: “This Side of Paradise,” by Scott Fitzgerald, is true enough to have provoked endless controversy in Princeton; and “Salt: The Education of Griffith Adams,” by Charles G. Norris, is a memorable appraisal of student ideals in a typical co-educational institution. Dorothy Canfield’s “The Bent Twig” is also laid in a co-educational college. Booth Tarkington’s “Ramsay Milholland” attends a State University; and the hero of “Gold Shod,” by Newton Fuessle, is a revelatory failure of the University of Chicago regimen. To these add an autobiography--“An American in the Making, The Life Story of an Immigrant,” by M. E. Ravage, whose candid report on his fellows at the Missouri State University is a masterpiece of sympathetic criticism.

C. B.

THE INTELLECTUAL LIFE

To attempt to give references to specific books on so general and inclusive a topic would be an impertinence. But one may legitimately suggest the trends of investigation one would like to see thoroughly explored. In my own case they would be: (1) a study of the pioneer from the point of view of his cultural and religious interests, correlating those interests with his general economic status; (2) a study of the revolutionary _feeling_ of America (not formulas) in psychological terms and of its duration as an emotional driving force; (3) a study of the effects of the post-Civil War period and the industrial expansion upon the position of upper-class women in the United States; (4) a study of sexual maladjustment in American family life, correlated again with the economic status of the successful pioneer; (5) a very careful study of the beginnings, rise, and spread of women’s clubs, and their purposes and accomplishments, correlated chronologically with the development of club life of men and the extent of vice, gambling, and drunkenness; (6) a study of American religions in more or less Freudian terms as compensations for neurotic maladjustment; (7) a study of instrumentalism in philosophy and its implications for reform; (8) a serious attempt to understand and appraise the more or less disorganized _jeunes_, with some attention to comparing the intensity of their bitterness or optimism with the places of birth and upbringing. No special study of American educational systems or of the school or college life would be necessary, it seems to me, beyond, of course, a general knowledge. The intellectual life of the nation, after all, has little relation to the academic life.

When such special studies had been finished by sympathetic investigators, probably one of several writers could synthesize the results and give us a fairly definitive essay on the intellectual life of America. Such studies, however, have not yet been done, and without them I have had to write this essay to a certain extent _en plein air_. Thus it has been impossible entirely to avoid giving the impression of stating things dogmatically or intuitively. But as a matter of fact on all the topics I have suggested for study I have already given much thought and time, and consequently, whatever its literary form, the essay is not pure impressionism.

H. E. S.

SCIENCE

There is no connected account of American achievement in science. Strangely enough, the most pretentious American book on the history of science, Sedgwick and Tyler’s “Short History of Science” (New York: Macmillan, 1917), ignores the most notable figures among the author’s countrymen. A useful biographical directory under the title of “American Men of Science” (New York Science Press, 1910, 2d edition), has been compiled by Professor James McKeen Cattell; a third revised edition has been prepared and issued this year prior to the appearance of the present volume.

On the tendencies manifest in the United States there are several important papers. An address by Henry A. Rowland entitled “A Plea for Pure Science” (_Popular Science Monthly_, vol. LIX, 1901, pp. 170–188), is still eminently worth reading. The external conditions under which American scientists labour have been repeatedly discussed in recent years in such journals as _Science_ and _School and Society_, both edited by Professor Cattell, who has himself appended very important discussions to the above-cited biographical lexicon. Against over-organization Professor William Morton Wheeler has recently published a witty and vigorous protest (“The Organization of Research,” _Science_, January 21, 1921, N. S. vol. LIII, pp. 53–67).

In order to give an understanding of the essence of scientific activity the general reader cannot do better than to trace the processes by which the master-minds of the past have brought order into the chaos that is at first blush presented by the world of reality. In this respect the writings of the late Professor Ernst Mach are unsurpassed, and even the least mathematically trained layman can derive much insight from portions of his book “Die Mechanik” (Leipzig, 7th edition, 1912), accessible in T. J. McCormack’s translation under the title of “The Science of Mechanics” (Chicago: Open Court Publishing Co.). The section on Galileo may be specially recommended. Mach’s “Erkenntnis und Irrtum” (Leipzig, 1906) contains most suggestive discussions of the psychology of investigation, dealing with such questions as the nature of a scientific problem, of experimentation, of hypothetical assumptions, etc. Much may also be learned from the general sections of P. Duhem’s “La theorie physique, son objet et sa structure” (Paris, 1906). E. Duclaux’s “Pasteur: Histoire d’un Esprit” has fortunately been rendered accessible by Erwin F. Smith and Florence Hedges under the title “Pasteur, the History of a Mind” (Philadelphia; Saunders, 1920). It reveals in masterly fashion the methods by which a great thinker overcomes not only external opposition but the more baneful obstacles of scientific folk-lore.

R. H. L.

PHILOSOPHY

The omission of Mr. Santayana’s philosophy from the above account indicates no lack of appreciation of its merits. Although written at Harvard, it is hardly an American philosophy. On one hand, Mr. Santayana is free from the mystical religious longings that have given our Idealisms life, and on the other, he is too confident of the reality of culture and the value of the contemplative life to sanction that dominance of the practical which is the stronghold of instrumentalism.

The only histories of American Philosophy are those by Professor Woodbridge Riley. His “Early Schools” (Dodd, Mead & Co., 1907), is a full treatment of the period in question, but his “American Thought from Puritanism to Pragmatism” (H. Holt, 1915) is better reading and comes down to date. These are best read in connection with some history of American Literature such as Barrett Wendell’s “Literary History of America” (Scribner’s Sons, 1914). Royce’s system is given in good condensed form in the last four chapters of his “Spirit of Modern Philosophy” (Houghton Mifflin, 1899). Its exhaustive statement is “The World and the Individual” (2 vols., Macmillan, 1900–1). The “Philosophy of Loyalty” (Macmillan, 1908) develops the ethics, and the “Problem of Christianity” (2 vols., Macmillan, 1913), relates his philosophy to Christianity. Hocking’s religious philosophy is given in his “Meaning of God in Human Experience” (Yale University Press, 1912). His general position is developed on one side in “Human Nature and Its Remaking” (Yale University Press, 1918). Anything of James is good reading. His chief work is the “Principles of Psychology” (H. Holt, 1890), but the “Talks to Teachers on Psychology and Some of Life’s Ideals” (H. Holt, 1907) and the “Will to Believe” (Longmans, Green & Co., 1899), better illustrate his attitude toward life. “Pragmatism” (Longmans, Green & Co., 1907) introduces his technical philosophizing. His religious attitude can be got from the “Varieties of Religious Experience” (Longmans, Green & Co., 1902). Dewey has nowhere systematized his philosophy. Its technical points are exhibited in the “Essays in Experimental Logic” (University of Chicago Press, 1916). The “Influence of Darwin on Philosophy” (H. Holt, 1910) has two especially readable essays, one the title-essay, the other on “Intelligence and Morals.” The full statement of his ethics is the “Ethics” (Dewey and Tufts, H. Holt, 1908). He is at his best in “Education and Democracy” (Macmillan, 1916). “German Philosophy and Politics” (H. Holt, 1915) is a war-time reaction giving an interesting point of view as to the significance of German Philosophy. “The New Realism” (Macmillan, 1912) is a volume of technical studies by the Six Realists. “Creative Intelligence” (H. Holt, 1917), by John Dewey and others, is a similar volume of pragmatic studies. The reviews are also announcing another co-operative volume, “Essays in Critical Realism” by Santayana, Lovejoy and others. In a technical fashion Perry has discussed the “Present Tendencies in Philosophy” (Longmans, Green & Co., 1912), but the best critical reaction to American philosophy is that of Santayana: “Character and Opinion in the United States” (Scribner’s Sons, 1920). Santayana’s own chief philosophic contributions are the “Sense of Beauty” (Scribner’s Sons, 1896), and the “Life of Reason” (5 vols., Scribner’s Sons, 1905–6). The first two chapters of his “Winds of Doctrine” (Scribner’s Sons, 1913), on the “Intellectual Temper of the Age” and “Modernism and Christianity,” are also relevant. Brief but excellent expositions of Royce, Dewey, James, and Santayana by Morris R. Cohen have appeared in the _New Republic_, vols. XX-XXIII.

H. C. B.

LITERATURE

Perhaps the most illuminating books for any one interested in the subject of the essay on literature are the private memorials of certain modern European writers. For a sense of everything the American literary life is _not_, one might read, for instance, the Letters of Ibsen, Dostoievsky, Chekhov, Flaubert, Taine and Leopardi--all of which have appeared, in whole or in part, in English.

V. W. B.

MUSIC