Chapter VIII: Part 8

To thwart idealism, psychology must be rewritten. While consciousness exists there is always the chance that our world of facts may fade into subjective presentations. Seizing a fruitful suggestion of James’, they introduce us to a world of objects that exists quite independently of being known. The relations of these objects are external to them and independent of their character. Sometimes, however, there arise relations between our organisms and other objects that can best be described by asserting that these objects have entered into our consciousness. How then can we fall into error? Only as nature makes mistakes, by reacting in a way that brings conflict with unnoted conditions. Perhaps the greatest contribution of Realism as yet to American thought is the contribution of some of its apostles to its implicit psychology, already independently established as behaviourism, the most vital movement in contemporary psychology.

The highly technical form of the Six Realists’ co-operative volume has kept their doctrine from any great reading public. But in its critical echoes, the busy American finds a sympathetic note in the assertion of the independent reality of the objects with which he works and the world in which he has to make his way. His also is practical faith in science, and he is glad to escape an inevitable type of religion and moral theory to be swallowed along with philosophy. Until the New Realists, however, develop further implications of their theory, or at least present congenial religious, moral, and social attitudes, their philosophy has only the negative significance of release. If it is going to take a deep hold on life, it must also be creative, not replacing dogma by dogma, but elaborating some new world vision. As yet it has told us little more than that truth, goodness, and beauty are independent realities, eternal subsistencies that await our discovery.

Professor Perry has outlined a realistic morality. For him a right action is any that conduces to goodness and whatever fulfils an interest is good. But a good action is not necessarily moral. Morality requires the fulfilment of the greatest possible number of interests, under the given circumstances; the highest good, if attainable, would be an action fulfilling all possible interests. This doctrine, though intelligible, is hard to apply in specific instances. In it realism dissolves into pragmatism, and its significance can best be seen in connection with that philosophy, where it has received fuller development and concrete applications.

Pragmatism obtained its initial impulse through a mind in temper between the sturdy common sense of the New Realists and the emotionalistic romanticism of the Idealists, or rather comprehending both within itself. This mind is that of William James, the last heir of the line of pure New England culture, made cosmopolitan by travel and intellectual contacts. Of Swedenborgian family, skilled alike in science and art, James lived the mystical thrills of the unknown but could handle them with the shrewdness of a Yankee trader. With young America, his gaze is directed toward the future, and with it, he is impatient of dogma and restraint. He is free from conventions of thought and action with the freedom of those who have lived them all in their ancestry and dare to face realities without fear of social or intellectual _faux pas_. With such new-found freedom goes a vast craving for experience. For him, the deepest realities are the personal experiences of individual men.

James’ greatest contribution is his “Psychology.” In it he places himself in the stream of human experience, ruthlessly cutting the gordian knots of psychological dogma and conventions. The mind that he reports is the mind each of us sees in himself. It is not so much a science of psychology as the materials for such a science, a science in its descriptive stage, constantly interrupted by shrewd homilies wherein habit appears as the fly-wheel of society, or our many selves enlarge the scope of sympathetic living. Nor is it congenial to this adventurer in experience that his explorations should constrain human nature within a scientist’s map. Not only must the stream of consciousness flow between the boundaries of our concepts, but also in the human will there is a point, be it ever so small, where a “we,” too real ever to be comprehended by science or philosophy, can dip down into the stream of consciousness and delay some fleeting idea, be it only for the twinkling of an eye, and thereby change the whole course and significance of our overt action. Freedom must not unequivocally surrender to scientific determinism, or chance to necessity.

James is a Parsifal to whom the Grail is never quite revealed. His pragmatism and radical empiricism are but methods of exploration and no adventure is too puny or mean for the quest. We must make our ideas clear and test them by the revelation they produce. Thoughts that make no difference to us in living are not real thoughts, but imaginings. The way is always open and perhaps there is a guiding truth, a working value, in the operations of even the deranged mind. We must entertain the ecstatic visions of saints, the alleged communications of spiritualists, mystical contacts with sources of some higher power, and even the thought-systems of cranks, that nothing be lost or untried. Not that we need share such beliefs, but they are genuine experiences and who can foretell where in experiences some fruitful vision may arise!

As a psychologist, James knew that the significance of a belief lies not so much in its content as in its power to direct the energies it releases. His catholic interests are not equivalent to uncritical credulity. Santayana, the wisest of his critics, is right in his assertion that James never lost his agnosticism: “He did not really believe; he merely believed in the right of believing that you might be right if you believed.” As for Pascal, the wager on immortality might be worth the making for if one won there was the blessedness of Heaven, and if one lost--at least there should have been a sustaining optimism through the trials of this life. Communion with the infinite might open new sources of power. If so, the power was there. If not, no harm had been done by the trial. Yet there is no evidence in James’ philosophy that he himself drew inspiration from any of such sources.

If James has drawn to himself the greatest reading public of all American philosophers, it is because in him each man can find the sanction for himself. Without dogmatism or pedantry, James is the voice of all individual human experiences. In him, each man can find a sympathetic auditor, and words vivid with the language of the street, encouraging his endeavours or at least pointing out the significance of his experiences for the great business of living. Sometimes James listens to human confessions with a suppressed cry of pain and recalls wistfully “A Certain Blindness in Human Beings,” or asks “Is Life Worth Living?” Once with indignation at “the delicate intellectualities and subtleties and scrupulosities” of philosophy he confronts “the host of guileless thoroughfed thinkers” with the radical realities of Morrison I. Swift, only to partially retract a few pages later with the admission, for him grudgingly given, that the Absolute may afford its believers a certain comfort and is “in so far forth” true. We live after all in an open universe, the lid is off and time relentlessly operates for the production of novelties. No empiricist can give a decision until the evidence is all in, and in the nature of the case this can never happen.

Such openness of interest forefends the possibility of James’ founding a school of philosophy. It also renders all his younger contemporaries in some measure his disciples. Popularly he is the refuge of the mystics and heterodox, the spiritualists and the cranks who seek the sanction of academic scholarship and certified dignity. There are more things in the philosophies of these who call him master than are dreamed of in his philosophy. In academic philosophy there is a dual descent of the James tradition. As a principle of negative criticism, it may be turned into its opposite, as with Hocking, who enunciates the extreme form of the pragmatic principle, If a theory is not interesting, it is false--and utilizes it for his realistic, mystic, idealistic absolutism. The philosophy of Henri Bergson, that has been widely read in this country, reinforces this mystical spiritual side, but American mysticism has popularly tended to degenerate into the occultisms of second-rate credulous minds.

On the other hand, for those in whom the conflict of science and religion is settling itself on the side of science, the principle of pragmatism lends itself to the interpretation originally intended by Charles Peirce, the author of the term, as an experimentalism, a search for verifiable hypotheses after the manner of the sciences. But this side of the doctrine is the one that has been developed by John Dewey.

Professor Dewey is without question the leading American philosopher, both from the thoroughness of his analyses and the vigour of his appeal to the American public. In discarding the Hegelian Idealism in which he was trained, he is thoroughly aligned with the New America. In him science has wholly won, and although of New England, Vermont, ancestry, there remains not a trace of the New Englander’s romantic spiritual longings for contact with a vast unknown. His dogmatic faiths, and no man is without such faiths, relate to evolution, democracy, and the all-decisive authority of experience.

For Dewey, as for the Realists, psychology is the study of human behaviour. For him mind is the instrument by which we overcome obstacles and thinking takes place only when action is checked. Hence in the conventional sense there are no abstractions. Our concepts are instruments by which we take hold of reality. If we need instruments to manufacture instruments, or to facilitate their use, these instruments are also concepts. We may call them abstract, but they are not thereby removed from the realm of experienced fact. Since, therefore, our real interest is not in things as they are in themselves, but in what we can do with them, our judgments are judgments of value, and value is determined by practice. Such judgments imply an incomplete physical situation and look toward its completion. But the will to believe is gone. There is no shadow of James’ faith in the practicality of emotional satisfactions, or in his voluntaristic psychology. Our “sensations are not the elements out of which perceptions are composed, constituted, or constructed; they are the finest, most carefully discriminated objects of perception.” Early critics, particularly among the realists, have accused Dewey of subjectivism, but except in the sense that an individual must be recognized as one term in the reaction to a situation, and the realists themselves do this, there is no ground for the charge.

Such a philosophy as Dewey’s is nothing if it is not put to work. And here is his greatest hold on American life. Like most Americans, he has no sympathy for the lazy, and even the over-reflective may suffer from the contamination of sloth; the true American wants to see results, and here is a philosophy in which results are the supreme end. Reform is, for America, a sort of sport and this philosophy involves nothing but reform. Metaphysical subtleties and visions leave the busy man cold; here they are taboo.

Professor Dewey puts his philosophy to work in the fields of ethics and education. Perhaps his ethics is the least satisfactory, howsoever promising its beginnings. Moral codes become the expression of group-approval. But they easily pass into tradition, get out of touch with fact, are superannuated. The highest virtue is intelligence and with intelligence one can recognize the uniqueness of every moral situation and develop from it its own criteria of judgment. Progress in morals consists in raising the general level of intelligence and extending the group whose approvals are significant from a social class to the nation, a notion of highest appeal to Democracy, with its faith in the individual man. But with Dewey the limit of group expansion is humanity, and this may verge on dangerous (unfortunately) radicalism. Dewey’s weapon against conventional ethics is two-edged. For the intelligent man perhaps there is no better actual moral standard than that springing from intelligent specific judgments, but for the uneducated, it is only too easy to identify intelligence with sentimental opinion and to let practice degenerate into legislative repression.

After all, judgments of practice do face incomplete situations and the problem is not only to complete but also to determine the manner in which the completion shall be brought about. What men transform is not merely the world, but themselves, and the ethics is incomplete without some further consideration of such questions as what are human natures, and what do we want them to become. But perhaps such questions are too dangerously near metaphysics to have appealed to Dewey’s powers of analysis. At any rate, the general effectiveness of his ethics is weakened by his neglect of attention to principles in some sense at least ultimate.

In education Dewey’s philosophy has its most complete vitality, for here he is dealing with concrete needs and the means of satisfying them. The problem of education is to integrate knowledge and life. He finds no joy in information for information’s sake. Curiosity may be the gift of the child, but it must be utilized to equip the man to hold his own in a world of industrialism and democracy. Yet Dewey’s sympathies are with spontaneity. He is a Rousseau with a new methodology. Connected with the Laboratory School at Chicago from 1896 to 1903, he has since followed with sympathetic interest all radical experimentation from the methods of Madame Montessori to those of the Gary Schools. The vast erudition amassed in this field, and his careful and unprejudiced study of children, has made him competent above all men to speak critically of methods and results.

In regard to education, he has given a fuller consideration of the ends to be attained than in the case of ethics. The end is seen as continued growth, springing from the existing conditions, freeing activity, and flexible in its adaptation to circumstances. The educational result is social efficiency and culture. This efficiency does not, however, imply accepting existing economic conditions as final, and its cultural aspect, good citizenship, includes with the more specific positive virtues, those characteristics that make a man a good companion. Culture is a complete ripening of the personality. “What is termed spiritual culture has usually been futile, with something rotten about it, just because it has been conceived as a thing which a man might have internally--and therefore exclusively.” The antithesis between sacrificing oneself for others, or others for oneself, is an unreal figment of the imagination, a tragic product of certain spiritual and religious thinking.

Professor Dewey well understands the dangers that lurk behind such terms as _social efficiency_ and _good citizenship_. To him sympathy is much more than a mere feeling: it is, as he says it should be, “a cultivated imagination for what men have in common and a rebellion at whatever unnecessarily divides them.” But his very gift of clear vision, his penetration of the shams of dogma, economic and social, leads him to treat these things with scant respect. In consequence his fellow-philosophers, the educators over whom his influence is profound, and the public suspect him of radicalism. Only too often, to avoid suspicion of themselves, they turn his doctrine to the very uses that he condemns: industrial efficiency for them becomes identical with business expedience; the school, a trade school; culture, a detached æstheticism to be condemned; and democracy, the privilege of thinking and acting like everybody else.

The greatest weakness of Dewey’s philosophy, and it is serious, for Dewey as no other American philosopher grasps principles through which American civilization might be transformed for the better--lies in its lack of a metaphysics. Not, of course, a transcendentalism or a religious mysticism, but above all an interpretation of human nature. Emotionality represents a phase of the behaviour process too real to deny, yet it has no place in Dewey’s philosophy of man. Human longings and aspirations are facts as real as the materials of industry. Most men remain religious. Must they rest with quack mystics or unintelligent dogmatists? What is religion giving them that they crave? Is it a form of art, an attitude toward the ideal, or some interpretation of the forces of nature that they seek to grasp? Professor Dewey is himself a lover of art, but what place has art in his philosophy? If it is an instrument of education, what end does it serve, and how is it to be utilized? The pragmatic ethics gives no guarantee that the moral criteria developed by specific situations will always be the same even for two men equally intelligent. Perhaps, in spite of the paradox, there may be several best solutions. If so, this fact has some significance rooted in man’s nature and his relations to the world that philosophy should disclose. Such supplementation need not change the character of the results, but it might forefend them from misinterpretation and abuse.

With all its incompleteness, Dewey’s philosophy is undeniably that of the America of to-day. What shall we say of the future? No nation in the world has more abused its philosophies than ours. The inspirational elements of our idealisms have become the panderings of sentimentalists. The vitalizing forces of our pragmatisms threaten to congeal into the dogmata of cash-success. The war has intensified our national self-satisfaction. We tend to condemn all vision as radical, hence unsound, hence evil, hence to be put down. Philosophy thrives in the atmosphere of the Bacchæ:

“What else is Wisdom? What of man’s endeavour
Or God’s high grace, so lovely and so great?
To stand from fear set free, to breathe and wait;
To hold a hand uplifted over Hate;
And shall not loveliness be loved for ever?”

But what have we now of this atmosphere?

At Christmas-time, the American Philosophical Association devoted three sessions to the discussion of the Rôle of the Philosopher in Modern Life. From report, opinion was divided between those who would have him a social reformer, to the exclusion of contemplative background, and those with a greater sense of playing safe, who would have him turn to history, of any sort, or contemplation quite detached from social consequences. Let us hope these opinions are not to be taken seriously. Our social reformers are not all like Dewey, whose neglect of basic reflection is probably not as great as the omission of such reflections from his published works would indicate. Nor is an academic chair generally suited to the specific contacts with life from which successful reforms must be shaped. On the other hand, abstract contemplation with the pedagogic reinforcements advocated, will confirm the popular American sentiment against reflection, if it is true, as Dewey asserts, that education must be an outgrowth of existing conditions. Fortunately genius, if such there be amongst us, will not submit to the opinions of the American Philosophic Association. If philosophy can find freedom, perhaps America can yet find philosophy.

HAROLD CHAPMAN BROWN

THE LITERARY LIFE

Among all the figures which, in Mrs. Wharton’s “The Age of Innocence,” make up the pallid little social foreground, the still more pallid middle distance, of the New York of forty years ago, there is none more pallid than the figure of Ned Winsett, the “man of letters untimely born in a world that had no need of letters.” Winsett, we are told, “had published one volume of brief and exquisite literary appreciations,” of which one hundred and twenty copies had been sold, and had then abandoned his calling and taken an obscure post on a women’s weekly. “On the subject of _Hearth-fires_ (as the paper was called) he was inexhaustibly entertaining,” says Mrs. Wharton; “but beneath his fun lurked the sterile bitterness of the still young man who has tried and given up.” Sterile bitterness, a bright futility, a beginning without a future: that is the story of Ned Winsett.

One feels, as one turns Mrs. Wharton’s pages, how symbolic this is of the literary life in America. I shall say nothing of the other arts, though the vital conditions of all the arts have surely much in common; I shall say nothing of America before the Civil War, for the America that New England dominated was a different nation from ours. But what immediately strikes one, as one surveys the history of our literature during the last half century, is the singular impotence of its creative spirit. That we have and have always had an abundance of talent is, I think, no less evident: what I mean is that so little of this talent succeeds in effectuating itself. Of how many of our modern writers can it be said that their work reveals a continuous growth, or indeed any growth, that they hold their ground tenaciously and preserve their sap from one decade to another? Where, to speak relatively, the characteristic evolution of the European writer is one of an ever-increasing differentiation, a progress toward the creation, the possession of a world absolutely his own (the world of Shaw, the world of Hardy, the world of Hamsun, of Gorky, of Anatole France), the American writer, having struck out with his new note, becomes--how often!--progressively less and less himself. The blighted career, the arrested career, the diverted career are, with us, the rule. The chronic state of our literature is that of a youthful promise which is never redeemed.

The great writer, the _grand écrivain_, has at the best of times appeared but once or twice in America: that is another matter. I am speaking, as I say, of the last half century, and I am speaking of the rank and file. There are those who will deny this characterization of our literature, pointing to what they consider the robust and wholesome corpus of our “normal” fiction. But this fiction, in its way, precisely corroborates my point. What is the quality of the spirit behind it? How much does it contain of that creative element the character of which consists in dominating life instead of being dominated by it? Have these novelists of ours any world of their own as distinguished from the world they observe and reflect, the world they share with their neighbours? Is it a personal vision that informs them, or a mob-vision? The Danish writer, Johannes V. Jensen, has described their work as “journalism under exceptionally fortunate conditions.” Journalism, on the whole, it assuredly is, and the chief of these fortunate conditions (fortunate for journalism!) has been the general failure of the writers in question to establish and develop themselves as individuals; as they have rendered unto Cæsar what was intended for God, is it any wonder that Cæsar has waxed so fat? “The unfortunate thing,” writes Mr. Montrose J. Moses, “is that the American drama”--but the observation is equally true of this fiction of ours--“has had many brilliant promises which have finally thinned out and never materialized.” And again: “The American dramatist has always taken his logic second-hand; he has always allowed his theatrical sense to be a slave to managerial circumstance.” The two statements are complementary, and they apply, as I say, to the whole of this “normal” literature of ours. Managerial circumstance? Let us call it local patriotism, the spirit of the times, the hunger of the public for this, that, or the other: to some one of these demands, these promptings from without, the “normal” American writer always allows himself to become a slave. It is the fact, indeed, of his being a slave to some demand from without that makes him “normal”--and something else than an artist.

The flourishing exterior of the main body of our contemporary literature, in short, represents anything but the integrity of an inner well-being. But even aside from this, one can count on one’s two hands the American writers who are able to carry on the development and unfolding of their individualities, year in, year out, as every competent man of affairs carries on his business. What fate overtakes the rest? Shall I begin to run over some of those names, familiar to us all, names that have signified so much promise and are lost in what Gautier calls “the limbo where moan (in the company of babes) still-born vocations, abortive attempts, larvæ of ideas that have won neither wings nor shapes”? Shall I mention the writers--but they are countless!--who have lapsed into silence, or have involved themselves in barren eccentricities, or have been turned into machines? The poets who, at the very outset of their careers, find themselves extinguished like so many candles? The novelists who have been unable to grow up, and remain withered boys of seventeen? The critics who find themselves overtaken in mid-career by a hardening of the spiritual arteries? Our writers all but universally lack the power of growth, the endurance that enables one to continue to produce personal work after the freshness of youth has gone. Weeds and wild flowers! Weeds without beauty or fragrance, and wild flowers that cannot survive the heat of the day.

Such is the aspect of our contemporary literature; beside that of almost any European country, it is indeed one long list of spiritual casualties. For it is not that the talent is wanting, but that somehow this talent fails to fulfil itself.

This being so, how much one would like to assume, with certain of our critics, that the American writer is a sort of Samson bound with the brass fetters of the Philistines and requiring only to have those fetters cast off in order to be able to conquer the world! That, as I understand it, is the position of Mr. Dreiser, who recently remarked of certain of our novelists: “They succeeded in writing but one book before the iron hand of convention took hold of them.” There is this to be said for the argument, that if the American writer as a type shows less resistance than the European writer it is plainly because he has been insufficiently equipped, stimulated, nourished by the society into which he has been born. In this sense the American environment is answerable for the literature it has produced. But what is significant is that the American writer _does_ show less resistance; as literature is nothing but the expression of power, of the creative will, of “free will,” in short, is it not more accurate to say, not that the “iron hand of convention” takes hold of our writers, but that our writers yield to the “iron hand of convention”? Samson had lost his virility before the Philistines bound him; it was because he had lost his virility that the Philistines were able to bind him. The American writer who “goes wrong” is in a similar case. “I have read,” says Mr. Dreiser, of Jack London, “several short stories which proved what he could do. But he did not feel that he cared for want and public indifference. Hence his many excellent romances.” _He did not feel that he cared for want and public indifference._ Even Mr. Dreiser, as we observe, determinist that he is, admits a margin of free will, for he represents Jack London as having made a choice. What concerns us now, however, is not a theoretical but a practical question, the fact, namely, that the American writer as a rule is actuated not by faith but by fear, that he cannot meet the obstacles of “want and public indifference” as the European writer meets them, that he is, indeed, and as if by nature, a journeyman and a hireling.

As we see, then, the creative will in this country is a very weak and sickly plant. Of the innumerable talents that are always emerging about us there are few that come to any sort of fruition: the rest wither early; they are transformed into those neuroses that flourish on our soil as orchids flourish in the green jungle. The sense of this failure is written all over our literature. Do we not know what depths of disappointment underlay the cynicism of Mark Twain and Henry Adams and Ambrose Bierce? Have we failed to recognize, in the surly contempt with which the author of “The Story of a Country Town” habitually speaks of writers and writing, the unconscious cry of sour grapes of a man whose creative life was arrested in youth? Are we unaware of the bitterness with which, in certain letters of his later years, Jack London regretted the miscarriage of his gift? There is no denying that for half a century the American writer as a type has gone down in defeat.

Now why is this so? Why does the American writer, relatively speaking, show less resistance than the European writer? Plainly, as I have just said, because he has been insufficiently equipped, stimulated, nourished by the society into which he has been born. If our creative spirits are unable to grow and mature, it is a sign that there is something wanting in the soil from which they spring and in the conditions that surround them. Is it not, for that matter, a sign of some more general failure in our life?

“At the present moment,” wrote Mr. Chesterton in one of his early essays (“The Fallacy of the Young Nation”), struck by the curious anæmia of those few artists of ours who have succeeded in developing themselves, usually by escaping from the American environment; “at the present moment the matter which America has very seriously to consider is not how near it is to its birth and beginning, but how near it may be to its end.... The English colonies have produced no great artists, and that fact may prove that they are still full of silent possibilities and reserve force. But America has produced great artists and that fact most certainly means that she is full of a fine futility and the end of all things. Whatever the American men of genius are, they are not young gods making a young world. Is the art of Whistler a brave, barbaric art, happy and headlong? Does Mr. Henry James infect us with the spirit of a school-boy? No, the colonies have not spoken, and they are safe. Their silence may be the silence of the unborn. But out of America has come a sweet and startling cry, as unmistakable as the cry of a dying man.” That there is truth behind this, that the soil of our society is at least arid and impoverished, is indicated by the testimony of our own poets; one has only to consider what George Cabot Lodge wrote in 1904, in one of his letters: “We are a dying race, as every race must be of which the men are, as men and not accumulators, third-rate”; one has only to consider the writings of Messrs. Frost, Robinson, and Masters, in whose presentation of our life, in the West as well as in the East, the individual as a spiritual unit invariably suffers defeat. Fifty years ago J. A. Froude, on a visit to this country, wrote to one of his friends: “From what I see of the Eastern states I do not anticipate any very great things as likely to come out of the Americans.... They are generous with their money, have much tenderness and quiet good humour; but the Anglo-Saxon power is running to seed and I don’t think will revive.” When we consider the general colourlessness and insipidity of our latter-day life (faithfully reflected in the novels of Howells and his successors), the absence from it of profound passions and intense convictions, of any representative individuals who can be compared in spiritual force with Emerson, Thoreau, and so many of their contemporaries, its uniformity and its uniform tepidity, then the familiar saying, “Our age has been an age of management, not of ideas or of men,” assumes indeed a very sinister import. I go back to the poet Lodge’s letters. “Was there ever,” he writes, “such an anomaly as the American man? In practical affairs his cynicism, energy, and capacity are simply stupefying, and in every other respect he is a sentimental idiot possessing neither the interest, the capacity, nor the desire for even the most elementary processes of independent thought.... His wife finds him so sexually inapt that she refuses to bear him children and so drivelling in every way except as a money-getter that she compels him to expend his energies solely in that direction while she leads a discontented, sterile, stunted life....” Is this to be denied? And does it not in part explain that extraordinary lovelessness of the American scene which has bred the note of a universal resentment in so much of our contemporary fiction? As well expect figs from thistles as any considerable number of men from such a soil who are robust enough to prefer spiritual to material victories and who are capable of achieving them.

It is unnecessary to go back to Taine in order to realize that here we have a matrix as unpropitious as possible for literature and art. If our writers wither early, if they are too generally pliant, passive, acquiescent, anæmic, how much is this not due to the heritage of pioneering, with its burden of isolation, nervous strain, excessive work and all the racial habits that these have engendered?

Certainly, for example, if there is anything that counts in the formation of the creative spirit it is that long infancy to which John Fiske, rightly or wrongly, attributed the emergence of man from the lower species. In the childhood of almost every great writer one finds this protracted incubation, this slow stretch of years in which the unresisting organism opens itself to the influences of life. It was so with Hawthorne, it was so with Whitman in the pastoral America of a century ago: they were able to mature, these brooding spirits, because they had given themselves for so long to life before they began to react upon it. That is the old-world childhood still, in a measure; how different it is from the modern American childhood may be seen if one compares, for example, the first book (“Boyhood”) of “Pelle the Conqueror” with any of those innumerable tales in which our novelists show us that in order to succeed in life one cannot be up and doing too soon. The whole temper of our society, if one is to judge from these documents, is to hustle the American out of his childhood, teaching him at no age at all how to repel life and get the best of it and build up the defences behind which he is going to fight for his place in the sun. Who can deny that this racial habit succeeds in its unconscious aim, which is to produce sharp-witted men of business? But could anything be deadlier to the poet, the artist, the writer?

Everything in such an environment, it goes without saying, tends to repress the creative and to stimulate the competitive impulses. A certain Irish poet has observed that all he ever learned of poetry he got from talking with peasants along the road. Whitman might have said almost as much, even of New York, the New York of seventy years ago. But what nourishment do they offer the receptive spirit to-day, the harassed, inhibited mob of our fellow-countrymen, eaten up with the “itch of ill-advised activity,” what encouragement to become anything but an automaton like themselves? And what direction, in such a society, does the instinct of emulation receive, that powerful instinct of adolescence? A certain visitor of Whitman’s has described him as living in a house “as cheerless as an ash-barrel,” a house indeed “like that in which a very destitute mechanic” might have lived. Is it not symbolic, that picture, of the esteem in which our democracy holds the poet? If to-day the man of many dollars is no longer the hero of the editorial page and the baccalaureate address, still, or rather more than ever, it is the “aggressive” type that overshadows every corner of our civilization; the intellectual man who has gone his own way and refused to flatter the majority was never less the hero or even the subject of intelligent interest; at best ignored, at worst (and usually) pointed out as a crank, he is only a “warning” to youth, which is exceedingly susceptible in these matters. But how can one begin to enumerate the elements in our society that contribute to form a selection constantly working against the survival of the creative type? By cutting off the sources that nourish it, by lending prestige to the acquisitive and destroying the glamour of the creative career, everything in America conspires to divert the spirit from its natural course, seizing upon the instincts of youth and turning them into a single narrow channel.

Here, of course, I touch upon the main fact of American history. That traditional drag, if one may so express it, in the direction of the practical, which has been the law of our civilization, would alone explain why our literature and art have never been more than half-hearted. To abandon the unpopular and unremunerative career of painting for the useful and lucrative career of invention must have seemed natural and inevitable to Robert Fulton and Samuel Morse. So strong is this racial compulsion, so feeble is the hold which Americans have upon ultimate values, that one can scarcely find to-day a scientist or a scholar who, for the sake of science or scholarship, will refuse an opportunity to become the money-gathering president of some insignificant university. Thus our intellectual life has always been ancillary to the life of business and organization: have we forgotten that the good Washington Irving himself, the father of American letters, thought it by no means beneath his dignity to serve as a sort of glorified press-agent for John Jacob Astor?

It is certainly true that none of these unfavourable factors of American life could have had such a baleful effect upon our literature if there had been others to counteract them. An aristocratic tradition, if we had ever had it, would have kept open among us the right of way of the free individual, would have preserved the claims of mere living. “It is curious to observe,” writes Nietzsche in one of his letters, “how any one who soon leaves the traditional highway in order to travel on his own proper path always has more or less the sense of being an exile, a condemned criminal, a fugitive from mankind.” If that is true in the old world, where society is so much more complex and offers the individual so much more latitude, how few could ever have had the strength in a society like ours, which has always placed such an enormous premium on conformity, to become and to remain themselves? Is it fanciful indeed to see in the famous “remorse” of Poe the traces left by this dereliction of the tribal law upon the unconscious mind of an artist of unique force and courage? Similarly, a tradition of voluntary poverty would have provided us with an escape from the importunities of bourgeois custom. But aside from the fact that even so simple a principle as this depends largely for its life on precedent (Whitman and the painter Ryder are almost alone among latter-day Americans in having discovered it for themselves), aside from the fact that to secede from the bourgeois system is, in America, to subject oneself to peculiar penalties (did it ever occur to Mark Twain that he _could_ be honourably poor?)--aside from all this, poverty in the new world is by no means the same thing as poverty in the old: one has only to think of Charles Lamb and all the riches that London freely gave him, all the public resources he had at his disposal, to appreciate the difference. With us poverty means in the end an almost inevitable intellectual starvation. Consider such a plaint as Sidney Lanier’s: “I could never describe to you” (he writes to Bayard Taylor) “what a mere drought and famine my life has been, as regards that multitude of matters which I fancy one absorbs when one is in an atmosphere of art, or when one is in conversational relationship with men of letters, with travellers, with persons who have either seen, or written, or done large things. Perhaps you know that, with us of the younger generation in the South since the war, pretty much the whole of life has been merely not dying.” That is what poverty means in America, poverty and isolation, for Lanier, whose talent, as we can see to-day, was hopelessly crippled by it, was mistaken if he supposed that there was anything peculiar to the South in that plight of his: it has been the plight of the sensitive man everywhere in America and at all times. Add to poverty the want of a society devoted to intellectual things and we have such a fate as Herman Melville’s in New York. “What he lacked,” wrote Mr. Frank Jewett Mather the other day, explaining the singular evaporation of Melville’s talent, “was possibly only health and nerve, but perhaps even more, companionship of a friendly, critical, understanding sort. In London, where he must have been hounded out of his corner, I can imagine Melville carrying the reflective vein to literary completion.” Truly Samuel Butler was right when he jotted down the following observation in his note-book: “America will have her geniuses, as every other country has, in fact she has already had one in Walt Whitman, but I do not think America is a good place in which to be a genius. A genius can never expect to have a good time anywhere, if he is a genuine article, but America is about the last place in which life will be endurable at all for an inspired writer of any kind.”

To such circumstances as these, I say, the weakness of our literary life is due. If we had lacked nothing else indeed, the lack of great leaders, of a strong and self-respecting literary guild, even of an enlightened publishing system would have sufficed to account for much of it. To consider the last point first: in the philosophy of American publishing, popularity has been regarded not only as a practical advantage but as a virtue as well. Thanks to the peculiar character of our democracy, our publishers have been able to persuade themselves that a book which fails to appeal to the ordinary citizen cannot be good on other grounds. Thus, if we had had to depend on the established system, the present revival in our letters, tentative as it is, would have been still more sadly handicapped. The history of Mr. Dreiser’s “Sister Carrie” is enough to suggest what may well have been the fate of many an incipient author less persistent than he. It is certain, in any case, that many another, at a critical moment, has drifted away from literature because of the lack in our publishing world of those opportunities for a semi-creative hack-work which have provided countless European writers with a foothold and even a guideway. The Grub Street of London and Paris is a purgatory, but as long as it exists, with its humble instrumentalities, translating, editing, reviewing, one can at least survive until one has either lost or found oneself: it scarcely needs to be pointed out that the American magazine, with its mechanical exactions, which levy such a terrible toll upon one’s individuality, is anything but an advantageous substitute. Till one has found oneself, the less one is subjected to such powerful, such essentially depolarizing influences, the better; the most mediocre institutions, if they enable one at the same time to maintain one’s contact with literature and to keep body and soul together, are as life is to death beside them. How many English writers owe their ultimate salvation to such trivial agencies as _T. P.’s Weekly_? In America, where nothing of the kind has existed until lately, or nothing adequate to the number of those who might have benefitted by it, the literary aspirant is lost unless his powers mature at once.

But the lack of great leaders, of a strong and self-respecting literary guild (the one results from the other)--is not this our chief misfortune? In the best of circumstances, and considering all the devils that beset the creative spirit, a strong impulse is scarcely enough to carry one through: one must feel not only that one is doing what one wishes to do but that what one is doing _matters_. If dozens of American writers have fallen by the wayside because they have met with insuperable obstacles, dozens of others have fallen, with all their gifts, because they have lost interest in their work, because they have ceased to “see the necessity” of it. This is just the point where the presence of a leader, of a local tradition, a school, a guild makes all the difference. “With the masters I converse,” writes Gauguin in his journal. “Their example fortifies me. When I am tempted to falter I blush before them.” If that could have been true of Gauguin, the “Wolf,” who walked by himself as few have walked, what shall we say of other men whose artistic integrity, whose faith in themselves, is exposed every day to the corroding influences of a third-rate civilization? It would be all very well if literature were merely a mode of “having a good time;” I am speaking of those, the real artists, who, with Nietzsche, make a distinction (illusory perhaps) between “happiness” and “work,” and I say that these men have always fed on the thought of greatness and on the propinquity of greatness. It was not for nothing that Turgeniev bore in his memory, as a talisman, the image of Pushkin; that Gorky, having seen Tolstoy once, sitting among the boulders on the seashore, felt everything in him blending in one happy thought, “I am not an orphan on the earth, so long as this man lives on it.” The presence of such men immeasurably raises the morale of the literary life: that is what Chekhov meant when he said, “I am afraid of Tolstoy’s death,” and is it not true that the whole contemporary literature of England has drawn virtue from Thomas Hardy? The sense that one is _working in a great line_: this, more than anything else perhaps, renews one’s confidence in the “quaint mania of passing one’s life wearing oneself out over words,” as Flaubert called it, in the still greater folly of pursuing one’s ego when everything in life combines to punish one for doing so. The successful pursuit of the ego is what makes literature; this requires not only a certain inner intensity but a certain courage, and it is doubtful whether, in any nation, any considerable number of men can summon up that courage and maintain it unless they have _seen the thing done_. The very notion that such a life is either possible or desirable, the notion that such a life exists even, can hardly occur to the rank and file: some individual has to start the ball rolling, some individual of extraordinary force and audacity, and where is that individual to be found in our modern American literature? Whitman is the unique instance, for Henry James, with all his admirable conscience, was at once an exile and a man of singularly low vitality; and Whitman was not only essentially of an earlier generation, he was an invalid who folded his hands in mid-career.

Of those others what can we say, those others whose gifts have fitted them to be our leaders? Mr. Howells once observed of the American drama of the last few decades that “mainly it has been gay as our prevalent mood is, mainly it has been honest, as our habit is, in cases where we believe we can afford it.” In this gently ironical pleasantry one seems to discern the true spirit of modern American letters. But it was Howells himself who, in order to arrive at the doctrine that “the more smiling aspects of life are the more American,” deliberately, as he has told us, and professed realist that he was, averted his eyes from the darker side of life. And Mark Twain suppressed his real beliefs about man and the universe. And Henry Adams refused to sponsor in public the novels that revealed what he considered to be the truth about American society. Thus spake Zarathustra: “There is no harsher misfortune in all the fate of man than when the mighty ones of earth are not also the most excellent.” At its very headwaters, as we see, this modern literature of ours has failed to flow clear: the creative impulse in these men, richly endowed as they were, was checked and compromised by too many other impulses, social and commercial. If one is to blame anything for this it is the immense insecurity of our life, which is due to its chaotic nature; for one is not entitled to expect greatness even of those who have the greatest gifts, and of these men Henry Adams was alone secure; of Howells and Mark Twain, Westerners as they were, it may be said that they were obliged to compromise, consciously or unconsciously, in order to gain a foothold in the only corner of the country where men could exist as writers at all. But if these men were unable to establish their independence (one has only to recall the notorious Gorky dinner in order to perceive the full ignominy of their position), what must one expect to find in the rank and file? Great men form a sort of wind shield behind which the rest of their profession are able to build up their own defences; they establish a right of way for the others; they command a respect for their profession, they arouse in the public a concern for it, an interest in it, from which the others benefit. As things are, the literary guild in America is not respected, nor does it respect itself. In “My Literary Passions” Howells, after saying that his early reading gave him no standing among other boys, observes: “I have since found that literature gives one no more certain station in the world of men’s activities, either idle or useful. We literary folk try to believe that it does, but that is all nonsense. At every period of life among boys or men we are accepted when they are at leisure and want to be amused, and at best we are tolerated rather than accepted.” Pathetic? Pusillanimous? Abject? Pathetic, I suppose. Imagine Maxim Gorky or Knut Hamsun or Bernard Shaw “trying to believe” that literature gives him a certain station in the world of men’s activities, conceiving for a moment that any activity could exceed his in dignity! Howells, we observe, conscientious craftsman as he was, instinctively shared, in regard to the significance of his vocation, the feeling of our pragmatic philosophers, who have been obliged to justify the intellectual life by showing how useful it is--not to mention Mr. R. W. Chambers, who has remarked that writers “are not held in excessive esteem by really busy people, the general idea being--which is usually true--that literature is a godsend to those unfitted for real work.” After this one can easily understand why our novelists take such pains to be mistaken for business men and succeed so admirably in their effort. One can easily understand why Jack London preferred the glory of his model ranch and his hygienic pigsties to the approval of his artistic conscience.