Chapter V

Every race and every nation that has ever existed has achieved its destiny only by selecting out of the many paths open to it, one path peculiar to itself and following that, acquiring thereby the singular virtue that is a particularity of that way of life, and of none other. The choice of such a path is never either a deliberate act of will on the part of a few individuals or of the great majority. It is due to the operation of climatic, social, and political factors influencing the capacity and environment of the race itself so that before we can say what any organised body of men can achieve, we have to take into consideration the place where they settle, the sort of work they are best fitted to perform, and the psychological possibilities inherent in the race itself. Thus we can say of the ancient Greeks that their special virtue was a new kind of intellectual agility, due to their position in a rocky and infertile peninsula, as small farmers and shipmen; while to the east and south lay older and more long-settled states which did not share the peculiar strain of adventurous daring and natural sentiment that the original Dorian settlers possessed. The Romans on the other hand, thanks to their genius for collective action, as well as the necessity that was imposed on them from the outset of conquering and ruling from fortified central hill-towns a more fertile valley-land divided between warring and highly-varied racial stocks, acquired early the virtues of discipline, loyalty, and legalism. The ancient Hebrews, on account of their position as nomads, no less than the constant proximity of the desert, together with the ever-present fear of external conquest, developed into a race of religious seers, prophets, and hard bargainers with the surrounding peoples, who displayed greater resources of material power, but less spiritual resource than they. Thus they acquired the mingled virtues of patience and far-seeing desire for justice, and tempered their will to the absolute to a higher degree than either Greeks or Romans. This method of seeing each people not as an abstraction, but a living force, taking and giving colour to its environment, could be applied with equal force to all modern nations.

Until we understand these psychological and ethical differences between nations, and are able to follow them from the highest historical event down to the daily life of the humblest individual, history is no more than a mere recital of names and dates. Waterloo, Trafalgar, Bunker Hill, Gettysburg, Tsushima and the Somme have no meaning unless we understand that behind every man and gun engaged there move the forces of unseen yet potent essences, swaying the result in their hands, now in one way, now in another. Homer was essentially right, artistically and philosophically, when he made his gods not only take an interest in the fortunes of the Trojan War upon earth, but also ready to take now one side, now the other, in that contest. It is of the nature of humanity to hold fast to that good which it realises to be necessary, in art as in life; and to seek to adjust both art and life to the most obvious reaction to necessity of the single soul, or of the body politic, under the underlying circumstances. Thus ethics and æsthetics are, psychologically speaking, essentially one and the same, and artistic or religious history is written fundamentally for a moral purpose. Even a Gibbon, despite his scepticism, was unable to avoid the moral implications of his theme in writing “The Decline and Fall.”

Our problem here is not to settle the sociological differences prevailing among the nations of Europe, but rather to examine the peculiar psychology which has throughout controlled the behaviour of the two great frontier states that at the end of the eighteenth century began to react upon Europe’s destiny, Russia and North America. What we shall have to say about North America here applies also in the same measure to South America, in its interaction upon the Latin-Mediterranean world; but in this respect it was North America that was the teacher, and the Declaration of Independence that the thirteen English-speaking colonies, which later formed the United States, signed in 1776, was followed and copied thereafter throughout the whole extent of both American continents. Both Russia and America, in its most extreme and characteristic national form of the United States, have existed long enough and have maintained, if not their complete independence, at least their aloofness long enough to have acquired psychological characteristics and virtues entirely different from anything that European nations can show us. But if we go to the pages of European historians, or even to European novelists, poets, and philosophers prepared to ask the question: “What is an American, a Russian? In what way do they differ from anything European or from each other?”, we by no means obtain a satisfactory answer. The only way we can deal with such a problem is by a direct envisagement first, of all of the countries of Europe itself, in so far as they have common characteristics; and second, of the conditions under which Russia and America came to be what they are.

Europe, psychologically speaking, is a great circle. The lower part of this circle--and since the downfall of Pagan Rome, the less creative, active and pioneering part--is coloured by the older Latin-Mediterranean civilisation, which thanks to its conquest of North Africa was able in antiquity to be the central force in European progress, but which lost this actuality after the seventh century, thanks to the uprise of Islam, and the renewed political power of the Germanic race. During the Middle Ages, the actually dominant force in Europe became the power of the northern half, and this Northern half has been controlled by two forces:--the boundless practical energy of the Teuton, the equally boundless intellectual curiosity of the Celt. If we follow these forces around the circumference of the circle which is Europe, through England, France, Spain, Italy, Austria, Hungary, Poland, Scandinavia, Scotland and Ireland till everywhere the boundaries merge with what is non-European,--be that either Moor or Turk or Lapp or Finn or Firbolg or Basque--we see that each European nation has grown up as a variation on the original Celtic-Teutonic-Latin chord; and that each has precisely what the other lacks, so that they complete each other. But this cannot be said of the great congeries of peoples that inhabit the Russian plain from the Baltic to the Black Sea. Here the original Slavonic--that is to say largely Scandinavian and East-European element--became overlaid with Tartar racial colour, to such an extent that only the intellectual top stratum, not the sentimental race-basis underneath, remained European. Nor can we define Northern America as fundamentally European, either. Apart from the Spanish influence, which so completely merged itself with the native Red Indian race and atmosphere as to become inseparable from it, we find that in America everywhere the original variations--such as French, Scottish, Scandinavian, English, Irish,--have tended not to remain distinct but to mingle with each other to such an extent that the result is a racial composite, continually becoming more and more flexible, which is solely united by common bonds of language and economic association, not of defined racial instinct. The result is that only the diminishing appeal of old sentimental association, not the fundamental present-day adjustment to the situation, makes the American something akin to the European. In order therefore to understand either America or Russia we have largely to dismiss Europe as a culturally fixed entity from our minds, and plunge into a wilderness of conflicting forces, guided only by the sense of historical movement and by our knowledge of the course that history has already taken, together with our instinct for soil and scenery and climate. When we arrive at the goals we are seeking, we will perhaps find that our most valuable tools will not after all be the fine pencil of the artist, but the plough of the economist, the axe of the social statistician.

2

The fundamental quality of the American took its origin at the outset from an overwhelming passion for land. The innumerable shiploads of people that have sped westward across the Atlantic from Columbus’ first voyage, down to the latest ocean liner, have sought to find land, to achieve land, to settle land, to overrun land, to subdue land. Even the Indian tribes that inhabited that interior before the white man came shared this feeling for land to a considerable extent. Most of them were nomads, practising little agriculture, and incapable of any lasting combination against the whites, because of their incurable habit of appropriating the hunting grounds of their neighbours. The most effective combinations, such as that of the Aztecs in Mexico or the Iroquois in the northwest, were very active despotisms, continually raiding the territory of weaker tribes and holding them to tribute. The whites, on attaining America, as they penetrated the interior, increasingly tended to drop their European powers of combination and to take on the nomadism and the local jealousies of the savage. One sees this in the eternal quarrels of the Spanish conquistadores over their spoil, no less than in the struggles of the separate colonies that preceded and continued throughout the Revolution, over the development of the western territory. The Revolution itself was less a war to put an end to British oppression than a successful attempt on the part of the colonial landholding aristocracy to attain to an indefinite expansion to the westward without British interference. It was directed by Washington who was himself one of the largest landowners of the period, and whose whole life was motivated by the passion for acquiring new land, notably in the Ohio region. From the Revolution through the Civil War and down to the fantastic scenes of the Florida land boom of a few years ago, the passion for land has been the motive force--one might almost say the virtue--of the great majority of Americans. For land spells to them security, and security means wealth, and wealth leads to power. The American race--if we can speak of such a thing--is a race of land-seizers and land-exploiters. The sinister prominence of the lawyer in American life, even on the frontier, from the beginning, was due to the innumerable wrangles about land-grants and land-claims. The entire subdual of the American continent by the whites, which took barely fifty years to accomplish, was accompanied by such a waste of the public domain as has been rarely paralleled in history. It is not for nothing that America has been referred to over and over again in the words of its orators and writers as “the land of promise,” “land of the Pilgrim’s pride,” “land of the free and home of the brave,” “the land of to-morrow.” One meets with something of the same sort for the first time in the glowing accounts of Columbus and the earliest Spanish explorers.

The sensation which inspired these accounts that in America one finds a fabulous and unexplored region of wealth, can still be experienced by almost anyone making a voyage westward across the Atlantic. Owing to the fact that the prevailing winds are westerly and that the Gulf Stream runs east, the journey to this day, even under modern steamer conditions, is frequently more rough and productive of discomfort than the passage from America to Europe. The westward coasts of Europe drop abruptly to the sea in great cliffs; the craggy coast of Cornwall, the sombre cliffs of Ireland, the great headlands of Portugal and Spain. Beyond that, there is nothing but waves and wind--wind always opposing further progress. And America does not make its presence known, until just before one reaches it. Two days before New York one encounters the Gulf Stream, that strange region of low-lying clouds, of heavy rain squalls, of intensely dark blue seas lifting and falling under crowns of heavy white foam. These seas are weedy, and the gulls become more frequent here, so that the whole has an effect of being a No Man’s Land of fantasy, a world before the creation gave bounds to chaos, a region where nothing is living except the ship. Then one comes out of the Gulf Stream into greyer, shoal water. All the rest of the way lies through shoals--long stretches of the sea more often shrouded in fog than shaken by storms, flat, unstirring, that invite one ever further and further onward. Europe is cut off, once and for all. The land--the unknown land--is taking possession of us. And the first thing one sees of this strange unknown region beyond Europe is a long empty sandbank, inviting one further still.

On the other hand, in travelling towards Russia, one has the impression that the land itself, like the ocean on the trans-Atlantic voyage, will never really come to an end. Long before one has finished rolling over the monotonous Polish plain, Europe is left behind. The endless distances, the sombre pine woods, the starveling villages, the scraggy fields, simply succeed one the other. Before such a landscape one has the fear of being cut off--of not being able ever to return to habitable scenes. Napoleon must have faced such a feeling when he hesitated on almost every stage of his journey to Moscow before going on; and even when one has gone on and crossed the frontier, the plain is still the same, the desolation and loneliness are only a little more intense. There is no Russia, nothing but a frightful distance of wilderness left behind which we must recross in order to find the social compactness of Europe. One is sick of land, sick of these endless horizons long before reaching Moscow, where at last one finds Russia. And when one reaches Russia at last, the mysterious face of the country is hidden behind the red walls of the Kremlin.

The passion for land then which made America what it is, is not the same passion that has made Russia what it is. Before the monotony of Russia the educated Russian shrugs his shoulders, the uneducated peasant spits. There is nothing here of the enthusiasm with which each American tells you excitedly that his is “God’s own country.” Nothing at all. The Russian is far more likely to assure you that his is “a dark people” living in “an unhappy country.” The passion that moves the Russian is at bottom something equally simple, and explicable, as the passion that moves the American. It has different psychological roots, and a different manifestation in form. But it isolates itself just as completely from Europe as the American identification of land and prosperity.

The Russian craves for power. This is comprehensible when one understands that Russia, with her enormous population, lay helpless and powerless under the Tartar invasion from the twelfth century till the sixteenth, when Ivan the Great and his successor, Ivan the Terrible, took the first steps towards independence, and consolidation. And even after that time, long after Russia had become a unified whole under the sole sway of Moscow, there were very few with power sufficient to keep this unity together. This is the true significance of the “time of troubles” that followed Ivan the Terrible’s end. His remaining legitimate son, a minor, was mentally incapable of rule; the choice of the leading nobles, Boris Godunov, was strong and capable, but could not prevail against the idea--rooted in the hearts of the people--that the power of the Czar should descend in unbroken succession from one anointed sovereign to the other. It was easy for a perfectly obscure man to impersonate the legitimate heir (who was actually dead), obtain Polish support, and finally by bargaining with the other nobles, who were jealous of Boris, make himself Czar. The subsequent history of the next twenty years reads like a nightmare. A succession of pretenders to the throne uprose, in each case giving out that they were sons, legitimate or illegitimate, of Ivan; and anarchy and disruption grew so rapidly that in the end in Moscow itself the nobles took two sides, now upholding one party, now the other. Only the intervention of the Church itself--at that time and for long later revered by the peasant and noble alike as being the one source of supernatural and united power,--saved the country’s independence, and allowed the Romanov line to ascend the throne. The same troubles broke out after Peter the Great’s reign. Having put his only legitimate heir to death, Peter announced that on each successive Czar after his time devolved the duty of naming his own successor. But he himself died before he did so. The result was a fresh series of impersonations, and more disorder, which rose to a climax in Catherine’s reign, in the peasant rebellion of Pugachev, a Cossack, who gave out that he was the legitimate Czar, the husband murdered by Catherine’s orders, and moreover gave names of well-known courtiers to his peasant officers.

Thus, for over two centuries and a half, from the time when Ivan the Great assumed the title of Czar of all the Russias at Moscow, down to the time of Peter the Great, the idea had grown and spread in the Russian mind that security, order, life and happiness itself were dependent on the maintenance of power. This power was spiritual in its essence; power to command and to be able to enforce one’s command. That explains why successive pretenders to the throne, after Peter the Great’s time, were at pains to have their cause blessed by some prominent prelate of the “Old Believers,” the anti-reform party which Peter himself had driven from the official Church, and which still persisted despite his edicts. It also explains why in every Russian house, before the Revolution, there was always to be found a shelf containing icons. It is not that the Russian is more superstitious than other people. It is simply because the saints are above all miracle-workers. They have, it is felt, supernatural powers. They and they alone can protect the sacred centre of the hearth from external disorder. After the Revolution, when the saints were shown to be powerless, the icons were taken down, and portraits of Lenin took their place. The Russian, whether peasant or noble, reactionary or revolutionary, seeks above all to command respect--and only the man with unlimited power can do this, in his eyes. The hero of Dostoevsky’s “Memoirs from the Underground” is illuminating in this respect. He is ready to reject the offer of any Utopia, unless he is given the liberty of “putting out his tongue at it,” and prefers to live in a hencoop instead. The American would make no such mistake. He would live loyally in the Utopia or the hencoop provided he were given a million dollars or its equivalent in steel-works, oil or water power leases.

It may perhaps be argued that the American of the present day has not the same passion for land-exploitation that his forbears had, but is apt, as in the above example, to lay stress on the importance of making money, of doing “big business.” This, however, is due less to any transformation of his original impulse than to the prevailing effect of the industrial system. Stocks, bonds, and factories have simply become substitutes for the broad acres of undeveloped fertility that his forefathers knew. Despite them, few Americans continue to live in the homes that their ancestors built. They are migrants, seeking something else. What they seek is a place where they can really feel at home, and this they cannot find without liberty and prosperity. Of that liberty and prosperity an individual domain is the actual symbol. It is not for nothing that so many wealthy Americans acquire old estates in Europe. Here they can for the first time feel that they are part of a settled land-tradition. They belong somewhere; they have a home, not simply a piece of soil only differentiated from the surrounding prairie by having a house on it. They are henceforth free to indulge their passion for possession to the utmost.

Power, then, means land, wealth, possessions to the American: to the Russian it means simply absolute and arbitrary freedom to do as he pleases. That is the psychological attitude that rules over the average man in both cases. The average American believes himself to be a product of “God’s own country” and only seeks an opportunity to prove it; the average Russian believes himself accursed by fate and thwarted by life, but is determined to make others respect his arbitrary whim. And the intellectuals only differ from the average by the degree to which they pursue these aims. It is impossible to show fully how this is so without anticipating matter that, properly speaking, belongs to another section of this study. We may however take two important and highly illuminating examples to illustrate our thesis.

3

Let us take the case of the completely uprooted Russian and the completely uprooted American. In such a case, if the obsession of the two minds were towards power and land as we have just stated, we should normally expect this obsession to be even more evident than it is in the case of the stay-at-homes. The nineteenth century provided two notable examples of this type, in the cases of Turgenev and Henry James. Here were two men of high intelligence and artistic capacity who spent their lives out of their respective countries. Since they were nearly contemporaries (though Turgenev was the elder) and moneyed men to boot, they practically came under the influence of the same type and period of European civilisation; and there is also a close kinship in their art, Turgenev having spent his life in refining upon the lyrical realism of Gogol, while Henry James spent his in refining upon the psychological realism of Hawthorne. Yet if we examine their careers there is nothing that presents a greater contrast.

The motive that guided Henry James was a search for a fatherland. He sought deliberately to build himself into the scheme of social relationships offered him by the country of his choice, which was England. In order to satisfy this passion for possessing a country, he set himself the task of assimilating the past of England, of which he knew little, and forgetting the past of America, of which he knew much. The result was that he fell into a cosmopolitanism which was neither English nor American; which was intensely artificial since it was the result not of the working of social, moral or religious factors, but of an æsthetic parasitism. Since James was a highly conscientious artist, he could not help making the most of this material, but its indecisiveness, its detachment from the cruder but more essential issues of life gradually sapped the source of the power with which he presented it. Even the common kinship of language which had perhaps chiefly appealed to him in taking up his residence in England, became a treacherous double-edged weapon, to be handled gingerly, rather than as an ally in this struggle. It has been said that Thomas Hardy once remarked sardonically that Henry James when he wrote about Washington Square wrote well, but that when he wrote about England, “did not know the difference between a rectory and a parish.” James himself probably felt this, and it explains his increasing apologeticalness, his increasing love of qualification, which makes his later style so much of a painful maze and puzzle. In the search for a country--a country that could never be totally his and yet must be made his--he sacrificed everything: vigour and directness, independence of judgment, breadth of vision, even his own life. The desire to become part of England became the ruling passion of Henry James’ life; it became so engrossing as to wipe out of his mind all earthly love affairs, and to assume the proportions of a grand passion, pursued with the ardor of a specialist. He attained his end, but only to die.

Turgenev did not go in this direction; he renewed by visits his own sense of the physical appearance, the psychological reality of Russia. But he sought just as persistently for some power greater than Russia to which he might give himself. Ardently believing in freedom, liberal in mind and in politics, he spent most of his life in revolt against the crudeness and crassness of the Russian world he had known; nor was he able to accept at its face value what the European State was ready to put into its place, as his pamphlet, “The Execution of Troppmann” bears witness. The only power, it seemed to him, was in the detached individual; and this drew the aristocratic landowner Turgenev towards the nihilists and the anarchists. He was the first to draw the portrait of a nihilist in his novel, “Fathers and Sons.” This conclusion too with its unsentimental realism, shocked Turgenev’s own conscience; with the result that he became the great portrayer of indecisive souls, of “superfluous men,” of hesitating, Hamlet-like, impotent characters to be found in the whole range of Russian literature. His complete erotic enslavement to the singer, Pauline Viardot, only increased this tendency. Here was a power that at least was greater than his. In his old age, in the “Dream-Tales” and “Poems in Prose,” Turgenev became a confirmed pessimist, feeling that all power lay totally beyond man’s grasp, in the divine indifference of nature and fate. Shortly after a final visit to Russia, during which he was applauded by the cosmopolitan literary salons, with their sentimental liberalism, but critically attacked by the most powerful Russian writers of his own generation, Turgenev died.

There are other points of parallelism between these two remarkable figures; such, for example, as the curious preference both displayed for female characters. But enough has been said to show that the power-land antithesis, which is here set down as the key to the Russian and American character persists even in the most refined, uprooted and highly subtle specimens of the race. If it persists in these, what must its strength be in the most native and elemental specimens? To find this question answered, the reader must turn to a later section of this study, where the antithesis will be more fully discussed in the works of Tolstoy and Whitman, Melville and Dostoevsky. Meanwhile it is sufficient to note once again that this antithesis is, in fact, a likeness. What the American and the Russian both seek is essentially freedom to do what they like--the freedom of which the American Jefferson wrote when he said the human being mostly wants to be let alone. The Russian seeks this freedom by means of attempting to despotically impose himself upon others; the American by means of acquiring the wealth or the estate that will enable him to set himself apart from his neighbours. The outer means only are different; the tendencies in their inner nature are essentially the same, springing as they do from an inner revolt against the modified “freedom in restraint” discovered and practised in Europe.

4

Before quitting this side of our subject it may be worth while to discuss one of the most notable examples of a revolter against this European “freedom in restraint” which America has produced. I refer not to Whitman, who indeed is an extreme though later and more logical example, but to Emerson. For Emerson was the pioneer in the path that Thoreau and Whitman later followed, and the more scholarly bent of his mind, together with the philosophical tinge he was able to throw over his doctrine, make of him a figure of supreme importance in American literature. There is no parallel to Emerson in Russian literature, no such single figure as he to paradoxically span the whole field of thought and give tone and direction to all that followed. For as he was on the one side pantheist mystic, upholding a contemplative ideal very different from the feverish pioneer effort on every side about him, so he was on the other side equally practical Yankee, foreshadowing the “practical truth” of the Pragmatists, and preferring activity to thought.

The basis of his doctrine might be described in these words from the longer of his two essays on “Nature”: “Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should we not have a poetry and philosophy out of insight, not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us?... The sun shines to-day also. There is more wool and flax in the fields. There are new lands, new men, new thoughts. Let us demand our own works and laws and worship.”

It must be noted that these “works and laws and worship” were all to be derived afresh from nature by the Americans who--by the simple accident of transporting themselves into a new and undeveloped country--were suddenly going to find them out for themselves, without external help from the past. Emerson’s own attitude towards the past is highly paradoxical. In one breath, he admits that the past contains much that is of value: Plato, and Jesus and other “representative men.” But in the next, he repudiates utterly the lesson of the past and declares the measure of history to be the ordinary man. Why? Because the Americans were individualist pioneers, and far from toning down their individualism, Emerson would make it still more acute. His chief ethical doctrine is self-reliance to the uttermost. And self-reliance to him meant in reality reliance on nature and external brute fact, as it must in every pioneer and rapidly-developing community. In other words, Emerson’s theory logically meant that the backwoodsman was equally if not more important to the scheme of things than the sage, the poet, and the scholar. It is true that Emerson tried to save his own position as one of the best read men in America, by positing in everyone’s breast a vague, mystical, and rather woolly “oversoul,” which at its appropriate time and place would bend down and whisper in the vulgarest being’s ear how much akin he was to Socrates or Marcus Aurelius. But this check on his favourite self-reliance is altogether the weakest and least important part of Emerson’s teaching and for its obscurantism deserves to be ranked along with the infantile mystery mongering of American pseudo-oriental cults and secret societies.

In his soberer moments, Emerson did indeed realize that there were two laws abroad in this world: the “law for man and the law for thing” and that while the “law for thing” had much the best of it, in practical affairs, it was destructive of human worth and dignity in the long run. But unfortunately, he never decided in his own mind whether to give his support to human dignity, or to the “law for thing” which was having its own way in the America of which he wrote. So he salved his conscience by supposing that nature would help his fellow-countrymen to find their own laws. But so far as nature is concerned, man is probably of less importance, certainly of far less permanence, than the tree that stands in the midst of the field and sucks its life strength directly from the bosom of the earth and the oceanic vastness of the air. But man comes and cuts down the tree to build himself a cabin, and when he has built it makes a law of a sort which nature never knew, to the effect that no one who crosses its threshold shall ever come armed to kill him, and that the woman who sleeps with him on its wolf-pelt bed for one night shall remain to serve him and his needs both night and day. That is the law for the man, and it goes on, whether the wind that rocked the tree, lays flat the cabin, or the earth that suckled it swallows it up. Yet Emerson fondly supposed that some wonderful new law could be made by simply transporting man out of a peasant’s cottage that had stood for centuries in Europe, and giving him a log hut in the wilderness. He flattered the vanity of the Americans, by telling them that their prosperous growth would not only develop the body but the soul. It was a false theory, doing incalculable harm.

Emerson’s philosophy was entirely a philosophy for pioneers and with the vanishing of the pioneer type its influence and the influence of the vague mystical land-hunger of the frontier--that marvellous realm where wonderful things were always to be done, but never accomplished--began to diminish in American life. Yet with its insistence on individual self-reliance and on possession, Emerson struck the keynote of the American philosophy of to-day with its “go-getter” shrewdness, its refrain of “getting as much as you can and giving as little as you can,” its assumption of superiority based on individual cunning, its vague and pernicious subsidiary hankering for what is mysterious and occult and esoteric, whereby its crudeness is leavened. All this America owes to one man, to Emerson, and it is obvious that we must forgive this man the enormous damage he did by recollecting continually, how just before his day, America had passed through the most inchoate period of her national development, a period of democratic chaos, out of which neither an intelligent institution nor an organized political state could have evolved had it not been for the conservative moneyed classes. Let us also remember that Emerson, in his private capacity, loved chiefly to appear as a scholar, in order to distinguish himself from the community; much as Tolstoy, in his desire to set himself apart, loved to pose as a peasant and wear birch-bark shoes.