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Another random document with
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 Nothing more clearly demonstrates the futility and disrepute of
criticism in this country than the constant surrenders to the prestige
of the foreigner. A cheap fashion in European literature has only to
be thrust with sufficient publicity upon the women’s literary clubs, and
parish meeting-houses, to ensnare the uneasy wearers of the
academic crown. Give them time and they will be found praising a
translated French poet for precisely those qualities which offend
them in the protégés of Miss Harriet Monroe. The young
Englishman, Rupert Brooke, might have contributed to “Poetry” for
ten years without securing any more recognition than did the
American, Robert Frost. But now both reputations, made in England,
are widely accepted, and the inevitable professor is found to tread
respectfully where Henry James rushed in. Compare the critical
essays which James wrote during a period of thirty years with the
stereotyped Bostonian theses of the men he left behind him. Yet
nobody will accuse James of a disregard for tradition.
The American word “standpatter” is curiously precise as a
designation of the species. The conservative critic in Europe,
Brunetière, for example, is never so purely negative as his
counterpart on this side of the Atlantic. When Brunetière adversely
criticized the Symbolist movement in French poetry he did so
intelligently, not in that laboriously facetious fashion which is affected
by the Stuart Shermans and W. H. Boyntons when they are moved
to discuss les jeunes. Brunetière, in a word, was a man of education
and culture, capable of defending rationally his own theories, without
suggesting that the unfamiliar was necessarily bad. He condemned
the excesses of the new school, not the school itself. If he had been
in America, he would have denied the Symbolists even the right to
exist. Edward Dowden might also be cited as a similar example, in
English literature, of enlightened conservatism. Dowden was partly
responsible for bringing Whitman to the favourable notice of the
English public, and his work stands as a proof that respect for the
classics does not involve hostility to the moderns. Just as he was
able to write a masterpiece of Shakespearean criticism without
retiring into hermitage, so he was qualified to appreciate original
genius when it presented itself. He was not paralyzed, in short, by
the weight of his literary traditions and conventions.
 A thousand and one reasons have been advanced to explain the
absence of a genuine American literature, and all of them are
probably true. The country is comparatively young, and its energies
have been, are still, directed chiefly towards the exploitation of
material resources and the conquest of natural difficulties. Racially
the nation is in an embryonic stage, and until some homogeneity is
attained the creation of a native tradition must be slow. Moreover, the
conflict of diverse races implies, in a broad sense, the clash of two or
more civilizations, one of which must impose its culture if any
organized progress is to be made. The language of the Hyphenated
States is English, but to what extent will the nation in being evolve in
accordance with this linguistic impulse? Will it be Anglo-Saxon,
Teutonic, Latin, or Slav? These are a few of the problems which
have a direct bearing upon the intellectual development of the
country. They must be solved before America can give her imprint to
the arts. They cannot be solved by the assumption that the Anglo-
Saxon hyphen is alone authentic. The permanent hypothesis of
Colonialism must be abandoned, if “Americanization” is ever to be
more than the silliest political cant. Puritanism must be confined to
the conventicles, to its natural habitat. It must not be allowed to
masquerade as art, philosophy, and statesmanship. The evangelical
tyranny exists elsewhere, but only in America has it invaded every
branch of the national life. In the more impatient and realistic
generation which has emerged from the world war this monstrous
extension of prohibitions is arousing a violent reaction. It is rare now
to find a young American who does not cry out against American
civilization.
To the disinterested European, this spectacle is an affecting
illustration of what may be called the enchantment of distance.
Evidently these disconsolate citizens imagine that there is a way of
escape from the Presbyterian wilderness, an oasis in the desert of
one hundred per cent. Americanism, where every prospect pleases
and man is only relatively vile. One listens to the intelligentsia,
rendered more than usually loquacious by generous potations of
unconstitutional Scotch whiskey, cursing the subtle blow to the arts
administered by the Volstead denial of the necessary ambrosia.
Advanced thinkers revelling in the delights of a well-organized
polygamy, have taken me aside to explain how the prophets of
Methodism have laid waste this fair land. I have read desperate
appeals to all young men of spirit to shake off the yoke of
evangelistic philistinism by expatriation to more urbane centres of
culture.
These are brave words, coming as they do, for the most part,
from those who are in no wise incommoded by the ukases of the
gospel-tent tyrants, and who have taken appropriate measures to
defeat the Eighteenth Amendment. Back of all their plaints is the
superstition that Europe is free from the blight which makes America
intolerable in their eyes. They do not know that the war has almost
destroyed the Europe of a civilized man’s affections. Socially,
politically, and intellectually that distracted continent is rapidly
expiring in the arms of profiteers and class-conscious proletarians,
who have decided between them to leave not a blade of culture
upstanding. The leisured class, which was rarely the wealthiest, is
being ground out of existence by the plutocracy and the proletariat.
That was the class which made the old Europe possible, yet there
are Americans who go on talking as if its extinction did not knock the
bottom out of their utopia. Most of these disgruntled Americans are
radicals, who strive to forward the designs of the plain people and
their advocates.
Yet, every European knows that if prohibition is making the
headway it surely is, the chief reason must be sought in the growth
of radicalism. From Bernard Shaw to Trotsky, our revolutionaries are
“dry.” Their avowed ideal is a state of society in which the
allurements of love are reduced to a eugenic operation, the
mellowing influences of liquor are abolished, and compulsory labour
on the Taylor efficiency plan of scientific management is substituted.
In fine, by the benign workings of democratic progress Europe is
moving steadily toward the state of affairs attributed here by
disillusioned intellectuals to the sinister machinations of Wall Street
and the evangelists.
No doubt America was a purer and happier place in 1620 than in
1920. No Sumner was needed to keep the eyes of the settlers from
the dimpled knees of Ziegfeld’s beauties, and the platitudes of the
Wilsonian epoch were the brightest flowers of wisdom in 1776. Alas!
that it should be so, and in every country of our Western World. If the
Magna Charta were to be offered for signature in London now, some
nasty Bolshevik would be sure to prove that the document was
drawn up in a private conclave of the international financiers. If
Lincoln were to make his Gettysburg speech to-day the world would
snicker irreverently, and a dreadfully superior person, with a
Cambridge accent (like John Maynard Keynes, C.B.), would publish
the “Economic Consequences of the Civil War,” full of sardonic gibes
at the innocent evangelism of Springfield. As for the Declaration of
Independence—well, during “the late unpleasantness” we saw what
happened to such un-American sedition-mongers. In fine, things are
not what they used to be; we pine for what is not, and so forth. Of
this only we may be sure, that America corresponds neither more
nor less than any other country to the dreams of its ancestors.
Indeed, to be more affirmative in this plea for America, it is
probable that this country has followed more closely the intentions of
its founders than the critics will admit. Unlike most European nations,
the Americans have preserved, with an almost incomprehensible
reverence, the constitution laid down to meet conditions entirely
unlike those of the 20th century. Ancestor worship is the cardinal
virtue of America and surpasses that of China and Japan, where
revolutionary changes have been made in the whole social and
political structure. America was created as a political democracy for
the benefit of staunch individualists, and both these ends have been
achieved to perfection. Everything against which the super-sensitive
revolt has come about planmaessig, and existed in the germ from
the day when the Pilgrim Fathers first brought the blessings of
Anglo-Saxon civilization to the shores of Cape Cod.
In the South alone were traces of a Weltanschauung which might
have given an impulse in another direction, but the South went
under, in obedience to the rules of democratic Darwinism. Once the
dissatisfied American can bring himself to look the facts of his own
history and of contemporary Europe in the face, he may be forced to
relent. He will grant, at least, that it is useless to cherish the notion
that the ills the American mind is heir to are spared to other peoples.
He may even come to recognize the positive virtues of this country,
where the stories in the Saturday Evening Post actually come true.
Here a man can look his neighbour straight in the eye and subscribe
—without a smile—to the romantic credo that all men are equal, in
so far as it is possible by energy, hard work, and regular attendance
at divine service, to reach the highest post in any career. Class
barriers are almost unknown, and on all sides there is an endlessly
generous desire to learn, to help, and to encourage. The traditional
boy can still arrive from the slums of Europe and finish up in the
editorial chair of a wealthy newspaper. If he ever fails to do so it can
only be because he starts by reading the Liberator, and devotes to
the deciphering of Thorstein Veblen’s hieroglyphics of socialism the
time which should have been given to mastering the more profitable
technique of Americanism.
Ernest Boyd
 III. AS AN ITALIAN SEES IT
IN a typical form of primitive society, where institutions and ideals,
collective representations and individual reactions, coincide, no
distinction can be made between culture and civilization. Every element
of the practical culture is a spiritual symbol, and there is no other logic
or reason than that which is made manifest by the structure and habits
of the social group. Life is a religion, in the two meanings of the word,
that of a binding together of men, and the deeper one—of gathering the
manifold activities of the individual in one compact spiritual mass. The
mythical concepts, which limit and integrate the data of experience, in a
sphere which is neither purely imaginative nor purely intellectual,
present to the individual mind as irresistibly as to the mind of the group,
a world of complementary objects which are of the same stuff as the
apprehended data. Thought—practical, æsthetic, ethical—is still
undifferentiated, unindividualized, as if a collective mind were an active
reality, a gigantic, obscure, coherent personality, entering into definite
relations with a world homogeneous with itself.
Such an abstract, ideal scheme of the life of the human spirit before
it has any history, before it is even capable of history, affords, in its
hypothetical indistinction (within the group, within the individual), a
prefiguration of a certain higher relationship of culture with civilization,
of a humana civilitas, in which the practical should be related to the
spiritual, nature to the mind, in the full light of consciousness, with a
perfect awareness of the processes of distinction and individualization.
In the twilight and perspective of historical knowledge, if not in their
actuality, Greece before Socrates, Rome before Christ, the Middle
Ages before Saint Francis (each of them, before the apparition of the
disrupting and illuminating element of growth), are successive attempts
or étapes towards the creation of a civilization of such a kind—a human
civilization.
Between these two limits—the primitive and the human—the ideal
beginning and the ideal end—we can recognize, at any given moment
in history, through the segmentation and aggregation of a multitude of
cultures, different ages and strata of culture coexisting in the same
social group; and the individual mind emerges at the confluence of the
practical cultures, with science and philosophy and the ethical, non-
tribal ideals, germs and initia, of the human civilization remaining above
the given society as a soul that never entirely vivifies its own body.
History begins where first the distinction between civilization and
culture appears, or, to state the same fact from a different angle, where
individual consciousness is born. It ends, ideally, where the same
distinction fades away into Utopia, or death, or the Kingdom of Heaven;
where the highest form of individual consciousness is at no point higher
than the consciousness of the group from which it originally
differentiated itself.

* * * * *
The writer of these pages belongs, by birth, education, and
election, to the civilization of Rome and to the culture, or cultures, of
Italy. The civilization of Rome, the latina civilitas, is a complex mind,
whose successive phases of growth are the abstract humanism of
ancient Greece, the civic and legal humanism of Rome, the moral and
spiritual humanism of the Latin church, the æsthetic and metaphysical
humanism of the Renaissance. Each phase is an integration of the
preceding one and the acquisition of a new universal principle, made
independent of the particular social body in which it has partially
realized itself before becoming a pure, intelligible ideal, an essential
element of the human mind. The first three phases, Greece, Rome, and
the Church, are still more or less closely associated, in relation to the
forms of humanism which are peculiar to each of them, with particular
cultures. But the last one, which, in its progress from the 13th century
to our days, has been assimilating, purifying, and clarifying all the
preceding ones, does not, at any given moment, directly connect itself
with any definite social body. In its inception, as a purely Italian
Renaissance, it may appear as the spiritual form of Italian society from
the 13th to the 15th century; but its apparition coincides with the natural
growth of the several, sharply defined European nationalities, and very
soon (and apart from the evident insufficiency of any individual nation
to fulfil its spiritual exigencies) it manifests its intrinsic character of
universality by overflowing the frontiers of Italy and becoming the law of
the whole Western European world.
The history of Europe during the last six centuries is the history of
the gradual penetration of that idea within the circle of the passively or
actively resistant, or inert, local, national cultures. The Reformation, of
all active resistances, is the strongest and most important. The
Germanic tribes rebel against the law of Rome, because a delay of
from five to ten centuries in the experience of Christianity, and an
experience of Christianity to be made not on a Græco-Roman, but on
an Odinic background, create in them the spiritual need of an
independent elaboration of the same universal principles. Germany is
practically untouched by the spirit of the Renaissance until the 18th
century, and Italy herself is for two centuries reduced to spiritual and
political servitude by the superior material strength which accompanies
and sustains the spiritual development of the nations of the North.
Through the whole continent, within the single national units, as well as
between nation and nation, the contrast and collaboration of the
Romanic and Germanic elements, of Renaissance and Reformation, is
the actual dialectic of the development of European civilization: of the
successive approximations of the single cultures, or groups of cultures,
in a multitude of more or less divergent directions, with alternating
accelerations and involutions, towards the common form, the humana
civilitas.

* * * * *
Of all the nations of Europe, Italy is the only one that, however
contingently and imperfectly, has actually realized all of the four phases
of humanism in a succession of historical cultures: Magna Græcia, the
Roman Empire, the Catholic Church, the Renaissance. And as each of
these successive cultures was trying to embody in itself a universal, not
a particular, principle, nationality in Italy is not, as for other nations, the
acceptance of certain spiritual limits elaborated from within the social
body, but a reaction to the pressure of adjoining nationalities, which
presented themselves as obstacles and impediments, even within the
life of Italy herself, to the realization of a super-national principle. This is
the process through which the humanism of the Renaissance, after
having received its abstract political form at the hands of the thinkers
and soldiers of the French Revolution, becomes active and militant in
Mazzini’s principle of nationality, which is a heroic effort towards the
utilization of the natural growth of European nations for the purposes of
a universal civilization.
The distance between that civilization and the actual cultures of the
nations of Europe can easily be measured by the observer of European
events during the last seven years. To that civilization belong the ideals,
to those cultures, the realities, of the Great War. And all of us who have
thought and fought in it have souls which are irremediably divided
between that civilization and those cultures. If we should limit ourselves
to the consideration of present facts and conditions, we might well give
way to despair: not for a good many years in the past have nationalities
been so impervious to the voice of the common spirit as they are in
Europe to-day. And the sharp contrast between ideals and realities
which has been made visible even to the blind by the consequences of
the war, has engendered a temper of violence and cynicism even
among those rare men and parties who succeeded in keeping their
ideals au dessus de la mêlée, and therefore did not put them to the
destructive test of a promise which had to be broken.
The moral problem which every nation of Europe will have to labour
at in the immediate future, is that of the relations of its historical culture
or cultures with the exigencies of the humana civilitas. It is the problem
that presents itself more or less dimly to the most earnest and
thoughtful of Europeans, when they speak of the coming “death of our
civilization,” or of the “salvaging of civilization.” To many of them, it is
still a problem of institutions and technologies: its essentially spiritual
quality does not seem to have been thoroughly grasped as yet. But it is
also the problem that confronts, less tragically, with less urgency, but
not less inevitably, this great European Commonwealth which has
created its own life on the North American continent for the space of
the last three centuries.

* * * * *
This European Commonwealth of America owes its origin to a
small number of adventurers and pilgrims, who brought the seeds of
English culture to the new world. Let us very rapidly attempt a
characterization of that original culture.
 England holds as peculiar and distinctive a position among the
nations of Europe as Italy. She is the meeting-point of the Romanic and
Germanic elements in European history; and if her culture may appear
as belonging to the family of mediterranean cultures (to what we have
called the latina civilitas), to an English Catholic, like Cardinal Newman,
there was a time, and not very remote, when the Protestant could be
proud of its Teutonic associations. From a Catholic and Franco-Norman
mediæval England, logically emerges, by a process similar to that
exemplified by Italy and France and Spain, the England of Henry VIII
and Elizabeth, of Shakespeare and the Cavaliers: Renaissance
England. She flourishes between the suppression of the monasteries
and the suppression of the theatres. She moulds, for all centuries to
come, the æsthetic and political mind of the English people. But she
carries the germs of a widely different culture in her womb: she borrows
from them, already during the Elizabethan age, some traits that
differentiate her from all other Renaissance cultures. And these germs,
slowly gaining impetus through contrast and suppression, ultimately
work her overthrow with the short-lived triumph of Cromwell and the
Puritans.
After 1688, the law of English life is a compromise between Puritan
and Cavalier, between Renaissance and Reformation, which sends the
extreme representatives of each type out of the country, builders of an
Empire of adventurers and pilgrims—while at home the moderate
Cavalier, and the moderate Puritan, the Tory and the Whig, establish a
Republic with a King, and a Parliamentary feudal régime. But the
successive stages of English culture do not interest us at this point,
except in so far as America has always remained closer to England
than to any other European nation, and has again and again relived in
her own life the social, political, spiritual experiences of the Mother
Country.
It is from the two main directions of English spiritual life that
America, through a double process of segmentation, Elizabethan or
Cavalier in the South, Puritan in the North, draws the origins of her own
life. It is in the Cavalier and the Puritan, still within the circle of English
life, that the germs of American culture must be sought. The peculiar
relations of the Cavalier and the Puritan to the general design of
European civilization define the original attitude of this Commonwealth
beyond the sea towards the other European cultures, and are the
origins of the curves which, modified in their development by the
addition of new elements and by the action of a new, distinctive
environment, American culture has described and will describe in the
future.

* * * * *
Puritanism is essentially a culture and not a civilization. The Puritan
mind, in its quest for an original Christian experience, falls upon the Old
Testament and the Ancient Law. The God of the tribes of Israel
becomes its God, a God finding a complete expression in the law that
rules his chosen people. A compact, immovable spiritual logic, a set of
fixed standards, a rhetoric of the virtues, the identification of any
element of growth and change with the power of evil, a dualistic
morality, and the consequent negation of a spiritually free will, these are
the characteristics of Puritanism, constituting at the same time, and
with the same elements, a system of truth and a system of conduct. In
both the meanings in which we have used the word religion at the
beginning of this essay, Puritanism is a perfect, final religion.
Transplanted to America when Europe was slowly becoming conscious
of the metaphysical implications of the destruction of the old
Cosmology—when the discovery of an infinite universe was depriving a
purely transcendent divinity of the place it had been given beyond the
limits of a finite universe—the infinite universe itself being manifest, in
the words of Bruno, as lo specchio della infinita deità,—it gave birth to
an intrinsically static culture, standing out against a background of
transcendental thought.
The principles of growth in Puritanism were not specifically Puritan:
they were those universal values that Puritan discipline succeeded in
rediscovering because every moral discipline, however fettered by its
premises, will inevitably be led towards them. Quite recently, a sincere
and ardent apologist of Puritanism recognized in a document which he
considers as the highest expression of that culture in America, a
paraphrase of the Roman dulce et decorum. The irrationality which
breaks through the most hermetically closed system of logic, in the
process of life, asserts itself by extracting from a narrowly institutional
religion values which are not dependent upon a particular set of
institutions, nor are valid for one people only. But we might detect the
germs of that irrationality already in the very beginnings of the system,
when Milton adds the whole weight of the Roman tradition to the
Puritan conception of democracy—or in the divine words of the
Gospels, through which in all times and places every anima naturaliter
christiana will hear the cry of Love rebelling against the letter of the
Ancient Law.
What the Cavalier brought to America, we should have to
investigate only if we were tracing the history of divergent directions, of
local cultures: because the original soul of America is undoubtedly the
Puritanic soul of New England, and the South, even before the War of
Secession, in relation to the main direction, to the general culture, has
a merely episodical significance. Yet, though the founders of New
England were only Puritans, certain traits of the Cavalier spirit, the
adventurer in the pilgrim, will inevitably reappear in their descendants,
repeating the original dichotomy in the generations issuing from an
apparently pure stock: partly, because a difference in beliefs is not
always the mark of a fundamental difference in temperaments, and
partly because those traits correspond to some of the generally human
impulses suppressed by the choice of the Puritan.
There is one element which is common to Puritan and Cavalier in
America, and which cannot be said to belong in precisely the same
fashion to their ancestors in England. It is, in England and the rest of
Europe, a mythology formed by similar hopes and desires, by a similar
necessity of giving an imaginary body to certain thoughts and
aspirations, on the part of the spirit of the Renaissance as well as of the
spirit of the Reformation: a mythology which, in the mind of the
European during the centuries between the discovery of America and
the French Revolution, inhabits such regions as the island of Utopia,
the city of the Sun, and the continent of America. In that mythology,
Utopism and American exoticism coincide. But the adventurer and the
pilgrim were actually and firmly setting their feet on one of the lands
mapped in that purely ideal geography, and thoughts and aspirations
confined by the European to the continent of dreams, became the
moral exigencies of the new Commonwealth. Thus America set herself
against Europe as the ideal against the real, the land of the free, and
the refuge of the oppressed; and was confirmed in such a position by
her natural opportunities, by the conditions of pioneer life, by contrast to
European despotism—finally, by the Revolution and the Constitution, in
which she felt that the initial moral exigencies were ultimately fulfilled. It
is to this myth of a Promised Land, which is neither strictly Puritan nor
strictly Cavalier, and yet at times seems to coincide with the less static
aspects of Puritanism, that a peculiarly American idealism,
unconquerable by defeat and even by the evidence of facts, abstract,
self-confident, energetic, youthful and optimistic, owes its strength and
its courage: an idealism which is hardly conscious of what Europe has
been taught by centuries of dire experience—the irreparable
contingency and imperfection of history; and which believes, as firmly
as the Puritan legislator believes it, that such institutions have been
devised, or can be devised, through which the ideal law, when thought
out and written, will not fail to become the law of reality for all times to
come.
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