that of any other modern people it is almost as if we had to resort to a miracle to explain causes. It is as if the boy overnight had been touched by the magician's wand and awakes a man, a giant in force and intellect, and yet with all the vital enthusiasm of youth, who is conscious of his strength and who has the stripling's contempt for age. Men sneer at his juvenescence and think it surprising that he is still so crude, and wonder when, if ever, he will emerge from adolescence and arrive at the dignity of man's estate, and yet they stand amazed at his power and his mind. He defies every tradition, the wisdom of his elders he laughs at and becomes a law unto himself, the fallacy of theory he joyously mocks, and with it all he grows stronger, better, spiritually more exalted. The same difficulty that confronted Bagehot meets me, but in a much greater degree. There is great difficulty, he says, in the way of a writer who attempts to sketch a living Constitution — a Constitution that is an actual work and power. The difficulty is that the subject is in constant change. If this is so in the case of a Constitution, how much more so must it be when a study is made of a civilization that is still in a state of flux, that is constantly being moulded to receive new impressions? A contemporary writer, Bagehot says, who tries to paint what is before him is puzzled and perplexed; what he sees is changing daily.1 In America this change 1 Bagehot: The English Constitution, pp. 1-2. is perpetual. I have watched it in the few years that have elapsed since I began this study; it has caused me more than once to revise my judgment. America, says Bryce, changes so fast that every few years a new crop of books is needed to describe the new face which things have put on, the new problems that have appeared, the new idea germinating among her people, the new and unexpected developments for evil as well as for good of which her established institutions have been found capable.1 With equal force Reich has pointed out the perplexities one encounters at every turn. But suppose we wish, he says, to investigate a question of national psychology, we have no laboratory to appeal to; we must seek sense impressions in the world abroad. In order to comprehend the characteristics of one's own nation, we must subject it to a scrutinizing comparison with other nations. How difficult is this comparison to make. How few have even the opportunity of making it. It implies a long sojourn in foreign countries of a person endowed with keen and critical faculties of observation, and a mastery of the literature and language of those countries. These are the essentials, and how rarely are they fulfilled. But without comparison after this manner there can be no real advance.2 When Europeans, and not alone Europeans but 1 Bryce: The American Commonwealth, vol. i, p. 2. many Americans also, deplore the crudeness of American civilization and become despondent because America has not yet produced a Leonardo da Vinci, a Wren, a Shakespeare, a Mozart, and pronounce their obiter dicta that America is deaf to the higher voices, they forget that Europe has a heritage of a thousand years and America but a hundred; that men are the product of their soil and their environment, and art is born not in the stress of commercialism, but comes later. History has served us to no purpose if we do not recognize this. Art is the expression of luxury and fashion and idleness, of a certain form of voluptuousness; it flourishes best where there is a Mæcenas and his order to give to it the approval of their patronage; or it is the expression of religion; or it is the soul cry of a people despairing of the present and hopeless of the future. In the beginning art was the symbolism of religion or superstition; later it lost its original meaning and became conventionalized, and then commercialized. In America there is great luxury, fashion peculiar to American conditions, but little idleness; voluptuousness as a national quality does not exist; of religion there is much, but it does not take the form that inspired the Greeks and the cathedral builders of mediæval Europe; the American people instead of despairing face the problems of the present and the unknown questions of the future with supreme self-reliance. In a word, their national vitality is too high for them yet to have reached that stage when imagination makes a greater appeal than action. The artistic temperament and the strenuous, masterful, almost brutal qualities of the man of action do not reside in the same body. Almost universally the men who have sung their songs of incomparable beauty, "too wise to be wholly poets and yet too surely poets to be implacably wise," in whom Weltschmerz has colored their whole vision of life, have shrunk from the rough contact of the world and hated the very thought of strife. If we have read history aright, if we do not confuse causes with effects or underestimate the forces that produced such momentous results, one conclusion is ineluctable. No race has ever given proof of a high order of mental attainments until after it has enjoyed a long period of great material prosperity. Art and literature are not born in the dregs of national poverty; no people struggling for a bare existence and content with food or raiment enough merely to keep themselves alive have given birth to the deathless voice of the bard. After the struggle for existence has been won there comes the desire for comfort, and then follows luxury; and what is luxury but the appeal to the senses, the gratification of the body or the delight of the mind, the enjoyment of the sensual or the quickening of the emotions aroused by music or art or poetry? But it will be said that the poets whose songs are in the hearts of the people have been of the people; that it was suffering and poverty and great compassion that made them articulate; that it was their protest against wrongs too great to be silently endured; that it was only because they knew the hopeless misery of the downtrodden that they were able to voice it; that prosperity would have made them content and dumb; which is much like saying that the world has been deprived of its great poets because there are so many successful greengrocers. The greater the wealth of a people, whether a community or a nation, the greater its poverty, so far apart are the two ends of the social scale, so far apart must they be when wealth is the reward of individual endeavor or is dependent upon audacity, courage, industry, or an intuitive sense of possibilities. Among a people where the dead level of conditions exists there is, it is true, no sense of social injustice because all are practically equal, but there is also no stimulus; there is no Promethean voice to flame, no heart to be touched. If it is true that the poets of the people have been of the people and it is a generalization to be accepted only with the respect due to all generalizations we now see why; we now see why there can be no great poets when life flows placidly like a stream in which there is not even a rock to add the variety of a ripple to its dull monotony or momentarily to reflect the sun's glint. Out of the depths of his soul man voices his faith |