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LETTERS AND LEADERSHIP 
 
By the same author: 
 
 America's Coming-of-Age 
 
 The World of H. G. Wells 
 
 The Malady of the Ideal 
 Essays on Amiel, etc. 
 
 The Wine of the Puritans: 
 A Study of Present-Day Anaerica 
 
 John Addington Symonds: 
 A Biographical Study 
 
LETTERS AND 
 LEADERSHIP 
 
 BY 
 
 VAN WYCK BROOKS 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 B. W. HUEBSCH 
 
 MCMXVIII 
 
COPYRIGHT, 1918, BT 
 B. W. HUBBSCH 
 
 PRINTED IN U. S. A. 
 
It is curious to me that while so miny voices, pens, 
 minds, in the press, lecture-rooms, in our Congress, 
 etc., are discussing intellectual topics, pecuniary dan- 
 gers, legislative problems, the suffrage, tariff and la- 
 bor questions, and the various business and benevolent 
 needs of America, with propositions, remedies, often 
 worth deep attention, there is one need, a hiatus the 
 profoundest, that no eye seems to perceive, no voice 
 to state. Our fundamental want to-day in the United 
 States, with closest, amplest reference to present con- 
 ditions, and to the future, is of a class, and the clear 
 idea of a class, of native authors,' literatuses, . . . 
 permeating the whole mass of American mentality, 
 taste, belief, breathing into it a new breath of life, 
 giving it decision, affecting politics far more than the 
 popular superficial suffrage, with results inside and 
 underneath the elections of Presidents or Congresses 
 — radiating, begetting appropriate teachers schools, 
 manners, and as its grandest result accomplishing . . . 
 a religious and moral character beneath the political 
 and productive and intellectual bases of the States. 
 , . . View'd to-day, from a point of view sufficiently 
 over-arching, the problem of humanity all over the 
 civilized world is social and religious, and is to be 
 finally met and treated by literature. 
 
 — Whitman, Democratic Vistas. 
 
PREFACE 
 
 M. Pierre de Lanux's Young France and 
 New America will for the first time bring to 
 the attention of a large class in this country a 
 certain question over which our own writers 
 have long been meditating, without being able 
 to arrive at very definite conclusions. 
 
 M. de Lanux is the ambassador of a group 
 of ideas and tendencies, in their infancy before 
 the war, and still at the awkward age where 
 they have to be loved a little before they can 
 be understood at all. He has in mind, if I 
 am not mistaken, a sort of conquest of the world 
 carried out by the common action of the young 
 people of all nations. Conquest, I say; I mean 
 rather the sloughing of the old skin of so- 
 ciety, the conscious and deliberate formulation 
 of a new way of living, a new way of seeing 
 life and arranging its conditions. Let us say 
 
 vii 
 
viii PREFACE 
 
 that industrialism has developed among the na- 
 tions a certain community of experience, and 
 that this community of experience has in turn 
 given birth to certain universal desires, emo- 
 tions, hopes, ideas, and plai^ universal, yes, 
 even because of the war. Well, M. de Lanux 
 constantly touches upon this group of desires, 
 emotions, hopes, ideas, and plans. The writ- 
 ers from whom he quotes, the leaders of the 
 young French intellectual class during the 
 twentieth century, have ardently expressed per- 
 haps the greater part of them. Is it necessary 
 to mention Verhaeren, for example, a "good 
 European" if there ever wa^s-tme, the spokes- 
 man of modern humanity? And behind Ver- 
 haeren there is Whitman, whose influence on 
 the French literature of to-day, M. de Lanux 
 says, may well be called decisive. What do 
 they portend, these writers, if it is not a height- 
 ened common consciousness in all who are still 
 young enougSln spirit to harbor generous hopes 
 for civilization, a common aim leading them 
 
PREFACE ix 
 
 to struggle for a world that is able to keep and 
 use the whole of its creative energy? 
 
 I do not mean that M. de Lanux develops 
 this general thesis. But it is, I believe, the 
 matrix of his argument. And it implies that 
 if we are to develop this common aim, if we are 
 to unite in this common programme, it is of the 
 highest importance for us to understand the 
 unique conditions that hamper the creative life 
 in each individual country. What we want is 
 the fullest and the freest expression of every 
 people along the lines of its own genius, for it 
 is of the nature of the creative spirit that its 
 manifestations cannot conflict with one another 
 and that the more various they are the richer 
 and the more harmonious life becomes. That 
 is why M. de Lanux, in selecting certain of our 
 writers to translate into French, says that the 
 more genuinely American they are the more 
 France will be inclined to welcome them. 
 
 Now, there is something so disinterested and 
 so beneficent in the French spirit and we feel 
 
X PREFACE 
 
 so keenly our debt to it at the present time that 
 we are much more disposed to be virtuous for 
 France's sake than for the beautiful eyes of 
 virtue itself. If, then, M. de Lanux tells us 
 that his countrymen are certain to rejoice in 
 the work of Vachel Lindsay, whose "muse es- 
 sentially belongs to Springfield, Illinois, and 
 knows no other shores," adding that "that is 
 precisely why we shall be glad to welcome her," 
 is it not the simplest of all deductions that we 
 ought to set to work immediately producing as 
 many poets as the homely muse of America can 
 be induced to yield? I say this lightly because 
 I want to take advantage of the present French 
 alliance that apparently appeals so strongly to 
 the common sense of the average American of 
 the dominant class. In point of fact, of course, 
 it implies a complete reorientation of American 
 life. This of itself the average American of 
 the dominant class could never be brought to 
 contemplate. But how far would he not be 
 reconciled to it if he were obliged to see that 
 
PREFACE xi 
 
 it is merely the logical outcome of his own 
 loyalties in the war and that the more closely 
 he draws to any of the societies of Europe the 
 more he will have to surrender the baser ele- 
 ments of his own Americanism? 
 
 We speak of the obligations the war has laid 
 upon us. Have we in fact begun to realize 
 how grave they are? We say that the time has 
 come for us to play our part among the societies 
 of the world. But has it occurred to us that 
 this means infinitely more than "men, money, 
 and ships," that it requires nothing less than 
 a mobilization of new, characteristic, and unique 
 forces for the universal contest between dark- 
 ness and light? Let us say that, thanks largely 
 to our isolation, the spirit of our life in the past 
 has been innocent of many of those baser ele- 
 ments in European life that produced the war. 
 Let us say this, if we find it comforting, for it 
 is true. But what have we to put beside those 
 finer elements in European life that the war 
 has not been able to destroy and that are even 
 
xii PREFACE 
 
 now giving birth to whatever the ruture seems 
 to hold of promise for the human spirit? A 
 great deal, I should say, but little indeed in 
 presentable form. That is what enables our 
 unkinder critics to assert, with a certain air of 
 plausibility, that we really have nothing at all. 
 Frankly, with full recognition of the facts 
 of historic necessity, what is the present aspect 
 of our American life? We have been a primi- 
 tive people, faced with an all but impossible 
 task. But is it not abundantly evident now 
 that we have accomplished this task and that 
 most of the customs we developed in the process 
 of meeting it have long since passed into the 
 limbo of "good customs that corrupt the 
 world"? The struggle that has hitherto en- 
 gaged us has been a struggle not between the 
 more creative and the less creative in man, but 
 between man and nature, and the impulse that 
 has determined it has come not from the pres- 
 sure of humane desires within, but from the 
 existence, the allure, and the eventual decay of 
 
PREFACE xiii 
 
 material opportunities outside. How shall one 
 characterize the social result of that contest, that 
 necessary contest, fraught with so much bitter- 
 ness which we have cloaked in optimism in or- 
 der to be able to endure it at all? The fierce, 
 rudimentary mass-mind of America, like that 
 of some inchoate primeval monster, relentlessly 
 concentrated in the appetite of the moment, 
 knows nothing of its own vast, inert, nerveless 
 body, encrusted with parasites. One looks out 
 to-day over the immense vista of our society, 
 stretching westward in a succession of dreary 
 steppes, and one realizes what it means to 
 possess no cultural tradition filling in the in- 
 terstices of energy and maintaining a steady 
 current of life over and above the ebb and flow 
 of individual purposes, of individual destinies ! 
 Our life is like a badly motivated novel, full 
 of genius but written with an eye to quick re- 
 turns, a novel that possesses no leading theme 
 and alternates in style between journalese and 
 purple patches, while every character goes its 
 
xiv PREFACE 
 
 own arbitrary way, failing of its full effect. 
 We are a population at sixes and sevens, hold- 
 ing among all classes and at all levels of de- 
 velopment scarcely any common conviction 
 save one, that "the essential preoccupation of 
 youth," as one of our admired novelists put it 
 the other day, is "organizing a living." 
 
 Such is the present aspect of our society and, 
 like children whistling in the dark, we reassure 
 one another that we like it and find it good. 
 How simple we are! How little we know of 
 the realities that our unconscious life reveals 
 to the least experienced observer! Have we 
 never tried to explain to ourselves that weary, 
 baffled expression one sees in so many thousand 
 middle-aged American faces, typical American 
 faces, "successfuF' faces, the faces of bewildered 
 men like Mr. Henry Ford? Has it never oc- 
 curred to us to compare Mr. Ford's face with 
 Mr. Ford's recent career? Has it never oc- 
 curred to us that Mr. Ford is merely one of an 
 immense class of men who have discovered that 
 
PREFACE XV 
 
 business somehow fails to fulfill their spiritual 
 needs and have reached out from it only to find 
 themselves lost in a maze of wider relation- 
 ships with which no technique that they possess 
 enables them to cope? 
 
 I think, indeed, that we could hardly find a 
 more perfect symbol of American life in the 
 present decade than Mr. Ford presents — Mr. 
 Ford and his millions and his peace ship, and 
 the total failure of these elements to coalesce 
 in any effective purpose. If, therefore, we are 
 dreaming of a "national culture," it is because 
 our characteristic idealism has itself forced the 
 issue. The gifts we possess are unique gifts, 
 but of what avail are these gifts if we have no 
 technique that enables them to find their mark? 
 And what sort of technique will ever do this 
 that has not arisen out of a consciousness of 
 those gifts, that is not peculiar as they are pe- 
 culiar and so adapted as to make them yield 
 their fullest value? We wish to play our part 
 in the higher life of the world, and we are in- 
 
xvi PREFACE 
 
 capafble of doing so because we have no organ- 
 ized higher life of our own. Could there be a 
 more unmistakable demand for just that re- 
 lease, that synthesis of the creative energies of 
 the younger generation which M. de Lanux 
 proposes and which the younger generation it- 
 self desires more deeply even than it knows? 
 
 It is in the hope of partially preparing the 
 way for that synthesis that the following pages 
 have been written. "We have striven, per- 
 haps in vain," wrote Professor Barrett Wendell 
 once, "to maintain a country where men shall 
 be free to win not their aspirations, but their 
 deserts." But aspirations are deserts in a great 
 society, a society as great as America now for 
 the first time has the opportunity to be. How 
 can it seize that opportunity? Only, as I have 
 said, by fully understanding the conditions that 
 hamper its creative life. The reader will find 
 these pages largely historical and all too largely 
 negative. I hope, however, that he will find 
 also between the lines certain suggestions of a 
 programme for the future. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 Preface, vii. 
 
 CHAPTER 
 
 I Old America, i. 
 
 II The Culture of Industrialism, 23. 
 
 III Young America, 49. 
 
 IV Our Critics, 62. 
 
 V Our Awakeners, 90. 
 VI Toward the Future, 119. 
 
LETTERS AND LEADERSHIP 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 OLD AMERICA 
 
 There is a certain spot in New York where 
 I often ruminate in the summer noontime, a 
 lonely, sunny, windy plaza surrounded by ram- 
 shackle hoardings and warehouses unfinished 
 and already half in ruin. It is the fag end of 
 a great cross-town thoroughfare, a far-thrown 
 tentacle, as it were, of the immense monster one 
 hears roaring not so far away, a tentacle that 
 lies there sluggish and prone in the dust, over- 
 taken by a sort of palsy. To the right and 
 left stretches one of those interminable sim- 
 
 swept avenues that flank the city on east and 
 
 I 
 
2 LETTERS AND LEADERSHIP 
 
 west, wide, silent, and forsaken, perpetually 
 vibrating in the blue haze that ascends from its 
 hot cobblestones, bordered on one side by rick- 
 ety wharves, on the other by a succession of 
 tumble-down tenements left there like the sea- 
 wrack at the ebb of the tide. For scarcely a 
 living thing lingers here about the frayed edges 
 of the town," it is as if one had been suddenly 
 set down in the outskirts of some pioneer city 
 on the plains of the Southwest, one of those 
 half-built cities that sprawl out over the prairie, 
 their long streets hectically al^ve in the center 
 but gradually shedding their population and the 
 few poor trees that mitigate the sun's glare, till 
 at last, all but obliterated in alkali dust, they 
 lose themselves in the sand and the silence. 
 
 All our towns and cities, I think, have this 
 family likeness and share this alternating aspect 
 of life and death — New York as much as the 
 merest concoction of corrugated iron and clap- 
 boards thrown together beside a Western rail- 
 way to fulfill some fierce evanescent impulse of 
 
OLD AMERICA 3 
 
 pioneering enterprise. Like a field given over 
 to fireworks, they have their points of light and 
 heat, a district, a street, a group of streets where 
 excitement gathers and life is tense and every- 
 thing spins and whirls; and round about lie 
 heaps of ashes, burned-out frames, seared en- 
 closures, abandoned machinery, and all the 
 tokens of a prodigal and long-spent energy. 
 
 But it is the American village that most be- 
 trays the impulse of our civilization, a civiliza- 
 tion that perpetually overreaches itself only to 
 be obliged to surrender again and again to na- 
 ture everything it has gained. How many 
 thousand villages, frost-bitten, palsied, full of 
 a morbid, bloodless death-in-life, villages that 
 have lost, if they ever possessed, the secret of 
 self-perpetuation, lie scattered across the conti- 
 nent ! Even in California I used to find them 
 on long cross-country walks, villages often 
 enough not half a century old but in a state of 
 essential decay. Communities that have come 
 into being on the flood-tide of an enterprise too 
 
4 LETTERS AND LEADERSHIP 
 
 rapidly worked out, they all signify some lost 
 cause of a material kind that has left humanity 
 high and dry; like the neutral areas in an old 
 painting where the color, incompetently mixed 
 and of perishable quality, has evaporated with 
 time. \ 
 
 I suppose it is only natural in the West, 
 these decayed settlements where time has taken 
 so seriously, as it were, mankind's deliberate 
 challenge to permanence. What shocks one is 
 to realize that our Eastern villages, the seats of 
 all the civilization we have, are themselves 
 scarcely anything but the waste and ashes of 
 pioneering, and that no inner fire has taken pos- 
 session of the hearth where that original flame 
 so long since burned itself out. 
 
 Off and on during the summers I have stayed 
 in one of those ancient Long Island villages that 
 still seem to preserve a little of the atmosphere 
 of the early Republic. The crazy, weather- 
 beaten houses that hold themselves up among 
 their unkempt acres with a kind of angular 
 
OLD AMERICA $ 
 
 dignity, the rotting porches and the stench of 
 decay that hangs about their walls, the weed- 
 choked gardens, the insect-ridden fruit trees, 
 the rusty litter along the roads, the gaunt, silent 
 farmers that stalk by in the dusk — ^how over- 
 whelmingly they seem to betray a losing fight 
 against the wilderness ! For generations every 
 man has gone his own way and sought his own 
 luck. Nature has been robbed and despoiled 
 and wasted for the sake of private and tempo- 
 rary gains, and now, having no more easy re- 
 wards to offer, it is taking its revenge on a race 
 that has been too impatient and self-seeking to 
 master its inner secrets. Incapable of co-oper- 
 ating with nature, of lying fallow, of merging 
 themselves, as it were, in the great current of 
 life, they have accumulated no buoyant fund of 
 instinct and experience, and each generation, a 
 little more spiritually impoverished than the 
 last, runs out the ever-shortening tether of self- 
 reliance. Still pioneers, pioneers or nothing, 
 they have lost the sap of adventure without de- 
 
6 LETTERS AND LEADERSHIP 
 
 veloping beyond the stage of improvisation. 
 It is all so familiar, so intensely American, 
 and yet the warm ancestral bond eludes one so ! 
 One looks out over a landscape everywhere 
 abundant and propitious, but still in some way, 
 after so many years of tillage, unimpregnated 
 by human destiny, almost wholly wanting in 
 that subtle fusion of natural and human ele- 
 ments which everywhere the European land- 
 scape suggests. For Europe is alive in all its 
 members ; in its loneliest and most isolated cor- 
 ner there is hardly a hamlet where life does not 
 still persist, as green and warm and ruddy as 
 the heart of an old olive tree. Some profound 
 inertia, some imperturbable tenacity of the 
 spirit, has prevented it from quite surrendering 
 to nature anything, a bit of ground, a house, a 
 road, that has once passed into the keeping of 
 the race. And thus it is that while the conquest 
 has been slow and laborious, invention tardy, 
 ideas few, means inadequate, something cumu- 
 lative survives. 
 
OLD AMERICA 7 
 
 Old American things are old as nothing else 
 anywhere in the world is old, old without 
 majesty, old without mellowness, old without 
 pathos, just shabby and bloodless and worn out. 
 That is the feelmg that comes over one in vil- 
 lages like this, capable only of being galvanized 
 by some fresh current .of enterprise into a sem- 
 blance of animation. Inhabited as they have 
 always been by a race that has never cultivated 
 life for its own sake, a race that has lived and 
 built and worked always conscious of the possi- 
 bility of a greater advantage to be found else- 
 where, there is no principle of life working in 
 them, three hundred years of effort having bred 
 none of the indwelling spirit of continuity. 
 
 II 
 
 "Why is it," asks the author of Jude the 
 Obscure, "that these preternaturally old boys 
 always come out of new countries?" It was 
 the spectacle of Jude himself, transplanted from 
 Australia into the midst of the ancient peas- 
 
8 LETTERS AND LEADERSHIP 
 
 antry of southern England, that prompted the 
 question, and I remember with what force it 
 came into my mind once, during a brief visit 
 in Oxford, when, accustomed as my eyes for the 
 moment were to the jocund aspect of young 
 England in flannels, I came upon a company 
 of Rhodes scholars from across the Atlantic. 
 Pallid and wizened, little old men they seemed, 
 rather stale and flat and dry; and I said to 
 myself, it is a barren soil these men have sprung 
 from, — ^plainly they have never known a day of 
 good growing weather. 
 
 They might not have been typical Rhodes 
 scholars, these men — I don't pretend to any 
 wide knowledge of the species. But I know 
 that, as often happens abroad when we encoun- 
 ter the things of home in unfamiliar surround- 
 ings, they brought to a head certain obscure im- 
 pressions that had long been working in my 
 imagination. I remembered, for instance, the 
 "young instructors" I had encountered between 
 Boston and San Francisco; I remembered the 
 
OLD AMERICA 9 
 
 sad, sapless_air_qf^o many, of them and j^eij 
 sepulchral jvoices,_th£^ notes_jiiLjiigLL^^ 
 pr iggishne ss the characteristic of which, accord--, 
 ing to Chest erton, is to haYejiiQre-prid&-in-the* 
 1 possession of one'&.-intdIect„,than,.joy irulh£.ii54 
 iQf.JL.^,-1 fell to thinking about this professor 
 and that I had known at home, and about our 
 intellectual and artistic life in general. How 
 anaemic it seemed, how thin, how deficient in 
 the tang and buoyancy of youth, in personal 
 conviction and impassioned fancy, how lacking 
 in the richer notes ! And at last there arose in 
 my mind the memory of a concert at which all 
 the accepted American composers had appeared 
 on the stage one after another, grave, earnest, 
 high-minded, and tinkled out their little intel- 
 lectual harmonies. Surely, I said to myself 
 again, there is something sadly amiss with our 
 creative life. 
 
 Am I wrong in my impression that our "seri- 
 ous" people really are like leaves prematurely 
 detached from the great tree of life? As a 
 
lo LETTERS AND LEADERSHIP, 
 
 class they seem never to have been young, and 
 they seem never to grow mellow and wise. 
 Take our earnest popular novelists off guard; 
 read their occasional comments on society, on 
 the war, even on their own art. How dull, how 
 mechanical, how utterly wanting in fresh in- 
 sight their minds in general are ! Mr. Winston 
 Churchill, expatiating on citizenship, talks in 
 one breath with all the puzzled gravity of a 
 child and some of the weary flatulence of a re- 
 tired evangelist. Even when they are not evan- 
 gelical but writers merely they still seem some- 
 how uprooted from the friendly soil. Some- 
 thing infinitely old and disillusioned peers out 
 between the rays of George Ade's wit, and 
 Mrs. Wharton's intellectuality positively 
 freezes the fingers with which one turns her 
 page. And it is the same in our other arts, the 
 plastic arts alone perhaps excepted. Think of 
 that one little vibrant chord, like a naked nerve 
 perpetually harped on, that constitutes the the- 
 atrical art of Mrs. Fiske ! Think of the arctic 
 
OLD AMERICA ii 
 
 frigidity of Mr. Paul Elmer More's criticism! 
 That little seed of the spirit a wayward and un- 
 lucky wind has planted in them, why has it 
 never been able to take on flesh and blood, why 
 has it so dried up the springs of animal impulse? 
 It is as if, driven in upon themselves, their lives 
 were a constant strain, as if their emotional na- 
 tures had run dry and they had come to exist 
 solely in their intellects and their nerves, as if in 
 fact they had gone gray and bloodless precisely 
 in the measure that an inflexible conscience had 
 enabled them in spite of all to trim the little 
 lamp that flickered in them. 
 
 Grow they certainly do not. With immense 
 difficulty our intellectual types forge for them- 
 selves a point of view with which they confront 
 the world, but like a suit of armor it permits no 
 further expansion. They do not move easily 
 within it; they are chafed and irritated by it; 
 in order to breathe freely they are obliged to 
 hold themselves rigidly to the posture they have 
 at first adopted; and far from being able to de- 
 
12 LETTERS AND LEADERSHIP 
 
 velop spontaneously beyond this original pos- 
 ture they have to submit to its cramping limita- 
 tions until the inevitable shrinkage of their men- 
 tal tissues brings them release and relief. 
 
 Whatever the reason may be, it is certain 
 that the long-fermented mind, the counselor, 
 the wise old man of letters, the mind that re- 
 lates past, present, and future, is a type our 
 civilization all but utterly fails to produce. 
 Our thinking class quickly reaches middle age 
 and after a somewhat prolonged period during 
 which it seems to be incapable of assimilating 
 any fresh experiences it begins to decay. The 
 rest of our people meanwhile never even grow 
 up. For if our old men of thought come to a 
 standstill at middle age, our old men of action, 
 as one sees them in offices, in the streets, in pub- 
 lic positions, everywhere ! are typically not old 
 men at all but old boys. Graybeards of sixty 
 or seventy, mentally and spiritually indistin- 
 guishable from their sons and grandsons, exist- 
 ing on a level of reflection and emotion in no 
 
OLD AMERICA 13 
 
 way deeper or richer than that of their own 
 childhood, they seem to have miraculously 
 passed through life without undergoing any of 
 life's maturing influences. 
 
 HI 
 
 In short, I think we are driven to the conclu- 
 sion that our life is, on all its levels, in a state 
 of arrested development, that it has lost, if in- 
 deed it has ever possessed, the principle of 
 growth. 
 
 To the general sense of this many of the main 
 documents in our recent literature bear witness. 
 Consider, for example, those vast literary pyra- 
 mids of Mr. Theodore Dreiser, those prodigious 
 piles of language built of the commonest rubble 
 and cohering, in the absence of any architectural 
 design, by sheer virtue of their weight and size. 
 Mr. Dreiser's Titans and Financiers and Gen- 
 iuses are not even the approximations of men 
 in a world of men, — they are monsters, blindly 
 effectuating themselves, or failing to effectuate 
 
14 LETTERS AND LEADERSHIP 
 
 themselves, in a primeval chaos ; and the world 
 wears them and wearies them as it wears and 
 wearies the beasts of the field, leaving them as 
 immature in age as it found them in youth. 
 Cowperwood, the financier, put in prison as a 
 result of his piratical machinations, weaves 
 chair-bottoms and marks time spiritually against 
 the day of his release, when he snaps back into 
 his old self absolutely unaltered by reflection: 
 and of Eugene Witla, after he has passed 
 through seven hundred and thirty-four pages 
 of soul-searing adventure, Mr. Dreiser is able 
 to enquire : "Was he not changed then? Not 
 much, no. Only hardened intellectually and 
 emotionally, tempered for life and work." 
 Puppets as they are of an insensate force which 
 has never been transmuted into those finer initi- 
 atives that shed light on human destiny, they 
 are insulated against human values; love and 
 art pass into and out of their lives like things 
 of so little meaning that any glimmer of mate- 
 rial opportunity outshines them; and therefore 
 
OLD AMERICA 15 
 
 they are able to speak to us only of the vacuity 
 of life, telling us that human beings are as the 
 flies of summer. 
 
 And then there is the Spoon River Anthol- 
 ogy. The immense and legitimate vogue of 
 this book is due to its unerring diagnosis of 
 what we all recognize, when we are confronted 
 with it, as the inner life of the typical American 
 community when the criterion of humane values 
 is brought to bear upon it in place of the cri- 
 terion of material values with which we have 
 traditionally pulled the wool over our eyes. It 
 is quite likely of course that Mr. Masters, with 
 a reasonable pessimism, has exaggerated the 
 suicidal and murderous tendencies of the Spoon 
 Riverites. But I know that he conveys an 
 extraordinarily just and logical impression. 
 He pictures a community of some thousands of 
 souls every one of whom lives in a spiritual 
 isolation as absolute as that of any lone farmer 
 on the barren prairie, a community that has 
 been utterly unable to spin any sort of spiritual 
 
i6 LETTERS AND LEADERSHIP 
 
 fabric common to all, which has for so many 
 generations cherished and cultivated its animos- 
 ity toward all those non-utilitarian elements in 
 the human heart that retard the successful pur- 
 suit of the main chance that it has reduced itself 
 to a spiritual desert in which nothing humane is 
 able to find rootage and grow at all. And yet 
 all the types that shed glory on humankind 
 have existed in that, as in every community! 
 They have exi'sted, or at least they have been 
 born. They have put forth one green shoot 
 only to wither and decay because all the mois- 
 ture has evaporated out of the atmosphere that 
 envelops them. Poets, painters, philosophers, 
 men of science and religion, are all to be found, 
 stunted, starved, thwarted, embittered, prevent- 
 ed from taking even the first step in self-devel- 
 opment, in this amazing microcosm of our soci- 
 ety, a society that stagnates for want of leader- 
 ship, and at the same time, incurably suspicious 
 of the very idea of leadership, saps away all 
 those vital elements that produce the leader. 
 
OLD AMERICA 17 
 
 For that is the vicious circle in which we 
 revolve. In the absence both of an intellectual 
 tradition and a sympathetic soil, we who above 
 all peoples need great men and great ideals have 
 been unable to develop the latent greatness we 
 possess and have lost an incalculable measure 
 of greatness that has, in spite of all, succeeded 
 in developing itself. For one thing, we have 
 lost an army of gifted minds, of whom Henry 
 James and Whistler are only the most notorious 
 examples, minds about which our intellectual 
 life could have rallied to its infinite advantage, 
 as it always does when born leaders are in the 
 field. 
 
 But the loss, great and continuing as it is, 
 of so many talents that we have repelled and 
 poured out, talents that have been driven to an 
 exotic development in other countries, is really 
 nothing beside what we have lost in ways that 
 are perhaps less obvious. We are t he victims 
 of a systematic process of inverse selection so 
 f^[js jhejcJjdUziag-element* iTri:herAineficah 
 
i8 LETTERS AND LEADERSHIP 
 
 nature are concerned. Our ancestral faith in 
 the individual and what he is able to accom- 
 plish (or, in modern parlance, to "put over") 
 as the measure of all things has despoiled us of 
 that instinctive human reverence for those di- 
 vine reservoirs of collective experience, religion, 
 science, art, philosophy, the self-subordinating 
 service of which is almost the measure of the 
 highest happiness. In consequence of this our 
 natural capacities have been dissipated; they 
 have become ego-centric and socially centrifugal 
 and they have hardened and become fixed in 
 the most anomalous forms. The religious en- 
 ergy of the race, instead of being distilled and 
 quintessentialized into the finer inspirations of 
 human conduct, has escaped in a vast vapor 
 that is known under a hundred names. So 
 also our scientific energy has been diverted from 
 the study of life to the immediacies of practical 
 invention, our philosophy, quite forgetting that 
 its function is to create values of life, has oscil- 
 lated between a static idealism and a justifica- 
 
OLD AMERICA 19 
 
 tion of all the ansemic tendencies of an anaemic 
 age, and our art and literature, oblivious of the 
 soul of man, have established themselves on a 
 superficial and barren tgchnique. 
 
 Of all this individualism is at once the cause 
 and the result. For it has prevented the forma- 
 tion of a collective spiritual life in the absence 
 of which the individual, having nothing greater 
 than himself to subordinate himself to, is either 
 driven into the blind alley of his appetites or 
 rides some hobby of his own invention until 
 it falls to pieces from sheer craziness. Think 
 of the cranks we have produced! Not the 
 mere anonymous cranks one meets, six to a 
 block, in every American village, but the emi- 
 nent cranks, and even the preeminent cranks, 
 the Thoreaus and Henry Georges, men who 
 might so immensely more have enriched our 
 spiritual heritage had we been capable of as-^' 
 sin^feting their minds, nurturing and disciplin- 
 ing them out of their aberrant individualism. 
 For every member of the vast army of Ameri- 
 
20 LETTERS AND LEADERSHIP 
 
 can cranks has been the graveyard of some 
 "happy thought," some thought happier than 
 his neighbors have had and which has turned 
 sour in his brain because the only world he has 
 known has had no use for it. As for our litera- 
 ture, it is quite plain that there is nothing in- 
 herently "greater" in many of the writers whose 
 work we import (and rightly import) from 
 abroad than in writers of a corresponding order 
 at home. The former simply have been able 
 to make a better use of their talents owing to 
 the complicated system of critical and tradi- 
 tional forces perpetually at play about them. 
 
 For only where art and thought and science 
 organically share in the vital essential pro- 
 gramme .of life can the artist and the 
 thinker and the scientist find the prelim- 
 inary foothold that enables them properly 
 to undertake their task. To state the case 
 in its lowest terms, only under these con- 
 ditions are they able to receive an adequate, 
 intensive training along non-utilitarian lines 
 
OLD AMERICA 21- 
 
 without hopelessly crippling their chances of 
 self-preservation; for under _ these conditions 
 they know that the social fabric is complicated 
 enough to employ all the faculties of their minds 
 and that in following feSwitilitarian interests 
 they are fulfilling a r"cnsinii«ffj r^ffd-nf sn riety. 
 It is this w hich breeds in them the sense that 
 they are serving something great, something so 
 generally felt to be great that society rewards 
 them with a pride calling forth their own pride, 
 taking delight in setting up the sort of obstacles 
 that constantly put them on their mettle. 
 
 Without these . conditions w e cannot have 
 great leaders; without leaders we cannot have 
 a great society. If this suggests the hope of a 
 "national culture" to come it is only in order 
 that America may be able in the future to give 
 something to the rest of the world that is bet- 
 ter than what the world too generally means 
 by "Americanism." For two generations the 
 most sensitive minds in Europe — Renan, Rus- 
 kin, Nietzsche, to name none more recent — 
 
22 LETTERS AND LEADERSHIP 
 
 have summed up their mistrust of the future in 
 that one word; and it is because, al together e x- 
 ternalized ourselves, we have typified the uni- 
 versally externalizing influences of modern in- 
 dustrialism. The shame of this is a national 
 shame, and one that the war, with all the 
 wealth it has brought us, has infinitely accentu- 
 ated. And it covers a national problem — the 
 problem of creating objects of loyalty within 
 the nation by virtue of which the springs of our 
 creative energy are not only touched into play 
 but so economized as to be able to irrigate the 
 entire subsoil of our national life. 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 THE CULTURE OF INDUSTRIALISM 
 
 If we are dreaming of a "national culture" 
 to-day it is because our inherited culture has 
 so utterly failed to meet the exigencies of our 
 life, to seize and fertilize its roots. It is amaz- 
 ing how that fabric of ideas and assumptions, 
 of sentiments and memories and attitudes which 
 made up the civilization of our fathers has 
 melted away like snow uncovering the sordid 
 facts of a society that seems to us now so little 
 advanced on the path of spiritual evolution. 
 The older generation does not recognize its 
 offspring in the crude chaotic manifestations 
 of the present day, but I wonder if it ever con- 
 23 
 
24 LETTERS AND LEADERSHIP 
 
 siders this universal lapse from grace in the 
 light of cause and effect? I wonder if it ever 
 suspects that there must have been some in- 
 herent weakness in a culture that has so lost 
 control of a really well-disposed younger gen- 
 eration, a culture which, after being dominant 
 for so long, has left in its wake a society so 
 little civilized? What is the secret of its de- 
 cay? And how does it happen that we, whose 
 minds are gradually opening to so many living 
 influences of the past, feel as it were the chill 
 of the grave as we look back over the spiritual 
 history of our own race? 
 
 It was the culture of an age of pioneering, 
 the reflex of the spirit of material enterprise — 
 that is the obvious fact; and with the gradual 
 decay of the impulse of enterprise it has itself 
 disintegrated like a mummy at the touch of 
 sunlight. Why? Because it was never a liv- 
 ing, active culture, releasing the creative ener- 
 gies of men. Its function was rather to divert 
 these energies, to prevent the anarchical, skep- 
 
CULTURE OF INDUSTRIALISM 25 
 
 tical, extravagant, dynamic forces of the spirit 
 from taking the wind out of the myth of "prog- 
 ress," that myth imposed by destiny upon the 
 imagination of our forebears in order that a 
 great uncharted continent might be subdued to 
 the service of the race. 
 
 For the creative impulses of men are always 
 at war with their possessive impulses, and 
 poetry, as we know, springs from brooding on 
 just those aspects of experience that most re- 
 tard the swift advance of the acquisitive mind. 
 The spirit of a living culture, which ever has 
 within it some of the acid of Pascal's phrase: 
 "Cffisar was too old to go about conquering the 
 world; he ought to have been more mature" — 
 how could this ever have been permitted to 
 grow up, even supposing that it might have been 
 able to grow up, in a people confronted with 
 forests and prairies and impelled by the neces- 
 sities of the race to keep their hearts whole and 
 their minds on their task? No, it was essen- 
 tial that everything in men should be repressed 
 
26 LETTERS AND LEADERSHIP 
 
 and denied that would have slackened their 
 manual energy and made their ingenuity a thing 
 of naught, that would have put questions into 
 their minds, that would have made them static 
 materially and dynamic spiritually, that would 
 have led them to feel too much the disparity 
 between the inherited civilization they had left 
 behind and the environment in which they had 
 placed themselves, that would have neutral- 
 ized the allure of the exterior ambition which 
 led them on. 
 
 Puritanism was a complete philosophy for 
 the pioneer and by making human nature con- 
 temptible and putting to shame the charms of 
 life it unleashed the acquisitive instincts of men, 
 disembarrassing those instincts by creating the 
 belief that the life of the spirit is altogether a 
 secret life and that the imagination ought never 
 to conflict with the law of the tribe. It was 
 this that determined the character of our old 
 culture, which cleared the decks for practical 
 action by draining away all the irreconcilable 
 
CULTURE OF INDUSTRIALISM 27 
 
 elements of the American nature into a trans- 
 cendental upper sphere. 
 
 European critics have never been able to un- 
 derstand why a "young nation," living a vigor- 
 ous, primitive life, should not have expressed 
 itself artistically in a cognate form; and be- 
 cause Whitman did so they accepted him as 
 the representative poet of America, So he was ; 
 but it is only now, long after the pioneer epoch 
 has passed and the "free note" has begun to 
 make itself heard, that he has come to seem a 
 typical figure to his own countrypeople. In 
 his own time Whitman was regarded with dis- 
 trust and even hatred because, by releasing, or 
 tending to release, the creative faculties of the 
 American mind, by exacting a poetical coopera- 
 tion from his readers, he broke the pioneer law 
 of self-preservation. By awakening people to 
 their environment, by turning democracy from 
 a fact into a spiritual principle, his influence 
 ran directly counter to the necessities of the age, 
 and his fellow-writers justly shunned him for 
 
28 LETTERS AND LEADERSHIP 
 
 hitting in this way below the belt. In fact, 
 had Whitman continued to develop along the 
 path he originally marked out for himself he 
 might have seriously interfered with the logical 
 process of the country's material evolution. 
 But there was in Whitman himself a large share 
 of the naive pioneer nature, which made it im- 
 possible for him to take experience very seri- 
 ously or to develop beyond a certain point. As 
 he grew older, the sensuality of his nature led 
 him astray in a vast satisfaction with material 
 facts, before which he purred like a cat by the 
 warm fire. This accounts for the reconcilia- 
 tion which occurred in later years between 
 Whitman and his literary contemporaries. 
 They saw that he had become harmless; they 
 accepted him as a man of talent; and making 
 the most of his more conventional verse, they at 
 last crowned him provisionally as the "good 
 gray poet." 
 
 For the orthodox writers of the old school 
 had a serious duty to perform in speeding the 
 
CULTURE OF INDUSTRIALISM 29 
 
 pioneers on their way; and they performed it 
 with an efRciency that won them the gratitude 
 of all their contemporaries. Longfellow with 
 his lullabies, crooning to sleep the insatiable 
 creative appetites of the soul, Lowell, with his 
 "weak-wing'd song" exalting "the deed" — how 
 invaluable their literature was to the "tired 
 pioneer," forerunner of the "tired business man" 
 of the present day and only a loftier type be- 
 cause, like the tired soldier of the trenches, it 
 was in response to the necessities of the race 
 that he had dammed at their source the reju- 
 venating springs of the spirit! Yes, it was a 
 great service those old writers rendered to the 
 progress of this country's primitive develop- 
 ment, for by unconsciously taking in charge, 
 as it were, all the difficult elements of human 
 nature and putting them under an anaesthesia, 
 they provided a free channel for the elan of 
 their age. 
 
 But in so doing they shelved our spiritual 
 life, conventionalizing it in a sphere above the 
 
30 LETTERS AND LEADERSHIP 
 
 sphere of action. In happier countries litera- 
 ture is the vehicle of ideals and attitudes that 
 have sprung from experience, ideals and atti- 
 tudes that release the creative impulses of the 
 individual and stimulate a reaction in the in- 
 dividual against his environment. This our 
 literature has failed to do; it has necessarily re- 
 mained an exercise rather than an expression. 
 Itself denied the principle of life or the power 
 of giving life, it has made up for its failure to 
 motivate the American scene and impregnate 
 it with meaning by concentrating all its forces 
 in the exterior field of esthetic form. Gilding 
 and idealizing everything it has touched and 
 frequently attaining a high level of imaginative 
 style, it has thrown veils over the barrenness 
 and emptiness of our life, putting us in ex- 
 tremely good conceit with ourselves while ac- 
 tually doing nothing either to liberate our minds 
 or to enlighten us as to the real nature of our 
 civilization. Hence we have the meticulous 
 technique of our contemporary "high-class" 
 
CULTURE OF INDUSTRIALISM 31 
 
 magazines, a technique which, as we know, can 
 be acquired as a trick, and which, artistic as it 
 appears, is really the mark of a complete spir- 
 itual conventionality and deceives no sensible 
 person into supposing that our general clever- 
 ness is the index of a really civilized society. 
 
 II 
 
 This total absence of any organic native cul- 
 ture has determined our response to the culture 
 of the outer world. There are no vital rela- 
 tionships that are not reciprocal and only in 
 the measure that we undergo a cognate experi- 
 ence ourselves can we share in the experience of 
 others. To the Catholic, Dante, to the aristo- 
 crat, Nietzsche, to the democrat, Whitman, in- 
 evitably means more than any of them can 
 mean to the scholar who merely receives them 
 all through his intellect without the palpitant 
 response of conviction and a sympathetic ex- 
 perience. Not that this "experience" has to 
 be identical in the literal sense; no, the very 
 
32 LETTERS AND LEADERSHIP 
 
 essence of being cultivated is to have developed 
 a capacity for sharing points of view other than 
 our own. But there is all the difference be- 
 tween being actively and passively cultivated 
 that there is between living actively or pas- 
 sively emotional lives. Only the creative mind 
 can really apprehend the expressions of the 
 creative mind. And it is because our field of 
 action has been preempted by our acquisitive 
 instincts, because in short we have no national 
 fabric of spiritual experience, that we are so 
 unable to-day to think and feel in international 
 terms. Having ever considered it our pre- 
 rogative to pluck the fruits of the spirit with- 
 out undergoing the travail of generating them, 
 having ever given to the tragi-comedy of the 
 creative life a notional rather than a real as- 
 sent, to quote Newman's famous phrase, we 
 have been able to feed ourselves with the sugar- 
 coating of all the bitter pills of the rest of man- 
 kind, accepting the achievements of their crea- 
 tive life as effects which presuppose in us no 
 
CULTURE OF INDUSTRIALISM 33 
 
 causal relationships. That is why we are so 
 terribly at ease in the Zion of world culture. 
 
 All this explains the ascendancy among our 
 fathers of the Arnoldian doctrine about "know- 
 ing the best that has been thought and said in 
 the world." For, wrapped up as they were in 
 their material tasks, it enabled them to share 
 vicariously in the heritage of civilization, en- 
 dowing them, as it were, with all the pearls of 
 the oyster while neatly evading in their behalf 
 the sad responsibility of the oyster itself. It 
 upholstered their lives with everything that is 
 best in history, with all mankind's most sumptu- 
 ous effects quite sanitarily purged of their ugly 
 and awkward organic relationships. It set side 
 by side in the Elysian calm of their bookshelves 
 all the warring works of the mighty ones of 
 the past. It made the creative life synonymous 
 in their minds with finished things, things that 
 repeat their message over and over and "stay 
 put." In short, it conventionalized for them 
 the spiritual experience of humanity, pigeon- 
 
34 LETTERS AND LEADERSHIP 
 
 holing it, as it were, and leaving them fancy- 
 free to live "for practical purposes." 
 
 I remember that when as children we first 
 read Carlyle and Ruskin we were extremely 
 puzzled by their notes of exasperated indigna- 
 tion. "What are they so angry about?" we 
 wondered, and we decided that England must 
 be a very wicked country. Presently, how- 
 ever, even this idea passed out of our heads, and 
 we came to the conclusion that anger and in- 
 dignation must be simply normal properties of 
 the literary mind (as they are, in a measure) 
 and that we ought to be grateful for this 
 because they produce so many engaging gro- 
 tesqueries of style. Our own life was so obvi- 
 ously ship-shape and water-tight — was it pos- 
 sible that people in other countries could have 
 allowed their life to become less so? Unable 
 as we were to decide this point, we were quite 
 willing to give the prophets the benefit of the 
 doubt, as regards their own people. But it was 
 inconceivable that for us they meant any more 
 
CULTURE OF INDUSTRIALISM 35 
 
 by their emotional somersaults than the prophets 
 of the Bible meant, whose admirably intoned 
 objurgations we drank in with perfect compo- 
 sure on Sundays. 
 
 How natural, then, that the greatest, the 
 most "difficult" Eurdpean writers should have 
 had, as Carlyle and Browning and Meredith 
 had, their first vogue in America! How nat- 
 ural that we should have flocked about Ibsen, 
 patronized Nietzsche, found , something enter- 
 taining in every kind of revolutionist, and wel- 
 comed the strangest philosophies (the true quite 
 as readily as the false) ! For having ourselves 
 undergone no kindred creative experience for 
 them to corroborate and extend, we have ever 
 been able to escape their slings and arrows with 
 a whole skin. They have said nothing real to 
 us because there has been nothing in our own 
 field of reality to make their messages real. 
 
 Consequently, those very European writers 
 who might, under normal circumstances, have 
 done the most to shake us out of our compla- 
 
36 LETTERS AND LEADERSHIP 
 
 cency have only served the more to confirm us 
 in it. Our immediate sphere of action being 
 sealed against them, their influence has been 
 deflected into "mere literature," where it has 
 not been actually inverted. For in so far as 
 our spiritual appetites have been awake, it has 
 only gone to convince us, not that we are un- 
 enlightened ourselves, but that other people are 
 wicked. This explains the double paradox that 
 while our reformers never consider it necessary 
 to take themselves in hand before they set out 
 to improve the world, our orthodox literary men, 
 no matter what models they place before them- 
 selves, cannot rise above the tribal view of their 
 art as either an amusement or a soporific. 
 
 in 
 
 How then can our literature be anything but 
 impotent? It is inevitably so, since it springs 
 from a national mind that has been sealed 
 against that experience from which literature 
 derives all its values. 
 
CULTURE OF INDUSTRIALISM 37 
 
 How true this is can be seen from almost 
 any of its enunciations of principle, especially 
 on the popular, that is to say the frankest, level. 
 I open, for instance, one of our so-called better- 
 class magazines and fall upon a character- 
 sketch of William Gillette: "What a word! 
 Forget! What a feat I What a faculty! 
 Lucky the man who can himself forget. How 
 gifted the one who can make others forget. 
 It is the triumph of the art of William Gillette 
 that in the magic of his spell an audience for- 
 gets." Opening another magazine I turn to a 
 reported interview in which a well-known pop- 
 ular poet expatiates on his craft. "Modem 
 life," he tells us, "is full of problems, complex 
 and difficult, and the man who concentrates his 
 mind on his problems all day doesn't want to 
 concentrate it on tediously obscure poetry at 
 night. The newspaper poets are forever 
 preaching the sanest optimism, designed for the 
 people who really need the influence of optim- 
 ism — the breadwinners, the weary, the heavy- 
 
38 LETTERS AND LEADERSHIP 
 
 laden. That's the kind of poetry the people 
 want, and the fact that they want it shows 
 that their hearts and heads are all right." 
 
 Here are two typical pronouncements of the 
 American mind, one on the art of acting, one 
 on the art of poetry, and they unite in express- 
 ing a perfectly coherent doctrine. This doc- 
 trine is that the function of art is to turn aside 
 the problems of life from the current of emo- 
 tional experience and create in its audience a 
 condition of cheerfulness that is not organically 
 derived from experience but added from the out- 
 side. It assumes that experience is not the 
 stuff of life but something essentially meaning- 
 less; and not merely meaningless but an obstruc- 
 tion which retards and complicates our real 
 business of getting on in the world and getting 
 up in the world, and which must therefore be 
 ignored and forgotten and evaded and beaten 
 down by every means in our power. 
 
 What is true on the popular level is not less 
 true on the level of serious literature, in spite 
 
CULTURE OF INDUSTRIALISM 39 
 
 of everything our most conscientious artists have 
 been able to do. Thirty years ago an acute 
 English critic remarked, apropos of a novel by 
 Mr. Howells, that our novelists seemed to re- 
 gard the Civil War as an occurrence that sep- 
 arated lovers, not as something that ought nor- 
 mally to have colored men's whole thoughts on 
 life. And it is true that if we did not know 
 how much our literature has to be discounted, 
 we could hardly escape the impression, for all 
 the documents which have come down to us, 
 that our grandfathers really did pass through 
 the war without undergoing the purgation of 
 soul that is often said to justify the workings 
 of tragic mischance in human affairs. Mr. 
 Howells has himself given us the comedie ^hu- 
 tnaine of our post-bellum society, Mr. Howells 
 whose whole aim was to measure the human 
 scope of that society and who certainly far less 
 than any other novelist of his time falsified 
 his vision of reality in the interests of popular 
 entertainment. Well, we know the sort of so- 
 
40 LETTERS AND LEADERSHIP 
 
 ciety Mr. Howells pictured and how he pictured 
 it. He has himself explicitly stated, in connec- 
 tion with certain Russian novels, that Ameri- 
 cans in general do not undergo the varieties of 
 experience that Russian fiction records, that 
 "the more smiling aspects of life" are "the 
 more American," and that in being true to our 
 "well-to-do actualities" the American novelist 
 does all that can be expected of him. Could 
 one ask for a more essential declaration of ar- 
 tistic bankruptcy than that"? 
 
 For what does it amount to, this declaration? 
 It identifies the reality of the artist's vision 
 with what is accepted as reality in the world 
 about him. But every one knows that the 
 sketchiest, the most immature, the most trivial 
 society is just as susceptible as any other of the 
 most profound artistic reconstruction; all that 
 is required is an artist capable of penetrating 
 beneath it. The great artist floats the visible 
 world on the sea of his imagination and meas- 
 ures it not according to its own scale of values 
 
CULTURE OF INDUSTRIALISM 41 
 
 but according to the values that he has himself 
 derived from his descent into the abysses of life. 
 What, then, is amiss with our writers? They 
 are victims of the universal taboo which the 
 ideal of material success, of the acquisitive life, 
 has placed upon experience. It matters not at 
 all that they have no part or lot in this ideal, 
 that they are men of the finest artistic con- 
 science. In the first place, from their earliest 
 childhood they are taught to repress everything 
 that conflicts with the material welfare of their 
 environment] in the second place, their environ- 
 ment is itself so denatured, so stripped of 
 .everything that might nourish the imaginationjj^ 
 that they do not so much mature at all as ex^ 
 ternalize themselves in a world of externalities. 
 Unable to achieve a sufficiently active conscious- 
 ness of themselves to return upon their environ- 
 ment and overthrow it and dissolve it and re- 
 create it in the terms of a personal vision, they 
 gradually come to accept it on its own terms. 
 If Boston is their theme, they become Bos- 
 
42 LETTERS AND LEADERSHIP 
 
 tonian ; if it is the Yukon, they become "abys- 
 mal brutes"; if it is nature, nature becomes 
 the hero of their work; and if it is machinery, 
 the machines themselves become vocal and ex- 
 press their natural contempt for a humanity 
 that is incapable, either morally or artistically, 
 of putting them in their place and keeping them 
 there. 
 
 We know how this occurred with Mr. How- 
 ells. "It seemed to me then, and for a good 
 while afterward," he writes in literary Friends 
 and Acquaintance^ apropos of his first recep- 
 tion by the Boston Olympians of the sixties, 
 "that a person who had seen the men and had 
 the things said before him that I had in Boston, 
 could not keep himself too carefully in cotton; 
 and this was what I did all the following win- 
 ter, though of course it was a secret between 
 me and me." Never, assuredly, in any other 
 society, has literary hero-worship taken quite 
 the complexion of that; for the statement is 
 accurately true. Such was the prestige of 
 
CULTURE OF INDUSTRIALISM 43 
 
 Boston and the pundits of Boston that Mr. 
 Howells, having cast his anchor in its lee, 
 never felt the necessity of exploring, on 
 his own account, beyond the spacious, quiet 
 harbor of life that presented itself to the cul- 
 tivated New England eye. The result can be 
 seen in such novels as A Modern Instance, the 
 tragedy of which is viewed not from the angle 
 of an experience that is wider and deeper, as 
 the experience of a great novelist always is, 
 than that of any character the novelist's imagi- 
 nation is able to conceive, but from the angle 
 of Ben Halleck, the epitome of Boston's best 
 public opinion. Boston passes judgment, and 
 Mr. Howells concurs; and you close the book 
 feeling that you have seen life not through the 
 eye of a free personality but of a highly con- 
 ventional community at a given epoch. 
 
 It is exactly the same, to ignore a thousand 
 incidental distinctions, in the work of Jack 
 London. Between the superman of European 
 fiction and Jack London's superman there is all 
 
44 LETTERS AND LEADERSHIP 
 
 the difference that separates an ideal achieved 
 in the mind of the writer and a fact accepted 
 from the world outside him; all the difference, 
 in short, that separates the truth of art from 
 the appearance of life. If these, therefore, 
 among the freshest and most original talents our 
 fiction has known since Hawthorne's day, have 
 been absorbed in an atmosphere which no one 
 has ever been able to condense, is it remarkable 
 that the rank and file have slipped and fallen, 
 that they have never learned to stand upright 
 and possess themselves? Is it remarkable that 
 they sell themselves out at the first bid, that 
 they dress out their souls in the ready-made 
 clothes the world offers them? 
 
 Such, in fact, is the deficiency of personal 
 impulse, of the creative will, in America, so 
 overwhelming is the demand laid upon Ameri- 
 cans to serve ulterior and impersonal ends, that 
 it is as if the springs of spiritual action had 
 altogether evaporated. Launched in a society 
 where individuals and their faculties appear 
 
CULTURE OF INDUSTRIALISM 45 
 
 only to pass away, almost wholly apart from 
 and without acting upon one another, our writ- 
 ters find themselves enveloped in an impalpable 
 atmosphere that acts as a perpetual dissolvent 
 to the whole field of reality both within and 
 without themselves, an atmosphere that invades 
 every sphere of life and takes its discount from 
 everything that they "can do, an atmosphere 
 that prevents the formation of 'oases of reality 
 in the universal chaos. Is it remarkable that 
 they take refuge in the abstract, the non-human, 
 the impersonal, in the "bigness" of the phe- 
 nomenal world, in the surface values of "local 
 color," and in the "social conscience," which 
 enables them to do so much good by writing 
 badly that they often come to think of artistic 
 truth itself as an enemy of progress? 
 
 IV 
 
 Thus, because it possesses none of those values 
 which endow life with a significance in and of 
 itself, values which art and literature alone can 
 
46 LETTERS AND LEADERSHIP 
 
 give, the American mind has been gradually 
 subdued to what it has worked in. It has had 
 no barriers to throw up against the overwhelm- 
 ing material forces that have beleaguered it. 
 Consequently, it has gone out of itself as it 
 were and assumed the values of its environ- 
 ment. 
 
 Of this the most obvious example is the pe- 
 culiar optimism, the so-called systematic op- 
 timism, that can be fairly taken as what psy- 
 chologists call the "total reaction upon life" 
 of the typical American mind of the last twenty 
 years. Mr. Horace Fletcher has defined this 
 optimism in terms that leave no doubt of its be- 
 ing at once an effect and a cause of our spiritual 
 impotence : 
 
 "Optimism can be prescribed and applied as 
 a medicine. Is there anything new and prac- 
 tical in this or is it but a continuation of the 
 endless discussion of the philosophy of life, mor- 
 als, medicine, etc.? Is it something that a 
 busy person may put into practice, take with 
 
CULTURE OF INDUSTRIALISM 47 
 
 him to his business, without interfering with 
 his business, and profit by; and, finally, what 
 does it cost? Does adoption of it involve dis- 
 charging one's doctor-friend, displeasing one's 
 pastor, alienating one's social companions, or 
 shocking the sacred traditions that were dear 
 to father and mother? It is ameliorative, pre- 
 ventive, and harmonizing; and also it is easy, 
 agreeable, ever available, and altogether profit- 
 able. By these hall-marks of Truth we know 
 that it is true." 
 
 Grotesque as this may seem, you will search 
 in vain for a more accurate presentation of the 
 workaday point of view of our tumbling Amer- 
 ican world. This is the way Americans think, 
 and what they think, whether they profess the 
 religion of mind cure, uplift, sunshine, popular 
 pragmatism, the gospel of advertising, or plain 
 business; and they mean exactly what the 
 beauty experts mean when they say, "Avoid 
 strong emotions if you wish to retain a youth- 
 ful complexion." Systematic optimism, in 
 
48 LETTERS AND LEADERSHIP 
 
 other words, effects a complete revaluation of 
 values and enthrones truth upon a conception 
 of animal success the prerequisite of which is a 
 thorough-going denial and evasion of emo- 
 tional experience. It is the chronic result of 
 contact with a prodigal nature too easily borne 
 under by a too great excess of will, of oppor- 
 tunities so abundant and so alluring that we 
 have been led to suppress the creative spirit in 
 ourselves, traditionally unaware as we are of 
 the mature potentialities and justifications of 
 human nature, and establish our scale of values 
 in the incomparably rich material territory that 
 surrounds us. If to-day, therefore, we find no 
 principle of integrity at work in any depart- 
 ment of our life, if religion competes with ad- 
 vertising, art competes with trade, and trade 
 gives itself out as philanthropy, if we present 
 to the world at large the spectacle of a vast un- 
 differentiated herd of good-humored animals, 
 it is because we have passively surrendered our 
 human values at the demand of circumstance. 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 YOUNG AMERICA 
 
 "When first hatched they are free-swimming micro- 
 scopic creatures, but in a few hours they fall to the 
 bottom and are lost unless they can adhere to a firm, 
 clean surface while making their shells and under- 
 going development." 
 
 — Report on the Oyster Industry. 
 
 When I speak of the culture of industrialism 
 I do not mean to imply that it has been peculiar 
 to us. Everywhere the industrial process has 
 devitalized men and produced a poor quality of 
 human nature. By virtue of this process the 
 culture of the whole Western world fell too 
 largely, during the nineteenth century, into the 
 hands of the prig and the sesthete, those two sick 
 blossoms of the same sapless stalk, whose 
 roots have been for so long unwatered by 
 49 
 
50 LETTERS AND LEADERSHIP, 
 
 the convictions of the race. But in Eu- 
 rope the great traditional culture, the cul- 
 ture that has ever held up the flame of the 
 human spirit, has never been quite gutted out. 
 The industrialism that bowled us over, because 
 for generations our powers of resistance had 
 been undermined by Puritanism, was no sooner 
 well under way in Europe than human nature 
 began to get its back up, so to speak; and a long 
 line of great rebels reacted violently against its 
 desiccating influences. Philologists like Nietz- 
 sche and Renan, digging among the roots of 
 Greek and Semitic thought, artists like Morris 
 and Rodin, rediscovering the beautiful and 
 happy art of the Middle Ages, economists like 
 Marx and Mill, revolting against the facts of 
 their environment, kept alive the tradition of 
 a great society and great ways of living and thus 
 were able to assimilate for human uses the posi- 
 tive by-products of industrialism itself, science 
 and democracy. They made it impossible for 
 men to forget the degradation of society and 
 
yOUNG AMERICA 51 
 
 the poverty of their lives and built a bridge be- 
 tween the greatness of the few in the past and 
 the greatness of the many, perhaps, in the fu- 
 ture. Thus the democracies of Europe are 
 richer than ours in self-knowledge, possessing 
 ideals grounded in their own field of reality and 
 so providing them with a constant stimulus to 
 rise above their dead selves, never doubting 
 that experience itself is worth having lived for, 
 even if it leads to nothing else. And thus, 
 however slowly they advance, they advance on 
 firm ground. 
 
 For us, individually and socially, as I have 
 tried to show, nothing of this kind has been pos- 
 sible. It seems to me wonderfully symbolic of 
 our society that the only son of Lincoln should 
 have become the president of the Pullman Com- 
 pany, that the son of the man who liberated the 
 slaves politically should have been the first, as 
 The Nation pointed out not long ago, to exploit 
 them industrially. Our disbelief in experience, 
 our habitual repression of the creative instinct, 
 
52 LETTERS AND LEADERSHIP 
 
 our consequent over-stimulation of the acquisi- 
 tive instinct, has made it impossible for us to 
 take advantage of the treasures our own life 
 has yielded. Democracy and science, for ex- 
 ample, have happened to us abundantly, more 
 abundantly perhaps than to others because they 
 have had less inertia to overcome ; but like chil- 
 dren presented with shining gold pieces we have 
 not known how to use them. Either we have 
 been unable to distinguish them from copper 
 pennies, or else we have spent them in foolish 
 ways that have made us ill. Our personal life 
 has in no way contributed to the enriching of 
 our environment ; our environment, in turn, has 
 given us personally no sense of the significance 
 of life. 
 
 We of the younger generation, therefore, find 
 ourselves in a grave predicament. For having, 
 unlike Europeans of any class, no fund of spir- 
 itual experience in our blood as it were, to bal- 
 ance the various parts of our natures, we are 
 all but incapable of coordinating ourselves in 
 
YOUNG AMERICA 53 
 
 a free world. We are no longer able to make 
 the sort of "go" of life our fathers made: the 
 whole spirit of our age is against the dualism 
 which they accepted as a matter of course. The 
 acquisitive life has lost the sanction of neces- 
 sity which the age of pioneering gave it. A 
 new age has begun, an age of intensive cultiva- 
 tion, and it is the creative life that the nation 
 calls for now. But for that how ill-equipped 
 we are I Our literature has prepared no path- 
 ways for us, our leaders are themselves lost. 
 We are like explorers who, in the morning of 
 their lives, have deserted the hearthstone of the 
 human tradition and have set out for a distant 
 treasure that has turned to dust in their hands; 
 but having on their way neglected to mark 
 their track they no longer know in which di- 
 rection their home lies, nor how to reach it, and 
 so they wander in the wilderness, consumed 
 with a double consciousness of waste and im- 
 potence. 
 
 I think this fairly describes the frame of 
 
54 LETTERS AND LEADERSHIP 
 
 mind of a vast number of Americans of the 
 younger generation. They find themselves bom 
 into a race that has drained away all its spir- 
 itual resources in the struggle to survive and 
 that continues to struggle in the midst of plenty 
 because life itself no longer possesses any other 
 meaning. The gradual commercialization of 
 all the professions, meanwhile, has all but en- 
 tirely destroyed the possibility of personal 
 growth along the lines that our society provides 
 and, having provided, sanctions. Brought up 
 as they have been to associate activity almost 
 solely with material ends and unable in this 
 overwhelmingly prosperous age to feel any pow- 
 erful incentive to seek these ends, acutely con- 
 scious of their spiritual unemployment and im- 
 poverished in will and impulse, the more sen- 
 sitive minds of the younger generation drift 
 almost inevitably into a state of internal an- 
 archism that finds outlet, where it finds outlet 
 at all, in a hundred unproductive forms. 
 
 Our society, in fact, which does everything 
 
yOUNG AMERICA SS 
 
 by wholesale, is rapidly breeding a race of Ham- 
 lets the like of which has hardly been seen be- 
 fore, except perhaps in nineteenth-century Rus- 
 sia. Nothing is more remarkable than the sim- 
 ilarity in this respect between the two immense 
 inchoate populations that flank Europe on east 
 and west. To be sure, the Oblomovs and Ba- 
 zarovs and Levins and Dmitri Rudins of Rus- 
 sian fiction are in many ways, like Hamlet him- 
 self, universal characters. But for one Hamlet 
 in an organized society which, according to the 
 measure of its organization, provides an outlet 
 for every talent, there are twenty in a society 
 which, as we say, has no use for its highly de- 
 veloped types. And that is the situation both 
 in Russia and the United States: the social 
 fabric is too simple to be able to cope with the 
 complicated strain that has been suddenly put 
 upon it by a radical change in the conditions of 
 life. Yet in each case the complexities have 
 developed along just the lines most necessary 
 for the rounded well-being of society. The 
 
56 LETTERS AND LEADERSHIP 
 
 Hamlets of Russian fiction, generally speaking, 
 are social idealists, wrapped up in dreams of 
 agricultural and educational reform; they long 
 to revolutionize their country estates and ameli- 
 orate the lot of their peasantry, and they lose 
 their will and their vision because there is no 
 social machinery they can avail themselves of: 
 thrown as they are upon their own unaided re- 
 sources, their task overwhelms them at the outset 
 with a sense of futility. Turn the tables about 
 and you have the situation of the corresponding 
 class in America. They find the machinery of 
 education and social welfare in a state as highly 
 developed as the life of the spirit is in Russia; 
 it is the spiritual technique that is wanting, a 
 living culture, a complicated scheme of ideal ob- 
 jectives, upheld by society at large, enabling 
 them to submerge their liberties in their loyal- 
 ties and to unite in the task of building up a 
 civilization. 
 
 In short, owing to the miraculous rapidity 
 and efficiency with which we have been able to 
 
YOUNG AMERICA 57 
 
 effect the material conquest of the continent, a 
 prodigious amount of energy has been thrown 
 out of employment which our society is unable 
 to receive and set to work. All the innate spir- 
 ituality of the American nature, dammed up, 
 stagnant from disuse, has begun to pour itself 
 out in a vast flood of undisciplined emotional- 
 ism that goes — ^how often ! — to waste. It goes 
 to waste largely because the scope of our "use- 
 ful" objectives is so restricted, and because, in- 
 heriting as we do an ingrained individualism, 
 an ingrained belief in quick returns, we are all 
 but unable to retain these treacherous elements, 
 of which we have had so little practical experi- 
 ence in the past, until they have reached a sufH- 
 cient maturity to take shape in lasting forms. 
 
 But this new individualism, which finds its 
 gospel in self-expression, is totally different 
 from the individualism of the past. The old 
 spiritual individualism was blood-brother to the 
 old materialistic individualism : it throve in the 
 same soil and produced a cognate type of mind. 
 
58 LETTERS AND LEADERSHIP 
 
 It was hard, stiff-necked, combative, opiniona- 
 tive, sectarian, self-willed; it gave birth to the 
 crank, the shrill, high-strung propounder of 
 strange religions, the self-important monopolist 
 of truth. In short, it was essentially competi- 
 tive. The new individualism, on the other 
 hand, is individualistic only by default; its in- 
 dividualistic character, so to say, is only an in- 
 herited bad habit, a bad habit that is perpetu- 
 ated by the want of objectives in the truly 
 vacuous world with which it finds itself con- 
 fronted. It has, I think, no desire to vaunt it- 
 self; it tends, instead of this, to lavish itself; 
 it is not combative, it is cooperative, not opin- 
 ionative but groping, not sectarian but filled 
 with an intense, confused eagerness to identify 
 itself with the life of the whole people. If it 
 remains confused, if it is unable to discipline 
 itself, if it is often lazy and wilful, if its smoke 
 is only at intervals illuminated by flame — well, 
 was it not just so with the Oblomovs of Rus- 
 sia? I can't conceive that any one wants to 
 
YOUNG AMERICA 59 
 
 be confused and lazy, especially if he has no 
 material motives to console him in other ways. 
 People who do not "burn with a hard, gem-like 
 flame" are simply people who are not being em- 
 ployed by civilization. 
 
 Undoubtedly the gospel of self-expression, 
 makeshift as it is, has revealed a promise in 
 America that we have always taken for granted 
 but hardly reckoned with. Isolated, secretive, 
 bottled up as we have been in the past, how 
 could we ever have guessed what aims and hopes 
 we have in common had they not been brought 
 to light, even in the crudest and most inadequate 
 ways'? That they have at last been brought to 
 light I think few will deny; but will they get 
 any further? Only, it seems to me, if we are 
 able to build up, to adapt a phrase from the 
 slang of politics, a programme for the conserva- 
 tion of our spiritual resources. 
 
 "Humanity," wrdte Mazzini in 1858, "is a 
 great army marching to the conquest of un- 
 known lands, against enemies both strong and 
 
6o LETTERS AND LEADERSHIP 
 
 cunning. The peoples are its corps, each with 
 its special operation to carry out, and the com- 
 mon victory depends on the exactness with 
 which they execute the different operations." 
 That nationalities are the workshops of hu- 
 manity, that each nationality has a special duty 
 to perform, a special genius to exert, a special 
 gift to contribute to the general stock of civ- 
 ilization, and that each, in consequence, grow- 
 ing by the trust that other nationalities place 
 in it, must be a living, homogeneous entity, with 
 its own faith and consciousness of self — could 
 any idea more perfectly than this express the 
 dream, the necessity, of Young America? To 
 live creatively, to live completely, to live in be- 
 half of some great corporate purpose, — that is 
 its desire. A national faith we had once, a 
 national dream, the dream of the "great Amer- 
 ican experiment." But had it not been sadly 
 compromised would the younger generation find 
 itself adrift as it is to-day? Too many ele- 
 ments of that old faith of ours were at war 
 
YOUNG AMERICA 6i| 
 
 with all that was good in it, and it admitted 
 so few of the factors of life; it was betrayed by 
 what was false within; it was unable to em- 
 brace the freer impulses of a new time. That 
 is why it contributes so little to the new faith 
 without which America cannot live, and for 
 which it now seeks in the darkness of the war. 
 To discover that faith, to formulate that new 
 .technique, to build up, as I have said, that pro- 
 gramme for the conservation of our spiritual re- 
 sources, is the task of criticism and philosophy. 
 Our critics and philosophers, I think, have thus 
 far shirked this task. Why, and in what de- 
 gree, I hope to suggest in the following chap- 
 ters. 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 
 OUR CRITICS 
 
 In a famous essay Matthew Arnold said that it 
 is "the business of the critical power to see the 
 object as in itself it really is." If any of our 
 critics had been able to act upon this principle, 
 if they had been able to put aside their prepos- 
 sessions and merely open their minds to the facts 
 of American life, even without attempting any 
 of the more heroic measures our life notoriously 
 demands, I think the predicament of the 
 younger generation would be far less grave than 
 it is. For, as Arnold goes on to say, by seeing 
 the object as in itself it really is, criticism 
 "tends to make an intellectual situation of 
 which the creative power can profitably avail 
 itself." There, surely is the very thing that 
 
 Young America needs. Deficient as it is in 
 
 62 
 
OUR CRITICS 63 
 
 creative power, it has more creative desire than 
 it knows what to do with; and is it not a situa- 
 tion of which it can profitably avail itself that 
 turns desire into power? If our critics have 
 failed to make that situation, they can hardly 
 hold Young America responsible for the chaos 
 that now debilitates it. The responsibility, I 
 think, lies rather upon our critics themselves. 
 
 For the truth is that, far from "seeing the 
 object as in itself it really is," our critics do 
 not see the object, for them the supreme ob- 
 ject, America, the living creative life of Amer- 
 ica, at all. That is only natural perhaps in 
 the pundits of our criticism, Mr. Paul Elmer 
 More and Professor Irving Babbitt, for exam- 
 ple, who feel that there is nothing worth seeing 
 in a world Rousseau has debauched. And per- 
 haps it is not surprising in such sensitive minds 
 of the older generation as Mr. Brownell and 
 Mr. Woodberry, who responded so passion- 
 ately in their youth to visions of grace that 
 never could have been ours, that they have no 
 
64 LETTERS AND LEADERSHIP 
 
 heart for the homelier tasks of America. But, 
 remarkably, it is just as true of those more com- 
 placent and sometimes all too complacent crit- 
 ics of the middle generation who feel them- 
 selves in life apparently by no means alien to 
 the stirring American scene. Professor Stuart 
 P. Sherman carries on a guerrilla warfare with 
 his younger contemporaries, but has he ever dis- 
 played anything that could be called an inter- 
 est in them or any desire to find out what they 
 are seeking? Professor William Lyon Phelps, 
 on the other hand, pats them on the back, but 
 he never dreams of applying values to them be- 
 cause he is romantically anxious not to see them 
 as in themselves they really are: he is afraid 
 perhaps to find that they are not the good 
 fellows in print that he likes to think them 
 in life. As for Mr. J. E. Spingarn, that 
 freest of amateurs, that patron of ssthetic rad- 
 icalism, he wraps himself in a web of crit- 
 ical theory from which he has never emerged 
 at all into the melee of our creative life. In- 
 
OUR CRITICS 65 
 
 terest, in short, mere friendly interest, for se- 
 vere interest we cannot expect, is the last boon 
 our critics yield us. Is it strange, then, that our 
 creative life halts and stammers in bewilder- 
 ment? 
 
 It is certainly remarkable, this apparently 
 general determination not to be practical on 
 the part of so many dissimilar minds; and it 
 is all the more remarkable because criticism has 
 ever been, in other countries, precisely the most 
 practical of the literary arts. Since the days 
 when Socrates, its august founder, sat in the 
 market-place and played the midwife to so 
 many inarticulate minds, it has been the joy- 
 ous pj-erogative of criticism to be on the spot 
 when thoughts are being born. Not to men- 
 tion any names that the most academic of our 
 critics can possibly gainsay, is it not the glory 
 of Lessing that he established a sort of norm 
 of the German character, descending into the 
 thick of reality and building, by creation and 
 controversy alike, amid the shifting sands of 
 
66 LETTERS AND LEADERSHIP 
 
 pedantry and exoticism, an impregnable base 
 for the superstructure of a civilization to come ? 
 As for Sainte-Beuve, he lived in an age and a 
 society that required no such drastic re-state- 
 ments of fundamental truth; he inherited ^nd, 
 perpetuated that marvelous equilibrium of the 
 French temper which is the result of an organic 
 culture founded on the suffrages of the whole 
 race; but Sainte-Beuve lived and wrote in sub- 
 stantial harmony with the creative life of his 
 contemporaries, and he too was ever ready to 
 spring to the defence of new-born thoughts 
 and fight for their just rights of passage into 
 the French mind. No doubt in the France 
 of Sainte-Beuve there were more new-bom 
 thoughts worth fighting for, strictly as thoughts, 
 than there are in the America of to-day. But 
 no one denies that at present in this country 
 an immense amount of creative energy has at 
 least conclusively turned itself toward the field 
 of the arts. If it does not in many instances 
 come rightly and fully to a head, if it fails 
 
OUR CRITICS 67 
 
 very often to eventuate in thoughts in them- 
 selves vitally important, does it not all the more 
 behoove criticism to condense the vapors that 
 confuse this creative energy and to spring loy- 
 ally to the support of groping minds that bear 
 the mark of sincerity and promise? As for our 
 critics, what birth out of life have any of them 
 ever defended with that heavy artillery they 
 so enjoy training upon those popular American 
 fallacies many of which, quite plainly, are the 
 result of their own immemorial absentee-mind- 
 edness? Have they ever been at pains to grasp 
 the contemporary American mind and its prob- 
 lems, to discover what the contemporary Amer- 
 ican mind is, and what it is capable of, and 
 how it can best be approached, and whether 
 it is able to assimilate the whole culture of the 
 world before it has formed any personal con- 
 ception of what culture is? 
 
 Our critics, if they are in touch with Euro- 
 pean life, must be aware that the relation in 
 which they stand to the life of their own coun- 
 
68 LETTERS AND LEADERSHIP 
 
 try is quite unique. But far even from con- 
 sidering the idea that the living forces about 
 them deserve a little sympathetic and discreet 
 attention they seem to be persuaded that the 
 younger generation presents a united front 
 against everything that mankind has tried and 
 found worthy, and that it has formed a sort of 
 conspiracy to propagate falsehood at whatever 
 cost. "What Matthew Arnold would call 'the 
 elephantine main body,' " says Mr. Babbitt, 
 "seems more convinced than ever that man, to 
 become perfect, has only to continue indefinitely 
 the programme of the nineteenth century, — that 
 is, to engage in miscellaneous expansion and 
 back it up if need be with noisy revolt against 
 all the forms of the past." To which Mr. 
 Brownell subjoins the following: "Every one 
 who sympathetically 'belongs' to [the age] feels 
 himself stanchly supported by the consensus of 
 all it esteems. . . . The militancy of the age 
 therefore finds itself not only in possession of 
 a perfectly definite — if mainly destructive — 
 
OUR CRITICS 69 
 
 credo, but of a practically united and enthusi- 
 astic army." 
 
 To us who are so much in the thick of things 
 that we cannot see the forest for the trees, 
 statements of this kind are all but unintelligible. 
 They seem to us like anathemas delivered in 
 some half-forgotten sacred language to a peo- 
 ple that has begun to stammer in a vernacular 
 of its own. We are so conscious of our own 
 differences, of the hundred and one programmes 
 that we are pursuing precisely not in common, 
 that while we are prepared for body-blows from 
 Mr. Babbitt (to whose vigorous intellect, by the 
 way, many of us are greatly indebted), we 
 scarcely know what to make of Mr. Brownell's 
 rather more graciously delivered thrusts. But 
 we may be very sure that if, to the older gen- 
 eration, we appear to be a "practically united 
 and enthusiastic army" we must be so in some 
 sense in which the older generation is not. To 
 what that sense is our critics themselves in a 
 general way have given us the clue. They say 
 
70 LETTERS AND LEADERSHIP 
 
 that we are emotional, and they give to their 
 accusation an air of plausibility by adding that 
 we are over-emotional, as indeed we are; but 
 what they really object to is that we are emo- 
 tional at all, the strength of their own case 
 resting wholly on the assumption that literature 
 ought to spring not from the emotions but from 
 the intellect. This we deny, and I suppose 
 that our denial is so unanimous that it does, in 
 a way, neutralize our intellectual differences. 
 But why do we deny it? Partly because our 
 reaction upon life, on the one hand, and our 
 reading of the history of literature, on the other, 
 leads us to believe that it is false; and partly 
 because we have witnessed the failure and 
 breakdown of intellectualism itself. 
 
 Consider, for example, Mr. More, our chief 
 exponent of the intellectualist position. Mr. 
 More, referring to the yellow press, delivers 
 himself of the following remarks: "On days 
 when no sensational event has occurred, it will 
 indulge in the prettiest sentimental sermons on 
 
OUR CRITICS 71 
 
 the home and on family felicities. . . . But 
 let the popular mind be excited by some crime 
 of lust, and the same journal will forget the 
 sweet obligations of home and wife . . . and 
 will deck out the loathsome debauchery of a 
 murderer and his trull as the spiritual history 
 of two young souls finding themselves in the 
 pure air of passion." . . . Now, really, what- 
 ever the provocations of the yellow press, can 
 one imagine a piece of worse literary breeding 
 than this? Yet it can almost be called Mr. 
 More's habitual tone whenever, leaving the 
 charmed circle of literary ideas, he deals with 
 modern society. Far from being reasonable, 
 disinterested, and humane, his note is one of 
 nagging, pettish, and one would almost say vul- 
 gar exasperation ; he betrays a tendency to break 
 out on every occasion into promiscuous abuse. 
 How then can our intellectualists expect to 
 convert us to the music of the classical dis- 
 cipline when some of their own most repre- 
 sentative minds — for Mr. More is by no means 
 
,72 LETTERS AND LEADERSHIP 
 
 unique as an advocate of "the classic point of 
 view" — are so singularly ill-nurtured*? If this 
 is what the classical discipline does — ^how can 
 we avoid being led, quite unjustly, to con- 
 clude? — let us by all means turn to the dis- 
 cipline of science which produced the ever just 
 and ever genial William James. 
 
 That is what we mean 'when we speak of the 
 breakdown of intellectual ism; for of course the 
 reason why Mr. More's humane attitude cracks 
 and crumbles so at the touch of life is because 
 it is based on a culture of the intellect that is 
 not borne out by a corresponding culture of the 
 feelings. Mr. More's emotional life, as his 
 writings exhibit it, is just as crude and untem- 
 pered as the intellectual life of the younger 
 generation which he attacks. Why is this so? 
 Because Mr. More's intellectualism is the con- 
 verse and counterpart of the materialism that 
 has led to the younger generation's incapacity 
 to accept the discipline he offers it. He has not 
 been able to feel human values finely because 
 
OUR CRITICS 73 
 
 to have done so would have been to upset his 
 whole faith in a society based not upon the cre- 
 ative but upon the acquisitive instincts of men, 
 a society ruled over by the "natural aristoc- 
 racy" of economic power. Mr. More is simply 
 a belated pioneer, with all the repressed im- 
 pulses, the fundamental limitations, the exag- 
 gerated antipathies that belong to the pioneer 
 type, extended and subtilized in the sphere of 
 the intellect alone. Turn from his philosoph- 
 ical and literary essays, in which he is able to 
 be humane at large, to his essays on social and 
 economic themes, and see how quickly he lets 
 the cat out of the bag. "Looking at the larger 
 good of society," he observes, "we may say that 
 the dollar is more than the man and that the 
 rights of property are more important than the 
 right to life" 
 
 Here, then, we have a clue not merely to the 
 breakdown of the intellectualist point of view 
 but to its origin as well. Mr. Brownell says 
 that we used to have in this country a public 
 
74 LETTERS AND LEADERSHIP 
 
 comparable with those honnetes gens, equally 
 removed from a court that was too rigid and a 
 pit that was too free, through which the French 
 tradition was so long maintained, "A public 
 like this," he says, "we once had, and we have 
 it no longer. Its limitations were marked, but 
 they emphasized its existence. ' Its standards 
 were narrow, but it had standards. We had 
 a class, not numerous but fairly defined, cor- 
 responding to the class Charles Sumner found 
 in England, distinct from the nobility but pos- 
 sessed in abundance of serious knowledge, high 
 accomplishment, and refined taste, the class, 
 precisely, called by Moliere les honnetes gens" 
 Now, that such a class did exist at one time in 
 this country no one who has any associations 
 with our past could possibly deny. But that 
 this class ever at bottom corresponded with the 
 honnetes gens of France one might perhaps be 
 permitted to question, even if M. Andre Gide, 
 whom Mr. Brownell quotes from, had not re- 
 marked that in France itself the tradition they 
 
OUR CRITICS 75 
 
 maintained would hardly have been possible 
 without the court. But why did the existence 
 of the court make so much difference'? Be- 
 cause the court, removed as it was from the in- 
 fluences of the market-place, kept alive in 
 France the free, the non-acquisitive, in short 
 the creative conception of life; and this con- 
 ception, permeating thence downward the whole 
 fabric of society, linked the artistic expressions 
 at the top with the common consciousness of 
 the race beneath, a common consciousness that 
 has never denied its Rabelaisian elements. Be- 
 tween these two extremes, then, of racial ex- 
 perience and racial expression and partaking 
 abundantly of both, the honnetes gens, with 
 their "serious knowledge, their high accom- 
 plishment, their refined taste" formed a sort of 
 mean, logically poised. French wit, French 
 elegance, French taste — are they not, as Mr. 
 Brownell himself would be the first to point 
 out, simply the polished outside, the polished 
 extremity, as it were, of a social mass that is 
 
76 LETTERS AND LEADERSHIP 
 
 modeled and civilized all the way through, ac- 
 cording to its own genius, a social mass all the 
 strata of which are fused and unified and which 
 is grounded imperturbably on the basis of a 
 common experience of life? It is quite true, 
 as Mr. Brownell says, that Moliere would 
 never have written his best work had he prac- 
 tised only on his cook. But is there not a 
 certain difference between French society and 
 our own in the fact that Moliere was able to 
 practise on his cook at all ? 
 
 For our cultivated class of old never de- 
 manded, never assumed the existence of, and 
 never attempted to create, a common ground 
 of experience in the American people. It ac- 
 cepted men as "infinitely repellent particles" 
 and drew them together by projecting a spirit 
 that appealed to their intellect and their will 
 alone and that never conflicted with the full 
 exercise of their instincts of acquisition. Hav- 
 ing neither on the one hand "a court that was 
 too rigid" but that would, nevertheless, have 
 
OUR CRITICS 77 
 
 preserved the creative conception of life, nor 
 on the other "a pit that was too free" but that 
 would, equally, have kept them in touch with a 
 level of primitive emotional life, our culti- 
 vated class with their serious knowledge, their 
 high accomplishment, their refined taste were 
 suspended in the air, so to speak, deprived alike 
 of the creative spark that lifts men above them- 
 selves and the animal under-proppings that 
 maintain their contact with rude reality. Our 
 old writers established as a common ground 
 between themselves and their readers either the 
 non-human world of external nature (Tho- 
 reau), the world of the will (Emerson), the 
 world of memory and association (Longfel- 
 low), the emotion of special causes like aboli- 
 tion or the Civil War (Whittier, Lowell) or of 
 special occasions (Holmes), but never the con- 
 gruous world of human life in general. They 
 knew that their neighbors and that extended 
 neighborship that constituted their public had 
 no emotional life in common because their ex- 
 
78 LETTERS AND LEADERSHIP 
 
 istence on the active plane was a competitive 
 one; bent as their public was on getting on 
 individually, how could they admit or cultivate 
 an inner community as social beings? Admit 
 it of course they could not, neither could they 
 cultivate it; and the result was that our old 
 culture never was and never became organic ; — 
 a by-product of the conditions of its time, it 
 was unable to project itself beyond those condi- 
 tions. That is why it strikes one as so futile 
 when Mr. Brownell pleads for the extension 
 of taste without taking into consideration the 
 primitive forces that will have to undergo a 
 profound transmutation before taste in the or- 
 ganic sense will really be possible to the Amer- 
 ican public. Inorganic taste we already have 
 in abundance, and every year, following the 
 spread of wealth, it increases more and more. 
 Nowadays a little money and a little training 
 and a little expert advice enable almost any- 
 one to possess a "flawless" drawing-room, for 
 example (especially if he keeps within the safe 
 
OUR CRITICS 79 
 
 circle of the neutral colors). But is it not 
 abundantly evident that this very general at- 
 tainment of aesthetic taste is quite compatible 
 with an extreme want of taste in other relations 
 of life? 
 
 Upon almost all our social relations, in fact, 
 the effect is so obvious of our competitive, non- 
 creative past that, were it not that our critics 
 belong to that competitive, non-creative past 
 and cannot escape from its circle of ideas, it 
 would seem almost wanton of them to accuse 
 the younger generation of having created a 
 chaos which, in truth, they have only become 
 conscious of. Our critics themselves have al- 
 ways said that our society is too incongruous 
 to produce a high social comedy; but why do 
 they draw the line there? Do they not see 
 that "high" literature in any genre, literature, 
 I mean, that is based on a complicated social 
 understanding, is all but impossible for us at 
 present, except on a forced and artificial plane? 
 Consider Dr. Crothers, for example. Why are 
 
8o LETTERS AND LEADERSHIP 
 
 the essays of Dr. Crothers so self-conscious if 
 it is not because Dr. Crothers knows perfectly 
 well that his eighty thousand readers have no 
 emotional life in common either with him or 
 with each other, because he does not feel at 
 %ome with his readers as Charles Lamb felt, 
 or even as Dr. Holmes felt in his little Harvard 
 world of the past"? They admit, I suppose, 
 that Dr. Crothers is self-conscious; but why do 
 they accept with only a gesture of deprecation 
 the self-consciousness of Dr. Crothers while 
 they attack in so savage a way the self-con- 
 sciousness of the younger generation? Be- 
 cause while the self-consciousness of the younger 
 generation stands for an instinctive drive to- 
 ward a common understanding on the creative 
 plane, the self-consciousness of Dr. Crothers, 
 making no levy upon our creative life, accepts 
 the pioneer law of self-preservation, in the 
 scheme of which literature is only a kind of 
 associational and secondary play of the mind 
 
OUR CRITICS 8i 
 
 in a society whose real business is the art of 
 getting on. 
 
 Our critics are thus unable to connect at any 
 point with the creative life of the present time 
 because they are precluded from so doing by 
 the entire programme of the epoch in which they 
 were bred. Mr. Babbitt and Mr. Brownell 
 differ from Mr. More in being instinctively hu- 
 mane minds; but they are in implicit agree- 
 ment with Mr. More's pioneer sociology, none 
 the less; they have simply not filled out their 
 points of view on the economic and psycho- 
 logical sides, and thus, without deliberately re- 
 pudiating, they ignore the economic and psy- 
 chological interpretations of life according to 
 which literature is not an entity in itself but 
 one of the manifestations of society. Here 
 is a statement in point from Mr. Babbitt's 
 New Laokoon: "Lessing repudiated what was 
 artificial and superficial in the French tradi- 
 tion, — its conventions, and etiquette, and gal- 
 
82 LETTERS AND LEADERSHIP 
 
 lantries, — but at the risk of losing a real virtue, 
 viz., the exquisite urbanity that the French at 
 their best had really succeeded in attaining." 
 Mr. Babbitt, you see, implies that literature and 
 society are distinct entities following separate 
 laws. For only on the assumption that liter- 
 ature is independent of society and not, as Ma- 
 dame de Stael said a hundred years ago, an 
 expression of it, only on the assumption, that 
 is to say, that literature forms a self-sufficient 
 world of its own, is it possible to dream that 
 you can pick out all the plums from the liter- 
 ary pudding and make a nice little particular 
 pie for yourself. How, indeed, could this "ex- 
 quisite urbanity" of the French tradition have 
 been anything but exotic in the Berlin of 1760? 
 And how could it possibly have been preserved 
 when those other characteristics of the French 
 tradition, with which it was organically bound 
 up, had been repudiated? Was it not, in fact, 
 the great work of Lessing, that work not so 
 much of intelligence as of character for which, 
 
OUR CRITICS 83 
 
 according to Goethe, the Germans have so re- 
 vered his memory, that he purged the German 
 mind of all its exotic elements and grounded its 
 literature in the firm subsoil of its own nature? 
 Our critics, to repeat, maintain this peculiar 
 cosmopolitan eclecticism partly because, not be- 
 ing creative minds, they do not appreciate, as 
 the creative mind does, the necessary corre- 
 spondence between expression and experience, 
 even, if need be, the most limited, merely local, 
 experience; and partly because by means of it 
 they are able to prevent literature from coming 
 into direct contact with a society whose acquisi- 
 tive, non-creative programme it would immedi- 
 ately upset and destroy. 
 
 From that programme our critics of the middle 
 generation have been unable to liberate them- 
 selves. There is Professor Stuart P. Sherman, 
 for example. Professor Sherman plainly wants 
 to take part in the creative life of his contem- 
 poraries; besides, he is a natural oppositionist 
 and a vigorous oppositionist we ought to have. 
 
84 LETTERS AND LEADERSHIP 
 
 Nothing is more tonic than to be reminded, 
 constantly and aggressively, of the human sig- 
 nificance of points of view other than one's own. 
 But Professor Sherman's opposition is sterile, 
 because it lies outside the creative sphere alto- 
 gether. Talk as he may of humanism, his hu- 
 manism is avowedly based upon that of Mr. 
 More, author of the damaging statement that 
 "the rights of property are more important than 
 the right to life"; he cannot therefore convey, 
 because he has obviously never experienced, the 
 artistic value of any principle, even the most 
 reactionary one. An innate conviction that ex- 
 perience itself is vain and that the acquisitive 
 instincts have and ought to have the right of 
 way desiccates the mind of the man who might 
 have been Young America's dearest and most 
 stimulating enemy and has led him to write a 
 book that futilizes not merely the contemporary 
 literature with which it deals but all literature 
 whatsoever. 
 
 Mr. Spingarn's mind, of course, is of quite 
 
OUR CRITICS 85 
 
 a different order; but he too belongs to the 
 circle of our past. For while he is up to the 
 minute in his critical theory he is the victim of 
 a society which has so abridged and emasculated 
 the function of criticism that he is himself un- 
 able to generate enough interest in contem- 
 porary phenomena to feel it worth his while to 
 bring his critical apparatus into play. It hap- 
 pens, of course, that many of Mr. Spingarn's 
 ideas are intelligent and true. Why then does 
 so much of his writing reduce itself to a thin 
 dialectic, the wheels of which turn round with 
 extraordinary facility but without gathering 
 heat or throwing out light? Because, while his 
 critical point of view is intellectually admir- 
 able, it does not represent the kind of criticism 
 for which a society in our stage of development 
 offers an adequate opportunity. Mr. Spin- 
 gam's aesthetic, as we know, is derived from 
 that of Benedetto Croce and Benedetto Croce, 
 as we also know, conducts in Italy a critical 
 magazine from which a large part of the liter- 
 
86 LETTERS AND LEADERSHIP 
 
 ary life of his country takes its direction. This 
 is an aspect of reality just as real as the reality 
 of Benedetto Croce's ideas. How does it hap- 
 pen, then, that Mr. Spingarn emulates the one 
 without emulating the other? Obviously be- 
 cause America is not Italy and because, while 
 a theory may be equally true in all countries, 
 what makes a theory effective is the peculiar 
 condition of the given time and place with which 
 it is brought into relationship. That works of 
 art ought to be judged purely on their own mer- 
 its and without regard to time and place is, no 
 doubt, perfectly valid as a standard of criticism. 
 But a criticism that employs that standard will 
 never be able to play the effective part in this 
 country that it plays in Italy until our literature 
 has been brought into such an organic relation- 
 ship with our life that in discussing literary phe- 
 nomena on their own merits it will also be dis- 
 cussing, by implication, the society of which lit- 
 erary phenomena are the expression. 
 
 Thus Mr. Spingarn, modern as he is and de- 
 
OUR CRITICS 87 
 
 riving his point of view from a field of learn- 
 ing largely untapped by the critics of the older 
 generation, is essentially, so far as America is 
 concerned, in the same boat with Mr. Babbitt 
 and Mr. Brownell. For just as Mr. Spingarn 
 does not see why he should not take over the 
 Italian criticism of Benedetto Croce, so Mr. Bab- 
 bitt and Mr. Brownell see no reason why they 
 should not take over the principles and methods 
 of French criticism, in spite of the fact that 
 France is the most perfect example of a social 
 organism the modem world knows, the most 
 perfect example, that is to say, of a spontaneous 
 unity in all departments of life. Obviously 
 in a civilization that is based on a traditional 
 common understanding, where literature pro- 
 ceeds through a constant, illuminating reference 
 to known antecedents, where literary values are 
 fixed by an experience in which all have shared, 
 the merest of "merely" literary criticism is im- 
 plicitly a form of social criticism as well; and 
 by virtue of this it is true of French critics of 
 
88 LETTERS AND LEADERSHIP 
 
 whatever school that in touching on a given 
 book they write about France, setting in vibra- 
 tion, throwing into relief, a fragment of the 
 racial consciousness itself. How, then, can the 
 principles and methods of French criticism be 
 divorced altogether from the texture of French 
 society? How can they be taken over bodily 
 and applied in societies that possess no compar- 
 able organic development? The answer is that 
 they can be taken over but that they can not be 
 applied, as the whole work of our orthodox 
 critics goes to prove; for the classical method 
 loses its force at once when it is brought to bear 
 on a literature that has no values based on ex- 
 perience and expresses no achieved social organ- 
 ism but only the necessarily irresponsible im- 
 pulses of isolated individuals. Our critics, by 
 assuming this attitude, not in regard to spe- 
 cific works, for these they ignore, but in regard 
 to the tendencies that lie behind them, are led 
 quite naturally to find in these tendencies noth- 
 ing but sound and fury, signifying nothing. 
 
OUR CRITICS 89 
 
 But they themselves are unable to suggest any 
 principles of order adapted to a spiritually un- 
 organized society. 
 
CHAPTER V 
 
 OUR AWAKENERS 
 I 
 
 In that very interesting testament, Literature 
 in Ireland, which he left for his fellow-poets, 
 Thomas MacDonagh showed how disadvanta- 
 geous it is to have a full-grown criticism side by 
 side with what he calls a baby literature. 
 "There is," he says, "a school of criticism in 
 Ireland, a school that knows the work of the 
 finest critics in the world, and knows too, what 
 is more important, the finest literature in the 
 world. This, when dealing with literature in 
 general, adds to the store of fine critical work. 
 This at times encourages and approves good 
 original Irish work. I think it unfortunate, 
 however, that it should have grown with, or in- 
 deed before, the original work. Dealing with 
 
 the monuments of the older literatures — Eng- 
 90 
 
OUR AWAKENERS 91 
 
 lish, French, and the like — this criticism knows 
 its place, its bearings, its conditions. Dealing 
 with a naissant literature it looks over its shoul- 
 der, as it were. Its neck is awry. Its eyes are 
 twisted round. Its feet turn from their known 
 way and stumble. When it does get a clear 
 view of its object, it misses the shapes and forms 
 it saw in other lands and expresses its disap- 
 pointment." 
 
 Of our own criticism surely, of our own 
 critics, one could hardly have a better descrip- 
 tion than that. For Ireland and America 
 really are alike in that they inherit a dominant 
 academic tradition colonial in essence, having 
 its home in centers of civilization remote from 
 the springs of a national life which has only of 
 late come into its own consciousness. For the 
 shaping of that consciousness, therefore, we 
 cannot look to our critics for any assistance. 
 Not guides and friends of the creative spirit 
 about them but incredulous pedagogues by ne- 
 cessity, they have been really driven to destroy 
 
92 LETTERS AND LEADERSHIP 
 
 in others the poet that has died in themselves. 
 Of their "humanism" let this be the merciful 
 epitaph. 
 
 But, after all, our critics have never set up 
 to be national awakeners. They have never 
 pretended to be on terms of intimacy with the 
 real conditions of our life; they know in their 
 own hearts, I think, that they cannot suggest 
 any way out of our difEculties. Who, then, 
 are, or who purport to be, our real awakeners? 
 The sociologists whose doctrine is the adapta- 
 tion of man to his environment, the apostles of 
 a narrow efficiency, and the pragmatic and real- 
 istic philosophers who stand behind them. For 
 twenty years and more now they have occupied 
 the center of our life. They have not only ac- 
 cepted reality, they have claimed reality, they 
 have said that they alone apprehend reality, 
 and that reality has been taken out of the hands 
 of the muddleheads and put in their special 
 charge because they alone are able to do some- 
 thing with it. Well, and here we are. They 
 
OUR AWAKENERS 93 
 
 have asked us to judge them by their fruits. 
 What are we to say? 
 
 For the influence of these awakeners of ours 
 has been, directly or indirectly, universal ; their 
 philosophy has been the formulation, the ra- 
 tionalization of the whole spirit of American 
 life at least since the Spanish war. And ob- 
 serve the condition in which we now are: sul- 
 try, flaccid, hesitant, not knowing what we want 
 and incapable of wanting anything very much, 
 certainly not in love with our life, certainly not 
 at home in this field of reality our awakeners 
 have bidden us to be at home in, inclined as 
 ever to substitute monetary for real values, and 
 to stand in mortal fear of letting loose the 
 spiritual appetites that impede our pursuit of 
 a neat, hygienic, and sterile success. . . . 
 What, in fact, is the note of our society to- 
 day? A universal tepidity, it seems to me, the 
 faded offspring of the Puritan hatred of human 
 nature, which makes perhaps a majority of our 
 kindly fellow-countrymen seem quite incapable 
 
94 LETTERS AND LEADERSHIP. 
 
 of living, loving, thinking, dreaming, or hop- 
 ing with any degree of passion or intensity, 
 pacifistic at bottom not from any specific real- 
 ization of war but from a distaste for the mili- 
 tant life in toto. We know this only too well ; 
 it is the secret of our humiliation, and it ex- 
 plains the desire of so many people to see this 
 country rudely jolted and shaken up; it er- 
 plains the pathological hopes that so many peo- 
 ple lavish upon the war, hopes that have been 
 bred by the morbid state into which We iare 
 fallen. . . . What can our awakeners say to 
 all this? It is not their fault, certainly, that 
 things are so; but so things are, and it is in the 
 days of their consulate that things have become 
 so. Out of pragmatism our new leadership has 
 been recruited — the leadership of "interpreta- 
 tion." If at last that leadership has revealed 
 itself as no leadership at all, I think it is be- 
 cause pragmatism, by default, has got itself 
 into a false position. 
 
 By default, I say; for not content with re- 
 
OUR AWAKENERS 95 
 
 maining a method, it has, owing to the impo- 
 tence of our poetical tradition and the extra- 
 scientific sympathies of its founders, attempted 
 to fill the place which poetry alone can fill ade- 
 quately, and which our poetry, in its complacent 
 animalism on the one hand, and its complicated 
 escape from reality on the other, has left vacant. 
 That is to say, it has assumed the right to form- 
 ulate the aims of life and the values by which 
 those aims are tested, aims and values which, 
 we are led by history to believe, can be eflFec- 
 tively formulated only by individual minds not 
 in harmony with the existing fact but in re- 
 volt against it. Social efficiency is the ideal 
 posited by Professor Dewey. But an ideal is 
 an end, and social efficiency is not an end; it is 
 a means toward the realization of human values. 
 Has not the purpose, has not even the scope of 
 social efficiency ever been determined by indi- 
 viduals who from time to time repudiate the 
 social organism altogether and, rising themselves 
 to a fresh level, drag mankind after them? 
 
96 LETTERS AND LEADERSHIP 
 
 Life proceeds not by the burnishing up of exist- 
 ent ideals, but by the discovery of new and more 
 vital ones, thanks to the imagination, which 
 reaches out into an unknown whither the intelli- 
 gence is able to follow only by a long second. 
 Does not pragmatism therefore turn the natural 
 order of things inside out when it accepts the in- 
 telligence instead of the imagination as the 
 value-creating entity? It does, virtually if not 
 absolutely, and in so doing crowds out and re- 
 places the essential factor from which all dy- 
 namic creativity springs. It becomes, in a 
 word, the dog in the manger of our creative life. 
 What if it is an amiable, friendly dog with none 
 of the other disagreeable proclivities of the dog 
 in the fable? The main thing is that it makes 
 its bed where the winged horse of poetry ought 
 to lie. That is why we have no right to object 
 when the winged horse suddenly opens his 
 mouth and remarks in the words of iEsop: 
 "What a miserable cur! He cannot eat corn 
 
OUR AWAKENERS 97 
 
 himself, nor will he allow others to eat it who 
 can." 
 
 Had not the pragmatists issued a special 
 claim upon reality, had they not, a little arro- 
 gantly, assumed the rights of leadership, no 
 one would hold them responsible now for the 
 general aimlessness of our life. Drift is their 
 abhorrence too, and in many directions they 
 have pointed out the road to mastery. More- 
 over, pragmatism was formulated by two think- 
 ers who, in their feeling for reality, in their 
 acceptance of a human nature that calls noth- 
 ing common or unclean, and in their desire to 
 make human nature more conscious of itself, 
 might well be called rather poets than phi- 
 losophers. They were poets, yes; but they 
 were not sufficiently poets to intensify the con- 
 ception of human nature that they had inherited 
 from our tradition — their own vein of poetry, 
 golden in Professor James, silver in Professor 
 Dewey, ran too thin for that; and besides, their 
 
98 LETTERS AND LEADERSHIP. 
 
 whole training had gone to make them students 
 of the existing fact. Unable as they were to 
 alter the level of human vision, all they could do 
 was to take men on the level where they found 
 them and release their latent capacities on that 
 level — an immensely valuable thing, of course, 
 but not the vital thing for us, because it is the 
 level itself that is at fault in America. Had 
 our existing fact, had the core of our life been 
 rich, as it is, for example^ in Russia, then their 
 programme of liberation and control would have 
 been as adequate for the nation in general as it 
 now is for the few qualified individuals. What 
 it actually did was to unfold, for the most part, 
 a human nature that was either detached from 
 the sources of life or contented with a very 
 primitive range of needs and desires. 
 
 That is why, though they are always cutting 
 off the heads of the hydra that has us in its 
 grasp, our pragmatic awakeners have really not 
 only failed us but traduced us. For our hydra 
 is, and always has been, self-complacency, satis- 
 
OUR AWAKENERS 99 
 
 faction with just the primitive scale of human 
 values I speak of] and self-complacency, as a 
 spiritual fact, is proof against all the arrows of 
 the intelligence. Our awakeners accept them- 
 selves as a norm and by so doing become them- 
 selves a part of the very hydra that they attack. 
 Assuming the intelligence as a final court of ap- 
 peal, they are sealed against those impulses that 
 give birth to self-criticism and the principle of 
 growth; all they can do, therefore, is to unfold 
 the existing fact in themselves, and in the world 
 about them. 
 
 Does it matter that the founders of pragma- 
 tism, like certain of its English congeners, H. 
 G. Wells, for example, have passed outside it 
 in order to meet the critical issues of life? The 
 mercurial pilgrim soul of Professor James had 
 passed on to a strange polytheistic mysticism 
 long before he died; H. G. Wells, under the 
 stress of the war, has redoubled his quest of 
 "God, the Invisible King"; and Professor 
 Dewey has not denied the need of a national 
 
loo LETTERS AND LEADERSHIP 
 
 faith in this country, to attain which we shall 
 certainly have not merely to do something other 
 than we normally do, but to be something other 
 than we normally are. Creators themselves, 
 and essentially poets, they have been free of 
 their own creations, they have shown that they 
 are members of the elect company of the "older 
 and bolder"; nevertheless, they have justified 
 a multitude of their followers in that com- 
 placent, mechanistic view of life to which 
 everything else in our mock-efficient, success- 
 loving society predisposes them. Enthroning, 
 as they have, the intelligence which merely sees, 
 in place of the imagination which sees and feels, 
 they have in their "practicality" sanctioned the 
 type of mind whose emotional needs are so lim- 
 ited that the efficient pursuit of some special 
 object is all that it demands of life. 
 
 II 
 
 Pragmatism has failed us, I say, because it 
 
 has attempted to fill the place that only a na- 
 
 6ii 
 
OUR AWAKENERS loi 
 
 tional poetry can adequately fill. Does any 
 one imagine that we are the only people that 
 has been reduced to the pulp-like, inelastic state 
 in which we find ourselves to-day? Have we 
 forgotten what Germany was like at the begin- 
 ning of the nineteenth century, disjointed, 
 vague and sentimental, for all the sporadic 
 flames of her music and philosophy? And 
 have we forgotten how Germany in a genera- 
 tion reached the wonderful maturity that pre- 
 ceded that plunge into imperialism which the 
 bad old ways of the nineteenth century alone 
 rendered inevitable? Our localists, our indi- 
 vidualists, our American decentralizers may, if 
 they choose, regard that process as an evil one, 
 but if so they deny Goethe, the poet who, co- 
 operating as it were with the Napoleonic wars, 
 brought its dynamic unity to the German peo- 
 ple. How did he do this? By projecting in 
 Faust a personification of spiritual energy an- 
 chored by a long chain of specific incidents in 
 the concrete experience of the German people 
 
102 LETTERS AND LEADERSHIP 
 
 and thereby infusing into that experience the 
 leaven of development, impelling the individ- 
 ual to form himself into a peculiar being ever in 
 search also of a conception of what men are 
 collectively. By thus laying more and ever 
 more demands upon human nature, by com- 
 pelling men to accept that spirit of restless striv- 
 ing which gives them a leverage over things, he 
 not only electrified the German people but 
 obliged it to create an environment worthy of 
 itself. 
 
 Now, it is of no importance at the moment 
 that we have no Goethe in America and that 
 we have no reason to suppose we are going to 
 get one; it is of no importance that we cannot 
 count on a messianic solution of our troubles, 
 any more than we can count on the rude jolt 
 which the war may, or may not, give us. What 
 is important is for us to see that the really ef- 
 fective approach to life is the poetic approach, 
 the approach that Goethe summed up in his 
 phrase "from within outward," and that it is 
 
OUR AWAKENERS 103 
 
 the effective approach because it envisages 
 method in terms of value, every ounce of pres- 
 sure that is put upon value registering itself 
 with a tenfold intensity, so to speak, in the 
 sphere of application. 
 
 This has been the European approach from 
 time immemorial. Since the days of the ca- 
 thedral builders everything that we call the en- 
 vironment has come as a natural result of the 
 demands that human nature has laid upon itself. 
 Is this less true of the present day than of the 
 past? Has not the whole impetus toward so- 
 cial reform in modern England come about 
 through that intensification of the poetic view 
 of life which began with Carlyle's tremendous 
 restatement of the spiritual principle, which 
 passed over into the economic sphere with Rus- 
 kin and William Morris, and through which 
 English liberalism has since learned gradually 
 but effectively to assimilate science and use it as 
 a ship uses a search-light? Can any of our 
 awakeners take exception to the following pas- 
 
104 LETTERS AND LEADERSHIP 
 
 sage in which Morris, actuated by his own lusty, 
 creative joy in life and by his hatred, his vivid, 
 compelling hatred of the ugliness of modern 
 society, pointed out the path to reform from 
 within outward? 
 
 "It was my good luck only that has put me 
 on this side of the window among delightful 
 books and lovely works of art, and not on the 
 other side, in the empty street, the drink-steeped 
 liquor shops, the foul and degraded lodgings. 
 I know hy my own feelings and desires what 
 these men want, what could have saved them 
 from this lowest depth of savagery : employment 
 which would foster their self-respect, and win 
 the praise and S3Tiipathy of their fellows, and 
 dwellings which they would come to with pleas- 
 ure, surroundings which would soothe and ele- 
 vate them, reasonable labor, reasonable rest. 
 There is only one thing that can give them this 
 —Art." 
 
 Thus Morris, with his conception of "joy in 
 labor," threw out in the midst of a machine 
 
OUR AWAKENERS lOjT 
 
 age a palpitant standard of living that will in 
 the end, especially now that it has come to light 
 again in the minds of English reconstruction- 
 ists, serve to delimit the essential function of 
 the machine in English society. And he did 
 this, precisely, by the "unrealistic" method of 
 projecting a Utopia, by seeing life in terms of 
 that imagination which knows how important 
 the intelligence is and is able to impel it in the 
 direction of a deeply desired goal. That Mor- 
 ris knew little of science and cared little for it 
 is beside the point; by laying demands upon 
 life, by insisting that human nature must be 
 creative, he obliged his contemporaries and his 
 successors to frame through science an environ- 
 ment that would make that consummation pos- 
 sible. That is why the English liberalism rep- 
 resented in various ways by Shaw and Wells 
 and Graham Wallas is so much more effective 
 than the liberalism of our awakeners, who, 
 while they have assimilated the ideas of all 
 these men, have been unable to share their im- 
 
io6 LETTERS AND LEADERSHIP 
 
 pulse. Shaw and Wells and Wallas, all of 
 whom are as much the heirs of Morris's pe- 
 culiar socialism as they are of science, have ever 
 envisaged evolution in terms of a more stringent 
 demand upon life; not in terms of fine think- 
 ing merely but of "love and fine thinking," not 
 in terms of man merely but of self-surpassing 
 man, not in terms of efficiency merely but of 
 happiness, and all the other things have been 
 added unto them — the things which have made 
 possible, for instance, that beautiful programme 
 of the British Labor Party over which we were 
 all marveling the other day. Is it not a suffi- 
 cient comment on our pragmatic awakeners that, 
 possessing no infectious ideal of "joy in labor," 
 the best they can do is to publish unleavened 
 studies on the control of fatigue? 
 
 Ill 
 
 "I know by my own feelings and desires." 
 Why has no one been able to embrace our 
 American life in those dynamic personal terms 
 
OUR AWAKENERS 107 
 
 with which Morris embraced the life of Eng- 
 land?. Why has it been impossible for us to 
 compass the poetic view of life that has proved 
 itself in other countries capable of so many won- 
 derful things? It is because we have never 
 been able to make any complicated imaginative 
 demand upon life. Our field of reality has re- 
 quired such an over-development of our acquisi- 
 tive instincts that our creative instincts have had 
 no scope at all ; and consequently we have never 
 been able to rise above those two equally un- 
 creative conceptions of human nature, the total 
 depravity of Puritanism and that optimistic 
 self-complacency which is Puritanism's obverse 
 and twin brother. Instead of a Carlyle we 
 have had an Emerson, instead of a Morris we 
 have had a Whitman — that is the whole story. 
 For Emerson's private perfectibility, based 
 as it was on the idea that all we have to do to 
 attain our majority is to look within ourselves 
 and cast off the swaddling-clothes of tradition, 
 led by an easy transition, our society being what 
 
io8 LETTERS AND LEADERSHIP 
 
 it was in the nineteenth century, into that con- 
 ception of the "spontaneous man" which our 
 political democracy had inherited from Rous- 
 seau and which, splendidly amplified by Walt 
 Whitman, has weathered all the vicissitudes of 
 our thinking to the present day, "Time," said 
 Emerson, in words that might well be applied 
 to himself, "melts to shining ether the solid 
 angularity of facts"; is it remarkable that his 
 own subjective idealism went by default? Not 
 that one means to disparage Walt Whitman, 
 who has taught us all to accept life and rejoice 
 in it, but that Whitman's great work is to be 
 measured in terms not of general human expe- 
 rience but of a special situation: one has only 
 to recall that up to a generation ago our entire 
 race was conceived in the holy shame of a re- 
 luctant wedlock to realize the extent of our 
 national obligation to Whitman's robust animal 
 humors. But greater as Whitman was than 
 William Morris, he fulfilled a more primitive 
 need, a need that would never have existed had 
 
OUR AWAKENERS 109 
 
 it not been for our exclusively Puritan past ; he 
 was unable to carry us a step forward as Morris 
 carried England, because, having embraced life, 
 he was unable really to make anything of it. 
 Where Morris, with his conception of "joy in 
 labor," not only released the creative energies 
 of men but held out before them a vision of 
 excellence in labor that mobilized those energies 
 and impelled men to reconstruct their environ- 
 ment in order to give them full play, Whitman 
 merely universalized the miraculous animality 
 that summed up his own experience. He knew 
 nothing of what has been made of life, he was 
 unable to imagine what can be made of life, 
 over and above this miraculous animality. 
 "Glad to be alive" simply, however intensely, 
 he established a point of departure for the crea- 
 tive spirit — and there he left us. And there, 
 so far as our poetical tradition is concerned, we 
 have remained. 
 
 I resume all this because it explains why the 
 pragmatists inherit no dynamic faith and why, 
 
no LETTERS AND LEADERSHIP. 
 
 lacking a dynamic faith, their treatment of 
 society is itself so ineffective. It is in this 
 lack of dynamic faith that they betray their 
 unbroken descent from our old reformers and 
 prove that pragmatism has not been the vital 
 departure in our life that we have all been 
 looking for. For what does it matter that our 
 old reformers, ignorant of science, took for 
 granted a "normal" human nature that was do- 
 mestic and acquisitive, while our awakeners of 
 the present day, equipped with a consummate 
 scientific knowledge of mankind, take for 
 granted a normal human nature that is efRcient 
 and sophisticated? At bottom they are all 
 chips of the same block. Whittier, having risen 
 to the heights of passion over the question of 
 slavery, relapsed as soon as the war was over 
 into a normal scale of values that enabled him 
 to write that epic of satisfaction with things 
 as they are, Snow-Bound. The muck-rakers of 
 a later day having, at the rate of ten cents 
 a word, abolished Peruna out of the world. 
 
OUR AWAKENERS in 
 
 passed on purified into the happy sphere in 
 which Mr. Ray Stannard Baker now writes his 
 Adventures in Contentment. And so it has 
 been with the social workers and the big broth- 
 ers of the settlement-house. Impelled to "give 
 the other fellow a chance" to rise to the tepid 
 status which life has portioned out to them and 
 which they regard as highly fortunate and satis- 
 factory, they have carried things to such a pass 
 that immigrant sociologists, under the stimulus 
 of a middle-class journalism, have been known 
 to regard it as the highest dream of their hearts 
 to be able to "lift" to the level of some ordinary 
 American neighborhood into which they them- 
 selves have gained admittance men and women 
 who are often immeasurably above it in the 
 scale of the spirit. 
 
 This question of our immigrant population 
 affords,' I think, the most critical test of any 
 merely pragmatic sociology. Our "hyphen- 
 ates," bred in a richly poetic, a richly creative 
 soil, desire to live poetically and creatively; 
 
112 LETTERS AND LEADERSHIP 
 
 but they come to us as the detached limbs of a 
 tree that they have left behind them. Has it 
 never occurred to our awakeners that the only 
 way in which we can absorb their life is by pro- 
 viding them with a new tree upon which they 
 can engraft themselves and that the only hope 
 of accomplishing this lies, not in improving 
 their environment, in offering them comfort, in 
 minimizing fatigue and shortening hours of la- 
 bor, important as all these things are, by the 
 way, but in quickening our own consciousness, 
 in puncturing our own complacency, in rising 
 by the force of our own demands upon life to 
 that sphere of joyous activity where we our- 
 selves are able to shed light and communicate 
 warmth'? This a pragmatic sociology cannot 
 accomplish; nor can it be accomplished except 
 through an appeal from sociology to the higher 
 court of literature. Incapable of the poetic 
 view of life and repudiating it, the pragmatists 
 are able only to codify our society, to rearrange 
 the allegiances that already exist, and to impose 
 
OUR AWAKENERS 113 
 
 upon the American people programmes which 
 have sprung from the poetic vision of other 
 countries and which they have assimilated 
 through their intelligence alone. Self-sufBcient 
 as they are, committed by the weakness of their 
 imagination and by the analytical habitude of 
 their minds to a mechanistic view of human na- 
 ture, they are unable to fuse and unify our wills, 
 they are unable to communicate any of those 
 vital incentives which are the austere fruits not 
 of "interest" but of love. Did I say that, pos- 
 sessing no infectious ideal of "joy in labor," 
 the best they can do is to concentrate their minds 
 on the control of fatigue? No, they can do 
 one thing better; they can evade reality alto- 
 gether and say with Mr. Henry Ford that "no 
 man can take pride in his work until he gets 
 something for it, until he has leisure to enjoy 
 life." In this way, throwing up the sponge 
 altogether, accepting machinery and more ma- 
 chinery and still more machinery as a fait ac- 
 compli, and giving up all hope of determining 
 
114 LETTERS AND LEADERSHIP 
 
 the rational place of machinery in life, they can 
 tell every one except the favored few whose 
 sophistication enables them to glut their intelli- 
 gence on that strange freak the American soul, 
 to seek reality in anything else than their work 
 — riding about the country in Ford cars, on 
 Sundays, for example, with their mouths open. 
 Such is the destiny of the working class, as our 
 young pragmatic intellectuals see it. As to the 
 middle class, they can in time, by consummat- 
 ing their freedom and capping it with control, 
 attain the more discreet paradise that the Fierce- 
 Arrow Company is at last able to place at their 
 disposal. 
 
 IV 
 
 So, becalmed as we are on a rolling sea, flap- 
 ping and fluttering, hesitating and veering 
 about, oppressed with a faint nausea, is it 
 strange that we have turned mutinous not only 
 against our old leaders, the colonial, fire-eating 
 minor prophets of Wall Street and their liter- 
 
OUR AWAKENERS 115 
 
 aiy and philosophical standard-bearers, but also 
 against our awakeners, the pragmatists, and 
 the human nature that they wish to liber- 
 ate in its own vicious circle, a human nature 
 impoverished by hard, primitive conditions 
 which has fulfilled the prophecy John Stuart 
 Mill made with regard to industrialism in gen- 
 eral, that it threatened the world with a "de- 
 ficiency of preferences" ? 
 
 Let us put it to our awakeners themseives. 
 They say that we are born too late in a world 
 too old to be able to compass anew the poetic 
 view of life that has actuated the societies of 
 Europe. They say that our blood is too mixed 
 and our aims too diverse for us to achieve a 
 national faith in the European sense. But 
 what are they able to suggest as a substitute? 
 We have no American culture, no; but we have 
 an "American spirit," the spirit which has pro- 
 duced Sousa's music and Christy's art and Mrs. 
 Eddy's religion. Are they satisfied with this? 
 We have none of the unity that gives life, no; 
 
ii6 LETTERS AND LEADERSHIP 
 
 but we have almost succumbed to the uniform- 
 ity that destroys it. Are they pleased with 
 this? Whether they subscribe to the "melting- 
 pot" theory or believe in "preaching hyphena- 
 tion," have they not proved themselves, in fact, 
 bankrupt in solutions? They have, and it is 
 because they have not entered into themselves, 
 these awakeners of ours. "I know by my own 
 feelings and desires," said Morris of the Eng- 
 lish workingmen of his time, "what these men 
 want." When we have "feelings and desires," 
 when, rather, we have poets to formulate them, 
 to create for us emblems of a greater life, mag- 
 netic ideals grounded in our own field of reality, 
 then our social problems, effectively handled 
 by the very minds that fumble now because 
 they cannot distinguish between ideals and 
 methods, will begin to solve themselves. 
 
 Let no one imagine then that we have out- 
 grown the poetic view of life; we have simply 
 not grown up to it, we have not yet reached 
 
OUR AWAKENERS 117 
 
 that full consciousness where faith and purpose, 
 the hallmarks of the mature kind, are able to 
 subjugate to their own ends the machinery of 
 existence. "For life to be fruitful," said 
 George Sand, "life must be felt as a blessing." 
 But to love life, to perceive the miraculous 
 beauty of life, and to seek for life, swiftly and 
 effectively, a setting worthy of its beauty — this 
 is the acme of civilization, to be attained, 
 whether by individuals or by nations, only 
 through a long and arduous process. But is it 
 not true that human nature, at bottom the same 
 the world over and at all times, irresistibly 
 desires life and growth? And is it not true 
 that human nature, in its infinite complexity, 
 responds now with one set of faculties, now 
 with another, according to circumstances and 
 the quality of its leadership"? If our poetic life 
 is at present in the most rudimentary state and 
 beset with fallacies of every kind, consider what 
 our circumstances have been, and remember that 
 
ii8 LETTERS AND LEADERSHIP 
 
 our leadership in the past has not only not en- 
 couraged it, but has over-stimulated those very 
 elements in our make-up that most retard its 
 development. 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 
 TOWARD THE FUTURE 
 
 So I return to the beginning of my enquiry. 
 An organized higher life : that is what the world 
 demands of us, that is what we have at last come 
 to demand of ourselves. 
 
 An organized higher life, — in other words, 
 in the first place, a literature fully aware of the 
 difficulties of the American situation and able, 
 in some sense, to meet them. For poets and 
 novelists and critics are the pathfinders of so- 
 ciety; to them belongs the vision without which 
 the people perish. Our literature in the past 
 has failed to produce sufficient minds capable 
 of taking that supreme initiative; in conse- 
 quence, it has fallen by its own weight under 
 the chaos of our life. But for this it has not 
 only the best of excuses, it has also at least one 
 119 
 
120 LETTERS AND LEADERSHIP 
 
 extraordinary precedent. Could there be a 
 stranger parallel to the state of our literature 
 today than the state of German literature in 
 1795, as Goethe describes it in the following 
 words? 
 
 "Germany is absolutely devoid of any cen- 
 tral point of social culture, where authors 
 might associate with one another and develop 
 themselves by following, each in his own spe- 
 cial branch, one aim, one common purpose. 
 Bom in places far remote from each other, edu- 
 •cated in all manner of ways, dependent as a 
 rule upon themselves alone and upon the im- 
 pressions of widely different surroundings; car- 
 ried away by a predilection in favor of this or 
 ^at example of native or foreign literature, 
 driven to all kinds of attempts, nay, even blun- 
 ders in their endeavor to test their own powers 
 without proper guidance; brought to the convic- 
 tion, gradually and only after much reflection, 
 that they ought to adopt a certain course, and 
 taught by practice what they can actually do; 
 
TOWARD THE FUTURE 121 
 
 ever and anon confused and led astray by a 
 large public devoid of taste and ready to swal- 
 low the bad with the same relish with which 
 it has previously swallowed the good, — is there 
 any German writer of note who does not recog- 
 nize himself in this picture, and who will not 
 acknowledge with modest regret the many times 
 that he has sighed for the opportunity of sub- 
 ordinating at an earlier stage of his career the 
 peculiarities of his original genius to a general 
 national culture, which, alas! was nowhere to 
 be found? For the development of the higher 
 classes by other moral influences and foreign 
 literature, despite the great advantage which 
 we have derived therefrom, has nevertheless 
 hindered the Germans, as Germans, from de- 
 veloping themselves at an earlier stage." 
 
 How keenly our conscientious writers of the 
 older generation must have experienced that re- 
 gret, those, I mean, who have never quite sub- 
 mitted to the complacent colonialism that has 
 marked so much of our culture in the past! 
 
122 LETTERS AND LEADERSHIP 
 
 But, unfortunately, they have left no testi- 
 monies behind them. They have considered it 
 so much an obligation to justify American life 
 merely as American life that they have glossed 
 over their own tragedies, not realizing perhaps 
 that in this way they have glossed over also the 
 failure of those higher aims that they them- 
 selves were born to represent. "Not the fruit 
 of experience, but experience itself, is the end." 
 That is the essential European doctrine, and it 
 is because Europeans value life as such that so 
 great a part of their vital energy goes into the 
 production of minds capable of heightening that 
 value, minds that are able to keep the ball of life 
 rolling in the sight and to the glory of all. But 
 that, as I have tried to show, was not the doc- 
 trine of our forebears; quite the contrary, 
 indeed. In consequence, the writers of the 
 younger generation inherit all the difRculties of 
 their elders, and at compound interest. 
 
 For the intellectual life is sustained by the 
 emotional life; in order to react vigorously 
 
TOWARD THE FUTURE 123 
 
 against one's environment one must in some 
 degree have been emotionally nurtured by it. 
 Our gifted minds lack too generally a certain 
 sort of character without which talent is alto- 
 gether fickle and fugitive; but what is this char- 
 acter if it is not the accumulated assurance, the 
 spiritual force that results from preceding gen- 
 erations of effort along the lines toward which 
 talent directs us? Professor Bruckner points 
 out in his history of Russian literature that "the 
 direct transition from uncultured strata to 
 strenuous mental activity is wont to avenge it- 
 self: the individual succumbs sooner or later to 
 the unwonted burden." And as for us young 
 people, how often do we not wear ourselves 
 out constructing the preliminary platform with- 
 out which it is impossible to create anything! 
 We have so few ideals given us that the facts 
 of our life do not instantly belie. Is it strange, 
 therefore, that we have, unlike the peoples of 
 Europe, no student class united in a common 
 discipline and forming a sort of natural breed- 
 
124 LETTERS AND LEADERSHIP. 
 
 ing ground for the leadership that we desire? 
 Nevertheless, a class like this we must have, 
 and there are, I think, many signs that such a 
 class is rapidly coming into existence. To be- 
 gin with, the sudden contraction of the national 
 cultures of Europe during the war, owing to 
 which many currents of thought, formerly 
 shared by all, have been withdrawn as it were 
 from circulation, has thrown us unexpectedly 
 back upon ourselves. How many drafts we 
 have issued in the past upon European thought, 
 unbalanced by any investment of our own! 
 The younger generation have come to feel this 
 obligation acutely. At the same time they have 
 been taught to speak a certain language in com- 
 mon by the social movements of the last twenty 
 years. Acquainted through study and travel 
 with ranges of human possibility which their 
 ancestors were able to contemplate only in the 
 abstract, they feel that the time has come to 
 explore these possibilities and to test them out 
 on our own soil. They see that Americans have 
 
TOWARD THE FUTURE 125 
 
 never so much as dreamed of a radically more 
 beautiful civilization, our Utopias having been 
 so generally of the nature of Edward Bellamy's, 
 complex and ingenious mechanisms, liberating 
 the soul into a vacuum of ennui. They see that 
 it is art and literature which give the soul its 
 higher values and make life worthy of interces- 
 sion, and that every effective social revolution 
 has been led up to and inspired by visionary 
 leaders who have shown men what they might 
 become and what they miss in living as they do. 
 "Thought," according to one of the greatest of 
 modem philosophers, "is strong enough to dis- 
 turb the sense of satisfaction with nature; it is 
 too weak to construct a new world in opposition 
 to it." Only desire can do this, they feel, 
 these Americans of the new age; that is what 
 separates them not only from our traditional 
 leaders, but also from our awakeners,the prag- 
 matists, who are so busily unfolding the social 
 order of which they form an integral part. 
 They feel this, I say ; they feel it very deeply. 
 
126 LETTERS AND LEADERSHIP. 
 
 How deeply they desire another America, not 
 like the America of to-day, grande et riche, mats 
 desordonnee, as Turgeniev said of Russia, but 
 harmonious and beneficent, a great America 
 that knows how to use the finest of its gifts! 
 And have they not seen, rising about them on 
 the wings of a warm, humane, concerted en- 
 deavor, nation after nation, casting off what- 
 ever incubus of crabbed age, paralysis, tyranny, 
 stupidity and sloth has lain most heavily upon 
 the people's life, checking the free development 
 of personality, retarding the circulation of gen- 
 erous ideas? The Young Italy of Mazzini's 
 day, the Young Ireland of ours, the rebirth of 
 the submerged nationalities of Eastern Europe, 
 reborn not to the greater glory of imperialism 
 but in the name of an incalculably rich interna- 
 tional humanity that beckons from the future — 
 have they witnessed again and again that sud- 
 den fusion of great natural aggregations of men 
 by which all their elements have been set beat- 
 ing together at the highest pitch, without feel- 
 
TOWARD THE FUTURE 127 
 
 ing, to the bottom of their hearts, that civiliza- 
 tion ought to be a S3Tnphony and that there is 
 in mankind an orchestral instinct that is even 
 now clamoring at the gates of consciousness? 
 
 I do not say that there is in this fact any 
 presentiment of unison for us. Too many .of 
 the best minds of our own younger generation 
 have already, owing to the aridity of our cul- 
 tural soil, fallen victims to the creeping paral- 
 ysis of the mechanistic view of life. Too many, 
 more poetically endowed, have lost .themselves 
 in a confused and feeble anarchism. Too few 
 Americans are able even to imagine what it 
 means to be employed by civilizatioin. 
 
 But certainly no true social revolution will 
 ever be possible in America till a race of artists, 
 profound and sincere, have brought us face to 
 face with our own experience and set working 
 in that experience the leaven of the highest cul- 
 ture. For it is exalted desires that give their 
 validity to revolutions, and exalted desires take 
 form only in exalted souls. But has there ever 
 
128 LETTERS AND LEADERSHIP, 
 
 been a time when masses of men have conceived 
 these desires without leaders appearing to form- 
 ulate them and press them home? We are lax 
 now, too lax, because we do not realize the 
 responsibility that lies upon us, each in the 
 measure of his own gift. Is it imaginable, 
 however, that as time goes on and side by side 
 with other nations we come to see the inade- 
 quacy of our own, we shall fail to rise to the 
 gravity of our situation and recreate, out of the 
 sublime heritage of human ideals, a new syn- 
 thesis adaptable to the unique conditions of our 
 life? 
 
 When that occurs, we shall begin to grow, as 
 a people; and having begun to grow we shall 
 grow quickly. For we already possess elements 
 that belong to every level of development, even 
 the highest; we possess them all, but they are 
 not grouped in a vital order, they have no cumu- 
 lative significance. As soon as the foundations 
 of our life have been reconstructed and made 
 solid on the basis of an experience of which we 
 
TOWARD THE FUTURE 129 
 
 have been shown the potentialities, all these ex- 
 traneous, ill-regulated forces will rally about 
 their newly-found center; they will fit in, each 
 where it belongs, contributing to the essential 
 architecture of our life. Then, and only then, 
 shall we cease to be a blind, selfish, disorderly 
 people. We shall become a luminous people, 
 dwelling in the light and sharing our light.