Re TELE Be tn) Vs 7 earn cm | Sia es yr | ae wir. : ; / i : , : t We : iI : saat, , f. " 4 i a a (eile . af wp : af : ay * "i ~ .. ‘ ’ . i ® a a “we 5 r st Pat ' 4 \- ¢ - 1} ¥,/ 4 - " i it, T — Ce Ex a Tet v4 }' Wes Vicar a a bee THE GOLDEN DAY The Golden Day A Study in American Eaperience and Culture LEWIS MUMFORD fe ~ BONI AND LIVERIGHT oo ow Publishers ow NEW YORK MCMXXVI COPYRIGHT 1192.6 °42 oes BONI & LIVERIGHT, Inc. PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES “Le “py First printing, November, 1926 Second printing, February, 1927 Third printing, February, 1927 Fourth printing, April, 1927 NOTE Tis book rounds out the study of American life begun in Sticks and Stones. Where in the first book I used architecture as an index of our civilization, in The Golden Day I have treated imaginative _ literature and philosophy as a key to our culture. Civilization and culture, the material fact and the spiritual form, are not exclusive terms; for one is never found without at least a vestige of the other: and I need not, I trust, apologize because here and there the themes of the two books interpenetrate. The substance of this book was delivered in a series of lectures on The Development of American Culture before a group of European and American students at Geneva, in August, 1925. These lec- tures were given at the invitation of the Geneva Federation; and I gratefully record my debt to Mr. and Mrs. Alfred Zimmern for their constant under- standing and sympathy. Without the numerous explorations Mr. Van Wyck Brooks has made, it would have been impossible to make the connected study I have here attempted; and without Mr. J. E. Spingarn’s criticism of the final draft of the manu- script more than one page would have been the poorer. The first chapter appeared in The Ameri- can Mercury. : Lewis Mumrorp. ” ms bi et a CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE I. Tue Oriains of THE AMERICAN MIND. . 11 II. Tue Romanticism ofr THE PionrER . . 47 PrleeeeexOLpEN Day . . . . 2. 2 « 85 IV. Tue Pracmatic AcquiEscENcE. . . . 157 V. Tue Pirrace or tHe Past . . . ... 199 VI. Tue SHapow or THE Muck-RAKE . . . 2383 eR ir ee gc ee lat ee 1) BTB Heaven always bears some proportion to earth. EMERSON. CHAPTER ONE THE ORIGINS OF THE AMERICAN MIND Z Tue settlement of America had its origins in the unsettlement of Europe. America came into exist- ence when the European was already so distant in mind from the ancient ideas and ways of his birth- place, that the whole span of the Atlantic did not materially widen the gulf. The dissociation, the displacement, and finally, the disintegration of European culture became most apparent in the New World: but the process itself began in Europe, and the interests that eventually dominated the Ameri- can scene all had their origin in the Old World. The Protestant, the inventor, the politician, the explorer, the restless delocalized man—all these types appeared in Europe before they rallied to- gether to form the composite American. If we can understand the forces that produced them, we shall fathom the origins of the American mind. The settlement of the Atlantic seaboard was the culmina- tion of one process, the breakup of medieval culture, and the beginning of another. If the disintegration Pi] The Golden Day went farthest in America, the processes of renewal have, at intervals, been most active in the new coun- try; and it is for the beginnings of a genuine cul- ture, rather than for its relentless exploitation of materials, that the American adventure has been significant. ‘To mark the points at which the cul- ture of the Old World broke down, and to discover in what places a new one has arisen are the two poles of this study. Something of value disappeared with the colonization of America. Why did it dis- appear? Something of value was created. How did that come about? If I do not fully answer these questions, I purpose, at least, to put them a little more sharply, by tracing them to their historic beginnings, and by putting them in their social context. nag In the Thirteenth Century the European heritage of medieval culture was still intact. By the end of the Seventeenth it had become only a heap of fragments, and men showed, in their actions if not by their professions, that it no longer had a hold over their minds. What had happened? If one tries to sum up the world as it appeared to the contemporaries of Thomas Aquinas or Dante [12] The Origins of the American Mind one is conscious of two main facts. The physical earth was bounded by a narrow strip of seas: it was limited: while above and beyond it stretched the golden canopy of heaven, infinite in all its invitations and promises. ‘The medieval culture lived in the dream of eternity: within that dream, the visible world of cities and castles and caravans was little more than the forestage on which the prologue was spoken. The drama itself did not properly open until the curtains of Death rang down, to destroy the illusion of life and to introduce the main scene of the drama, in heaven itself. During the Middle Ages the visible world was definite and secure. The occupations of men were defined, their degree of excellence described, and their privileges and duties, though not without struggle, were set down. Over the daily life lay a whole tissue of meanings, derived from the Christian belief in eternity: the notion that existence was not a biological activity but a period of moral probation, the notion of an intermediate hierarchy of human beings that connected the low- est sinner with the august Ruler of Heaven, the idea that life was significant only on condition that it was prolonged, in beatitude or in despair, into the next world. The beliefs and symbols of the Chris- [13 J The Golden Day tian Church had guided men, and partly modified their activities, for roughly a thousand years. Then, one by one, they began to crack; one by one they ceased to be “real” or interesting; and gradu- ally the dream that held them all together started to dissolve. When the process ceased, the united order of Christendom had become an array of inde- pendent and sovereign States, and the Church itself had divided up into a host of repellent sects. At what point did medieval culture begin to break down? The current answer to this, “With the Renaissance,” is merely an evasion. When did it finally cease to exist? The answer is that a good part of it is still operative and has mingled with the customs and ideas that have succeeded it. But one can, perhaps, give an arbitrary beginning and an arbitrary end to the whole process. One may say that the first hint of change came in the Thir- teenth Century, with the ringing of the bells, and that medieval culture ceased to dominate and direct the European community when it turned its back upon contemporary experience and failed at last to absorb the meanings of that experience, or to modify its nature. The Church’s inability to control usury; her failure to reckon in time with the Protestant [14] The Origins of the American Mind criticism of her internal administration; the unreadi- ness of the scholastics to adapt their methods to the new interests and criteria of science; the failure to prevent the absorption of the free cities, the feudal estates, and the monasteries by the central govern- ment—these are some of the stigmata of the decline. It is impossible to give a date to all of them; but it is pretty clear that by the end of the Seventeenth Century one or another had come to pass in every part of Europe. In countries like England, which were therefore “advanced,” all of them had come to pass. It is fairly easy to follow the general succession of events. First, the bells tolled, and the idea of time, or rather, temporality, resumed its hold over men’s minds. All over Europe, beginning in the Thirteenth Century, the townsman erected campa- niles and belfries, to record the passing hour. Immersed in traffic or handicraft, proud of his city or his guild, the citizen began to forget his awful fate in eternity; instead, he noted the succession of the minutes, and planned to make what he could of them. It was an innocent enjoyment, this regular tolling of the hour, but it had important conse- quences. Ingenious workmen in Italy and Southern Germany invented clocks, rigorous mechanical | [15] The Golden Day clocks: they adapted the principle of the woodman’s lathe and applied it to metal. Here was the begin- ning of the exact arts. The craftsman began by measuring time; presently he could measure milli- meters, too, and with the knowledge and technique introduced by the clockmaker, he was ready to make the telescope, the microscope, the theodolite—all of them instruments of a new order of spatial explora- tion and measurement. The interests in time and space advanced side by side. In the Fifteenth Century the mapmakers devised new means of measuring and charting the earth’s surface, and scarcely a generation before Columbus’s voyages they began to cover their maps with imaginary lines of latitude and longitude. As soon as the mariner could calculate his position in time and space, the whole ocean was open to him; and henceforward even ordinary men, without the special skill and courage of a Marco Polo or a Leif Ericsson, could travel to distant lands. So time and space took possession of the European’s mind. Why dream of heaven or eternity, while the world was still so wide, and each new tract that was opened up promised, if not riches, novelty, and if not novelty, well, a new place to breathe in? So the bells tolled, and the ships set sail. Secure in his [16] The Origins of the American Mind newly acquired knowledge, the European traveled outward in space, and, losing that sense of the immediate present which went. with his old belief in eternity, he traveled backward and forward in time. An interest in archeology and in utopias char- acterized the Renaissance. They provided images of purely earthly realizations in past and future: ancient Syracuse and The City of the Sun were equally credible. The fall of Constantinople and the diffusion of Greek literature had not, perhaps, such a formative influence on this change as the historian once thought. But they accompanied it, and the image of historic Greece and Rome gave the mind a tem- porary dwelling-place. Plainly, the knowledge which once held it so firmly, the convictions that the good Christian once bought so cheaply and cheer- fully, no longer sufficed: if they were not altogether thrown aside, the humanists began, with the aid of classic literature, to fill up the spaces they had left open. The European turned aside from his traditional cathedrals and began to build according to Vitruvius. He took a pagan interest in the human body, too, and Leonardo’s St. John was so lost to Christianity that he became Bacchus without changing a feature. The Virgin herself lost her old [177 The Golden Day sanctity. Presto! the Child disappeared, the respon- sibilities of motherhood were gone, and she was now Venus. What had St. Thomas Aquinas to say about theology? One could read the Phedo. What had Aristotle to say about natural history? Leonardo, unaided, discovered fossils in the Tuscan hills and inferred that the ocean was once there. Simple peasants might cling to the Virgin, ask for the intercession of the saints, and kneel before the cross; but these images and ideas had lost their hold upon the more acute minds of Europe. They had broken, these intellectual adventurers, outside the tight little world of Here and Eternity: they were interested in Yonder and Yesterday; and since eternity was a long way off and we'll “be damnably moldy a hundred years hence,” they accepted to- morrow as a substitute. There were some who found it hard to shake off the medieval dream in its entirety; so they retained the dream and abandoned all the gracious practices that enthroned it in the daily life. As Protestants, they rejected the outcome of historic Christianity, but not its inception. They believed in the Eucha- rist, but they did not enjoy paintings of the Last Supper. They believed in the Virgin Mary, but they were not softened by the humanity of Her [18 ] The Origins of the American Mind motherhood. They read, voraciously, the literature of the Ancient Jews, and the legends of that sect which grew up by the shores of Galilee, but, using their private judgment and taking the bare words as the sum and substance of their religion, they for- got the interpretations from the early Fathers to St. Thomas which refined that literature and melted it into a comprehensible whole. When the Protes- tant renounced justification by works, he included under works all the arts which had flourished in the medieval church and created an independent realm of beauty and magnificence. What remained of the faith was perhaps intensified during the first few generations of the Protestant espousal—one cannot doubt the original intensity and vitality of the protest—but alas! so little remained! In the bareness of the Protestant cathedral of Geneva. one has the beginnings of that hard barracks architecture which formed the stone-tenements of Seventeenth Century Edinburgh, set a pattern for the austere meeting-houses of New England, and finally deteriorated into the miserable shanties that line Main Street. The meagerness of the Protestant ritual began that general starvation of the spirit which finally breaks out, after long repression, in the absurd jamborees of Odd Fellows, Elks, Wood- [19] The Golden Day men, and kindred fraternities. In short, all that was once made manifest in a Chartres, a Strasbourg, or a Durham minster, and in the mass, the pageant, the art gallery, the theater—all this the Protestant bleached out into the bare abstraction of the printed word. Did he suffer any hardship in moving to the New World? None at all. All that he wanted of the Old World he carried within the covers of a book. Fortunately for the original Protestants, that book was a whole literature; in this, at least, it differed from the later protestant canons, per- petrated by Joseph Smith or Mrs. Mary Baker Eddy. Unfortunately, however, the practices of a civilized society cannot be put between two black covers. So, in many respects, Protestant society ceased to be civilized. it Our critical eyes are usually a little dimmed by the great release of energy during the early Renais- sance: we forget that it quickly spent itself. For a little while the great humanists, such as More, Erasmus, Scaliger, and Rabelais, created a new home for the spirit out of the fragments of the past, and the new thoughts were cemented together by the [ 20 ] The Origins of the American Mind old habits of medieval civilization, which persisted among the peasants and the craftsmen, long after they had been undermined in the Church and the palace. The revival of classic culture, however, did not give men any new power of command over the workaday routine of life, for the very ability to reénter the past and have commerce with its great minds implied leisure and scholarship. Thus the great bulk of the community had no direct part in the revival, and if the tailor or the tinker abandoned the established church, it was only to espouse that segment called Protestantism. ‘Tailors and tinkers, almost by definition, could not be humanists. More- over, beyond a certain point, humanism did not make connections with the new experience of the Colum- buses and the Newtons any better than did the medieval culture. If the criticism of the pagan scholars released a good many minds from Catholic theology, it did not orient them toward what was “new” and “practical” and “coming.” ‘The Renais- sance was not, therefore, the launching out of a new epoch: it simply witnessed the breakdown and dis- ruption of the existing science, myth, and fable. When the Royal Society was founded in London in the middle of the Seventeenth Century the humanities [21 ] The Golden Day were deliberately excluded. “Science” was indiffer- ent to them. Once the European, indeed, had abandoned the dream of medieval theology, he could not live very long on the memory of a classic culture: that, too, lost its meaning; that, too, failed to make connec- tions with his new experiences in time and space. Leaving both behind him, he turned to what seemed to him a hard and patent reality: the external world. The old symbols, the old ways of living, had become a blank. Instead of them, he took refuge in abstrac- tions, and reduced the rich actuality of things to a bare description of matter and motion. Along this path went the early scientists, or natural philoso- phers. By mathematical analysis and experiment, they extracted from the complicated totality of everyday experience just those phenomena which could be observed, measured, generalized, and, if necessary, repeated. Applying this exact method- ology, they learned to predict more accurately the movements of the heavenly bodies, to describe more precisely the fall of a stone and the flight of a bullet, to determine the carrying load of a bridge, or the composition of a fragment of “matter.” Rule, authority, precedent, general consent—these things were all subordinate in scientific procedure to the [22] The Origins of the American Mind methods of observation and mathematical analysis: weighing, measuring, timing, decomposing, isolating —all operations that led to results. At last knowledge could be tested and practice reformed; and if the scientists themselves were usually too busy to see the upshot of their investiga- tions, one who stood on the sidelines, Francis Bacon, was quick to announce their conclusion: science tended to the relief of man’s estate. With the aid of this new procedure, the external world was quickly reduced to a semblance of order. But the meanings created by science did not lead into the core of human life: they applied only to “matter,” and if they touched upon life at all, it was through a post-mortem analysis, or by follow- ing Descartes and arbitrarily treating the human organism as if it were automatic and externally determined under all conditions. For the scientists, these new abstractions were full of meaning and very helpful; they tunneled through whole con- tinents of knowledge. For the great run of men, however, science had no meaning for itself; it trans- ferred meaning from the creature proper to his estate, considered as an independent and external realm. In short, except to the scientist, the only consequences of science were practical ones. A new [28] The Golden Day view of the universe developed, naturally, but it was accepted less because of any innate credibility than because it was accompanied by so many cogent proofs of science’s power. Philosophy, religion, art, none of these activities had ever baked any bread: science was ready, not merely to bake the bread, but increase the yield of the wheat, grind the flour and eliminate the baker. Even the plain man could ap- preciate consequences of this order. Seeing was believing. By the middle of the Seventeenth Cen- tury all the implications of the process had been imaginatively grasped. In 1661 Glanvill wrote: “TI doubt not posterity will find many things that are now but rumors, verified into practical realities. It may be that, some ages hence, a voyage to the Southern tracts, yea, possibly to the moon, will not be more strange than one to America. To them that come after us, it may be as ordinary to buy a pair of wings to fly to remotest regions, as now a pair of boots to ride a journey; and to confer at the dis- tance of the Indies by sympathetic conveyances may be as usual in future times as by literary correspond- ence. The restoration of gray hairs to juvenility, and renewing the exhausted marrow, may at length be effected without a miracle; and the turning of the now comparatively desert world into a Paradise [ 24 ] The Origins of the American Mind may not improbably be effected from late agri- culture.” IV The process of abstraction began in the theology of Protestantism as an attempt to isolate, deform, and remove historic connections; it became habitual in the mental operations of the physical scientist ; and it was carried over into other departments. The extended use of money, to replace barter and service, likewise began during this same period of disintegration. Need I emphasize that in their origin Protestantism, physical science, and finance were all liberating influences? They took the place of habits and institutions which, plainly, were mori- bund, being incapable of renewal from within. Need I also emphasize the close historic inter-connection of the three things? We must not raise our eyebrows when we discover that a scientist like Newton in Seventeenth Century England, or Rittenhouse, in Eighteenth Century America, became master of the mint, nor must we pass by, as a quaint coincidence, the fact that Geneva is celebrated both as the home of Jean Calvin and as the great center of watches and clocks, ‘These connections are not mystical nor fac- [25] The Golden Day titious. The new financial order was a direct out- growth of the new theological and scientific views. First came a mechanical method of measuring time: then a method of measuring space: finally, in money, men began more widely to apply an abstract way of measuring power, and in money they achieved a calculus for all human activity. This financial system of measurement released the European from his old sense of social and economic limitations. No glutton can eat a hundred pheas- ants; no drunkard can drink a hundred bottles of wine at a sitting; and if any one schemed to have so much food and wine brought to his table daily, he would be mad. Once he could exchange the potential pheasants and Burgundy for marks or thalers, he could direct the labor of his neighbors, and achieve the place of an aristocrat without being to the manner born. Economic activity ceased to deal with the tangible realities of the medieval world —land and corn and houses and universities and cities. It was transformed into the pursuit of an abstraction—money. ‘Tangible goods were only a means to this supreme end. When some incipient Rotarian finally coined the phrase, “Time is money,” he expressed philosophically the equivalence of two [26 | The Origins of the American Mind ideas which could not possibly be combined, even in thought, so long as money meant houses, food, pic- tures, and time meant only what it does in Berg- son’s durée, that is, the succession of organic expe- riences. Does all this seem very remote from the common life? On the contrary, it goes to the roots of every activity. The difference between historical periods, as the late T. E. Hulme pointed out, is a difference between the categories of their thought. If we have got on the trail of their essential categories, we have a thread which will lead outward into even remote departments of life. The fact is that from the Seventeenth Century onward, almost every field was invaded by this process of abstraction. The people not affected were either survivals from an older epoch, like the orthodox Jews and Roman Catholics in theology, or the humanists in literature, or they were initiators, working through to a new order—men like Lamarck, Wordsworth, Goethe, Comte. Last and most plainly of all, the disintegration of medieval culture became apparent in politics. Just as “matter,” when examined by the physicist is ab- stracted from the esthetic matrix of our experience, so the “individual” was abstracted by the political [27 J The Golden Day philosopher of the new order from the bosom of human society. He ceased, this individual, to main- tain his omnipresent relations with city, family, household, club, college, guild, and office: he became the new unit of political society. Having abstracted this purely conceptual person in thought—he had, of course, no more actual existence than an angel or a cherub—the great problem of political thinking in the Eighteenth Century became: How shall we restore him to society?—for somehow we always find man, as Rousseau grimly said, in chains, that is, in relations with other human beings. ‘The solution that Rousseau and the dominant schools of the time offered was ingenious: each individual is endowed with natural rights, and he votes these political rights into society, as the shareholder votes his economic rights into a trading corporation. ‘This principle of consent was necessary to the well-being of a civil society; and assent was achieved, in free ~ political states, through the operation of the ballot, and the delivery of the general will by a parliament. The doctrine broke the weakening chain of his- torical continuity in Europe. It challenged the vested interests; it was ready to declare the exist- ing corporations bankrupt; it was prepared to wipe [ 28 ] The Origins of the American Mind away the traditional associations and nets of privi- leges which maintained the clergy, the nobility, the guilds. On its destructive side, the movement for po- litical liberty, like that for free contract, free associa- tion, and free investigation, was sane and reasonable; for the abuses of the past were genuine and the griev- ances usually had more than a small touch of justice. We must not, however, be blind to the consequences of all these displacements and dissociations. Perhaps the briefest way of characterizing them is to say that they made America inevitable. To those who were engaged in political criticism, it seemed that a genuine political order had been created in the set- ting up of free institutions; but we can see now that the process was an inevitable bit of surgery, rather than the beginning of a more organic form of politi- cal association. By 1852 Henry James, Sr., was keen enough to see what had happened: “Democ- racy,” he observed, “is not so much a new form of political life as a dissolution and disorganization of the old forms. It is simply a resolution of govern- ment into the hands of the people, a taking down of that which has before existed, and a recommit- ment of it to its original sources, but it is by no means the substitution of anything else in its place.” [29 ] The Golden Day wv) Now we begin to see a little more clearly the state of mind out of which the great migrations to the New World became possible. The physical causes have been dwelt on often enough; it is important to recognize that a cultural necessity was at work at the same time. The old culture of the Middle Ages had broken down; the old heritage lingered on only in the “backward” and “unprogressive” countries like Italy and Spain, which drifted outside the main currents of the European mind. Men’s interests be- came externalized ; externalized and abstract. They fixed their attention on some narrow aspect of ex- perience, and they pushed that to the limit. Intelli- gent people were forced to choose between the fos- silized shell of an old and complete culture, and the new culture, which in origin was thin, partial, ab- stract, and deliberately indifferent to man’s proper interests. Choosing the second, our Europeans already had one foot in America. Let them suffer persecution, let the times get hard, let them fall out with their governments, let them dream of worldly success—and they will come swarming over the ocean. The groups that had most completely shaken off the old symbolisms were those that were most [ 80 J The Origins of the American Mind ready for the American adventure: they turned themselves easily to the mastery of the external environment. To them matter alone mattered. The ultimate results of this disintegration of European culture did not come out, in America, until the Nineteenth Century. But its immediate consequence became visible, step by step, in the first hundred and fifty years or so of the American set- tlement. Between the landing of the first colonists in Massachusetts, the New Netherlands, Virginia and Maryland, and the first thin trickle of hunters that passed over the Alleghanies, beginning figura- tively with Daniel Boone in 1775, the communities of the Atlantic seaboard were outposts of Europe: they carried their own moral and intellectual climate with them. During this period, the limitations in the thought of the intellectual classes had not yet wrought them- selves out into defects and malformations in the com- munity itself: the house, the town, the farm were still modeled after patterns formed in Europe. It was not a great age, perhaps, but it had found its form. Walking through the lanes of Boston, or passing over the wide lawns to a manor house in Maryland, one would have had no sense of a great wilderness beckoning in the beyond. To tell the truth, the wil- [31 ] The Golden Day derness did not beckon: these solid townsmeén, these freeholders, these planters, were content with their civil habits; and if they thought of expansion, it was only over the ocean, in search of Palladian de- signs for their houses, or of tea and sperm-oil for their personal comfort. On the surface, people lived as they had lived in Europe for many a year. In the first century of colonization, this life left scarcely any deposit in the mind. There was no literature but a handful of verses, no music except the hymn or some surviving Elizabethan ballad, no ideas except those that circled around the dogmas of Protestantism. But, with the Eighteenth Cen- tury, these American communities stepped fully into the sphere of European ideas, and there was an American equivalent for every new European type. It is amusing to follow the leading biographies of the time. Distinguished American figures step onto the stage, in turn, as if the Muse of History had prepared their entrances and exits. Their arrange- ment is almost diagrammatic: they form a résumé of the European mind. In fact, these Edwardses and Franklins seem scarcely living characters: they were Protestantism, Science, Finance, Politics. The first on the stage was Jonathan Edwards: he figured in American thought as the last great expos- [ 82 |] The Origins of the American Mind itor of Calvinism. Edwards wrote like a man in a trance, who at bottom is aware that he is talking nonsense; for he was in love with beauty of the soul, like Plato before him, and it was only because he was caught in the premises of determinism that, with a heavy conscience, he followed his dire train of thought to its destination. After Edwards, Protes- tantism lost its intellectual backbone. It devel- oped into the bloodless Unitarianism of the early Nineteenth Century, which is a sort of humanism without courage, or it got caught in orgies of re- vivalism, and, under the name of evangelical Chris- tianity, threw itself under the hoofs of more than one muddy satyr. ‘There were great Protestant preachers after Edwards, no doubt: but the triumph of a Channing or a Beecher rested upon personal qualities; and they no longer drew their thoughts from any deep well of conviction. All the habits that Protestantism developed, its emphasis upon industry, upon self-help, upon thrift, upon the evils of “idleness” and “pleasure,’”? upon the worldliness and wickedness of the arts, were so many gratuitous contributions to the industrial revolution. When Professor Morse, the inventor of the telegraph, was still a painter, traveling in Italy, he recorded in one of his letters the animus that [ 33 ] The Golden Day pervaded his religious creed: the testimony loses nothing by being a little belated. “I looked around the church,” he wrote, “to ascertain what was the effect upon the multitude assembled. . . . Every- thing around them, instead of aiding devotion, was entirely calculated to destroy it. The imagination was addressed by every avenue; music and painting pressed into the service of—not religion but the contrary—led the mind away from the contempla- tion of all that is practical in religion to the charms of mere sense. No instruction was imparted; none ever seems to be intended.” It is but a short step from this attitude to hiring revivalist mountebanks to promote factory morale; nor are these thoughts far from that fine combina- tion of commercial zeal and pious effort which char- acterize such auxiliaries as the Y. M. C. A. The fictions of poetry and the delusions of feeling were the bugbears of Gradgrind, Bounderby, and M’Choakumchild in Dickens’s classic picture of in- dustrialism: for the shapes and images they called forth made those which were familiar to the Protes- tant mind a little dreary and futile. It was not merely that Protestantism and science had killed the old symbols: they must prevent new ones from devel- oping: they must abolish the contemplative attitude [ 34 ] The Origins of the American Mind in which art and myth grow up, and create new forms for man’s activities. Hence the fury of effort by which the leaders of the new day diverted ener- gies to quantitative production. The capacity to do work, which the new methods in industry had so enormously increased, gave utilitarian objects an importance they had not hitherto possessed. Did not God’s Word say: “Increase and multiply”? If babies, why not goods: if goods, why not dollars? Success was the Protestant miracle that justified man’s ways to God. The next figure that dominated the American scene stood even more completely for these new forces. He was, according to the pale lights of his time, a thoroughly cultivated man, and in his ma- turity he was welcomed in London and Paris as the equal of scientists like Priestley and Erasmus Dar- win, and of scholars like D’Alembert and D’Hol- bach. As a citizen, by choice, of Philadelphia, Benjamin Franklin adopted the plain manners and simple thrifty ways of the Quakers. He went into business as a publisher, and with a sort of sweet acuteness in the pursuit of money, he imparted the secrets of his success in the collection of timely saws for which he became famous. The line from Frank- lin through Samuel Smiles to the latest advertise- [35 J The Golden Day ments for improving one’s position and doubling one’s income, in the paper that dates back to Franklin’s ownership, is a pretty direct one. If one prefers Franklin’s bourgeois qualities to those of his successors, it is only perhaps because his life was more fully rounded. If he was not without the usu- rious habits of the financier, he had also the dignity and freedom of the true scientist. For Franklin was equally the money-maker, the scientist, the inventor, and the politician, and in science his fair boast was that he had not gained a penny by any of his discoveries. He experimented with electricity; he invented the lightning rod; he improved the draft of chimneys; in fact, on his last voyage home to America, shortly before his death, he was still improving the draft of chimneys. Finally he was a Deist: he had gotten rid of all the “gothick phantoms” that seemed so puerile and unworthy to the quick minds of the Eighteenth Century—which meant that he was completely absorbed in the domi- nant abstractions and myths of his own time, namely, matter, money, and political rights. He accepted the mechanical concept of time: time is money; the importance of space: space must be conquered; the desirability of money: money must be made; and he did not see that these, too, are phantoms, in pre- [ 36 ] The Origins of the American Mind occupation with which a man may lose most of the advantages of a civilized life. As a young man, Franklin even invented an elaborate system of moral- bookkeeping: utilitarianism can go no further. Although Franklin’s sagacity as a statesman can hardly be overrated, for he had both patience and principle, the political side of the American thought of his time is best summed up in the doctrines of a new immigrant, that excellent friend of humanity, Thomas Paine. Paine’s name has served so many purposes in polemics that scarcely any one seems to take the trouble to read his books: and so more than one shallow judgment has found its way into our histories of literature, written by worthy men who were incapable of enjoying a sound English style, or of following, with any pleasure, an honest system of thought, clearly expressed. The Rights of Man is as simple as a geometrical theorem; it contains, I think, most of what is valid in political libertarian- ism. JI know of no other thinker who saw more clearly through the moral humbug that surrounds a good many theories of government. Said Paine: “Almost everything appertaining to the circum- stances of a nation has been absorbed and con- founded under the general and mysterious word government. Though it avoids taking to its account [ 37 J The Golden Day the errors it commits and the mischiefs it occasions, it fails not to arrogate to itself whatever has the appearance of prosperity. It robs industry of its honors by pedantically making itself the cause of its effects; and purloins from the general character of man the merits that appertain to him as a social being.” Passage after passage in The Rights of Man and The Age of Reason is written with the same pithi- ness. Paine came to America as an adult, and saw the advantages of a fresh start. He believed that if first principles could be enunciated, here, and here alone, was a genuine opportunity to apply them. He summed up the hope in reason and in human con- trivance that swelled through the Eighteenth Cen- | tury. Without love for any particular country, and without that living sense of history which makes one accept the community’s past, as one accepts the totality of one’s own life, with all its lapses and mistakes, he was the vocal immigrant, justifying in his political and religious philosophy the complete break he had made with old ties, affections, alle- giances. Unfortunately, a man without a background is not more truly a man: he has merely lost the scenes and institutions which gave him his proper shape. [ 38 J The Origins of the American Mind If one studies him closely, one will find that he has secretly arranged another background, made up of shadows that linger in the memory, or he is uneasy and restless, settles down, moves on, comes home again, lives on hopeless to-morrows, or sinks back into mournful yesterdays. The immigrants who came to America after the War of Independence gave up their fatherland in exchange for a Constitution and a Bill of Rights: they forfeited all the habits and institutions which had made them men without getting anything in exchange except freedom from arbitrary misrule. ‘That they made the exchange willingly, proves that the conditions behind them were intolerable; but that the balance was entirely in favor of the new country, is something that we may well doubt. When the new settlers migrated in bodies, like the Moravians, they sometimes man- aged to maintain an effective cultural life; when they came alone, as “‘free individuals,’ they gained little more than cheap land and the privileges of the ballot box. The land itself was all to the good; and no one minded the change, or felt any lack, so long as he did not stop to compare the platitudes of Fourth of July orations with the actualities of the Slave Trade, the Constitutional Conventions, Alien and Sedition Acts, and Fugitive Slave Laws. [ 39 J The Golden Day It was possible for Paine, in the Eighteenth Cen- tury, to believe that culture was served merely by the absence of a church, a state, a social order such as those under which Europe labored. That was the error of his school, for the absence of these harm- ful or obsolete institutions left a vacancy in society, and that vacancy was filled by work, or more accu- rately speaking, by busy work, which fatigued the body and diverted the mind from the things which should have enriched it. Republican politics aided this externalism. People sought to live by politics alone; the National State became their religion. The flag, as Professor Carleton Hayes has shown, supplanted the cross, and the Fathers of the Con- stitution the Fathers of the Church. The interaction of the dominant interests of in- dustry and politics is illustrated in Paine’s life as well as Franklin’s. Paine was the inventor of the take-down iron bridge. Indeed, politics and inven- tion recurred rhythmically in his life, and he turned aside from his experiments on the iron bridge to answer Edmund Burke’s attack on the French Revo- lution. ‘The War of Independence,” as he himself said, “energized invention and lessened the catalogue of impossibilities. ... As one among thousands who had borne a share in that memorable revolu- [ 40 ] The Origins of the American Mind tion, I returned with them to the enjoyment of a quiet life, and, that I might not be idle, undertook to construct a bridge of a single arch for this river [the Schuylkill].” That I might not be idle! What a tale those words tell! While the aristocracy was in the ascendant, patient hirelings used to apply their knowledge of hydraulics to the working of fountains, as in Versailles, or they devised automatic chess- players, or they contrived elaborate clocks which struck the hour, jetted water, caused little birds to sing and wag their tails, and played selections from the operas. It was to such inane and harmless per- formances that the new skills in the exact arts were first put. The bored patron was amused; life plod- ded on; nothing was altered. But in the freedom of the new day, the common man, as indifferent to the symbols of the older culture as the great lords and ladies, innocent of anything to occupy his mind, except the notion of controlling matter and master- ing the external world—the common man turned to inventions. Stupid folk drank heavily, ate glutton- ously, and became libertines ; intelligent, industrious men like Franklin and Paine, turned their minds to increasing the comforts and conveniences of exist- ence. Justification by faith: that was politics: the [41] The Golden Day belief in a new heaven and a new earth to be estab- lished by regular elections and parliamentary de- bate. Justification by works: that was invention. No frivolities entered this new religion. ‘The new devices all saved labor, decreased distances, and in one way or another multiplied riches. With these inventors, the American, like his con- temporary in Europe, began the utilitarian conquest of his environment. From this time on, men with an imaginative bias like Morse, the pupil of Benja- min West, men like Whitney, the school-teacher, like Fulton, the miniature painter, turned to invention or at least the commercial exploitation of inventions without a qualm of distrust: to abandon the imagina- tive arts seemed natural and inevitable, and they no longer faced the situation, as the painters of the Renaissance had done, with a divided mind. Not that America began or monopolized the develop- ments of the Industrial Revolution: the great out- break of technical patents began, in fact, in England about 1760, and the first inklings of the movement were already jotted down in Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks. The point is that in Europe heavy layers of the old culture kept large sections of the directing classes in the old ways. Scholars, literary men, historians, artists still felt no need of justify- [ 42 |] The Origins of the American Mind ing themselves by exclusive devotion to practical activities. In America, however, the old culture had worn thin, and in the rougher parts of the country it did not exist. No one in America was unaffected by the progress of invention; each improvement was quickly cashed in. When Stendhal wrote L’Amour the American love of comfort had already become a by-word: he refers to it with contempt. Given an old culture in ruins, and a new culture im vacuo, this externalizing of interest, this ruthless exploitation of the physical environment was, it would seem, inevitable. Protestantism, science, inven- tion, political democracy, all of these institutions denied the old values; all of them, by denial or by precept or by actual absorption, furthered the new activities. ‘Thus in America the new order of Eu- rope came quickly into being. If the Nineteenth Century found us more raw and rude, it was not because we had settled in a new territory; it was rather because our minds were not buoyed up by all those memorials of a great past that floated over the surface of Europe. The American was thus a stripped European; and the colonization of America can, with justice, be called the dispersion of Europe —a movement carried on by people incapable of [43] The Golden Day sharing or continuing its past. It was to America that the outcast Europeans turned, without a Moses to guide them, to wander in the wilderness; and here they have remained in exile, not without an occa- sional glimpse, perhaps, of the promised land, [ 44] CHAPTER TWO THE ROMANTICISM OF THE PIONEER Tue pioneer lias usually been looked upon as a typical product of the American environment; but the truth is that he existed in the European mind before he made his appearance here. Pioneering may in part be described as the Romantic movement in action. If one wishes to fathom the pioneer’s peculiar behavior, one must not merely study his re- lations with the Indians, with the trading companies, and with the government’s land policies: one must also understand the main currents of European thought in the Eighteenth Century. In the episode of pioneering, a new system of ideas wedded itself to a new set of experiences: the experiences were Amer- ican, but the ideas themselves had been nurtured in Savoy, in the English lake country, and on the Scots moors. Passing into action, these ideas became queerly transmogrified, so that it now takes more than a little digging to see the relation between Chateaubriand and Mark Twain, or Rousseau and William James. The pioneer arose out of an ex- [47 ] The Golden Day ternal opportunity, an unopened continent, and out of an inward necessity. It is the inward necessity that most of our commentators upon him have neglected. In the Eighteenth Century, Europe became at last conscious of the fact that the living sources of its older culture had dried up; and it made its first attempt to find a basis for a new culture. Many of its old institutions were already hollow and rotten. The guilds had become nests of obsolete privileges, which stood doggedly in the way of any technical im- provement. The church, in England and in France, had become an institution for providing support to the higher ranks of the clergy, who believed only in the mundane qualities of bread and wine. In fact, all the remains of medieval Europe were in a state of pitiable decay; they were like venerable apple- trees, burgeoned with suckers and incapable of bear- ing fruit. A mere wind would have been enough to send the old structure toppling; instead of it, a veritable tempest arose, and by the time Voltaire had finished with the Church, Montesquieu and Rousseau with the State, Turgot and Adam Smith with the old corporations, there was scarcely anything left that an intelligent man of the Eighteenth Century would : [48] The Romanticism of the Pioneer have cared to carry away. Once the old shelters and landmarks were gone, where could people turn? The classic past had already been tried, and had been found—dull. Medievalism was not yet quite dead enough to be revived; chinoiseries were merely amusing. ‘There remained one great and permanent source of culture, and with a hundred different ges- tures the Eighteenth Century acclaimed it—Nature. The return to Nature occurred at the very climax of an arranged and artificial existence: trees had been clipped, hedges had been deformed, architecture had become as cold and finicking as a pastrycook’s icing, the very hair of the human head had been exchanged for the white wig of senility. Precisely at this moment, when a purely urbane convention seemed established forever, a grand retreat began. In the Middle Ages such a retreat would have led to the monastery: it now pushed back to the coun- try, by valiant mountain paths, like Rousseau’s, or by mincing little country lanes, like that which led Marie Antoinette to build an English village in Ver- sailles, and play at being a milkmaid. Nature was the fashion: “every one did it.” If one had re- sources, one laid out a landscape park, wild like the fells of Yorkshire, picturesque like the hills of Cum- [49] The Golden Day berland, the whole atmosphere heightened by an artificial ruin, to show dramatically the dominance of Nature over man’s puny handiwork. If one were middle class, one built a villa, called Idle Hour, or The Hermitage; at the very least, one took country walks, or dreamed of a superb adventurous manhood in America. In the mind of the great leader of this movement, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Nature was not a fresh element in the tissue of European culture: it was a complete substitute for the existing institutions, conventions, habits, and histories. Rousseau began his career with an essay on the question whether the restoration of the arts and sciences had the effect of purifying or corrupting public morals: he won the prize offered by the academy at Dijon by affirming their tendency to corrupt; and from that time on- ward (1750) he continued to write, with better sense but with hardly any decrease in his turbulent con- viction, upon the worthlessness of contemporary civilization in Europe. His prescription was simple: return to Nature: shun society: enjoy solitude. Rousseau’s Nature was not Newton’s Nature—a sys- tem of matter and motion, ordered by Providence, and established in the human mind by nice mathe- [ 50 ] The Romanticism of the Pioneer matical calculations. By Nature Rousseau meant the mountains, like those which shoulder across the background of his birthplace; he meant the mantle of vegetation, where one might botanize, and see “eternity in a grain of sand, and heaven in a wild flower ;”” he meant the fields, like those of Savoy, where a simple peasantry practiced the elementary routine of living. The return to Nature, in Rousseau’s sense, was not a new injunction; nor was it an unsound one. As an aid to recovery in physical illness and neu- rosis, its value was recognized at least as early as Hippocrates, and as a general social formula it has played a part in the life and literature of every finished civilization. 'The Georgics, the Bucolics, and the idylls of classic culture belong to its sophis- ticated moments: after the formalities of the Con- fucian period lLao-tse’s philosophy developed a similar creed and persuaded its individualistic adher- ents to renounce the sterile practices of the court and the bureaucracy and bury themselves in the Bamboo Grove. Nature almost inevitably becomes dominant in the mind when the powers of man himself to mold his fortunes and make over his institutions seem feeble—when, in order to exist at all, it is necessary [ 51 J The Golden Day to accept the wilderness of Nature and human pas- sion as “given,” without trying to subdue its dis- order. What made the authority of Rousseau’s doctrine so immense, what made it play such a presiding part in European life, echoing through the minds of Goethe, Herder, Kant, Wordsworth, and even, quite innocently, Blake, was the fact that there awaited the European in America a Nature that was primi- tive and undefiled. In the purely mythical continent that uprose in the European mind, the landscape was untainted by human blood and tears, and the Red Indian, like Atala, led a life of physical dignity and spiritual austerity: the great Sachem was an aborigine with the stoic virtues of a Marcus Aure- lius. Rousseau’s glorification of peasant life was after all subject to scrutiny, and by the time the French Revolution came, the peasant had a word or two to say about it himself; but the true child of Nature in the New World, uncorrupted by the superstitions of the Church, could be idealized to the heart’s content: his customs could be attributed to the unhindered spontaneity of human nature, his painfully acquired and transmitted knowledge might be laid to instinctive processes; in short, he became a pure ideal. Even William Blake could dream of [ 52 J The Romanticism of the Pioneer liberty on the banks of the Ohio, if not on the banks of the Thames. In America, if society was futile, one had only to walk half a day to escape it; in Europe, if one walked half a day one would be in the midst of another society. In Europe one had to plan a re- treat: in America one simply encountered it. If Nature was, as Wordsworth said, a world of ready wealth, blessing our minds and hearts with wisdom and health and cheerfulness, what place could be richer than America? Once Romanticism turned its eyes across the ocean, it became a movement indeed. It abandoned culture to return to Nature; it left a skeleton of the past for an embryo of the future; it renounced its hoarded capital and began to live on its current income; it forfeited the old and the tried for the new and the experimental. This transforma- tion was, as Nietzsche said, an immense physiologi- cal process, and its result was “the slow emergence of an essentially super-national and nomadic species of man, who possesses, physiologically speaking, a maxi- mum of the art and power of adaptation as his typi- cal distinction.” The Romantic Movement was thus the great form- ative influence which produced not merely the myth of pioneering, but the pioneer. But it was not the [ 53 | The Golden Day sole influence upon the scene. Human society was divided in the Eighteenth Century between those who thought +t perfectible, and those who thought that the existing institutions were all essentially rotten: the Benthams and the Turgots were on one side, the Rousseaus and Blakes on the other, and the great mass of people mixed these two incompatible doctrines in varying proportions. The perfection- ists believed in progress, science, laws, education, and comfort; progress was the mode and comfort the end of every civil arrangement. The followers of Rousseau believed in none of these things. Instead of sense, they wanted sensibility; instead of educa- tion, spontaneity; instead of smokeless chimneys and glass windows and powerlooms, a clear sky and an open field. If the pioneer was the lawfully begotten child of the Romantic Movement, he belonged to the other school by adoption. He wanted Nature; and he wanted comfort no less. He sought to escape the conventions of society; yet his notion of a free gov- ernment was one that devoted itself to a perpetual process of legislation, and he made no bones about appealing to the Central Government when he wanted inland waterways and roads and help in exterminat- ing the Indian. Society was effete: its machinery [54] The Romanticism of the Pioneer could be perfected—the pioneer accepted both these notions. He believed with Rousseau that “man is good naturally, and that by institutions only is he made bad.” And if the Yankees who first settled in Illinois were looked upon as full of “notions” because they were wont to take thought for the morrow and to multiply mechanical devices, these habits, too, were quickly absorbed. As Nature grew empty, progress took its place in the mind of the pioneer. Each of these ideas turned him from the past, and enabled him to speculate, in both the commercial and philosophic senses of the word, on the future. a In America the return to Nature set in before there was any physical necessity for filling up the raw lands of the West. ‘The movement across the Alle- ghanies began long before the East was fully oc- cupied: it surged up in the third quarter of the Eighteenth Century, after the preliminary scouting and road-building by the Ohio Company, and by the time the Nineteenth Century was under way, the con- quest of the Continent had become the obsession of every progressive American community. This westward expansion of the pioneer was, with- [ 55 J The Golden Day out doubt, furthered by immediate causes, such as the migration of disbanded soldiers after the Revolu- tion, endowed with land-warrants; but from the be- ginning, the movement was compulsive and almost neurotic; and as early as 1837 Peck’s New Guide to the West recorded that “migration has become al- most a habit.” External matters of fact would per- haps account for the New England migration to Ohio: they cease to be relevant, however, when they are called upon to explain the succession of jumps which caused so many settlers to pull up stakes and move into Illinois—and then into Missouri—and so beyond, until finally the Pacific Coast brought the movement temporarily to an end. This restless search was something more than a prospecting of resources; it was an experimental investigation of Nature, Soli- tude, The Primitive Life; and at no stage of the journey, however much the story may be obscured by land-booms and Indian massacres and gold rushes, did these things drop out of the pioneer’s mind. Charles Fenno Hoffmann in A Winter in the West (1835), was only echoing the unconscious justifica- tion of the pioneer when he exclaimed: “What is the echo of roofs that a few centuries since rung with barbaric revels, or of aisles that pealed the anthems [ 56 J The Romanticism of the Pioneer of painted pomp, to the silence which has reigned in these dim groves since the first fiat of Creation was spoken?” Mark the difference between this movement and that which first planted the colonists of Massachu- setts or Pennsylvania in the New World. In the first period of the seaboard settlement, America was a place where the European could remain more nearly his proper self, and keep up the religious practices which were threatened by economic innova- tions and political infringements in Europe. The Puritans, the Moravians, the Dunkers, the Quakers, the Catholics, sought America as a refuge in which they could preserve in greater security what they dearly valued in Europe. But with the drift to the West, America became, on the contrary, a place where the European could be swiftly transformed into something different: where the civil man could become a hardy savage, where the social man could become an “individual,” where the settled man could become a nomad, and the family man could forget his old connections. With pioneering, America ceased to be an outpost of Europe. The Western communities relapsed into an earlier and more primitive type of occupation; they reverted to the crude practices of the hunter, the woodman, and [ 57 | The Golden Day the miner. Given the occasion and the environment, these were necessary occupations; the point to be noted, however, is that, uninfluenced by peasant habits or the ideas of an old culture, the work of the miner, woodman, and hunter led to unmitigated destruction and pillage. What happened was just the reverse of the old barbarian invasions, which turned the Goths and the Vandals into Romans. The movement into backwoods America turned the European into a barbarian. The grisly process of this settlement was described by Crévecceur and Cooper long before Professor Turner’ summed them up in his classic treatise on the passing of the frontier. “In all societies,” says Créveceeur, “there are off-casts; this impure part serves as our precursors or pioneers. .. . By living in or near the woods, their actions are regulated by the neighborhood. The deer often come to eat their grain, the wolves to destroy their sheep, the bears to kill their hogs, the foxes to catch their poultry. The surrounding hostility immediately puts the gun into their hands; they watch these animals; they kill some; and thus, by defending their property, they soon become professed hunters; this is the progress; once hunters, farewell to the plow. The chase renders them ferocious, gloomy, unsociable; a [ 58 | The Romanticism of the Pioneer hunter wants no neighbors, he rather hates them because he dreads competition.” Equipped with his ax and his rifle, the two prin- cipal weapons of the pioneer, he carried on his war- fare against Nature, cutting down the forest and slaughtering its living creatures. Instead of seek- ing Nature in a wise passiveness, as Wordsworth urged, he raped his new mistress in a blind fury of obstreperous passion. No one who has read The Pioneers can forget Cooper’s account of the sicken- ing massacre of wild pigeons, carried on long after the need for food had been satisfied. In these prac- tices, the ordinary farmer and tradesman of the old country went back to a phase of European ex- perience which had lingered on chiefly in the archaic hunts of a predatory aristocracy; and in the ab- sence of any restraints or diversions, these primitive practices sank more deeply into the grain. The apology for this behavior was based upon the noblest grounds; one can scarcely pick up a contemporary description of the pioneering period without finding a flowery account of the new life, put in contrast to wretched, despotic, foolishly beautiful Europe; and this animus was echoed even in the comments that Hawthorne and Emerson, to say nothing of such a real pioneer as Mark Twain, [59 J The Golden Day made upon the institutions of the Old World. Let me put the contemporary apology and criticism side by side. The first is from a pamphlet by George Lunt called Three Eras of New England (1857): ‘*Whenever this is the state of man the impertinent fictions and sophisms of life die out. The borrow- ings and lendings of the human creature fall away from him under the rigid discipline of primeval neces- sities, as the encrusting dirt, which bedimmed the diamond, is removed by the hard process which re- veals and confirms its inestimable price. ‘The voice of the mountain winds would mock at the most indis- pensable and best recognized trappings of polished society as they rent them away and fastened them fluttering in the crevices of a cliff, or bore them on- wards to the unknown wilderness, and would hail its very discomforts with the shout and laughter of deri- sion. ... So far, therefore, as our familiar and in- herent characteristics, which form the foundation of our nature, and make us good and make us great, are liable to become diluted or perverted by the sophisti- cations of social being, they may require an actual refreshment and renewal, under the severe and inevi- table trials of colonial existence. . . . This, then, is the absolute law of all legitimate migration, that it leaves behind it the weaknesses, the concretions and [ 60 ] The Romanticism of the Pioneer superfluities of artificial life, and founds its new existence upon an appeal to the primordial elements of natural society.” Against this apology for the deprivations of the pioneer life, let me set the comment of a young Eng- lish settler named Fordham, who had come face to face with the untrammeled Children of Nature; this passage occurs on the page after that in which he records the amiable slaughter of six Indians, men and women, on English Prairie, in the spring of 1817: ‘Instead of being more virtuous, as he is less re- fined, I am inclined to think that man’s virtues are like the fruits of the earth, only excellent when sub- jected to culture. The force of the simile you will never feel, until you ride in these woods over wild _ strawberries, which dye your horses’ fetlocks like blood, yet are insipid in flavour; till you have seen wagon-loads of grapes, choked by the brambles and the poisonous vine; till you find peaches, tasteless as a turnip, and roses throwing their leaves of every shade upon the wind, with scarcely a scent upon them. °*Tis the hand of man that makes the wilder- ness shine.” The hand of man was of course busy, and here and there, particularly in Ohio, Kentucky and [61 ] The Golden Day Tennessee, villages and cities grew up which carried on, for a generation or so in the Nineteenth Century, the tradition that the seaboard knew in an earlier day; but like a river that, rushing onwards, deposits its heaviest burdens first, the best people and the soundest traditions tended to be deposited in the tracts that adjoined the original colonies, and as the stream moved further west, the traditions of a civil life disappeared, and the proportion of scala- wags, cut-throats, bruisers, bullies, and gamblers tended to increase, and the wilderness got the upper hand. There are plenty of exceptions to this gen- eralization, it goes without saying; but Texas and Nevada were the poles towards which pionee1 effort tended to run. The original process has been ob- scured in many places by a second and third wave of agriculturists: but it is not hard to get below the surface and see what the original reality was. III The shock of the pioneer’s experience left its mark in one or two gestures of anticipation, and in an aftermath of regretful reminiscence. ‘The post- Civil War writers who deal with Roughing It, A Son of the Middle Border, or A Hoosier School- [ 62 ] The Romanticism of the Pioneer master, to mention only a few examples, had already abandoned the scene of the pioneer’s efforts and had returned to the East: they made copy of their early life, but, though they might be inclined to sigh after it, because it was associated with their youth, they had only a sentimental notion of continuing it. For them, the pioneering experience could be recapitu- lated in a night around a camp-fire or a visit to the Wild West Show, which the astute Barnum had in- troduced to the denizens of New York in a day when the West was still in fact wild. A genuine culture and a relevant way of life do not lose their significance so easily; and the thin-skinnedness of the pioneer in the face of criticism, and the eagerness of the post-pioneer generation—The Inheritors of Susan Glaspell’s play—to identify themselves with the cul- ture of the past, shows, I think, that at bottom the pioneer realized that his efforts had gone awry. One is faced by the paradox that the formative elements in the pioneer’s career expressed them- selves in literature almost at the very outset of the movement, in the works of men who were in fact al- most as aloof from the realities of the western exodus as Chateaubriand himself; and although the pioneer types and the pioneer adventures have been repeated in literature of the rubber-stamp pattern from [ 63 J The Golden Day Gustave Aimard to Zane Grey, what was valid and what was peculiar in the pioneer regime was em- bodied, once for all, by James Fenimore Cooper. These‘ new contacts, these new scenes, these ad- ventures, served to create just three genuine folk- heroes. In these heroes, the habits of the pioneer were raised to the plane of a pattern. Cooper’s Leatherstocking was the new Natur- Mensch, established on a platform of simple human dignity. He was versed in the art of the woods, with the training of the aborigine himself; he shared the reticence and shyness that the Amerind perhaps showed in the company of strangers; and above the tender heart he exhibited mutely in The Deerslayer, he disclosed a leathery imperturbability. His eye was unerring; and it was only in instinct that Chingachgook, the Indian, sometimes surpassed this great hunter and warrior. Leatherstocking’s bullet, which drives the bullet that has already hit the bull’s eye still deeper into the target is, of course, no ordinary bullet: it shared the inevitable enlargement of the hero’s powers. Not every pioneer, needless to say, was a Natty Bumpo; but the shy, reserved, taciturn, dryly humorous hunter was the sort of being the pioneer tended, under the first stress of his new association, to become. Cooper himself [ 64 |] The Romanticism of the Pioneer painted other pioneer types, the sullen squatter, Ishmael, the fur trader, the frontier soldier, the woodman, the bee-hunter; but the fact that he had already outlined the character of Leatherstocking in the equally shrewd and reserved Spy of the Neutral Ground, Harvey Birch, showed, I believe, that this figure had become a property of his unconscious. First a hunter, then a scout, then a trapper, Leatherstocking encompassed the chief pioneering experiences; it required a generation or two before the trader became the boomtown manufacturer, and the manufacturer the realtor and financier, dealing only with the tokens of industry. Like the first pioneers, Leatherstocking fled before the smoke of the settler’s domestic fire, as before the prairie fire itself. With all the shoddiness of Cooper’s imagin- ative constructions, he was plainly seized by a great character: his novels live solely through their cen- tral conception of Leatherstocking. The hard man, a Sir Giles Overreach, or the cunning man, Ulysses, had been portrayed before in literature; but the hardness and craft of Leatherstocking brought forth a new quality, which came directly from the woods and the prairies. When the pioneer called his first political hero Old Hickory he poetically expressed this new truth of character: barbarians or [ 65 J The Golden Day outlaws they might be, these pioneers, but their heroes grew straight. This straightness is the great quality one feels in Lincoln. It was as if, after centuries of clipping and pruning, we had at last allowed a tree to grow to its full height, shaped only by snow, rain, sun, wind, frost. A too timid and complacent culture may sacrifice the inner strength to an agreeable conformity to a common mold, a little undersized. ‘These Old Hickories, on the other hand, grew a little scraggly and awkward; but in their reach, one would catch, occasionally, a hint of the innate possibilities of the species. In the course of the Nineteenth Century, Leather- stocking was joined by an even more authentic folk hero, Paul Bunyan, whose gigantic shape, partly perhaps derived from Gargantua through his French- Canadian forebears, took form over the fire in the logger’s shack. Paul Bunyan, properly enough, was an axman; and, as if to complete the symbolism and identify himself more completely with the prime activities of the new American type, he was also a great inventor. He figures on a continental scale. All his prowess and strength is based upon the notion that a thing becomes a hundred times as im- portant if it is a hundred times as big. The habit of counting and “calculating” and “figuring” and [ 66 ] The Romanticism of the Pioneer “reckoning” and “guessing”—the habit, that is, of exchanging quality for number—is expressed in nearly all of Bunyan’s exploits. In a day when no one dared point to the string of shacks that formed the frontier town as a proof of the qualitative beauties and delights of a pioneer community, the popular imagination took refuge in a statistical criterion of value: they counted heads: they counted money: they counted miles: they counted anything that lent itself to large figures. This habit grew to such an extent that people began to appreciate its comic quality; in the Bun- yan tales it is a device of humor as well as of heroic exaggeration. For many years, as the legend was quietly growing and expanding, Paul Bunyan lurked under the surface of our life: we lived by his light, even if we were ignorant of his legend. He, too, like Leatherstocking, was aloof from women; and this fact is not without significance; for with the woman the rough bachelor life must come to an end, and though the pioneer might carry his family with him, bedstead, baby, and all, they were sooner or later bound to domesticate him, and make him settle down. Woman was the chief enemy of the pioneer: she courageously rose to the burdens of the new life, and demanded her place side by side in the [67 J The Golden Day legislature: but in the end she had her revenge, in temperance clubs, in anti-vice societies, or in the general tarnation tidiness of ‘Tom Sawyer’s aunt. When Whitman sang of the Perfect Comrade, he did not at first think of woman: so far from indicating a special sexual anomaly in Whitman, it is rather a tribute to his imaginative identification with the col- lective experience of his generation. At the same time, another folk-hero arose in liter- ature, at first sight an incomprehensible one. He was neither heroic, nor, on the surface, a pioneer; and the story that brought him forth was a rather commonplace fantasy of an earlier day. Yet the history of Rip Van Winkle shows that he has had a deep hold on the American mind: Irving’s tale itself remains a popular legend, and the play that was written about him as early as the eighteen- thirties was remodeled by succeeding generations of American actors, until given its classic form by Joseph Jefferson. How did this happen? ‘The reason, I think, was that Rip’s adventures and dis- appointments stood for that of the typical American of the pioneer period. Inept at consecutive work, harried by his wife, and disgusted with human society, he retires to the hills with his dog and his gun. He drinks heavily, falls asleep, and becomes [ 68 |] The Romanticism of the Pioneer enchanted. At the end of twenty years he awakes to find himself in a different society. The old land- marks have gone; the old faces have disappeared ; all the outward aspects of life have changed. At the bottom, however, Rip himself has not changed; for he has been drunk and lost in a dream, and for all that the calendar and the clock records, he remains, mentally, a boy. There was the fate of a whole generation: in- deed, is it not still the fate of perhaps the great majority of Americans, lost in their dreams of a great fortune in real-estate, rubber, or oil? In our heroic moments, we may think of ourselves as Leatherstockings, or two-fisted fellows like Paul Bunyan; but in the bottom of our hearts, we are disconsolate Rips. In this process of uneasy transi- tion, in the endless experimentalism and externality of the American scheme, the American came to feel that something was wrong. He saw no way of rectifying the fact itself; the necessity to be “up and moving” seemed written in the skies. In his dis- appointment and frustration, he became maudlin. It is no accident that our most sentimental popular songs aJl date back to the earlier half of the Nine- teenth Century. At the moment when the eagle screamed loudest, when the words Manifest Destiny [ 69 J The Golden Day were put into circulation, when Colonel Diver, the fire-eater, Jefferson Brick, the editor of the Rowdy Journal, and Scadder, the real-estate gambler, were joining voices in a Hallelujah of triumph,—it was then that the tear of regret and the melancholy clutch of the Adam’s apple made their way into the ballad. The great song of the mid-century was “Don’t you remember Sweet Alice, Ben Bolt?” but the truth is that Alice was merely a name to start the tears rolling. It was not over the fate of Alice that the manly heart grieved: what hurt was the fact that in the short space of twenty years, the mill-wheel had fallen to pieces, the rafters had tumbled in, the cabin had gone to ruin, the tree had been felled, and “where once the lord of the forest waved” were grass and golden grain. In short, ruin and change lay in the wake of the pioneer, as he went westering. “There is change in the things I loved, Ben Bolt, they have changed from the old to the new,” and somehow this progressive generation had an uneasy suspicion that they were not changing altogether for the better. What a conflict was in the pioneer’s bosom! He pulls up stakes, to the tune of Home Sweet Home. He sells his parcel of real estate to the next gambler who will hold it, still sighing “there [70 ] The Romanticism of the Pioneer is no place like home.” He guts out the forest: “Woodman, spare that tree, touch not a single bough, in youth it sheltered me, and I'll protect it now.” Red Varmints he is driving to the Land of the Sunset the Song of Hiawatha slips from his hip-pocket. And in the struggle of scalping one of the Does this seem to exaggerate the conflict? Be assured that it was there. The Mark Twains, Bret Hartes, and Artemus Wards would not have found the old solidities of Europe so ingratiating, taught as they were to despise Europe’s cities and institu- tions as the relics of a miserable and feudal past, if the life they had known had not too often starved their essential humanity. IV With the experience of the Great War behind us, we can now understand a little better the psychal state of our various American communities, whilst they were immersed in their besetting “war against Nature.” A war automatically either draws people into the service, or, if they resist, unfits them for carrying on their civil duties in a whole-hearted manner. In the pioneer’s war against Nature, every member of the community was bound to take [71] The Golden Day part, or be branded as a dilettante, a skulker, a deserter. The phrases that were used in justifica- tion of pioneering during the Nineteenth Century were not those which set the Romantic Movement in ~ action in the Kighteenth: these newcomers sought to “conquer a wilderness,” ‘“‘subdue Nature,” “take possession of the continent.” ‘To act that each to-morrow finds us farther than to-day,” was the very breath of the new pioneer mores: the Psalm of Life was the sum of the pioneer’s life. The throb and urge of this grand march across the continent communicated itself to those who re- mained in the Kast. The non-combatants in Boston, Philadelphia, and New York were as uneasy and hesitating in their activities as a conscript who ex- pects at any moment to be called to the colors. Some of them, like C. F. Adams, were only too happy when the Civil War turned the call of the pioneer into a command; others, like George Perkins Marsh confessed that “in our place and day the scholar hath no vocation,” and made plain with what reluc- tance they turned their backs upon science and the humane arts to struggle in the world of business; others, like William Cullen Bryant, threw a handful of Nature poems into the scales, to weigh over against a life of zealous energy in newspaperdom. [72] The Romanticism of the Pioneer In these, and many other equally irritating biog- raphies, one finds that the myth of the Pioneer Conquest had taken possession of even the finer and more sensitive minds: they accepted the uglinesses and brutalities of pioneering, even as many of our contemporaries accepted the bestialities of war, and instead of recognizing no other necessity than their best desires, they throttled their desires and bowed to an imaginary necessity. In the end, the pioneer was as far from Rousseau and Wordsworth as the in- ventor of poison gas was from the troubadour who sang the Song of Roland. The effect of the pioneer habits upon our culture has become a commonplace of literary criticism dur- ing the last half-generation; the weakness of this criticism has been the failure to grasp the difference in origin between the puritan, the pioneer, and the inventor-business man. The Puritan did indeed pave the way for the extroverts that came after him; but what he really sought was an inner grace. The pioneer debased all the old values of a settled cul- ture, and made the path of a dehumanized industrial- ism in America as smooth as a concrete road; but it was only in the habits he had developed, so to say, on the road, that he turned aside from the proper goal of the Romantic Movement, which was to find [73 J The Golden Day a basis for a fresh effort in culture, and gave him- self over to the inventor-businessman’s search for power. All three, Puritan, pioneer, and business- man came to exist through the breakdown of Europe’s earlier, integrated culture; but, given the wide elbow room of America, each type tended to develop to its extreme, only to emerge in succeeding generations into the composite character of that fictitious person, the Average American. In order to appreciate the distance between the America of the Eighteenth Century, which was still attached umbilically to the older Europe, and the America of the pioneer, tinctured by the puritan and the industrialist, one might perhaps compare two representative men, Thomas Jefferson and Mark Twain. When Mark Twain went to Europe during the Gilded Age, he was really an innocent abroad: his experience in Roughing It had not fitted him for any sort of seasoned contact with climates, councils, governments. When Jefferson went to Paris from the backwoods of Virginia, a hundred years earlier, he was a cultivated man, walking among his peers: he criticized English architecture, not as Mark Twain might have done, because it was effete and feudal, but because it was even more barbarous than that of the American provinces. To Mark Twain, ea The Romanticism of the Pioneer as to most of his contemporaries, industry appeared in the light of what sporting people call a good thing; when, after sinking a small fortune in a new typesetting machine, he approached his friend H. H. Rogers with another invention, the chief attraction he emphasized was its potential monopoly. Jeffer- son’s concern with the practical arts, on the other hand, was personal and esthetic: he was an active farmer, with a carefully kept nursery book, and he brought back to America prints and measurements of public buildings, which served him in the design of his own. The death of Jefferson, the scholar, the artist, the statesman, and agriculturist—one of the last true figures of the Renaissance—was symbolic; for it came in 1826, just at the moment when the great westward expansion began. In two men of the fol- lowing generation, S. F. B. Morse and Edgar Allan Poe, we find the new pioneer mores working towards their two legitimate goals. Morse defended his pre- occupation with criticism, instead of painting, in words that might have been framed as an illustration of the mood I have been trying to describe. “If I am to be the Pioneer, and am fitted for it, why should I not glory as much in felling trees and clearing away rubbish as in showing the decorations suited to a [75 ] The Golden Day more advanced state of culture?” As for Poe, the Walpole of a belated Gothic revival, he recorded in literature the displacement and dissociation that was taking place in the community’s life. With no conscious connection with the life about him, Poe became nevertheless the literary equivalent of the industrialist and the pioneer. I have no desire to speak lightly of Poe’s capacities as a critic of literature, which were high, nor of his skill in the formal exercises of literary composition. Poe was the first artist consciously to give the short-story a succinct and final form; and as an esthetic ex- perimentalist his own arrangements in prose pre- pared the way, among other things, for Baudelaire’s prose poems. Yet Poe’s meticulous and rationalistic mind fitted his environment and mirrored its inner characteristics far more readily than a superficial look at it would lead one to believe. In him, the springs of human desire had not so much frozen up as turned to metal: his world was, in one of his favorite words, plutonian, like that of Watt and Fulton and Gradgrind: the tears that he dropped were steel beads, and his mind worked like a mechan- ical hopper, even when there were no appropriate materials to throw into it. It happened to be a very good mind; and when it had something valu- [76] The Romanticism of the Pioneer able to work upon, as in literary criticism, the results were often excellent. Left to himself, however, he either spent his energies on small ingenuities like ciphers and “scientific” puzzles, or he created a synthetic world, half-pasteboard and half-perfume, whose thinness as an imaginative reality was equaled only by its apparent dissociation from the actualities that surrounded him. The criticism of Poe’s fan- tasies is not that they were “unreal”: Shakespeare’s are equally so: the criticism is that they have their sources in a starved and limited humanity, the same starved and limited humanity in which Gradgrind devoted himself to “hard facts,” and the frontier fighter to cold steel. Terror and cruelty dominated Poe’s mind; and terror and cruelty leave a scar on almost every tale and anecdote about pioneer life. The emotional equivalence of Poe’s fiction and the pioneer’s fact was perhaps a matter of chance; I will not strain my point by trying to make out a case for anything else. That the equivalence is not a meretricious presumption on my part, is attested, I think, by the fact that it was corroborated a gen- eration later in the anecdotes of Mark Twain and the short stories of Ambrose Bierce. No sensitive mind can undergo warfare or pioneering, with all the raw savagery of human nature developed to the Des The Golden Day full, without undergoing a shock. The massacres, the banditries, even the coarse practical jokes, all left their detestable impressions. ‘There is a mock- sinister side to the Romantic Movement in European literature in the horror stories of Walpole and Mrs. Radcliffe; but these stories are mere pap for infants alongside those Mark Twain was able to recount in almost every chapter of Roughing It and Life on the Mississippi. Poe, perhaps, had never heard one of these stories ; but the dehumanized world he created gave a place for terrors, cruelties, and murders which expressed, in a sublimated and eminently readable form, the sadisms and masochisms of the pioneer’s life. Man is, after all, a domestic animal; and though he may return to unbroken nature as a relief from all the sobrieties of existence, he can reside for long in the wilderness only by losing some of the essential qualities of the cultivated human species. Poe had lost these qualities, neurotically, without even seeing the wilderness. Cooper’s generation had dreamed of Leatherstocking; in realization, the dream had become the nightmare world of Poe. There is scarcely a page of reliable testimony about pioneer life which does not hint at this nightmare. The resoumony is all the more salient when one finds [78 J The Romanticism of the Pioneer Mark Twain reciting his horrors in a vein of pure innocence, without a word of criticism, and then, by a psychic transfer, becoming ferociously indignant over the same things when he finds them in his im- aginary Court of King Arthur. Vv The vast gap between the hope of the Romantic Movement and the reality of the pioneer period is one of the most sardonic jests of history. On one side, the bucolic innocence of the Eighteenth Cen- tury, its belief in a fresh start, and its attempt to achieve a new culture. And over against it, the epic march of the covered wagon, leaving behind it de- serted villages, bleak cities, depleted soils, and the sick and exhausted souls that engraved their epitaphs in Mr. Masters’ Spoon River Anthology. Against the genuine heroism and derring-do that accom- panied this movement, and against the real gains that it achieved here and there in the spread of social well-being, must be set off the crudities of the pioneer’s sexual life, his bestial swilling and drinking and bullying, and his barbarities in dealing with the original inhabitants—“a fierce dull biped standing in our way.” The gun and the ax and the [79 ] The Golden Day pick, alas! had taught their lessons only too well; and the more social and codperative groups, like the Mormons, were attacked violently, but always under the cover of high moral indignation, by belligerent worthies whose morals would have given a bad odor to a hangman’s picnic. The truth is that the life of the pioneer was bare and insufficient: he did not really face Nature, he merely evaded society. Divorced from its social context, his experience became meaningless. That is why, perhaps, he kept on changing his occupation and his habitat, for as long as he could keep on moving he could forget that, in his own phrase, he was not “getting anywhere.” He had no end of experiences: he could shoot, build, plant, chop, saw, dicker: he was Ulysses, Nimrod, Noah, and Cain all bundled into one man. But there was, all too literally, no end to these activities—that is, no op- portunity to refine them, to separate the ore from the slag, to live them over again in the mind. In short, the pioneer experience did not produce a rounded pioneer culture; and if the new settler began as an unconscious follower of Rousseau, he was only too ready, after the first flush of effort, to barter all his glorious heritage for gas light and paved streets and starched collars and skyscrapers and the [ 80 ] The Romanticism of the Pioneer other insignia of a truly high and _ progressive civilization. The return to Nature led, ironically, to a denatured environment, and when, after the long journey was over, the pioneer became conscious once more of the social obligation, these interests manifested themselves in covert pathological ways, like campaigns to prohibit the cigarette or to pre- scribe the length of sheets for hotel beds, or to promote institutions of compulsory good fellowship. So much for an experience that failed either to ab- sorb an old culture or create a new one! [81] CHAPTER THREE THE GOLDEN DAY I THE MORNING STAR No one who was awake in the early part of the Nineteenth Century was unaware that in the prac- tical arrangements of life men were on the brink of a great change. The rumble of the industrial revo- lution was heard in the distance long before the storm actually broke; and before American society was completely transformed through the work of the land-pioneer and the industrial pioneer, there arose here and there over the land groups of people who anticipated the effects of this revolution and were in revolt against all its preoccupations. Some of these groups reverted to an archaic theocracy, like that of the Mormons, in which a grotesque body of beliefs was combined with an extraordinary amount of economic sagacity and statesmanship; some of them became disciples of Fourier and sought to live in codperative colonies, which would foster men’s various capacities more fully than the utilita- rian community. [ 85] The Golden Day The air quivered with both hope and trepidation. In the new industrial cities, the slum made its ap- pearance; great bodies of depauperate immigrants with strange traditions altered the balance of power ; politics became the business of clever rapscal- lions who looted the public treasury; by the end of the fifties an editorial writer in Harper’s Weekly prayed for professional admninistraeee who might bring a public consience into the corrupt democracy of the big cities. In general, all the forces that blighted America after the Civil War existed in embryonic form between 1830 and 1860. At the same time, the older regions began to reap the fruits of two centuries of contact with the new soil and new customs. It is at the hour when the old ways are breaking up that men step outside them sufficiently to feel their beauty and significance: lovers are often closest at the moment of parting. In New England, the inherited medieval civilization had become a shell; but, drying up, it left behind a sweet acrid aroma, and for a brief day it had a more intense existence in the spirit. Before the life itself collapsed, men felt the full weight of it in their imagination. In the act of passing away, the Puritan begot the Transcendentalist, and the will- [ 86 J The Golden Day to-power, which had made him what he was, with his firm but forbidding character, and his conscien- tious but narrow activity, gave way to the will-to- perfection. The period from 1830 to 1860 was in America one of disintegration and fulfillment: the new and the old, the crude and the complete, the base and the noble mingled together. Puritan fanatics like Goodyear brought to the vulcanization of rubber the same intense passion that Thoreau brought to Nature: sharp mountebanks like Barnum grew out of the same sort of Connecticut village that nour- ished an inspired schoolmaster like Bronson Alcott: genuine statesmen like Brigham Young organized the colonization of Utah whilst nonentities like Pierce and Buchanan governed the whole country. During this period, the old culture of the seaboard settlement had its Golden Day in the mind; the America of the migrations, on the other hand, partly because of weaknesses developed in the pioneer, partly because of the one-sided interests of the in- dustrialist, and partly because of the volcanic erup- tion of the Civil War had up to 1890 little more than the boomtown optimism of the Gilded Age to justify its existence. [ 87] The Golden Day Despite the foreboding that every intelligent mind felt when it contemplated the barbarism of the industrial age, inimical to any culture except that which grew out of its own inhuman absorption in abstract matter and abstract power, the dominant note of the period was one of hope. Before the Civil War the promise of the Westward march ex- panded the sense of achievement that came over the Eastern States; and men faced the world with a con- fidence that went beyond the complacent optimism of the British Utilitarians—tainted as that was by Carlyle’s dire reminders of the palpable wreckage and jetsam that had been washed into the slums of London, Manchester, and Birmingham on the wave of “industrial prosperity.” There were no Carlyles or Ruskins in America during this period; they were almost unthinkable. One might live in this atmosphere, or one might grapple with the White Whale and die; but if one lived, one lived without distrust, without inner com- plaint, and even if one scorned the ways of one’s fellows, as Thoreau did, one remained among them, and sought to remedy in oneself the abuses that ex- isted in society. Transcendentalism might criticize a fossilized past; but no one imagined that the [ 88 ] The Golden Day future could be equally fossilized. The testimony is unqualified. One breathed hope, as one might breathe the heady air of early autumn, pungent with the smell of hickory fires and baking bread, as one walked through the village street. “One cannot look on the freedom of this country, in connection with its youth,” wrote Emerson in The Young American, “without a presentment that here shall laws and institutions exist in some propor- tion to the majesty of Nature. . . . It is a country of beginnings, of projects, of vast designs and expec- tations. It has no past: all has.an onward and pro- spective look.” The voice of Whitman echoed Emer- son through a trumpet: but that of Melville, writ- ing in 1850, was no less sanguine and full-pulsed: “God has predestinated, mankind expects, great things from our race; and great things we feel in our souls. The rest of the nations must soon be in our rear. We are the pioneers of the world; the advance guard, sent on through the wilderness of untried things, to break a new path in the New World that is ours. In our youth is our strength; in our inexperience, our wisdom.” “Every institution is the lengthened shadow of a man.” Here and there in America during its Golden [89 ] The Golden Day Day grew up a man who cast a shadow over the landscape. They left no labor-saving machines, no discoveries, and no wealthy bequests to found a library or a hospital: what they left was something much less and much more than that-——an heroic con- ception of life. They peopled the landscape with their own shapes. ‘This period nourished men, as no other has done in America before or since. Up to that time, the American communities were provin- cial; when it was over, they had lost their base, and spreading all over the landscape, deluged with new- comers speaking strange languages and carrying on Old-World customs, they lost that essential like- ness which is a necessary basis for intimate communi- cation. The first settlement was complete: agricul- tural and industrial life were still in balance in the older parts of the country; and on the seas trade opened up activities for the adventurous. When Ticknor was preparing to go to Germany, in the first decade of the century, there was but one German dictionary, apparently, in New England. Within a generation, Goethe was translated, selections from the European classics were published; and importa- tions of the Indian, Chinese and Persian classics widened the horizon of people who had known India only by its shawls, China only by its tea. [90 ] The Golden Day The traffic of the American merchantman across the seas brought ideas with every load of goods. Living lustily in all these new experiences, the push- ing back of the frontier, the intercourse with the Ancient East, the promises of science and inven- tion—steamboats: railroads: telegraphs: rubber raincoats: reapers: Von Baer: Faraday: Darwin:— living in these things, and believing in them, the capacity for philosophic exploration increased, too; and when an Emerson went into retreat, he retired with an armful of experiences and ideas comparable only to the treasuries that the Elizabethans grandly looted. Within the circle of the daily fact, the Transcendentalists might protest against the dull materialism which was beginning to dominate the period: but it needed only a little boldness to con- vert the materialism itself into a source of new po- tencies. , An imaginative New World came to birth during this period, a new hemisphere in the geography of the mind. That world was the climax of American experience. What preceded led up to it: what fol- lowed, dwindled away from it; and we who think and write to-day are either continuing the first explo- ration, or we are disheartened, and relapse into some [91] The Golden Day stale formula, or console ourselves with empty ges- tures of frivolity. The American scene was a challenge; and men rose toit. The writers of this period were not alone; if they were outcasts in the company of the usual run of merchants, manufacturers, and politicians, they were at all events attended by a company of people who had shared their experience and moved on eagerly with it. When all is reckoned, however, there is nothing in the minor writers that is not pretty fully recorded by Emerson, Thoreau, Whit- man, Melville, and Hawthorne. These men, as Mr. D. H. Lawrence has well said, reached a verge. 'They stood between two worlds. Part of their experience enabled them to bring the protestant movement to its conclusion: the critical examination of men, creeds, and institutions, which is the vital core of protestantism, could not go much further. But already, out of another part of their experience, that which arose out of free institutions planted in an unpreémpted soil, molded by fresh contact with forest and sea and the more ingenious works of man, already this experience pushed them beyond the pit Melville fell into, and led them towards new institutions, a new art, a new philosophy, formed on the basis of a wider past than the European, caught [92 ] The Golden Day by his Mediterranean or Palestinian cultures, was capable of seizing. | It was the organic break with Europe’s past that enabled the American to go on; just as the immi- gration of people to America came to include speci- mens from almost all the folk of the world, so the American past widened sufficiently to bring Eastern and Western cultures into a common focus. The American went on. Whereas, in their search for a new basis for culture, Nietzsche went back to pre- Socratic Greece, Carlyle to Abbot Samson, Tolstoi and Dostoevsky to primitive Christianity, and Wag- ner to the early Germanic fables, Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman went forward leaning on the ex- periences about them, using the past as the logger uses the corduroy road, to push further into the wilderness and still have a sound bottom under him. They fathomed the possibilities, these Americans, of a modern basis for culture, and fathoming it, were nearer to the sources of culture, nearer to the forma- tive thinkers and poets of the past, than those who sought to restore the past. What is vital in the American writers of the Golden Day grew out of a life which opened up to them every part of their social heritage. And a thousand more experiences and fifty million more people have made us no wiser. [98 J The Golden Day The spiritual fact remains unalterable, as Emerson said, by many or few particulars. It is the spiritual fact of American experience that we shall examine during the period of its clearest expression. II All the important thinkers who shared in this large experience were born between 1800 and 1820; their best work was done by the time the Civil War came; if not beyond the reach of its hurt, they at all events could not be completely overthrown or warped by it. The leader of these minds, the central figure of them all, was Ralph Waldo Emerson. He was the first American philosopher with a fresh doctrine: he was the first American poet with a fresh theme: he was the first American prose writer to escape, by way of the Elizabethan dramatists and the Seventeenth Century preachers, from the smooth prose of Ad- dison or the stilted periods of Johnson. He was an original, in the sense that he was a source: he was the glacier that became the white mountain torrent of Thoreau, and expanded into the serene, ample- bosomed lake of Whitman. He loses a little by this icy centrality: he must be climbed, and there is so much of him that people become satisfied with a [94] The Golden Day brief glimpse, and forget that they have not reached the summit which dominates the lower peaks and platforms. His very coldness seems familiar to academic minds; and for too long they appropriated him, as one of them: they forgot that his coldness is not that of an impotence, but of an inner intensity: it burns! The outward manner of his life was mild: there are summer afternoons when from the distance Mont Blanc itself seems little more than a cone of ice-cream; and his contemporaries forgot that this sweet man carried a lash, a lash that would not merely drive the money-changers from the temple but the priests. Emerson was a sort of living essence. The preacher, the farmer, the scholar, the sturdy New England freeholder, yes, and the shrewd Yankee peddler or mechanic, were all encompassed by him; but what they meant in actual life had fallen away from him: he répresented what they stood for in eternity. With Emerson’s works one might recon- struct the landscape and society of New England: a few things would be left out from Nature which Thoreau would have to supply for us—a handful of flora and fauna, and the new Irish immigrants who were already building the railroads and who finally were to take possession of Boston—but what re- [95 ] The Golden Day mained would still be everything of importance in the New England scheme of things. The weaknesses of New England are there, too: its bookishness, its failure, as Margaret Fuller said of Emerson, to kiss the earth sufficiently, its impatience to assume too quickly an upright position, its too-tidy moral house- keeping. Strong or weak, Emerson was complete: in his thought the potentialities of New England were finally expressed. | It is almost impossible to sum up Emerson’s doc- trine, for he touched life on many sides, and what is more, he touched it freshly, so though he is a Platon- ist, one will not find Plato’s doctrines of Art in his essay on Art; and though he was in a very derivative way a Kantian, one will not find Kant’s principles at the bottom of his ethics. With most of the resources of the past at his command, Emerson achieved naked- ness: his central doctrine is the virtue of this in- tellectual, or cultural, nakedness: the virtue of get- ting beyond the institution, the habit, the ritual, and finding out what it means afresh in one’s own consciousness. Protestantism had dared to go this far with respect to certain minor aspects of the Catholic cult: Emerson applied the same method in a more sweeping way, and buoyed up by his faith in the future of America—a country endowed with [96 ] The Golden Day perhaps every advantage except venerability—he asked not merely what Catholic ritual means, but all ritual, not merely what dynastic politics means but all politics; and so with every other important aspect of life. Emerson divested everything of its associations, and seized it afresh, to make what as- sociations it could with the life he had lived and the experience he had assimilated. As a result, each part of the past came to him on equal terms: Buddha had perhaps as much to give as Christ: Hafiz could teach him as much as Shakespeare or Dante. More- over, every fragment of present experience lost its associated values, too: towards the _ established hierarchy of experiences, with vested interests that no longer, perhaps, could exhibit the original power of sword or spade, he extended the democratic chal- lenge: perhaps new experiences belonged to the sum- mit of aristocracy, and old lines were dying out, or were already dead, leaving only empty venerated names. Emerson saw the implications of this attempt to re-think life, and to accept only what was his. He did not shrink from them. “Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind. .. . I remem- ber an answer which when quite young I was prompted to make to a valued adviser, who was [97] The Golden Day wont to importune me with the dear old doctrines of the church. On my saying, ‘What have I to do with the sacredness of traditions, if I live wholly from within?’ my friend suggested,—‘But these im- pulses may be from below, not from above.’ I re- plied, ‘ They do not seem to me to be such; but if I am the Devil’s child, I will live then from the Devil.’ No law can be sacred to me but that of my Nature.” “Life only avails, not the having lived.” There is the kernel of the Emersonian doctrine of self-re- liance: it is the answer which the American, in the day of his confidence and achievement, flung back into the face of Europe, where the “having lived” has always been so conspicuous and formidable. In a certain sense, this doctrine was a barbarism; but it was a creative barbarism, a barbarism that aimed to use the old buildings not as a shell, but as a quarry; neither casting them aside altogether, nor attempting wretchedly to fit a new and lush ex- istence into the old forms. ‘The transcendental young photographer, in Hawthorne’s House of the Seven Gables, suggested that houses should be built afresh every generation, instead of lingering on in dingy security, never really fitting the needs of any family, but that which originally conceived and [98] The Golden Day built it. An uncreative age is aghast at this sug- gestion: for the new building may be cruder than the old, the new problem may not awaken sufficient creative capacities, equal to the previous one: these are the necessary counsels of prudence, impotence. In the heyday of the American adventure, neither Emerson nor Hawthorne was afraid. Emerson re- thought life, and in the mind he coined new shapes and images and institutions, ready to take the place of those he discarded.