Wealth has something to do with it, of course. People cannot spend money unless they have it. The public treasury is not a Fortunatus’ purse which fills itself. In the remote country districts, the little red schoolhouse, with its single room, its wooden benches, its iron stove, its unpainted flagstaff, stands on some hill-top without a tree to shadow it, in brave, unblushing poverty. In the richer cities there are common school palaces with an aspect of splendour which is almost disconcerting.
Yet it is not altogether a question of wealth. It is also a question of public spirit. Baltimore is nearly as large and half as rich as Boston, yet Boston spends about three times as much on her schools. Richmond has about the same amount of taxable property as Rochester, N.Y., yet Richmond spends only one-quarter as much on her schools. Houston, Texas; Wilmington, Delaware; Harrisburg, Pennsylvania; Trenton, New Jersey; New Bedford, Massachusetts; and Des Moines, Iowa, are six cities with a population of from 80,000 to 100,000 each, and not far apart in wealth. But their public-school bills in 1906 varied as follows: Des Moines, $492,000; New Bedford, $472,000; Harrisburg, $304,000; Trenton, $300,000; Wilmington, $226,000; and Houston, the richest of the six, $163,000.
If you should judge from this that the public schools are most liberally supported in the North Atlantic, North Central, and Far Western States, you would be right. The amount that is contributed to the common schools per adult male inhabitant is largest in the following States in order: Utah, $22; North Dakota, $21; New York, $20; Colorado, $20; Massachusetts, $19; South Dakota, $19; Nebraska, $17; and Pennsylvania, $16. The comparative weakness of the common schools in the South Atlantic and South Central States has led to the giving of large sums of money by private benevolence,the Peabody Fund, the Slater Fund, the Southern Education Fund, which are administered by boards of trustees for the promotion of education in these backward regions. The Spirit of America strongly desires to spread, to improve, to equalize and coördinate, the public schools of the whole country.
Is it succeeding? What lines is it following? Where are the changes most apparent?
First of all, there is a marked advance in the physical equipment of the common school. In the villages and in the rural districts the new buildings are larger and more commodious than the old ones. In many parts of the country the method of concentration is employed. Instead of half a dozen poor little schoolhouses scattered over the hills, one good house is built in a central location, and the children are gathered from the farmhouses by school omnibuses or by the electric trolley-cars. Massachusetts made a law in 1894 requiring every township which did not have a high school to pay the transportation expenses of all qualified pupils who wished to attend the high schools of neighbouring towns.
In many States text-books are provided at the public cost. In the cities the increased attention to the physical side of things is even more noticeable. No expense is spared to make the new buildings attractive and convenient. Libraries and laboratories,gymnasiums and toilet-rooms, are provided. In some cities a free lunch is given to the pupils.
The school furniture is of the latest and most approved pattern. The old idea of the adjustable child who could be fitted to any kind of a seat or desk, has given way to the new idea of the adjustable seat and desk which can be fitted to any kind of a child. School doctors are employed to make a physical examination of the children. In a few cities there are school nurses to attend to the pupils who are slightly ailing.
Physical culture, in the form of calisthenics, military drill, gymnastics, is introduced. Athletic organizations, foot-ball clubs, base-ball clubs, are encouraged among the boys. In every way the effort is apparent to make school life attractive, more comfortable, more healthful.
Some critics say that the effort is excessive, that it spoils and softens the children, that it has distracted their attention from the serious business of hard study. I do not know. It is difficult for a man to remember just how serious he was when he was a boy. Perhaps the modern common-school pupil is less Spartan and resolute than his father used to be. Perhaps not. Pictures on the wall and flowers in the window, gymnastics and music, may not really distract the attention more than uncomfortable seats and bad ventilation.
Another marked tendency in the American common school, at least in the large towns and cities, is the warm, one might almost say feverish, interest in new courses and methods of study. In the primary schools this shows itself chiefly in the introduction of new ways of learning to spell and to cipher. The alphabet and the multiplication table are no longer regarded as necessities. The phonetic pupil is almost in danger of supposing that reading, writing, and arithmetic are literally “the threer’s.” Hours are given to nature-study, object-lessons, hygiene. Children of tender years are instructed in the mysteries of the digestive system. The range of mental effort is immensely diversified.
In the high schools the increase of educational novelties is even more apparent. The courses are multiplied and divided. Elective studies are offered in large quantity. I take an example from the programme of a Western high school. The studies required of all pupils are: English, history, algebra, plane geometry, biology, physics, and Shakespeare. The studies offered for a choice are: psychology, ethics, commercial law, civics, economics, arithmetic, book-keeping, higher algebra, solid geometry, trigonometry, penmanship, phonography, drawing and the history of art, chemistry, Latin, German, French, Spanish, and Greek. This is quite a rich intellectual bill of fare for boys and girls between fourteen and eighteenyears old. It seems almost encyclopædic,—though I miss a few subjects like Sanskrit, Egyptology, photography, and comparative religions.
The fact is that in the American high schools, as in the Frenchlycéesthe effort to enlarge and vary the curriculum by introducing studies which are said to be “urgently required by modern conditions” has led to considerable confusion of educational ideals. But with us, while the extremes are worse, owing to the lack of the central control, the disorder is less universal, because the conservative schools have been free to adhere to a simpler programme. It is a good thing, no doubt, that the rigidity of the old system, which made every pupil go through the same course of classics and mathematics, has been relaxed. But our danger now lies in the direction of using our schools to fit boys and girls to make a living, rather than to train them in a sound and vigorous intellectual life. For this latter purpose it is not true that all branches of study are of equal value. Some are immensely superior. We want not the widest range, but the best selection.
There are some points in which the public schools of America, so far as one can judge from the general reports, are inferior to those of France. One of these points, naturally, is in the smooth working that comes from uniformity and coördination. Another point, strangely enough, is in the careful provisionfor moral instruction in the primary schools. At least in the programmes of the French schools, much more time and attention are given to this than in the American programmes.
Another point of inferiority in the United States is in the requirement of proper preparation and certification of all teachers; and still another is in the security of their tenure of office and the length of their service in the profession. The teaching force of the American schools is a noble army; but it would be more efficient if the regular element were larger in proportion to the volunteers. Thepersonnelchanges too often.
One reason for this, no doubt, is the fact that the women outnumber the men by three to one. Not that the women are poorer teachers. Often, especially in primary work, they are the best. But their average term of professional service is not over four years. They are interrupted by that great accident, matrimony, which invites a woman to stop teaching, and a man to continue.
The shortage of male teachers, which exists in so many countries, is felt in extreme form in the United States. Efforts are made to remedy it by the increase of normal schools and teachers’ colleges, and by a closer connection between the universities and the public-school system.
In the conduct and development of the commonschools we see the same voluntary, experimental, pragmatic way of doing things that is so characteristic of the Spirit of America in every department of life. “Education,” say the Americans, “is desirable, profitable, and necessary. The best way for us to get it is to work it out for ourselves. It must be practically adapted to the local conditions of each community, and to the personal needs of the individual. The being of the child must be the centre of development. What we want to do is to make good citizens for American purposes. Liberty must be the foundation, unity the superstructure.”
This, upon the whole, is what the common schools are doing for the United States: Three-fourths of the children of the country (boys and girls studying together from their sixth to their eighteenth year) are in them. They are immensely democratic. They are stronger in awakening the mind than in training it. They do more to stimulate quick perception than to cultivate sound judgment and correct taste. Their principles are always good, their manners sometimes. Universal knowledge is their foible; activity is their temperament; energy and sincerity are their virtues; superficiality is their defect.
Candour compels me to add one more touch to this thumb-nail sketch of the American common school. The children of the rich, the socially prominent, the higher classes, if you choose to call them so,are not generally found in the public schools. At least in the East and the South, most of these children are educated in private schools and academies.
One cause of this is mere fashion. But there are two other causes which may possibly deserve to be called reasons, good or bad.
The first is the fear that coeducation, instead of making the boys refined and the girls hardy, as it is claimed, may effeminate the boys and roughen the girls.
The second is the wish to secure more thorough and personal teaching in smaller classes. This the private schools offer, usually at a high price. In the older universities and colleges, a considerable part, if not the larger number, of the student body, comes from private preparatory schools and academies. Yet it must be noted that of the men who take high honours in scholarship a steadily increasing number, already a majority, are graduates of the free public high schools.
This proves what? That the State can give the best if it wants to. That it is much more likely to want to do so if it is enlightened, stimulated, and guided by the voluntary effort of the more intelligent part of the community.
III. This brings me to the last division of the large subject around which I have been hastily circling: the institutions of higher education,—universities, colleges, and technological schools. Remember that in America these different names are used with bewildering freedom. They are not definitions, nor even descriptions; they are simply “tags.” A school of arts and trades, a school of modern languages, may call itself a university. An institution of liberal studies, with professional departments and graduate schools attached to it, may call itself a college. The size and splendour of the label does not determine the value of the wine in the bottle. The significance of an academic degree in America depends not on the name, but on the quality, of the institution that confers it.
But, generally speaking, you may understand that a college is an institution which gives a four years’ course in liberal arts and sciences, for which four years of academic preparation are required: a university adds to this, graduate courses, and one or more professional schools of law, medicine, engineering, divinity, or pedagogy; a technological school is one in which the higher branches of the applied arts and sciences are the chief subjects of study and in which only scientific degrees are conferred.
Of these three kinds of institutions, 622 reported to the United States Bureau of Education in 1906: 158 were for men only; 129 were for women only; 335 were coeducational. The number of professors and instructors was 24,000. The number of undergraduate and resident graduate students was 136,000.The income of these institutions for the year was $40,000,000, of which a little less than half came from tuition fees, and a little more than half from gifts and endowments. The value of the real estate and equipment was about $280,000,000, and the invested funds for endowment amounted to $236,000,000.
These are large figures. But they do not convey any very definite idea to the mind, until we begin to investigate them and ask what they mean. How did this enormous enterprise of higher education come into being? Who supports it? What is it doing?
There are three ways in which the colleges and universities of America have originated. They have been founded by the churches to “provide a learned and godly ministry, and to promote knowledge and sound intelligence in the community.” They have been endowed by private and personal gifts and benefactions. They have been established by States, and in a few cases by cities, to complete and crown the common-school system.
But note that in the course of time important changes have occurred. Most of the older and larger universities which were at first practically supported and controlled by churches, have now become independent and are maintained by non-sectarian support. The institutions which remain under control of churches are the smaller colleges, the majority of which were established between 1810 and 1870.
The universities established by a large gift or bequest from a single person, of which Johns Hopkins in Maryland, Leland Stanford in California, and Chicago University founded by the head of the Standard Oil Company, may be taken as examples, are of comparatively recent origin. Their immediate command of large wealth has enabled them to do immense things quickly. Chicago is called by a recent writer “a University by enchantment.”
In the foundation of State universities the South pointed the way with the Universities of Tennessee North Carolina, and Georgia, at the end of the eighteenth century. But since that time the West has distinctly taken the lead. Out of the twenty-nine colleges and universities which report an enrolment of over a thousand undergraduate and graduate students, sixteen are State institutions, and fourteen of these are west of the Alleghanies.
It is in these State universities, especially in the Middle West, in Michigan, Wisconsin, Illinois, Minnesota, Iowa, that you will see the most remarkable illustration of that thirst for knowledge, that ambition for personal development, which is characteristic of the Spirit of Young America.
The thousands of sons and daughters of farmers, mechanics, and tradesmen, who flock to these institutions, are full of eagerness and hope. They are no respecters of persons, but they have a tremendous faith in the power of education. They all expect to succeed in getting it, and to succeed in life by means of it. They are alert, inquisitive, energetic; in their work strenuous, and in their play enthusiastic. They diffuse around them an atmosphere of joyous endeavour,—a nervous, electric, rude, and bracing air. They seem irreverent; but for the most part they are only intensely earnest and direct. They pursue their private aim with intensity. They “want to know.” They may not be quite sure what it is that they want to know. But they have no doubt that knowledge is an excellent thing, and they have come to the university to get it. This strong desire to learn, this attitude of concentrated attack upon the secrets of the universe, seems to me less noticeable among the students of the older colleges of the East than it is in these new big institutions of the Centre.
The State universities which have developed it, or grown up to meet it, are in many cases wonderfully well organized and equipped. Professors of high standing have been brought from the Eastern colleges and from Europe. The main stress, perhaps, is laid upon practical results, and the technique of industry. Studies which are supposed to be directly utilitarian take the precedence over those which are regarded as merely disciplinary. But in the best ofthese institutions the idea of general culture is maintained.
The University of Michigan, which is the oldest and the largest of these western State universities, still keeps its primacy with 4280 students drawn from 48 States and Territories. But the Universities of Wisconsin, and Minnesota, and Illinois, and California are not unworthy rivals.
A member of the British Commission which came to study education in the United States four years ago gave his judgment that the University of Wisconsin was the foremost in America. Why? “Because,” said he, “it is a wholesome product of a commonwealth of three millions of people; sane, industrial, and progressive. It knits together the professions and labours; it makes the fine arts and the anvil one.”
That is a characteristic modern opinion, coming, mark you, not from an American, but from an Englishman. It reminds me of the advice which an old judge gave to a young friend who had just been raised to the judicial bench. “Never give reasons,” said he, “for your decisions. The decision may often be right, but the reasons will probably be wrong.”
A thoughtful critic would say that the union of “the fine arts and the anvil” was not a sufficient ground for awarding the primacy to a university. Its standing must be measured in its own sphere,—the realmof knowledge and wisdom. It exists for the disinterested pursuit of truth, for the development of the intellectual life, and for the rounded development of character. Its primary aim is not to fit men for any specific industry, but to give them those things which are everywhere essential to intelligent living. Its attention must be fixed not on the work, but on the man. In him, as a person, it must seek to develop four powers—the power to see clearly, the power to imagine vividly, the power to think independently, and the power to will wisely and nobly. This is the university ideal which a conservative critic would maintain against the utilitarian theory. He might admire the University of Wisconsin greatly, but it would be for other reasons than those which the Englishman gave.
“After all,” this conservative would say, “the older American universities are still the most important factors in the higher education of the country. They have the traditions. They set the standard. You cannot understand education in England without going to Oxford and Cambridge, nor in America without going to Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Columbia.”
Perhaps the conservative would be right. At all events, I wish that I could help the friendly foreign observer to understand just what these older institutions of learning, and some others like them, havemeant and still mean to Americans. They are the monuments of the devotion of our fathers to ideal aims. They are the landmarks of the intellectual life of the young republic. Time has changed them, but it has not removed them. They still define a region within which the making of a reasonable man is the main interest, and truth is sought and served for her own sake.
Originally, these older universities were almost identical in form. They were called colleges and based upon the idea of a uniform four years’ course consisting mainly of Latin, Greek, and mathematics, with an addition of history, philosophy, and natural science in the last two years, and leading to the degree of Bachelor of Arts. This was supposed to be the way to make a reasonable man.
But in the course of time the desire to seek truth in other regions, by other paths, led to a gradual enlargement and finally to an immense expansion of the curriculum. The department of letters was opened to receive English and other modern languages. The department of philosophy branched out into economics and civics and experimental psychology. History took notice of the fact that much has happened since the fall of the Roman Empire. Science threw wide its doors to receive the new methods and discoveries of the nineteenth century. The elective system of study came in like a flood fromGermany. The old-fashioned curriculum was submerged and dissolved. The four senior colleges came out as universities and began to differentiate themselves.
Harvard, under the bold leadership of President Eliot, went first and farthest in the development of the elective system. One of its own graduates, Mr. John Corbin, has recently written of it as “a Germanized university.” It offers to its students free choice among a multitude of courses so great that it is said that one man could hardly take them all in two hundred years. There is only one course which every undergraduate is required to take,—English composition in the Freshman year: 551 distinct courses are presented by the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. In the whole university there are 556 officers of instruction and 4000 students. There is no other institution in America which provides such a rich, varied, and free chance for the individual to develop his intellectual life.
Princeton, so far as the elective system is concerned, represents the other extreme. President McCosh introduced it with Scotch caution and reserve, in 1875. It hardly went beyond the liberalizing of the last two years of study. Other enlargements followed. But at heart Princeton remained conservative. It liked regularity, uniformity, system, more than it liked freedom and variety. In recent years it hasrearranged the electives in groups, which compel a certain amount of unity in the main direction of a student’s effort. It has introduced a system of preceptors or tutors who take personal charge of each student in his reading and extra class-room work. The picked men of the classes, who have won prizes, or scholarships, or fellowships, go on with higher university work in the graduate school. The divinity school is academically independent, though closely allied. There are no other professional schools. Thus Princeton is distinctly “a collegiate university,” with a very definite idea of what a liberal education ought to include, and a fixed purpose of developing the individual by leading him through a regulated intellectual discipline.
Yale, the second in age of the American universities, occupies a middle ground, and fills it with immense vigour. Very slow in yielding to the elective system, Yale theoretically adopted it four years ago in its extreme form. But in practice the “Yale Spirit” preserves the unity of each class from entrance to graduation; the “average man” is much more of a controlling factor than he is at Harvard, and the solid body of students in the Department of Arts and Sciences gives tone to the whole university. Yale is typically American in its love of liberty and its faculty of self-organization. It draws its support from a wider range of country than either Harvard orPrinceton. It has not been a leader in the production of advanced ideas or educational methods. Originality is not its mark. Efficiency is. No other American university has done more in giving men of light and leading to industrial, professional, and public life in the United States.
Columbia, by its location in the largest of the American cities, and by the direction which its last three presidents have given to its policy, has become much stronger in its professional schools and its advanced graduate work, than in its undergraduate college. Its schools of mines and law and medicine are famous. In its graduate courses it has as many students enrolled as Harvard, Yale, and Michigan put together. It has a library of 450,000 volumes, and endowment for various kinds of special study, including Chinese and journalism.
None of these four universities is coeducational in the department of arts and sciences. But Harvard and Columbia each have an annex for women,—Radcliffe College and Barnard College,—in which the university professors lecture and teach.
In Yale, Harvard, Princeton, and most of the older colleges, except those which are situated in the great cities, there is a common life of the students which is peculiar, I believe, to America, and highly characteristic and interesting. They reside together in large halls or dormitories grouped in an academic estatewhich is almost always beautiful with ancient trees and spacious lawns. There is nothing like the caste division among them which is permitted, if not fostered, at Oxford and Cambridge by the existence of distinct colleges in the same university. They belong to the same social body, a community of youth bound together for a happy interval of four years between the strict discipline of school and the separating pressure of life in the outer world. They have their own customs and traditions, often absurd, always picturesque and amusing. They have their own interests, chief among which is the cultivation of warm friendships among men of the same age. They organize their own clubs and societies, athletic, musical, literary, dramatic, or purely social, according to elective affinity. But the class spirit creates a ground of unity for all who enter and graduate together, and the college spirit makes a common tie for all.
It is a little world by itself,—this American college life,—incredibly free, yet on the whole self-controlled and morally sound,—physically active and joyful, yet at bottom full of serious purpose. See the students on the athletic field at some great foot-ball or base-ball match; hear their volleying cheers, their ringing songs of encouragement or victory; watch their waving colours, their eager faces, their movements of excitement as the fortuneof the game shifts and changes; and you might think that these young men cared for nothing but out-of-door sport. But that noisy enthusiasm is the natural overflow of youthful spirits. The athletic game gives it the easiest outlet, the simplest opportunity to express college loyalty by an outward sign, a shout, a cheer, a song. Follow the same men from day to day, from week to week, and you will find that the majority of them, even among the athletes, know that the central object of their college life is to get an education. But they will tell you, also, that this education does not come only from the lecture-room, the class, the library. An indispensable and vital part of it comes from their daily contact with one another in play and work and comradeship,—from the chance which college gives them to know, and estimate, and choose, their friends among their fellows.
It is intensely democratic,—this American college life,—and therefore it has distinctions, as every real democracy must. But they are not artificial and conventional. They are based in the main upon what a man is and does, what contribution he makes to the honour and joy and fellowship of the community.
The entrance of the son of a millionnaire, of a high official, of a famous man, is noted, of course. But it is noted only as a curious fact of natural history which has no bearing upon the college world. The realquestion is, What kind of a fellow is the new man? Is he a good companion; has he the power of leadership; can he do anything particularly well; is he a vigorous and friendly person? Wealth and parental fame do not count, except perhaps as slight hindrances, because of the subconscious jealousy which they arouse in a community where the majority do not possess them. Poverty does not count at all, unless it makes the man himself proud and shy, or confines him so closely to the work of self-support that he has no time to mix with the crowd. Men who are working their own way through college are often the leaders in popularity and influence.
I do not say that there are no social distinctions in American college life. There, as in the great world, little groups of men are drawn together by expensive tastes and amusements; little coteries are formed which aim at exclusiveness. But these are of no real account in the student body. It lives in a brisk and wholesome air of free competition in study and sport, of free intercourse on a human basis.
It is this tone of humanity, of sincerity, of joyful contact with reality, in student life, that makes the American graduate love his college with a sentiment which must seem to foreigners almost like sentimentality. His memory holds her as theAlma Materof his happiest years. He goes back to visit her halls, her playgrounds, her shady walks, year after year, asone returns to a shrine of the heart. He sings the college songs, he joins in the college cheers, with an enthusiasm which does not die as his voice loses the ring of youth. And when gray hairs come upon him, he still walks with his class among the old graduates at the head of the commencement procession. It is all a little strange, a little absurd, perhaps, to one who watches it critically, from the outside. But to the man himself it is simply a natural tribute to the good and wholesome memory of American college life.
But what are its results from the educational point of view? What do these colleges and universities do for the intellectual life of the country? Doubtless they are still far from perfect in method and achievement. Doubtless they let many students pass through them without acquiring mental thoroughness, philosophical balance, fine culture. Doubtless they need to advance in the standard of teaching, the strictness of examination, the encouragement of research. They have much to learn. They are learning.
Great central institutions like those which Mr. Carnegie has endowed for the Promotion of Research and for the Advancement of Teaching will help progress. Conservative experiments and liberal experiments will lead to better knowledge.
But whatever changes are made, whatever improvements arrive in the higher education in America,one thing I hope will never be given up,—the free, democratic, united student life of our colleges and universities. For without this factor we cannot develop the kind of intellectual person who will be at home in the republic. The world in which he has to live will not ask him what degrees he has taken. It will ask him simply what he is, and what he can do. If he is to be a leader in a country where the people are sovereign, he must add to the power to see clearly, to imagine vividly, to think independently, and to will wisely, the faculty of knowing other men as they are, and of working with them for what they ought to be. And one of the best places to get this faculty is in the student life of an American college.
VIISELF-EXPRESSION AND LITERATURE
All human activity is, in a certain sense, a mode of self-expression. The works of man in the organization of the State, in the development of industry, in voluntary effort for the improvement of the common order, are an utterance of his inner life.
But it is natural for him to seek a fuller, clearer, more conscious mode of self-expression, to speak more directly of his ideals, thoughts, and feelings. It is this direct utterance of the Spirit of America, as it is found in literature, which I propose now, and in the following lectures,[1]to discuss.
Around the political and ecclesiastical and social structures which men build for themselves there are always flowing great tides and currents of human speech; like the discussions in the studio of the architect, the confused murmur of talk among the workmen, the curious and wondering comments of the passing crowd, when some vast cathedral or palace or hall of industry is rising from the silent earth.Man is a talking animal. The daily debates of the forum and the market-place, the orations and lectures of a thousand platforms, the sermons and exhortations of the thousand pulpits, the ceaseless conversation of the street and the fireside, all confess that one of the deepest of human appetites and passions is for self-expression and intercourse, to reveal and to communicate the hidden motions of the spirit that is in man.
Language, said a cynic, is chiefly useful to conceal thought. But that is only a late-discovered, minor, and decadent use of speech. If concealment had been the first and chief need that man felt, he never would have made a language. He would have remained silent. He would have lived among the trees, contented with that inarticulate chatter which still keeps the thoughts of monkeys (if they have any) so well concealed.
But vastly the greater part of human effort toward self-expression serves only the need of the transient individual, the passing hour. It sounds incessantly beneath the silent stars,—this murmur, this roar, thissusurrusof mingled voices,—and melts continually into the vague inane. The idle talk of the multitude, the eloquence of golden tongues, the shouts of brazen throats, go by and are forgotten, like the wind that passes through the rustling leaves of the forest.
In the fine arts man has invented not only a more perfect and sensitive, but also a more enduring, form for the expression of that which fills his spirit with the joy and wonder of living. His sense of beauty and order; the response of something within him to certain aspects of nature, certain events of life; his interpretation of the vague and mysterious things about him which seem to suggest a secret meaning; his delight in the intensity and clearness of single impressions, in the symmetry and proportion of related objects; his double desire to surpass nature, on the one side by the simplicity and unity of his work, or on the other side by the freedom of its range and the richness of its imagery; his sudden glimpses of truth; his persistent visions of virtue; his perception of human misery and his hopes of human excellence; his deep thoughts and solemn dreams of the Divine,—all these he strives to embody, clearly or vaguely, by symbol, or allusion, or imitation, in painting and sculpture, music and architecture.
The medium of these arts is physical; they speak to the eye and the ear. But their ultimate appeal is spiritual, and the pleasure which they give goes far deeper than the outward senses.
In literature we have another art whose very medium is more than half spiritual. For words are not like lines, or colours, or sounds. They are living creatures begotten in the soul of man. They cometo us saturated with human meaning and association. They are vitally related to the emotions and thoughts out of which they have sprung. They have a wider range, a more delicate precision, a more direct and penetrating power than any other medium of expression.
The art of literature which weaves these living threads into its fabric lies closer to the common life and rises higher into the ideal life than any other art. In the lyric, the drama, the epic, the romance, the fable, theconte, the essay, the history, the biography, it not only speaks to the present hour, but also leaves its record for the future.
Literature consists of those writings which interpret the meanings of nature and life, in words of charm and power, touched with the personality of the author, in artistic forms of permanent interest.
Out of the common utterances of men, the daily flood of language spoken and written, by which they express their thoughts and feelings,—out of that current of journalism and oratory, preaching and debate, literature comes. But with that current it does not pass away. Art has endowed it with the magic which confers a distinct life, a longer endurance, a so-called immortality. It is the ark on the flood. It is the light on the candlestick. It is the flower among the leaves, the consummation of the plant’s vitality, the crown of its beauty, the treasure-house of its seeds.
Races and nations have existed without a literature. But their life has been dumb. With their death their power has departed.
What does the world know of the thoughts and feelings of those unlettered tribes of white and black and yellow and red, flitting in ghost-like pantomime across the background of the stage? Whatever message they may have had for us, of warning, of encouragement, of hope, of guidance, remains undelivered. They are but phantoms, mysterious and ineffective.
But with literature life arrives at utterance and lasting power. The Scythians, the Etruscans, the Phœnicians, the Carthaginians, have vanished into thin air. We grope among their ruined cities. We collect their figured pottery, their rusted coins and weapons. And we wonder what manner of men they were. But the Greeks, the Hebrews, the Romans, still live. We know their thoughts and feelings, their loves and hates, their motives and ideals. They touch us and move us to-day through a vital literature. Nor should we fully understand their other arts, nor grasp the meaning of their political and social institutions without the light which is kindled within them by the ever-burning torch of letters.
The Americans do not belong among the dumb races. Their spiritual descent is not from Etruriaand Phœnicia and Carthage, nor from the silent red man of the western forests. Intellectually, like all the leading races of Europe, they inherit from Greece and Rome and Palestine.
Their instinct of self-expression in the arts has been slower to assert itself than those other traits which we have been considering,—self-reliance, fair-play, common order, the desire of personal development. But they have taken part, and they still take part (not altogether inaudibly), in the general conversation and current debate of the world. Moreover, they have begun to create a native literature which utters, to some extent at least, the thoughts and feelings of the soul of the people.
This literature, considered in itsensembleas an expression of our country, raises some interesting questions which I should like to answer. Why has it been so slow to begin? Why is it not more recognizably American? What are the qualities in which it really expresses the Spirit of America?
I. If you ask me why a native literature has been so slow to begin in America, I answer, first,that it has not been slow at all. Compared with other races, the Americans have been rather less slow than the average in seeking self-expression in literary form and in producing books which have survived the generation which produced them.
How long was it, for example, before the Hebrews began to create a literature? A definite answer to that question would bring us into trouble with the theologians. But at least we may say that from the beginning of the Hebrew Commonwealth to the time of the prophet Samuel there were three centuries and a half without literature.
How long did Rome exist before its literary activities began? Of course we do not know what books may have perished. But the first Romans whose names have kept a place in literature were Nævius and Ennius, who began to write more than five hundred years after the city was founded.
Compared with these long periods of silence, the two hundred years between the settlement of America and the appearance of Washington Irving and James Fenimore Cooper seems but a short time.
Even earlier than these writers I should be inclined to claim a place in literature for two Americans,—Jonathan Edwards and Benjamin Franklin. Indeed it is possible that the clean-cut philosophical essays of the iron-clad Edwards, and the intensely human autobiography of the shrewd and genial Franklin may continue to find critical admirers and real readers long after many writers, at present more praised, have been forgotten.
But if you will allow me this preliminary protest against the superficial notion that the Americanshave been remarkably backward in producing a national literature, I will make a concession to current and commonplace criticism by admitting that they were not as quick in turning to literary self-expression as might have been expected. They were not a mentally sluggish people. They were a race of idealists. They were fairly well educated. Why did they not go to work at once, with their intense energy, to produce a national literature on demand?
One reason, perhaps, was that they had the good sense to perceive that a national literature never has been, and never can be, produced in this way. It is not made to order. It grows.
Another reason, no doubt, was the fact that they already had more books than they had time to read. They were the inheritors of the literature of Europe. They had the classics and the old masters. Milton and Dryden and Locke wrote for them. Pope and Johnson, Defoe and Goldsmith, wrote for them. Cervantes and Le Sage wrote for them. Montesquieu and Rousseau wrote for them. Richardson and Smollett and Fielding gave them a plenty of long-measure novels. Above all, they found an overflowing supply of books of edification in the religious writings of Thomas Fuller, Richard Baxter, John Bunyan, Philip Doddridge, Matthew Henry, and other copious Puritans. There was no pressingneed of mental food for the Americans. The supply was equal to the demand.
Another reason, possibly, was the fact that they did not have a new language, with all its words fresh and vivid from their origin in life, to develop and exploit. This was at once an advantage and a disadvantage.
English was not the mother-tongue of all the colonists. For two or three generations there was a confusion of speech in the middle settlements. It is recorded of a certain young Dutchwoman from New Amsterdam, travelling to the English province of Connecticut, that she was in danger of being tried for witchcraft because she spoke a diabolical tongue, evidently marking her as “a child of Satan.”
But this polyglot period passed away, and the people in general spoke
“the tongue that Shakespeare spoke,”—
spoke it indeed rather more literally than the English did, retaining old locutions like “I guess,” and sprinkling their talk with “Sirs,” and “Ma’ams,”—which have since come to be considered as Americanisms, whereas they are really Elizabethanisms.
The possession of a language that is already consolidated, organized, enriched with a vast vocabulary, and dignified by literary use, has two effects. It makes the joyful and unconscious literature of adolescence, the period of popular ballads andrhymed chronicles, quaint animal-epics and miracle-plays, impossible. It offers to the literature of maturity an instrument of expression equal to its needs.
But such a language carries with it discouragements as well as invitations. It sets a high standard of excellence. It demands courage and strength to use it in any but an imitative way.
Do not misunderstand me here. The Americans, since that blending of experience which made them one people, have never felt that the English language was strange or foreign to them. They did not adopt or borrow it. It was their own native tongue. They grew up in it. They contributed to it. It belonged to them. But perhaps they hesitated a little to use it freely and fearlessly and originally while they were still in a position of tutelage and dependence. Perhaps they waited for the consciousness that they were indeed grown up,—a consciousness which did not fully come until after the War of 1812. Perhaps they needed to feel the richness of their own experience, the vigour of their own inward life, before they could enter upon the literary use of that most rich and vigorous of modern languages.
Another reason why American literature did not develop sooner was the absorption of the energy of the people in other tasks than writing. They had to chop down trees, to build houses, to plough prairies. It is one thing to explore the wilderness,as Chateaubriand did, an elegant visitor looking for the materials of romance. It is another thing to live in the wilderness and fight with it for a living. Real pioneers are sometimes poets at heart. But they seldom write their poetry.
After the Americans had won their security and their daily bread in the wild country, they had still to make a State, to develop a social order, to provide themselves with schools and churches, to do all kinds of things which demand time, and toil, and the sweat of the brow. It was a busy world. There was more work to be done than there were workmen to do it. Industry claimed every talent almost as soon as it got into breeches.
A Franklin, who might have written essays or philosophical treatises in the manner of Diderot, must run a printing-press, invent stoves, pave streets, conduct a postal service, raise money for the War of Independence. A Freneau, who might have written lyrics in the manner of André Chénier, must become a soldier, a sea-captain, an editor, a farmer.
Even those talents which were drawn to the intellectual side of life were absorbed in the efforts which belong to the current discussions of affairs, the daily debate of the world, rather than to literature. They disputed, they argued, they exhorted, with a direct aim at practical results in morals and conduct. They became preachers, orators, politicians, pamphleteers. They wrote a good deal; but their writing has the effect of reported speech addressed to an audience. The mass of sermons, and political papers, and long letters on timely topics, which America produced in her first two hundred years is considerable. It contains much more vitality than the imitative essays, poems, and romances of the same period.
John Dickinson’s “Letters from a Pennsylvania Farmer,” the sermons of President Witherspoon of Princeton, the papers of Madison, Hamilton, and Jay in theFederalist, are not bad reading, even to-day. They are virile and significant. They show that the Americans knew how to use the English language in its eighteenth-century form. But they were produced to serve a practical purpose. Therefore they lack the final touch of that art whose primary aim is the pleasure of self-expression in forms as permanent and as perfect as may be found.
II. The second question which I shall try to answer is this: Why is not the literature of America, not only in the beginning but also in its later development, more distinctly American?
The answer is simple:It is distinctly American. But unfortunately the critics who are calling so persistently and looking so eagerly for “Americanism” in literature, do not recognize it when they see it.
They are looking for something strange, eccentric, radical, and rude. When a real American like Franklin, or Irving, or Emerson, or Longfellow, or Lanier, or Howells appears, these critics will not believe that he is the genuine article. They expect something in the style of “Buffalo Bill.” They imagine the Spirit of America always in a red shirt, striped trousers, and rawhide boots.
They recognize the Americanism of Washington when he crosses the forest to Fort Duquesne in his leather blouse and leggings. But when he appears at Mount Vernon in black velvet and lace ruffles, they say, “This is no American after all, but a transplanted English squire.” They acknowledge that Francis Parkman is an American when he follows the Oregon trail on horseback in hunter’s dress. But when he sits in the tranquil library of his West Roxbury home surrounded by its rose gardens, they say, “This is no American, but a gentleman of Europe in exile.”
How often must our critics be reminded that the makers of America were not redskins nor amiable ruffians, but rather decent folk, with perhaps an extravagant admiration for order and respectability? When will they learn that the descendants of these people, when they come to write books, cannot be expected to show the qualities of barbarians and iconoclasts? How shall we persuade them to lookat American literature not for the by-product of eccentricity, but for the self-expression of a sane and civilized people? I doubt whether it will ever be possible to effect this conversion and enlightenment; for nothing is so strictly closed against criticism as the average critic’s adherence to the point of view imposed by his own limitations. But it is a pity, in this case, that the point of view is not within sight of the facts.
There is a story that the English poet Tennyson once said that he was glad that he had never met Longfellow, because he would not have liked to see the American poet put his feet upon the table. If the story is true, it is most laughable. For nothing could be more unlike the super-refined Longfellow than to put his feet in the wrong place, either on the table, or in his verse. Yet he was an American of the Americans, the literary idol of his country.
It seems to me that the literature of America would be more recognizable if those who consider it from the outside knew more of the real spirit of the country. If they were not always looking for volcanoes and earthquakes, they might learn to identify the actual features of the landscape.
But when I have said this, honesty compels me to go a little further and admit that the full, complete life of America still lacks an adequate expression in literature. Perhaps it is too large and variegatedin its outward forms, too simple in its individual types, and too complex in their combination, ever to find this perfect expression. Certainly we are still waiting for “the great American Novel.”
It may be that we shall have to wait a long time for this comprehensive and significant book which will compress into a single cup of fiction all the different qualities of the Spirit of America, all the fermenting elements that mingle in the vintage of the New World. But in this hope deferred,—if indeed it be a hope that can be reasonably entertained at all,—we are in no worse estate than the other complex modern nations. What English novel gives a perfect picture of all England in the nineteenth century? Which of the French romances of the last twenty years expresses the whole spirit of France?
Meantime it is not difficult to find certain partial and local reflections of the inner and outer life of the real America in the literature, limited in amount though it be, which has already been produced in that country. In some of it the local quality of thought or language is so predominant as to act almost as a barrier to exportation. But there is a smaller quantity which may fairly be called “good anywhere”; and to us it is, and ought to be, doubly good because of its Americanism.
Thus, for example, any reader who understands the tone and character of life in the Middle States,around New York and Philadelphia, in the first quarter of the nineteenth century, feels that the ideas and feelings of the more intelligent people, those who were capable of using or of appreciating literary forms, are well enough represented in the writings of the so-called “Knickerbocker School.”
Washington Irving, the genial humorist, the delicate and sympathetic essayist and story-teller ofThe Sketch-Book, was the first veritable “man of letters” in America. Cooper, the inexhaustible teller-of-tales in the open air, the lover of brave adventure in the forest and on the sea, the Homer of the backwoodsman, and the idealist of the noble savage, was the discoverer of real romance in the New World.
Including other writers of slighter and less spontaneous talent, like Halleck, Drake, and Paulding, this school was marked by a cheerful and optimistic view of life, a tone of feeling more sentimental than impassioned, a friendly interest in humanity rather than an intense moral enthusiasm, and a flowing, easy style,—the manner of a company of people living in comfort and good order, people of social habits, good digestion, and settled opinions, who sought in literature more of entertainment and relaxation than of inspiration or what the strenuous reformers call “uplift.”
After the days when its fashionable idol was Willis, and its honoured though slightly cold poet was Bryant, and its neglected and embittered genius was Edgar Allan Poe, this school, lacking the elements of inward coherence, passed into a period of decline. It revived again in such writers as George William Curtis, Donald Mitchell, Bayard Taylor, Charles Dudley Warner, Frank R. Stockton; and it continues some of its qualities in the present-day writers whose centre is undoubtedly New York.
Is it imaginary, or can I really feel some traces, here and there, of the same influences which affected the “Knickerbocker School” in such different writers as Mark Twain and William Dean Howells, in spite of their western origin? Certainly it can be felt in essayists like Hamilton Mabie and Edward S. Martin and Brander Matthews, in novelists like Dr. Weir Mitchell and Hopkinson Smith, in poets like Aldrich and Stedman, and even in the later work of a native lyrist like Richard Watson Gilder. There is something,—I know not what,—a kind ofurbanum genus dicendi, which speaks of the great city in the background and of a tradition continued. Even in the work of such a cosmopolitan and relentless novelist as Mrs. Wharton, or of such an independent and searching critic as Mr. Brownell, my mental palate catches a flavour of America and a reminiscence of New York; though now indeed there is little or nothing left of the Knickerbocker optimism and cheerful sentimentality.
The American school of historians, including such writers as Ticknor, Prescott, Bancroft, Motley, and Parkman, represents the growing interest of the people of the New World for the history of the Old, as well as their desire to know more about their own origin and development. Motley’sRise of the Dutch Republic, Parkman’s volumes on the French settlements in Canada, Sloane’sLife of Napoleon, and Henry C. Lea’sHistory of the Inquisitionare not only distinguished works of scholarship, but also eminently readable and interesting expressions of the mind of a great republic considering important events and institutions in other countries to which its own history was closely related. The serious and laborious efforts of Bancroft to produce a clear and completeHistory of the United Statesresulted in a work of great dignity and value. But much was left for others to do in the way of exploring the sources of the nation, and in closer study of its critical epochs. This task has been well continued by such historians as John Fiske, Henry Adams, James Bach McMaster, John Codman Ropes, James Ford Rhodes, Justin Winsor, and Sydney G. Fisher.
These are only some of the principal names which may be cited to show that few countries have better reason than the United States to be proud of a school of historians whose works are not only welldocumented, but also well written, and so entitled to be counted as literature.
The Southern States, before the Civil War and for a little time after, were not largely represented in American letters. In prose they had a fluent romancer, Simms, who wrote somewhat in the manner of Cooper, but with less skill and force; an exquisite artist of the short-story and the lyric, Poe, who, although he was born in Boston and did most of his work in Philadelphia and New York, may perhaps be counted sympathetically with the South; two agreeable story-tellers, John Esten Cooke and John P. Kennedy; two delicate and charming lyrists, Paul Hayne and Henry Timrod; and one greatly gifted poet, Sidney Lanier, whose career was cut short by a premature death.
But the distinctive spirit of the South did not really find an adequate utterance in early American literature, and it is only of late years that it is beginning to do so. The fine and memorable stories of George W. Cable reflect the poesy and romance of the creole life in Louisiana. James Lane Allen and Thomas Nelson Page express in their prose the Southern atmosphere and temperament. The poems of Madison Cawein are full of the bloom and fragrance of Kentucky. Among the women who write, Alice Hegan Rice, “Charles Egbert Craddock,” Ruth McEnery Stuart, “George Madden Martin,” and Mary Johnston may be named as charming story-tellers of the South. Joel Chandler Harris has made the old negro folk-tales classic, in hisUncle Remus,—a work which belongs, if I mistake not, to one of the most enduring types of literature.
But beyond a doubt the richest and finest flowering ofbelles lettresin the United States during the nineteenth century was that which has been called “the Renaissance of New England.” The quickening of moral and intellectual life which followed the Unitarian movement in theology, the antislavery agitation in society, and the transcendental fermentation in philosophy may not have caused, but it certainly influenced, the development of a group of writers, just before the middle of the century, who brought a deeper and fuller note into American poetry and prose.
Hawthorne, profound and lonely genius, dramatist of the inner life, master of the symbolic story, endowed with the double gift of deep insight and exquisite art; Emerson, herald of self-reliance and poet of the intuitions, whose prose and verse flash with gem-like thoughts and fancies, and whose calm, vigorous accents were potent to awaken and sustain the intellectual independence of America; Longfellow, the sweetest and the richest voice of American song, the household poet of the New World; Whittier, the Quaker bard, whose balladsand lyrics reflect so perfectly the scenery and the sentiment of New England; Holmes, genial and pungent wit, native humorist, with a deep spring of sympathy and a clear vein of poetry in his many-sided personality; Lowell, generous poet of high and noble emotions, inimitable writer of dialect verse, penetrating critic and essayist,—these six authors form a group not yet equalled in the literary history of America.
The factors of strength, and the hidden elements of beauty, in the Puritan character came to flower and fruit in these men. They were liberated, enlarged, quickened by the strange flood of poetry, philosophy, and romantic sentiment which flowed into the somewhat narrow and sombre enceinte of Yankee thought and life. They found around them a circle of eager and admiring readers who had felt the same influences. The circle grew wider and wider as the charm and power of these writers made itself felt, and as their ideas were diffused. Their work, always keeping a distinct New England colour, had in it a substance of thought and feeling, an excellence of form and texture, which gave it a much broader appeal. Their fame passed from the sectional to the national stage. In their day Boston was the literary centre of the United States. And in after days, though the sceptre has passed, the influence of these men may be traced in almost all American writers, of the East, the West, or the South,in every field of literature, except perhaps the region of realistic or romantic fiction.
Here it seems as if the West had taken the lead. Bret Harte, with his frontier stories, always vivid but not always accurate, was the founder of a new school, or at least the discoverer of a new mine of material, in which Frank Norris followed with some powerful work, too soon cut short by death, and where a number of living men like Owen Wister, Stewart Edward White, and O. Henry are finding graphic stories to tell. Hamlin Garland, Booth Tarkington, William Allen White, and Robert Herrick are vigorous romancers of the Middle West. Winston Churchill studies politics and people in various regions, while Robert Chambers explores the social complications of New York; and both write novels which are full of interest for Americans and count their readers by the hundred thousand.
In the short-story Miss Jewett, Miss Wilkins, and Mrs. Deland have developed characteristic and charming forms of a difficult art. In poetry George E. Woodberry and William Vaughn Moody have continued the tradition of Emerson and Lowell in lofty and pregnant verse. Joaquin Miller has sung the songs of the Sierras, and Edwin Markham the chant of labour. James Whitcomb Riley has put the very heart of the Middle West into his familiar poems, humorous and pathetic.
And Walt Whitman, the “democratic bard,” the poet who broke all the poetic traditions? Is it too soon to determine whether his revolution in literature was a success, whether he was a great initiator or only a great exception? Perhaps so. But it is not too soon to recognize the beauty of feeling and form, and the strong Americanism, of his poems on the death of Lincoln, and the power of some of his descriptive lines, whether they are verse or rhapsodic prose.
It is evident that such a list of names as I have been trying to give must necessarily be very imperfect. Many names of substantial value are omitted. The field is not completely covered. But at least it may serve to indicate some of the different schools and sources, and to give some idea of the large literary activity in which various elements and aspects of the Spirit of America have found and are finding expression.
III. The real value of literature is to be sought in its power to express and to impress. What relation does it bear to the interpretation of nature and life in a certain country at a certain time? That is the question in its historical form. How clearly, how beautifully, how perfectly, does it give that interpretation in concrete works of art? That is the question in its purely æsthetic form. What personalqualities, what traits of human temperament and disposition does it reveal most characteristically in the spirit of the land? That is the question in the form which belongs to the study of human nature.
It is in this last form that I wish to put the question, just now, in order to follow logically the line marked by the general title of these lectures. The Spirit of America is to be understood not only by the five elements of character which I have tried to sketch in outline,—the instinct of self-reliance, the love of fair-play, the energetic will, the desire of order, the ambition of self-development. It has also certain temperamental traits; less easy to define, perhaps; certainly less clearly shown in national and social institutions, but not less important to an intimate acquaintance with the people.
These temperamental traits are the very things which are most distinctive in literature. They give it colour and flavour. They are the things which touch it with personality. In American literature, if you look at it broadly, I think you will find four of these traits most clearly revealed,—a strong religious feeling, a sincere love of nature, a vivid sense of humour, and a deep sentiment of humanity.
(1) It may seem strange to say that a country which does not even name the Supreme Being in its national constitution, which has no established form of worship or belief, and whose public schools anduniversities are expressly disconnected from any kind of church control, is at the same time strongly religious, in its temperament. Yet strange as this seems, it is true of America.
The entire independence of Church and State was the result of a deliberate conviction, in which the interest of religion was probably the chief consideration. In the life of the people the Church has been not less, but more, potent than in most other countries. Professor Wendell was perfectly right in the lectures which he delivered in Paris four years ago, when he laid so much emphasis upon the influence of religion in determining the course of thought and the character of literature in America. Professor Münsterberg is thoroughly correct when he says in his excellent bookThe Americans, “The entire American people are in fact profoundly religious, and have been, from the day when the Pilgrim Fathers landed, down to the present moment.”
The proof of this is not to be seen merely in outward observance, though I suppose there is hardly any other country, except Scotland, in which there is so much church-going, Sabbath-keeping, and Bible-reading. It is estimated that less than fifteen of the eighty millions of total population are entirely out of touch with any church. But all this might be rather superficial, formal, conventional. It might be only a hypocritical cover for practical infidelity. And sometimes when one reads the “yellow journals” with their flaming exposures of social immorality, industrial dishonesty, and political corruption, one is tempted to think that it may be so.
Yet a broader, deeper, saner view,—a steady look into the real life of the typical American home, the normal American community,—reveals the fact that the black spots are on the surface and not in the heart of the country.
The heart of the people at large is still old-fashioned in its adherence to the idea that every man is responsible to a higher moral and spiritual power,—that duty is more than pleasure,—that life cannot be translated in terms of the five senses, and that the attempt to do so lowers and degrades the man who makes it,—that religion alone can give an adequate interpretation of life, and that morality alone can make it worthy of respect and admiration. This is the characteristic American way of looking at the complicated and interesting business of living which we men and women have upon our hands.
It is rather a sober and intense view. It is not always free from prejudice, from bigotry, from fanaticism, from superstition. It is open to invasion by strange and uncouth forms of religiosity. America has offered a fertile soil for the culture of new and queer religions. But on the whole,—yes, in immensely the larger proportion,—the old religion prevails, and a rather simple and primitive type of Christianity keeps its hold upon the hearts and minds of the majority. The consequence of this is (to quote again from Professor Münsterberg, lest you should think me a prejudiced reporter), that “however many sins there are, the life of the people is intrinsically pure, moral, and devout.” “The number of those who live above the general level of moral requirement is astonishingly large.”
Now this habit of soul, this tone of life, is reflected in American literature. Whatever defects it may have, a lack of serious feeling and purpose is not among them. It is pervaded, generally, by the spiritual preconception. It approaches life from the point of view of responsibility. It gives full value to those instincts, desires, and hopes in man which have to do with the unseen world.
Even in those writers who are moved by a sense of revolt against the darkness and severity of certain theological creeds, the attempt is not to escape from religion, but to find a clearer, nobler, and more loving expression of religion. Even in those works which deal with subjects which are non-religious in their specific quality,—stories of adventure, like Cooper’s novels; poems of romance, like the ballads of Longfellow and Whittier,—one feels the implication of a spiritual background, a moral law, a Divine providence,—
“Standeth God within the shadow, keeping watch above his own.”
This, hitherto, has been the characteristic note of the literature of America. It has taken for granted that there is a God, that men must answer to Him for their actions, and that one of the most interesting things about people, even in books, is their moral quality.
(2) Another trait which seems to me strongly marked in the American temperament and clearly reflected in American literature is the love of nature. The attractions of the big out-of-doors have taken hold upon the people. They feel a strong affection for their great, free, untended forests, their swift-rushing rivers, their bright, friendly brooks, their wooded mountain ranges of the East, their snowy peaks and vast plains and many-coloured canyons of the West.
I suppose there is no other country in the world where so many people break away from the fatigues of civilization every year, and go out to live in the open for a vacation with nature. The business of making tents and camp outfits for these voluntary gypsies has grown to be enormous. In California they do not even ask for a tent. They sleepà la belle étoile.