The American Mind Part 3

These facts ill.u.s.trate anew that standing temptation of the critic of American literature to palliate literary shortcomings by the plea that we possess certain admirable non-literary qualities. The dominant idealism of the nation has levied, or seemed to levy, a certain tax upon our writing. Some instincts, natural to the full-blooded utterance of Continental literature, have been starved or eliminated here. Very well. The characteristic American retort to this a.s.sertion would be: Better our long record and habit of idealism than a few masterpieces more or less. As a people, we have cheerfully accepted the Puritan restraint of speech, we have respected the shamefaced conventions of decent and social utterance. Like the men and women described in Locker-Lampson's verses, Americans

"eat, and drink, and scheme, and plod,-- They go to church on Sunday; And many are afraid of G.o.d-- And more of Mrs. Grundy."

Now Mrs. Grundy is a.s.suredly not the most desirable of literary divinities, but the student of cla.s.sical literature can easily think of other divinities, celebrated in exquisite Greek and Roman verse, who are distinctly less desirable still.

"Not pa.s.sion, but sentiment," said Hawthorne, in a familiar pa.s.sage of criticism of his own _Twice-Told Tales_. How often must the student of American literature echo that half-melancholy but just verdict, as he surveys the transition from the spiritual intensity of a few of our earlier writers to the sentimental qualities which have brought popular recognition to the many. Take the word "soul" itself. Calvinism shadowed and darkened the meaning, perhaps, and yet its spiritual pa.s.sion made the word "soul" sublime. The reaction against Calvinism has made religion more human, natural, and possibly more Christlike, but "soul" has lost the thrilling solemnity with which Edwards p.r.o.nounced the word. Emerson and Hawthorne, far as they had escaped from the bonds of their ancestral religion, still utter the word "soul"

with awe. But in the popular sermon and hymn and story of our day,--with their search after the sympathetic and the sentimental, after what is called in magazine slang "heart-interest,"--the word has lost both its intellectual distinction and its literary magic. It will regain neither until it is p.r.o.nounced once more with spiritual pa.s.sion.

But in literature, as in other things, we must take what we can get.

The great ma.s.s of our American writing is sentimental, because it has been produced by, and for, an excessively sentimental people. The poems in Stedman's carefully chosen _Anthology_, the prose and verse in the two volume Stedman-Hutchinson collection of American Literature, the Library of Southern Literature, and similar sectional anthologies, the school Readers and Speakers,--particularly in the half-century between 1830 and 1880,--our newspapers and magazines,--particularly the so-called "yellow" newspapers and the ill.u.s.trated magazines typified by _Harper's Monthly_,--are all fairly dripping with sentiment. American oratory is notoriously the most sentimental oratory of the civilized world. The _Congressional Record_ still presents such specimens of sentiment--delivered or given leave to be printed, it is true, for "home consumption" rather than to affect the course of legislation--as are inexplicable to an Englishman or a Frenchman or an Italian.

Immigrants as we all are, and migratory as we have ever been,--so much so that one rarely meets an American who was born in the house built by his grandfather,--we cling with peculiar fondness to the sentiment of "Home." The best-known American poem, for decades, was Samuel Woodworth's "Old Oaken Bucket," the favorite popular song was Stephen Foster's "My Old Kentucky Home," the favorite play was Denman Thompson's "Old Homestead." Without that appealing word "mother" the American melodrama would be robbed of its fifth act. Without pictures of "the child" the ill.u.s.trated magazines would go into bankruptcy. No country has witnessed such a production of periodicals and books for boys and girls: France and Germany imitate in vain _The Youth's Companion_ and _St. Nicholas_, as they did the stories of "Oliver Optic" and _Little Women_ and _Little Lord Fauntleroy_.

The sentimental att.i.tude towards women and children, which is one of the most typical aspects of American idealism, is constantly ill.u.s.trated in our short stories. Bret Harte, disciple of d.i.c.kens as he was, and Romantic as was his fas.h.i.+on of dressing up his miners and gamblers, was accurately faithful to the American feeling towards the "kid" and the "woman." "Tennessee's Partner," "The Luck of Roaring Camp," "Christmas at Sandy Bar," are obvious examples. Owen Wister's stories are equally faithful and admirable in this matter. The American girl still does astonis.h.i.+ng things in international novels, as she has continued to do since the eighteen-sixties, but they are astonis.h.i.+ng mainly to the European eye and against the conventionalized European background. She does the same things at home, and neither she nor her mother sees why she should not, so universal among us is the chivalrous interpretation of actions and situations which amaze the European observer. The popular American literature which recognizes and encourages this position of the "young girl" in our social structure is a literature primarily of sentiment. The note of pa.s.sion--in the European sense of that word--jars and shatters it. The imported "problem-play," written for an adult public in Paris or London, introduces social facts and intellectual elements almost wholly alien to the experience of American matinee audiences. Disillusioned historians of our literature have instanced this unsophistication as a proof of our national inexperience; yet it is often a sort of radiant and triumphant unsophistication which does not lose its innocence in parting with its ignorance.

That sentimental idealization of cla.s.ses, whether peasant, bourgeois, or aristocratic, which has long been a feature of Continental and English poetry and fiction, is practically absent from American literature. Whatever the future may bring, there have hitherto been no fixed cla.s.ses in American society. Webster was guilty of no exaggeration when he declared that the whole North was made up of laborers, and Lincoln spoke in the same terms in his well-known sentences about "hired laborers": "twenty-five years ago I was a hired laborer." The relative uniformity of economic and social conditions, which prevailed until toward the close of the nineteenth century, made, no doubt, for the happiness of the greatest number, but it failed, naturally, to afford that picturesqueness of cla.s.s contrast and to stimulate that sentiment of cla.s.s distinction, in which European literature is so rich.

Very interesting, in the light of contemporary economic conditions, is the effort made by American poets in the middle of the last century to glorify labor. They were not so much idealizing a particular laboring cla.s.s, as endeavoring, in Whitman's words, "To teach the average man the glory of his walk and trade." Whitman himself sketched the American workman in almost every att.i.tude which appealed to his own sense of the picturesque and heroic. But years before _Leaves of Gra.s.s_ was published, Whittier had celebrated in his _Songs of Labor_ the glorified images of lumberman and drover, shoemaker and fisherman. Lucy Larcom and the authors of _The Lowell Offering_ portrayed the fine idealism of the young women--of the best American stock--who went enthusiastically to work in the cotton-mills of Lowell and Lawrence, or who bound shoes by their own firesides on the Ess.e.x County farms. That glow of enthusiasm for labor was chiefly moral, but it was poetical as well. The changes which have come over the economic and social life of America are nowhere more sharply indicated than in that very valley of the Merrimac where, sixty and seventy years ago, one could "hear America singing." There are few who are singing to-day in the cotton-mills; the operators, instead of girls from the hill-farms, are Greeks, Lithuanians, Armenians, Italians. Whittier's drovers have gone forever; the lumbermen and deep-sea fishermen have grown fewer, and the men who still swing the axes and haul the frozen cod-lines are mostly aliens. The pride that once broke into singing has turned harsh and silent. "Labor" looms vast upon the future political and social horizon, but the songs of labor have lost the lyric note. They have turned into the dramas and tragedies of labor, as portrayed with the swift and fierce insistence of the short story, ill.u.s.trated by the Kodak. In the great agricultural sections of the West and South the old bucolic sentiment still survives,--that simple joy of seeing the "frost upon the pumpkin" and "the fodder in the stock" which Mr. James Whitcomb Riley has sung with such charming fidelity to the type. But even on the Western farms toil has grown less manual. It is more a matter of expert handling of machinery. Reaping and binding may still have their poet, but he needs to be a Kipling rather than a Burns.

Our literature, then, reveals few traces of idealization of a cla.s.s, and but little idealization of trades or callings. Neither cla.s.s nor calling presents anything permanent to the American imagination, or stands for anything ultimate in American experience. On the other hand, our writing is rich in local sentiment and sectional loyalty. The short story, which has seized so greedily the more dramatic aspects of American energy, has been equally true to the quiet background of rural scenery and familiar ways. American idealism, as shown in the transformation of the lesser loyalties of home and countryside into the larger loyalties of state and section, and the absorption of these, in turn, into the emotions of nationalism, is particularly ill.u.s.trated in our political verse. A striking example of the imaginative visualization of the political units of a state is the spirited roll-call of the counties in Whittier's "Ma.s.sachusetts to Virginia."

But the burden of that fine poem, after all, is the essential unity of Ma.s.sachusetts as a sovereign state, girding herself to repel the attack of another sovereign state, Virginia. Now the evolution of our political history, both local and national, has tended steadily, for half a century, to the obliteration, for purposes of the imagination, of county lines within state lines. At the last Republican state convention held in Ma.s.sachusetts, there were no county banners displayed, for the first time in half a century. Many a city-dweller to-day cannot tell in what county he is living unless he has happened to make a transfer of real estate. State lines themselves are fading away. The federal idea has triumphed. Doubtless the majority of the fellow citizens of John Randolph of Roanoke were all the more proud of him because the poet could say of him, in writing an admiring and mournful epitaph:--

"Beyond Virginia's border line His patriotism perished."

The great collections of Civil War verse, which are lying almost unread in the libraries, are store-houses of this ancient state pride and jealousy, which was absorbed so fatally into the larger sectional antagonism. "Maryland, my Maryland" gave place to "Dixie," just as Whittier's "Ma.s.sachusetts to Virginia" was forgotten when marching men began to sing "John Brown's Body" and "The Battle Hymn of the Republic." The literature of sectionalism still lingers in its more lovable aspect in the verse and fiction which still celebrates the fairer side of the civilization of the Old South: its ideals of chivalry and local loyalty, its gracious women and gallant men. Our literature needs to cultivate this provincial affection for the past, as an offset to the barren uniformity which the federal scheme allows.

But the ultimate imaginative victory, like the actual political victory of the Civil War, is with the thought and feeling of Nationalism. It is foreshadowed in that pa.s.sionate lyric cry of Lowell, which sums up so much and, like all true pa.s.sion, antic.i.p.ates so much:--

"O Beautiful! my Country!"

The literary record of American idealism thus ill.u.s.trates how deeply the conception of Nationalism has affected the imagination of our countrymen. The literary record of the American conception of liberty runs further back. Some historians have allowed themselves to think that the American notion of liberty is essentially declamatory, a sort of futile echo of Patrick Henry's "Give me Liberty or give me Death"; and not only declamatory, but hopelessly theoretical and abstract. They grant that it was a trumpet-note, no doubt, for agitators against the Stamp Act, and for pamphleteers like Thomas Paine; that it may have been a torch for lighting dark and weary ways in the Revolutionary War; but they believe it likewise to be a torch which gleams with the fire caught from France and which was pa.s.sed back to France in turn when her own great bonfire was ready for lighting. The facts, however, are inconsistent with this picturesque theory of contemporary reactionists.

It is true that the word "liberty" has been full of temptation for generations of American orators, that it has become an idol of the forum, and often a source of heat rather than of light. But to treat American Liberty as if she habitually wore the red cap is to nourish a Francophobia as absurd as Edmund Burke's. The sober truth is that the American working theory of Liberty is singularly like St. Paul's. "Ye have been called unto liberty; only use not liberty for an occasion to the flesh." A few sentences from John Winthrop, written in 1645, are significant: "There is a twofold liberty, natural ... and civil or federal. The first is common to man with beasts and other creatures. By this, man, as he stands in relation to man simply, hath liberty to do what he lists; it is a liberty to evil as well as to good. This liberty is incompatible and inconsistent with authority.... The other kind of liberty I call civil or federal, it may also be termed moral.... This liberty is the proper end and object of authority, and cannot subsist without it; and it is a liberty to that only which is good, just, and honest. This liberty you are to stand for, with the hazard (not only of your goods, but) of your lives, if need be.... This liberty is maintained and exercised in a way of subjection to authority; it is of the same kind of liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free."

There speaks the governor, the man of affairs, the typical citizen of the future republic. The liberty to do as one pleases is a dream of the Renaissance; but out of dreamland it does not work. n.o.body, even in revolutionary France, imagines that it will work. Jefferson, who is popularly supposed to derive his notion of liberty from French theorists, is to all practical purposes nearer to John Winthrop than he is to Rousseau. The splendid phrases of his "Declaration" are sometimes characterized as abstractions. They are really generalizations from past political experience. An arbitrary king, a.s.suming a liberty to do as he liked, had encroached upon the long-standing customs and authority of the colonists. Jefferson, at the bidding of the Continental Congress, served notice of the royal trespa.s.s, and incidentally produced (as Lincoln said) a "standard maxim for free society."

It is true, no doubt, that the word "liberty" became in Jefferson's day, and later, a mere partisan or national s.h.i.+bboleth, standing for no reality, degraded to a catchword, a symbol of antagonism to Great Britain. In the political debates and the impressive prose and verse of the anti-slavery struggle, the word became once more charged with vital meaning; it glowed under the heat and pressure of an idea. Towards the end of the nineteenth century it went temporarily out of fas.h.i.+on. The late Colonel Higginson, an ideal type of what Europeans call an "1848"

man, attended at the close of the century some sessions of the American Historical a.s.sociation. In his own address, at the closing dinner, he remarked that there was one word for which he had listened in vain during the reading of the papers by the younger men. It was the word "liberty." One of the younger school retorted promptly that since we had the thing liberty, we had no need to glorify the word. But Colonel Higginson, stanch adherent as he was of the "good old cause," was not convinced. Like many another lover of American letters, he thought that William Vaughn Moody's "Ode in Time of Hesitation" deserved a place by the side of Lowell's "Commemoration Ode," and that when the ultimate day of reckoning comes for the whole muddled Imperialistic business, the standard of reckoning must be "liberty" as Winthrop and Jefferson and Lincoln and Lowell and Vaughn Moody understood the word.

In the mean time we must confess that the history of our literature, with a few n.o.ble exceptions, shows a surprising defect in the pa.s.sion for freedom. Tennyson's famous lines about "Freedom broadening slowly down from precedent to precedent" are perfectly American in their conservative tone; while it is Englishmen like Byron and Landor and Sh.e.l.ley and Swinburne who have written the most magnificent republican poetry. The "land of the free" turns to the monarchic mother country, after all, for the glow and thunder and splendor of the poetry of freedom. It is one of the most curious phenomena in the history of literature. Shall we enter the preoccupation plea once more? Enjoying the thing liberty, have we been therefore less concerned with the idea?

Or is it simply another ill.u.s.tration of the defective pa.s.sion of American literature?

Yet there is one phase of political loyalty which has been cherished by the imagination of Americans, and which has inspired noteworthy oratory and n.o.ble political prose. It is the sentiment of Union. In one sense, of course, this dates back to the period of Franklin's _bon mot_ about our all hanging together, or hanging separately. It is found in Hamilton's pamphlets, in Paine's _Crisis_, in the _Federalist_, in Was.h.i.+ngton's "Farewell Address." It is peculiarly a.s.sociated with the name and fame of Daniel Webster, and, to a less degree, with the career of Henry Clay. In the stress of the debate over slavery, many a Northerner with abolitionist convictions, like the majority of Southerners with slave-holding convictions, forgot the splendid peroration of Webster's "Reply to Hayne" and were willing to "let the Union go." But in the four tragic and heroic years that followed the firing upon the American flag at Fort Sumter the sentiment of Union was made sacred by such sacrifices as the patriotic imagination of a Clay or a Webster had never dreamed. A new literature resulted. A lofty ideal of indissoluble Union was preached in pulpits, pleaded for in editorials, sung in lyrics, and woven into the web of fiction. Edward Everett Hale's _Man Without a Country_ became one of the most poignantly moving of American stories. In Walt Whitman's _Drum-Taps_ and his later poems, the "Union of these States" became transfigured with mystical significance: no longer a mere political compact, dissoluble at will, but a spiritual ent.i.ty, a new incarnation of the soul of man.

We must deal later with that American instinct of fellows.h.i.+p which Whitman believed to have been finally cemented by the Civil War, and which has such import for the future of our democracy. There are likewise communal loyalties, glowing with the new idealism which has come with the twentieth century: ethical, munic.i.p.al, industrial, and artistic movements which are full of promise for the higher life of the country, but which have not yet had time to express themselves adequately in literature. There are stirrings of racial loyalty among this and that element of our composite population,--as for instance among the gifted younger generation of American Jews,--a racial loyalty not antagonistic to the American current of ideas, but rather in full unison with it. Internationalism itself furnishes motives for the activity of the n.o.blest imaginations, and the true literature of internationalism has hardly yet begun. It is in the play and counterplay of these new forces that the American literature of the twentieth century must measure itself. Communal feelings novel to Americans bred under the accepted individualism will doubtless a.s.sert themselves in our prose and verse. But it is to be remembered that the best writing thus far produced on American soil has been a result of the old conditions: of the old "Reverences"; of the pioneer training of mind and body; of the slow tempering of the American spirit into an obstinate idealism. We do not know what course the s.h.i.+p may take in the future, but

"We know what Master laid thy keel, What Workman wrought thy ribs of steel, Who made each mast and sail and rope, What anvil rang, what hammers beat, In what a forge and what a heat Were shaped the anchors of thy hope!"

IV

Romance and Reaction

The characteristic att.i.tude of the American mind, as we have seen, is one of idealism. We may now venture to draw a smaller circle within that larger circle of idealistic impulses, and to label the smaller circle "romance." Here, too, as with the word "idealism," although we are to make abundant use of literary ill.u.s.trations of national tendencies, we have no need of a severely technical definition of terms. When we say, "Tom is an idealist" and "Lorenzo is a romantic fellow," we convey at least one tolerably clear distinction between Tom and Lorenzo. The idealist has a certain characteristic habit of mind or inclination of spirit. When confronted by experience, he reacts in a certain way. In his individual and social impulses, in the travail of his soul, or in his commerce with his neighbors and the world, he behaves in a more or less well-defined fas.h.i.+on. The romanticist, when confronted by the same objects and experiences, exhibits another type of behavior. Lorenzo, though he be Tom's brother, is a different fellow; he is--in the opinion of his friends, at least--a rather more peculiar person, a creature of more varying moods, of heightened feelings, of stranger ways. Like Tom, he is a person of sentiment, but his sentiment attaches itself, not so much to everyday aspects of experience, as to that which is unusual or terrifying, lovely or far away; he possesses, or would like to possess, bodily or spiritual daring. He has the adventurous heart. He is of those who love to go down to the sea in s.h.i.+ps and do business in great waters. Lorenzo the romanticist is made of no finer clay than Tom the idealist, but his nerves are differently tuned. Your deep-sea fisherman, after all, is only a fisherman at bottom. That is to say, he too is an idealist, but he wants to catch different species of fish from those which drop into the basket of the landsman. Precisely what he covets, perhaps he does not know. I was once foolish enough to ask an old Alsatian soldier who was patiently holding his rod over a most unpromising ca.n.a.l near Stra.s.sburg, what kind of fish he was fis.h.i.+ng for. "All kinds," was his rebuking answer, and I took off my hat to the veteran romanticist.

The words "romance" and "romanticism" have been repeated to the ears of our generation with wearisome iteration. Not the least of the good luck of Wordsworth and Coleridge lay in the fact that they scarcely knew that they were "romanticists." Middle-aged readers of the present day may congratulate themselves that in their youth they read Wordsworth and Coleridge simply because it was Wordsworth and Coleridge and not doc.u.ments ill.u.s.trating the history of the romantic movement. But the rising generation is sophisticated. For better or worse it has been taught to distinguish between the word "romance" on the one side, and the word "romanticism" on the other. "Romantic" is a useful but overworked adjective which attaches itself indiscriminately to both "romance" and "romanticism." Professor Vaughan, for example, and a hundred other writers, have pointed out that in the narrower and more usual sense, the words "romance" and "romanticism" point to a love of vivid coloring and strongly marked contrasts; to a craving for the unfamiliar, the marvellous, and the supernatural. In the wider and less definite sense, they signify a revolt from the purely intellectual view of man's nature; a recognition of the instincts and the pa.s.sions, a vague intimation of sympathy between man and the world around him,--in one word, the sense of mystery. The narrower and the broader meanings pa.s.s into one another by imperceptible shades. They are affected by the well-known historic conditions for romantic feeling in the different European countries. The common factor, of course, is the man with the romantic world set in his heart. It is Gautier with his love of color, Victor Hugo enraptured with the sound of words, Heine with his self-destroying romantic irony, Novalis with his blue flower, and Maeterlinck with his _Blue Bird_.

But these romantic men of letters, writing in epochs of romanticism, are by no means the only children of romance. Sir Humphrey Gilbert and Sir Walter Raleigh were as truly followers of "the gleam" as were Spenser or Marlowe. The spirit of romance is found wherever and whenever men say to themselves, as Don Quixote's niece said of her uncle, that "they wish better bread than is made of wheat," or when they look within their own hearts, and a.s.sert, as the poet Young said in 1759, long before the English romantic movement had begun, "there is more in the spirit of man than mere prose-reason can fathom."

We are familiar, perhaps too remorsefully familiar, with the fact that romance is likely to run a certain course in the individual and then to disappear. Looking back upon it afterward, it resembles the upward and downward zigzag of a fever chart. It has in fact often been described as a measles, a disease of which no one can be particularly proud, although he may have no reason to blush for it. Southey said that he was no more ashamed of having been a republican than of having been a boy. Well, people catch Byronism, and get over it, much as Southey got over his republicanism. In fact Byron himself lived long enough--though he died at thirty-six--to outgrow his purely "Byronic" phase, and to smile at it as knowingly as we do. Coleridge's blossoming period as a romantic poet was tragically brief. Keats and Sh.e.l.ley had the good fortune to die in the fulness of their romantic glory. They did not outlive their own poetic sense of the wonder and mystery of the world.

Yet many an old poet like Tennyson and Browning has preserved his romance to the end. Tennyson dies at eighty-three with the full moonlight streaming through the oriel window upon his bed, and with his fingers clasping Shakespeare's _Cymbeline_.

With most of us commonplace persons, however, a reaction from the romantic is almost inevitable. The romantic temperament cannot long keep the pitch. Poe could indeed do it, although he hovered at times near the border of insanity. Hawthorne went for relief to his profane sea-captains and the carnal-minded superannuated employees of the Salem Custom House. "The weary weight of all this unintelligible world"

presses too hard on most of those who stop to think about it. The simplest way of relief is to shrug one's shoulders and let the weight go. That is to say, we cease being poets, we are no longer the children of romance, although we may remain idealists. Perhaps it is external events that change, rather than we ourselves. The restoration of the Bourbons, the Revolutions of 1830 and 1848, make and unmake romantics.

Often society catches up with the romanticist; he is no longer a soldier of revolt; he has become a "respectable." Or, while remaining a poet, he s.h.i.+fts his attention to some more familiar segment of the idealistic circle. He sings about his wife instead of the wife of somebody else. Like Wordsworth, he takes for his theme a Mary Hutchinson instead of the unknown and hauntingly alluring figure of Lucy. To put it differently, the high light, the mysterious color of dawn or sunset disappears from his picture of human life. Or, the high light may be diffused in a more tranquil radiance over the whole surface of experience. Such an artist may remain a true painter or poet, but he is not a romantic poet or painter any longer. He has, like the aging Emerson, taken in sail; the G.o.d Terminus has said to him, "no more."

One must of course admit that the typical romanticist has often been characterized by certain intellectual and moral weaknesses. But the great romance men, like Edmund Spenser, for example, may not possess these weaknesses at all. Robert Louis Stevenson was pa.s.sionately in love with the romantic in life and with romanticism in literature; but it did not make him eccentric, weak, or empty. His instinct for enduring romance was so admirably fine that it brought strength to the sinews of his mind, light and air and fire to his soul. Among the writers of our own day, it is Mr. Kipling who has written some of the keenest satire upon romantic foibles, while never ceasing to salute his real mistress, the true romance.

"Who wast, or yet the Lights were set, A whisper in the void, Who shalt be sung through planets young When this is clean destroyed."

What are the causes of American romance, the circ.u.mstances and qualities that have produced the romantic element in American life and character? Precisely as with the individual artist or man of letters, we touch first of all upon certain temperamental inclinations. It is a question again of the national mind, of the differentiation of the race under new climatic and physical conditions. We have to reckon with the headiness and excitability of youth. It was young men who emigrated hither, just as in the eighteen-sixties it was young men who filled the Northern and the Southern armies. The first generations of American immigration were made up chiefly of vigorous, imaginative, and daring youth. The incapables came later. It is, I think, safe to a.s.sert that the colonists of English stock, even as late as 1790,--when more than ninety per cent of the population of America had in their veins the blood of the British Isles,--were more responsive to romantic impulses than their English cousins. For that matter, an Irishman or a Welshman is more romantic than an Englishman to-day.

From the very beginning of the American settlements, likewise, there were evidences of the weaker, the over-excitable side of the romantic temper. There were volatile men like Morton of Merrymount; there were queer women like Anne Hutchinson, admirable woman as she was; among the wives of the colonists there were plenty of Emily d.i.c.kinsons in the germ. Among the men, there were schemes that came to nothing. There were prototypes of Colonel Sellers; a temperamental tendency toward that recklessness and extravagance which later historical conditions stimulated and confirmed. The more completely one studies the history of our forefathers on American soil, the more deeply does one become conscious of the prevailing atmosphere of emotionalism.

Furthermore, as one examines the historic conditions under which the spirit of American romance has been preserved and heightened from time to time, one becomes aware that although ours is rather a romance of wonder than of beauty, the spirit of beauty is also to be found. The first fervors of the romance of discovery were childlike in their eagerness. Hakluyt's _Voyages_, John Smith's _True Relation of Virginia_, Thomas Morton's _New England's Canaan_, all appeal to the sense of the marvellous.

Listen to Morton's description of Cape Ann. I can never read it without thinking of Botticelli's picture of Spring, so navely does this picturesque rascal suffuse his landscape with the feeling for beauty:--

"In the Moneth of June, Anno Salutis 1622, it was my chaunce to arrive in the parts of New England with 30. Servants, and provision of all sorts fit for a plantation: and whiles our howses were building, I did indeavour to take a survey of the Country: The more I looked, the more I liked it. And when I had more seriously considered of the bewty of the place, with all her faire indowments, I did not thinke that in all the knowne world it could be paralel'd, for so many goodly groves of trees, dainty fine round rising hillucks, delicate faire large plaines, sweete cristall fountaines, and cleare running streames that twine in fine meanders through the meads, making so sweete a murmering noise to heare as would even lull the sences with delight a sleepe, so pleasantly doe they glide upon the pebble stones, jetting most jocundly where they doe meete and hand in hand runne downe to Neptunes Court, to pay the yearely tribute which they owe to him as soveraigne Lord of all the springs.

Contained within the volume of the Land, Fowles in abundance, Fish in mult.i.tude; and discovered, besides, Millions of Turtledoves on the greene boughes, which sate pecking of the full ripe pleasant grapes that were supported by the l.u.s.ty trees, whose fruitful loade did cause the armes to bend: while here and there dispersed, you might see Lillies and the Daphnean-tree: which made the Land to mee seeme paradice: for in mine eie t'was Natures Masterpeece; Her cheifest Magazine of all where lives her store: if this Land be not rich, then is the whole world poore."

This is the Morton who, a few years later, settled at Merrymount. Let me condense the story of his settlement, from the narrative of the stout-hearted Governor William Bradford's _History of Plymouth Plantation_:--

"And Morton became lord of misrule, and maintained (as it were) a schoole of Athisme. And after they had gott some good into their hands, and gott much by trading with the Indeans, they spent it as vainly, in quaffing & drinking both wine & strong waters in great exsess, and, as some reported 10.

worth in a morning. They allso set up a May-pole, drinking and dancing aboute it many days togeather, inviting the Indean women, for their consorts, dancing and frisking togither, (like so many fairies, or furies rather,) and worse practises. As if they had anew revived & celebrated the feasts of the Roman G.o.ddes Flora, or the beasly practieses of the madd Bacchinalians. Morton likewise (to shew his poetrie) composed sundry rimes & verses, some tending to lasciviousnes, and others to the detraction & scandall of some persons, which he affixed to this idle or idoll May-polle. They chainged allso the name of their place, and in stead of calling it Mounte Wollaston, they call it Merie-mounte, as if this joylity would have lasted ever."

But it did not last long. Bradford and other leaders of the plantations "agreed by mutual consent" to "suppress Morton and his consorts." "In a friendly and neighborly way" they admonished him. "Insolently he persisted." "Upon which they saw there was no way but to take him by force." "So they mutually resolved to proceed," and sent Captain Standish to summon him to yield. But, says Bradford, Morton and some of his crew came out, not to yield, but to shoot; all of them rather drunk; Morton himself, with a carbine almost half filled with powder and shot, had thought to have shot Captain Standish, "_but he stepped to him and put by his piece and took him_."

It is not too fanciful to say that with those stern words of Governor Bradford the English Renaissance came to an end. The dream of a lawless liberty which has been dreamed and dreamed out so many times in the history of the world was over, for many a day. It was only a hundred years earlier that Rabelais had written over the doors of his ideal abbey, the motto "Do what thou wilt." It is true that Rabelais proposed to admit to his Abbey of Theleme only such men and women as were virtuously inclined. We do not know how many persons would have been able and willing to go into residence there. At any rate, two hundred years went by in New England after the fall of Morton before any notable spirit dared to cherish once more the old Renaissance ideal. At last, in Emerson's doctrine that all things are lawful because Nature is good and human nature is divine, we have a curious parallel to the doctrine of Rabelais. It was the old romance of human will under a new form and voiced in new accents. Yet in due time the hard facts of human nature rea.s.serted themselves and put this romantic transcendentalism by, even as the implacable Myles Standish put by that heavily loaded fowling-piece of the drunken Morton.

But men believed in miracles in the first century of colonization, and they will continue at intervals to believe in them until human nature is no more. The marvellous happenings recorded in Cotton Mather's _Magnalia_ no longer excite us to any "suspension of disbelief." We doubt the story of Pocahontas. The fresh romantic enthusiasm of a settler like Crevecoeur seems curiously juvenile to-day, as does the romantic curiosity of Chateaubriand concerning the Mississippi and the Choctaws, or the zeal of Wordsworth and Coleridge over their dream of a "panti-Socratic" community in the unknown valley of the musically-sounding Susquehanna. Inexperience is a perpetual feeder of the springs of romance. John Wesley, it will be remembered, went out to the colony of Georgia full of enthusiasm for converting the Indians; but as he navely remarks in his _Journal_, he "neither found or heard of any Indians on the continent of America, who had the least desire of being instructed." The sense of fact, in other words, supervenes, and the glory disappears from the face of romance. The humor of Mark Twain's _Innocents Abroad_ turns largely upon this sense of remorseless fact confronting romantic inexperience.

American history, however, has been marked by certain great romantic pa.s.sions that seem endowed with indestructible vitality. The romance of discovery, the fascination of the forest and sea, the sense of danger and mystery once aroused by the very word "redskin," have all moulded and will continue to mould the national imagination. How completely the romance of discovery may be fused with the glow of humanitarian and religious enthusiasm has been shown once for all in the brilliant pages of Parkman's story of the Jesuit missions in Canada. Pictorial romance can scarcely go further than this. In the crisis of Chateaubriand's picturesque and pa.s.sionate tale of the American wilderness, no one can escape the thrilling, haunting sound of the bell from the Jesuit chapel, as it tolls in the night and storm that were fatal to the happiness of Atala. One scarcely need say that the romance of missions has never faded from the American mind. I have known a sober New England deacon aged eighty-five, who disliked to die because he thought he should miss the monthly excitement of reading the _Missionary Herald_. The deacon's eyes, like the eyes of many an old sea-captain in Salem or Newburyport, were literally upon the ends of the earth. No one can reckon how many starved souls, deprived of normal outlet for human feeling, have found in this pa.s.sionate curiosity and concern for the souls of black and yellow men and women in the antipodes, a constant source of beneficent excitement.

Nor is there any diminution of interest in the mere romance of adventure, in the stories of hunter and trapper, the journals of Lewis and Clarke, the narratives of Boone and Crockett. In writing his superb romances of the Northern Lakes, the prairie and the sea, Fenimore Cooper had merely to bring to an artistic focus sentiments that lay deep in the souls of the great ma.s.s of his American readers. Students of our social life have pointed out again and again how deeply our national temperament has been affected by the existence, during nearly three hundred years, of an alien aboriginal race forever lurking upon the borders of our civilization. "Playing Indian" has been immensely significant, not merely in stimulating the outdoor activity of generations of American boys, but in teaching them the perennial importance of certain pioneer qualities of observation, resourcefulness, courage, and endurance which date from the time when the Indians were a daily and nightly menace. Even when the Indian has been succeeded by the cowboy, the spirit of romance still lingers,--as any collection of cowboy ballads will abundantly prove. And when the cowboys pa.s.s, and the real-estate dealers take possession of the field, one is tempted to say that romance flourishes more than ever.

In short, things are what we make them at the moment, what we believe them to be. In my grandfather's youth the West was in the neighborhood of Port Byron, New York, and when he journeyed thither from Ma.s.sachusetts in the eighteen-twenties, the glory of adventure enfolded him as completely as the boys of the preceding generation had been glorified in the War of the Revolution, or the boys of the next generation when they went gold-seeking in California in 1849. The West, in short, means simply the retreating horizon, the beckoning finger of opportunity. Like Boston, it has been not a place, but a "state of mind."